Michael Sokolove is the author of the recent nonfiction book, The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw (click here for my review), as well as an earlier biography of Pete Rose, Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose. Last week he was kind enough to talk with me for a while about Strawberry, Rose, and a few other things of interest. Here's part two of our conversation. Did you miss the first half? Click here for Part 1.
BrokenCowboy:
This Crenshaw team was unique, not just because of it’s talent. They were also that rare inner-city black team to stand out in a region dominated for twenty-five years by predominantly white teams from the Valley. I was wondering, were the players aware of this at the time? Obviously they saw the clean uniforms, the well-manicured fields, and the white faces, but did they see a bigger picture?
Michael Sokolove:
Most of them, a lot of them did, to an extent that surprised me. As a journalist, you’re never sure if you’re getting the real memories of somebody when they were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, or something that to some extent has been informed by their adult experience.
But I could tell, that absolutely, they were aware even then, and that it drove them. Especially some of the really astute guys, like Reggie Dymally and George Cook and Chris Brown. Kids in general, and you know this from teaching, kids in general are pretty attuned to social things...
BC: Especially injustice.
MS: Yeah, injustice and elements of inequality. And they knew, they absolutely knew, that baseball, the sport they loved, was viewed as a white suburban game, and they got a big kick out of showing that, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re still playing this game in our neighborhood.”
BC: In your research for the book did you come across any kind of reason, or did you form an opinion about what some of the reasons are for this decline, for this switch to baseball being a white suburban game?
MS: Yeah, I get asked about this all the time. I was on Outside the Lines with ESPN, and this is a big subject. I guess the first thing I would say is you can’t make somebody play a sport. We all played the sports we played because we loved those sports. So the RBI program, which is baseball’s program to reintroduce baseball into the inner city, you know, it’s behind the eight ball to begin with if it’s sort of spoon fed like bad medicine, I’m not saying that it is. It’s not the hip thing. Its cultural moment has passed in the inner city, and I would say partly that’s role models. There’s no Michael Jordan equivalent in baseball. I think an under appreciated aspect of all of this is Ken Griffey’s decline. There was a time when people in the inner city were walking around with Griffey jerseys, but his career because of injuries just really went south. Nobody in the ‘hood is walking around with a Barry Bonds jersey.
BC: I don’t think many of my students know who Barry Bonds is.
MS: Wow. Well you know as well or better than I do. So there’s no buzz to baseball in the inner city. And then there are economic reasons, you know. The bats. An aluminum bat is an incredibly expensive thing. There are issues of the men in the city to organize these things, you know, you can go on and on and on. But I think it’s mostly cultural. It’s buzz has passed. So I would say number one, cultural, number two, economic. It’s not a cheap game to play.
BC: I also read someplace recently, you know this subject obviously has been talked into the ground, I read someplace recently that someone was theorizing that baseball has always been a game that has been passed from father to son, playing catch in the backyard, sitting in the bleachers, watching a game on the couch. Unfortunately, in a lot of these areas, there are not a whole lot of father-son conversations. Did you, in talking with the Crenshaw boys, did you feel like, I mean I know a lot of them had issues with their fathers, or didn’t have fathers, did you think that that was a factor?
MS: I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. Baseball has to be passed from father to son because there’s a whole body of knowledge that goes with it. Baseball’s an ongoing conversation, and it’s a complicated game. It’s an ongoing conversation that has to be passed on in some way, and if there’s nobody to pass it on, then it can die. The Crenshaw guys, as you know from reading the book, some of them who had very spare relationships with their fathers, who had troubled relationships, you know the one thing they did share was baseball. But what you have in the inner city now is, in too many cases, fathers who are not present at all. And at Crenshaw High School, and I would guess maybe where you are too, you’ve got kids who don’t have a mother or a father, who are in the foster care system or being raised by relatives, and you’ve put it better than I have. Baseball demands some form of a social structure where a male is present, or it seems to, that’s been its tradition. And I guess that is a big part of it, that’s really awful. And it’s awful for more reasons than...
BC: Right, more than just baseball.
MS: Right, but it is really awful.
BC: I recently read Pat Conroy’s memoir, My Losing Season, and one of the points that he brings up in this book, and the reason that he chose to write about an unsuccessful season, is that he feels we learn an awful lot more from losing than we do from winning. Do you feel like the Crenshaw team learned from their loss in that championship game?
MS: I don’t know, that’s a really hard question. I just don’t know the answer to that... I don’t think so. I think it was such a devastating loss. I don’t think that particular loss was something those kids needed. I mean, I agree with you overall, and I once heard someone say the best season is 6-4 or 4-6 or 5-5. You hear this in various ways. It’s not good to win all the time, it’s not good to lose all the time. I generally agree with that. This loss was devastating. It was devastating to Fernando Becker, who made the errors. I think it was an echo, I think they were counting on beating the white team from the Valley, and I think it was such a shock that they hadn’t, that it rocked some of them a bit. It was a little too devastating to be a good lesson.
BC: Probably one of the more intriguing characters in the book is Carl Jones. Could you tell me a little bit about him, your experience with him? It seems that you also have gotten closer to him than the other players that you spoke with.
MS: Actually right now on my computer screen in front of me is an op/ed piece I’m writing for the Los Angeles Times on three strikes which they asked me to write, which of course is gonna be a lot about Carl Jones. You know I didn’t realize it, did you know that there’s a ballot initiative that would soften three strikes?
BC: You know what, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t.
MS: That’s okay, I just found out myself. It’s pretty much under the radar. A lot of Californians don’t. So talk it up. I’ll e-mail you and let you know when my op/ed piece will appear.
BC: I’d appreciate it. The whole three strikes, it was interesting to me how during that part of the book you really were railing against this law. I think it was appropriate, I think the three strikes rule is ridiculous. It was passed during this time, after Polly Klaas -- we’re gonna get tough on everything -- and unfortunately there were too many stories like Carl Jones.
MS: You’ll appreciate this as an English teacher. My father, who had a traditional and a good high school education, said, “Well, Michael,” and he said this so gently because he didn’t want to sound critical, “when I was going to Central High in Philadelphia, they said that an essay should have a unifying theme, and it shouldn’t veer too much from it, and that seemed like a little bit of a departure.” And I said, “Well, it was.” And I don’t think my father reads a whole lot of nonfiction. Well, he does, but he doesn’t. And there’s a lot of nonfiction that takes huge detours, and many detours, and I figured that I was allowed one detour because I really care about this, and I’m really incensed. But I did get close to Carl, and I hate that law, and I hate what was done to him. My kids were very incensed about it, and he calls here on the phone, and he sometimes talks to my twelve-year-old, who’s really easily agitated to begin with and has this highly tuned sense of justice except when it comes to himself. So he’s mad about Carl, he’s mad about three strikes, he’s mad about George Bush. So we’re all, you know it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know what was gonna happen to Carl, or what kind of life Carl was gonna lead, but everybody, I don’t want to say everybody... It’s the worst part of this country, people are comfortable with the large number of people in jail, the large number of black guys in jail, basically, because some of them might not belong there, but the more of them you put away, the less chance there is that one of them’s gonna break into my house, is about what it amounts to.
BC: I was reading a story at some point in the last few years with my class, and I don’t even remember the story but there was some character who was going to jail, or had been in jail, and I asked the class, “How many of you know someone, someone in your family, someone close to you, who has been in jail?” Every single hand went up. And even though I’d been teaching these kids for thirteen years, I was still stunned. Thinking back to when I grew up, if a teacher had asked that question, I can’t imagine a single hand would’ve gone up.
MS: Where did you grow up?
BC: I grew up in pretty much the opposite of these places. I was born in Michigan, lived in Chicago for a couple of years, but I was essentially raised in California, for four years in Irvine, which is the heart of Orange County, and then we moved to Palos Verdes, which is, you know, forget about it.
MS: And you’re in what’s called a poverty school now?
BC: Yeah, it’s not like what’s described at Crenshaw, but certainly, for instance, I will never ask a child about his father, because most of the time there isn’t one. But there’s a lot of poverty.
MS: Is it black and Hispanic?
BC: It’s fairly evenly split, I think we have a little bit more Latino than black, plus some Asian, with a handful of white kids, you know, fifteen or twenty, maybe. And so they’ve all had these experiences that I certainly never did growing up, and so when I asked that question, I know that if any of my teachers had asked that, probably there would’ve been people who had some connection to someone in jail, but no one ever would’ve raised a hand. And the fact that it’s just such a common experience for these kids is really disheartening.
MS: It is disheartening, and the numbers are staggering, you know the pure numbers, the five billion dollar prison budget, and on and on and on. But yeah, you have to be in a neighborhood like you’re teaching in to see the actual human impact. That’s amazing.
BC: And several of my kids, their fathers are in jail, and have been in jail since, essentially their entire lives, and so when you see that side of it, it really changes your opinion.
MS: Of course, what people care about, what’s gonna change things, is that California and some of these places are so strapped for cash. So it won’t be the moral abomination of it, it’ll be the money part of it, but either way, things are gonna change a little bit. And then somebody’ll get out of jail, and there’ll be some horrible crime committed, and, you know.
BC: Exactly. The pendulum will swing. I have one more question about the book. There are a lot of sad stories in the book. What are some of the happy endings that you really enjoyed coming across?
MS: Well, I think that the preponderance of the book is relatively happy endings. I mean, there are some working men with families and productive lives. Reggie Dymally, who is a beautiful man, is doing what he loves, which is cooking. George Cook, who’s a really bright man, and I think could be more than a parking enforcement officer, and I think he knows he could be more than that. But on the other hand, he’s got a great wife, and a great family, and a beautiful house in Inglewood. Nelson Whiting has constructed this sort of spare life for himself that works, as a Navy man, and he’s still involved in music. Chris Brown -- and you know, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this -- did you know that Chris Brown is in Iraq?
BC: Yeah, driving a truck for Halliburton. I saw there was this spot on him in Sports Illustrated, and also I think I read somewhere you were doing an interview and you mentioned it.
MS: On ESPN, probably. Chris Brown, you know what a complicated person he was from the get go, and he and Brooks Hurst still have a sort of fractious relationship, it’s better than it was. But Chris, as opposed to Darryl, Chris has found faith in way that truly does have a relationship to the life that he leads and has led. But I think that Chris Brown is very much a success story, and I hope he’ll be all right in Iraq. Fernando Becker has had some hard times, but is doing well in San Diego right now. I always go around the horn when I do this. Cordie Dillard is just the guy he always was, the Original Varsity Player, he’s on his third or fourth wife or something. I don’t know how you categorize that. But I guess people read the book as sad. I see it as more poignant. It’s life as people lead life, and it’s full of plenty of pain and disappointment, but I think these guys have done okay. I mean, and it depends what eyes you look at it through. I think sometimes people want to read these books, and they want to find the guy who went to Harvard and became a doctor, and there are none of them. And I will say that I think that there could’ve been some of them, if there were other things shown to these guys, if their community was not so culturally deprived. It’s the first project I’ve ever done like this, whether it was a magazine story or a book, that I just feel like I made friends, and met these really beautiful people, and I really mean that. I see their lives in large degree as successes, but ones that were filled with struggle.
BC: Yeah, I think that maybe there’s kind of a feeling of what could have been, and like you said, sometimes we measure people against their seventeen-year-old dreams. Obviously they all wanted to be major leaguers, and it only worked out for a couple of them, but you’re right, a lot of them are living good lives.
MS: Yeah, I think so.
BC: I couldn’t let you go without asking you about Pete Rose.
MS: (Laughing.) He’s not one of the friends I’ve made in journalism.
BC: I have to just ask you the big question.
MS: Sure.
BC: Do you think that he should be in the Hall of Fame or not?
MS: Yes, I felt he should be from the beginning. I have virtually nothing good to say about Pete Rose’s character. Pete is a scoundrel, he’s a liar, but he didn’t cheat for the hits. He didn’t buy the hits, he got all those hits. And baseball’s gone about this really stupidly. It should have put him in the Hall of Fame and barred him from baseball.
BC: I agree with you completely. I think that that’s the solution.
MS: Keeping the two linked was a big mistake. I don’t think he’s gonna get in the Hall of Fame now, because his book and his appearances were public relations debacles.
BC: And he has a clock ticking as well.
MS: He does. I can’t even remember, what is it? He’s got one more year left?
BC: I think he has... 2005 I think is his last shot.
MS: Yeah, then it’s gotta go to the Veteran’s Committee, and these guys are the dinosaurs, they don’t want him in.
BC: Throughout this whole process, “I didn’t bet on baseball, I did bet on baseball,” has your opinion ever changed about the Hall of Fame, or has it been pretty much constant?
MS: No. I must say it’s been constant. In fact, in the paperback version of my book I think there’s a new forward, which only came out a year after the hardback. But it came out after -- and you know Fay Vincent, whom I like, denies that he had anything to do with this, and I’ll have to believe him -- it came out after the Hall of Fame changed its rules, so that if you were on baseball’s ineligible list, then you were ineligible for the Hall of Fame. That was the Pete Rose Rule. And I wrote in the forward then that baseball was giving itself a problem. It linked these two things, and it was going to have to live with the Pete Rose problem forever, and it has. Pete is an undeserved martyr. Baseball made a martyr out of Pete Rose, and that’s stupid.
BC: Why do think that it’s such a big deal to people whether he’s in the Hall of Fame or not? I don’t think that in other sports there would be quite the topic that it is with Pete Rose.
MS: You know, I don’t know. Because the baseball Hall of Fame is a big deal. You know I’m a sports fan, I really like the games, I like the competition, I like the intricacy, no matter what the game is. I’ve never been a person who’s very interested in autographs, I like the Hall of Fame, but it’s not that big a deal to me, but clearly it’s a huge deal to baseball fans, it’s a huge deal to the baseball establishment. And whether or not Pete’s in it, I think that to Pete’s partisans, of which there are fewer and fewer than there used to be, Pete became a symbol of baseball when baseball was good. And somewhat undeserved, because Pete was the original money-hungry athlete. But in fairness, he also gave a dollar ten effort for a dollar of pay every time he was on the field. That’s the best part of Pete. I think the reason it’s a big deal to people because the baseball Hall of Fame, for whatever reason, is a bigger deal than Canton, Ohio, or Springfield, Mass, which sort of nobody cares about.
BC: I could continue this conversation forever.
MS: You’ve gotta go teach, though!
BC: You’re right, I’ve gotta head out the door here in about fifteen minutes, but I just wanted to ask you one more thing. You mentioned that you have the op/ed piece on three strikes that’s coming up. Do you have any other projects in the works, whether books or articles?
MS: Not yet. I’m a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, so I just had a cover piece on Michael Phelps two weeks ago, and I write on sports and non-sports topics for them. By the way, I’ve generally not been a sportswriter through my career. So I’ll write more articles for the New York Times, because that’s my sort of day job, and I love it. And I’m looking for another book to write. I hope in the next couple of months I’ll have settled on an idea and sold it. But all ideas are welcome!
BC: Okay, I’ll think of some for you.
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