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The unsung impact of Ted's clout
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 7/9/2002
Bryant's book, ''Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston'' revisits a chapter of Red Sox history that has probably been lost to a generation of young fans who eagerly root for the Rainbow Coalition of Manny, Pedro, Jose, and Rickey. But the horror stories from the old days are gripping: the Sox' memorable, off-day 1945 tryout of Jackie Robinson, who was passed over and who hated owner Tom Yawkey (''one of the most bigoted guys in baseball'' - Robinson) for the rest of his life. Or the famous 1949 non-scouting of Willie Mays, who was briefly available to the Red Sox. Many old-timers come alive under Bryant's pen - racist manager Pinky Higgins; the hard-drinking Yawkey; Isadore ''Izzy'' Muchnick, the liberal city councilor; black journalist Mabray Kountze, and the lucky-unlucky Elijah ''Pumpsie'' Green, the first African-American to take the field for the Sox. Few of the white characters shine. But Williams does. ''If Pumpsie Green was unsure of what to expect from his teammates, Ted Williams provided the answer,'' Bryant writes. ''The great, aging star chose Green to warm up with him before every game. It was the symbolic gesture of a true leader, for even if anyone did harbor a problem with Green's arrival, no one would cross the mighty Williams.'' Green's career fizzled, but Bryant caught up with him in California, after Williams had used his 1966 Hall of Fame induction ceremony to bemoan the absence of Negro League players in the Hall. ''After hearing of Williams's speech, Green remembers smiling to himself,'' Bryant writes. ''Green remembers Williams as one of the few players that first year that made him feel like both a ballplayer and a man.'' Bryant's book focuses heavily on Boston sportswriters, those who carried water for what Globe writer Martin Nolan sardonically called Yawkey's ''klavern,'' and those who didn't. (Among the latter: the oft-reviled, Williams-baiting ''Colonel'' Dave Egan of the Record.) It will be excerpted in Boston magazine later this month and should be in bookstores by September, just as the Red Sox are clinching first place in their division. Dick's last report A paranoid has been defined as a man with all of the information at his disposal. There is no doubt that the late science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was clinically paranoid. But did he foresee that his own work would pass out of his control? Take the recent Steven Spielberg rendering of Dick's classic short story, ''Minority Report.'' (Good movie; too long.) Dick's story is, inevitably, darker than the shiny pebble created by Dreamworks & Co. In the movie, the Ashcroft-ian investigations of as-yet-uncommitted crimes ultimately serve the ambitions of one man: the scheming Precrime Director, played by the foreign-born (i.e. untrustworthy and insidious) Max von Sydow. But Dick viewed Precrime as the tool of a dangerous, Bonapartist Army of the Federated Westbloc Alliance that had been abolished after losing the Anglo-Chinese war. It was the proverbial sharp-eyed reader who noticed that in Dick's posthumously published novel, ''Radio Free Albemuth,'' he predicted that the radical anti-establishment message of his work would be watered down. In ''Albemuth,'' Dick is arrested by a ''Friend of the American People'' security officer who explains that instead of executing him, the government will instead kill his work: ''We will release books under your name which we will write. ... In them you will slowly conform to establishment views, book by book, until you reach a point we can approve of. The initial ones will still contain some of your subversive views, but since you are getting old it won't be unexpected for you to mellow.'' Mr. Spielberg, Philip K. Dick saw you coming. Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 7/9/2002.
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ed Williams's legacy on and off the baseball field will be the subject of much discussion; his prickly personality cast a shadow over his on-field heroics. But New York sportswriter Howard Bryant will soon be publishing a book that deals in part with one of Williams's less-remembered contributions to the game: his modest but important role in the long-delayed, 1959 integration of the Red Sox, the last team in major league baseball to include black players on its roster.