Cardinal virtues

The author recalls boyhood, baseball and Big Roy

My father was 50 years old when I was born, so by the time I began playing on my elementary school baseball team, he wasn't likely to join me in the backyard for a game of catch. But during the summers of my youth he would put me in the car and drive the 400 miles from our home in Tulsa, Okla. to St. Louis, where we would check into a Holiday Inn downtown and attend a weekend series featuring the baseball Cardinals at Busch Memorial Stadium in the shadow of the famous Gateway Arch.

We typically arrived late on Friday night, exhausted from the long drive. But we would get up early Saturday morning (at least I did) and walk to the ballpark hours before the first pitch was tossed that afternoon. We had pretty good seats, too. Not behind-the-dugout types, but close enough to see the sports heroes of my youth.

These Cardinals were not just any baseball team. These were the Cardinals of Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver and Orlando Cepeda, and they were managed by the legendary Red Schoendienst. Even Roger Maris played in St. Louis for a couple of seasons (1967 and 1968). The Cards were World Series champions (1967) and boasted future Hall of Famers (Brock, Gibson, Cepeda and Schoendienst). And they, along with Big Roy (as my dad's friends called him), were my boyhood idols. Indeed, during my more than two decades as a sports journalist, I have interviewed more legends than I could name in this space. But I was never more nervous than when I interviewed Lou Brock and Bob Gibson on separate occasions many years ago. I actually stammered a couple of times; it was really embarrassing.

Like many African-Americans of my generation -- the post-civil rights bunch -- I was the first baseball fan in my home who did NOT root for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Throughout the nation, blacks of my parents' generation rooted faithfully for the Dodgers, even if they'd never been to Brooklyn or Los Angeles. They rooted for the Dodgers for one reason: Jackie Robinson. By signing the first black major leaguer, Branch Rickey also obtained a legion of fans who might never see the Dodgers play in person, or even on television. They cheered for the Dodgers, as my dad once told me when I asked him why he was rooting for them during one of our weekends in St. Louis, "'cause of Jackie."

The Tulsa Oilers were the Cardinals' AAA farm team. Once a year, the Cardinals would come to Tulsa for an exhibition against the Oilers. I knew quite a few of the Oilers' black players. This was still Jim Crow America, so many of them lived in North Tulsa, the "black" part of the segregated city. And they often spent nights in my father's store on Greenwood Avenue -- a place with a soda fountain and a juke box, a place I still describe as a "black Happy Days." The players came by on off nights when the team was in town. They mostly sat around with the neighborhood men, enjoyed a root beer float, and talked the night away.

Big Roy died when I was 12 years old. So, in truth, we didn't make the trip to St. Louis more than a handful of summers. But the images of those times with him are still fresh, the memories still as vivid as they were to the young boy from Tulsa: Me, my dad and the St. Louis Cardinals, on our own far from home.

Roy S. Johnson is an assistant managing editor for Sports Illustrated. His "Pass the Word" column appears on SI.com every Friday. Catch Johnson on CNN Headline News every Thursday at 3:40 p.m. ET.

 

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