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My friend Jim Button died at the age of 80 years. Button, a former 20-game winner and star player of the New York Yankees, was best known for his 1970s classic Four ball, the most influential sports book of the 20th century. Four ball We tell with innocence and joy the true daily life of a major league baseball player, warts, etc. This included stories of the Yankees' legend, Mickey Mantle, who rode to the park, the hangover, and baseball players, out of curiosity and boredom, fighting over kisses on the team bus. Button paid a heavy tribute to writing Four ball: be avoided from the game that he loved. But after Four ball, sports hagiography has never been the same. I've been fortunate enough to be part of several panel discussions with Button – one of which in Boston with historian Howard Zinn, where Button and Zinn, longtime admirers, met for the first time. first time – and through our interaction, we were able to interview. It has never been published online, only appeared in my 2007 book, Welcome to the Terrordome.
-Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin: In the early 1960s, you are a star thrower of the Yankees; at the end of the 60's, you write this incredibly transgressive book. I just wanted to know if you ever thought about the role that the 1960s played in shaping your consciousness and your worldview.
Jim Button: Well, I think the sixties affected everyone. Part of what was really good about that was that she was questioning – all the assumptions, all the rules, all the ways, and throwing them out, forcing all the world to re-examine the issues. The authority, and you know, was really a necessary thing to do because we had just snuck in and then headed for Vietnam without a lot of public discussion about it, speaking from a handful of leaders … .
It was the driving force. This and racism. Blacks challenged the status quo in whites, so all of this was happening. At the time, I thought that none of us – and certainly not myself – thought this would be a pivotal period in American history. When you live through history, this seems to be the most natural thing in the world. I do not think I thought, "Gee, all these people are fed up, maybe I should write a book that does the same thing." This thought never came to my mind, but you are part of your environment. I do not know if I would have or could have even thought of writing Four ball during the Eisenhower years. Who knew? Who knows?
DZ: Speaking of the '60s, I just interviewed someone who has wonderful memories of you, Dennis Brutus.
JB: Dennis is the tallest man I have ever met. I met Dennis because he was executive secretary of SANROC – the non-racial South African Olympic Committee is what SANROC defended. I was first contacted by a white weightlifter from their group. They contacted me because I had signed a petition in favor of black South African athletes, who were not able, nor allowed, to compete for places in the team. South African Olympic Games. South Africa was made up of about 80% blacks and was represented by a team made up of whites. This petition appealed to me as a yanke baseball player and professional athlete in the United States. She said, "Athlete to athlete, this fair? Not fair? We need other athletes to defend us and change this injustice. "If athletics means everything, it's fairness and the easiest thing to do was sign this petition, a no-brainer! And I just thought I'd be one of the hundreds of signatures. But I was not there. It turned out to be about half a dozen, and very few of them were white. They wanted to hold this press conference to announce that this group would be traveling to Mexico City to lobby US Olympic officials to support the ban on the South African team until the next day. they form a racially representative team.
DZ: What was your impression of Dennis Brutus?
JB: Well, Dennis was such a special person. It was a scandal so obvious, and yet there was here a very composed man, very restrained, a beautiful speaker and writer. Even his calligraphy dates from the 1800s, with this fluid and elaborate script. Even a simple note from Dennis was really something. He had the sense of calmness and reason and so was exactly the kind of opponent they had to hate because they could not call him a screamer, an assailant, a thug, or any other bullshit, you know. . He was more cultured than them, more refined than them.
DZ: In the 1960s, you had interactions with Muhammad Ali. What were your impressions of Ali and what do you think he meant in his day?
JB: I think Muhammad Ali … was one of the great men in history, and I'm not talking about the history of sport – of one of the great men of history. He was loved around the world for all the right reasons. He took a risk with his career, with his life. He put everything into play and took a huge risk, paid the price, went to jail and saw his title taken out. Here's a guy ready to go to jail for his beliefs. How many are there around? Even today, we have politicians absolutely without mercy, [who] like this guy Paul Bremer [former viceroy of occupied Iraq] Now tells us in his book that he needed more troops at the time. Well, bullshit. Where was he when he should have said it? He is not Muhammad Ali. What a lesson for people, to see this bastard Bremer behave loosely, with a story of people like Muhammad Ali who never let go. So, they are not part of the same category of human being as far as I'm concerned. This applies to all those politicians who are ruthless, dead and blind. I read about [JFK’s defense secretary] Robert McNamara will go to Vietnam and find out what's wrong. He was what was wrong. Him personally. He does not have to go anywhere to find out. All these lost lives to find an "honorable" way out. It's disgusting to think about those lost lives.
DZ: So you write Four ball, and the ownership of the Major League Baseball and many players lose their heads. What caused collective panic and madness? Why do you think your book stimulated this?
JB: I do not know. I think for them it was just one more nail in the coffin, just a questioning of authority. The whole building was shaking under all the assaults and it was only about one more position: staying in shape, even in baseball! Even baseball can not be sacrosanct! That was part of it. I think baseball, football – they have always felt the need to be patriotic, to be on the side of America and to be able, to support wars in any circumstances, and that the Conservatives wanted pause in their ranks. a little too much for them. And the truth is that they had not read that damn book. They would have realized if they had read that the things that they thought were bothering them were simply in the context of a larger story. Baseball fans have easily assimilated this concept. So many people took this book to read it and got angry about it, started reading it and said, "Why the heck are they doing so much?" I mean, it was the tone of 99 % voices. letters that I have received. "I read your book, I kept waiting for it and wait for it, and I have never seen it. Nothing in the book was diverting me from the game, from the people involved or anything. It was just a love letter. It's the exact opposite of what baseball said. Commissioner [Bowie Kuhn] said that I had "made the game a bad service."
DZ: There is a quote from David Halberstam about Four ball it's a book "so deeply ingrained in the American mind that you can not call it a sports book." How can it work from the harmless "love letter" you describe and that also has such an impact?
JB: You know, some of the things that have been written about Four ball are almost too deep for me. Sometimes when you create a piece of art, you think you're doing this thing here, and it turns out that when you're done, you did that thing there without realizing it. It was only a few years later, when I realized that my diary had become an important element of journalism, because who could imagine it? But it was not my intention. I did not think of writing a revolutionary book or anything like that. We knew that the book was going to do silly things and that there were some things in there that had never been said before in the sport, but deep down, we were not trying to do it.
DZ: But fans liked the book?
JB: Not exactly at the beginning. When the book came out, I was playing for the Astros, and we were playing on the circuit, we were in New York to play against the Mets. And my parents would come to see me from New Jersey; I only came to town a few times a summer, so we bought them tickets for the baseball game and we had dinner after the baseball game in Shea. Anyway, the game continues, and I'm called to play. I'm called to the next generation at Shea Stadium. So when they announced my name – it was right after Dick Young had written three consecutive columns on what I was a fool. I was a social leper, Judas and Benedict Arnold, and the book was not out yet, it was just excerpts and "Oh, he said all these terrible things," so the fans reacted to the first ones attacks from sports journalists me, especially Dick Young.
So when I was called to the match, everyone at Shea Stadium booed. It was horrible to be a Jersey child and to have grown up in the New York area, to be booed by a crowded stadium. It was really awful. Once the match was over, I went out and my mother was crying. She said, "Jim, maybe you should not have written this book!" I said, "Mom, the book is not out yet, when it comes out, you better read it, you will understand that it is not a bad book, all this will fly away, it is only temporary, you just have to stay a little longer.
DZ: The part of the book dedicated to baseball executives struck you when you talked about Mickey Mantle, his alcohol consumption and his sometimes thorny personality. I wanted to ask you, on the record, what are your memories of Mickey Mantle and if you could talk a little bit about your last contact with him before he died.
JB: I've always had mixed feelings about Mickey. I loved his side a lot, his teammate. He was an excellent teammate, very entertaining and great in the dugout. He played after being injured and he would have had a broken leg to win a ball game for you. If you have ever been in a fox hole, you would like someone like Mickey to stay with you. Unlike Alex Rodriguez, who would like to enter the fox hole of the other and hide.
Whatever it was, Mickey was an excellent teammate, he was very funny, always joked, told jokes, made practical jokes. So, this part, I loved it. But then, I saw him rude to the kids, telling them to get out, slamming the pane of their pencils. God, I'll make a face when he does that. It was not necessary. Just tell the kids that you will do it later or say, "Hey, how are you?", Sign a few autographs, then continue. There is no reason to be mean about it. And I saw reporters approaching him for an interview, and he would give them a look that would almost crack them in half. I thought that he could have handled it a lot better.
He always said that he was going to die young. So what? There are many people with an illness who think they can die, it does not mean you can mistreat others. It was a lack of perspective that Mickey was not only, but a lot of guys. Take Roger Maris: he is young, he is healthy, he is paid a lot of money and he can beat or not beat the Babe Ruth home run record. How amusing is it? As Maris did in 1961, you can not say, "I do not care about breaking the record of Babe Ruth, then losing your hair. You care or you do not care. But in any case, they could never go back and see, "Well, I'm young, I'm healthy, I have a good job, I make a lot of money, kids respect me, what if not, do I want to live my life at this stage? The guys in their 20s simply had no perspective. Both of them died too young, which is a shame because most of the older baseball players realize that they have had a good life and that they have never had this perspective when they were in the dark. they were younger. I think Roger and Mickey would be the same today.
DZ: And you have tasted a bit with Mickey Mantle's last contact with you, right?
JB: Yes, it was – I think it was in 1995, Billy, Mickey's son, died. I sent him a note to tell him how bad I felt about Billy, and I remembered him running in the clubhouse at Spring Training, a polite little boy. And I also wrote in the note: "I would like to take this moment to tell you that I hope you feel good about Four ball, "That I have never written to hurt anyone, and that I have always considered it an honor to be his teammate. I just wanted to tell him that. I sent him this note, just a few lines. I did not expect to hear from him, Mickey is not the kind of guy who reached out that way.
About ten days later, I entered my office and my secretary was standing by the answering machine. She told me, "I want you to play that one for yourself" and I pressed the play button, and that was Mickey in his Oklahoma twang. . "Hey, Jim, it's Mick. Thank you for your note about Billy, I appreciate it. I'm fine for Ball four; it never bothered me so much. And one more thing: I want you to know that I am not the reason why you are not invited back to the Elders' Day. I've heard about this and it's not true. Anyway, thanks again, Bud.
DZ: What effect did it have when Jim Button's ban was lifted and you were finally able to return to the Alumni Party and return the uniform in 1998?
JB: It was one of those overwhelming days, emotionally. The reason for my return was because my son Michael had written a letter to the New York Times– a kind of letter to the editor for Father's Day explaining to the Yankees that Old Boys' Day was always a family time and that he liked it a lot when I was player; Old Timers' Day and we had lost Laurie the year before [Jim’s daughter, Laurie Bouton, died in a car accident] and he said, so it's time to invite my father back; he could use it – he could use any help that he can get now.
It was just a beautiful letter. And the New York Times used as part of their Father's Day. They have a picture of Mickey and me, and a picture of Laurie and me, and they ran that – what choice did the Yankees have to invite me again? So, they did it, and when I got home, it was extremely emotional. I did not know how the players would answer me, nor how the fans would react to me. Those were fans of the Old Timers party, Mickey Mantle fans, I was the guy who had written these things about The Mick – how were they going to answer me? And then there was the reason why I was back in the first place – that was because Laurie was dead, so I'm here for the sake of sympathy, and I was proud of my Michael's son for writing such a beautiful letter. was just an emotion after the other. Of course, the first response from my teammates was excellent. they came to take me in their arms and the guys were laughing, it looked like the good old days, as if I had just won my twentieth. It was so nice to be back. Some guys turned their backs on me, but the rest of the guys were great. And then the fans were wonderful. I have just been carried away.
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