Satchel: The Life and Times of An American Legend, by Larry Tye, Random House, 298 pages
-- Leroy “Satchel” Paige
I lost a dear colleague -- eleven years ago and much too soon – who, in addition to his friendship, ranked with the finest business advisors I’ve known.
He operated brilliantly at the complex intersection of law, finance and business – with a unique skill in bridging their conflicting vocabularies and cultures. In large part it was his ear and instinct for the perfect quote, citation or maxim.
His invocations, to relax a tense conference room or break an impasse in negotiations, drew on sources that were inexhaustible and encyclopedic:
- The movies: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges” and “We’ve been on double secret probation, whatever that is” and “It’s not personal, Sonny; it’s just business.”
- The military: “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan” and “Once more into the breach, dear friends” and “It’s good to kill the occasional admiral, pour encourager les autres.”
- And American novels: “Never cop another man’s plea” and, especially, “There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22.”
He was really at his best with the wisdom of sports – Red Smith and Casey Stengel, and Yoga Berra’s incomparable advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
So he’d have devoured with delight Larry Tye’s new book, which takes to a new level the basic, long-familiar tale of one of the game’s premier figures and doubtless one of its most quotable – Paige becoming widely known as a late-arriving darling of the national media, when at the venerable age of 42 he was finally able to pitch in the newly-integrated Major leagues.
It’s the strength of Tye’s examination to expose the dark poignancy behind the entertaining laugh lines. On Paige’s extraordinary control – “throw strikes – home plate don’t move” – the back story of his accuracy with a baseball lies in the poverty of his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, where his rock-throwing skill was both his defense against gangs of hostile white boys and the weapon to fell pheasants and squirrels for the family dinner table.
As for the famous “I ain’t never had a job – I just always played baseball”: The combined physical, financial and emotional pressures of barnstorming what Tye calls “hungryball,” around the rickety Negro leagues of depression-era America, would have drained Paige of any romance or sentimentality, long before his free-spending habits forced him to keep hustling -- well beyond the sell-by dates of either his talent or his dignity.
Paige’s saga is essential to the complex story of the integration of American professional sports – both the hesitating steps that belatedly opened the doors for Jackie Robinson, Paige’s much younger and perhaps less-deserving teammate on the Kansas City Monarchs, and the immediate shift of talent and fans that doomed the Negro leagues and their separate, unequal but influential place in black American culture.
Concentrating on Paige’s own perspective, author Tye tells an outsized character’s story, freely and refreshingly drawing on the vocabulary of the times – both the hyper-ventilated synonymy of the baseball press and the crude and racist language of a rigidly segregated society.
In so doing, he illuminates the evolutionary steps towards baseball’s integration – from Paige’s play in lily-white Bismarck, North Dakota, to the high level of competition between white and black teams in the California winter league.
And eventually, the national-level proof that integrated crowds would pay to see integrated baseball, under the entrepreneurship of the Iowa-bred and racially insensitive Clevelander Bob Feller, who faced off with Paige on a 1946 barnstorming tour, the year before Robinson moved up to the Dodgers.
All were part of the social fabric about to be so dramatically re-tailored by the court decisions, civil rights actions and legislative programs of the two decades to follow.
Living both as hard and as well as conditions would allow, Paige himself fulfilled the axioms of his philosophy only enough to sustain both his remarkably durable physical abilities and his celebrity.
This summary alone would underpin his approach to a lifetime of multi-layered competition -- and is freely adaptable to the management of a personal career, a team of employees or an entire company:
“Love like you’ve never been hurt."
“Dance like nobody’s watching.”
To readers in the business book industry: While Tye takes note of the broad press attention Paige eventually achieved, late in his playing days, there is an untapped market for a little volume on management leadership, compiling the lessons of the hundred best quotations out of my late friend’s commonplace book.
On which subject, all readers are invited to send personal favorites from their own experiences.
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