Be Like Reggie

Flashing back on some strong words that needed to be said on national TV

Happy Sunday, Jagged Time Lapsers!

I know I’d promised to post Part 2 of my incredible Eddie Money interview this past week, but deadlines and the various moving parts involved in getting the latest CROSSED CHANNELS podcast ready to go kinda got in the way. It’ll be up this Tuesday, I swear; and as it involves cocaine, Andy Gibb and Eddie fighting with his wife over who’s going to pick up their kid from baseball practice, I think you’ll find it worth the wait…

So, speaking of baseball… even though I’m better known in some circles for my baseball books than for my music journalism, I rarely write about baseball at Jagged Time Lapse without some kind of musical tie-in. From the get-go, this was always supposed to be a music-oriented Substack, in part because music has brought me a lot more joy during the last six or seven years than baseball has.

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That said, there was some baseball news this week that I feel the need to say something about, even though there’s no real musical angle to it. (Some of you may have already read a similar post on my Facebook page, but I wanted to preserve it in a place that’s easier to find.)

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson (whom I’ve previously written about here at JTL) was on a FOX MLB panel the other night before the game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. The game was planned as a tribute to the Negro Leagues, and to celebrate the life of Willie Mays — who, sadly, passed away just two days before the celebration. It was also the first regular season MLB game ever played in the state of Alabama.

During the pregame broadcast, Reggie was asked by Alex Rodriguez how it felt to be back in Birmingham, where 21 year-old Reggie had played 114 games for the Southern League's Birmingham A's in 1967. Reggie could have easily tossed out a few feel-good, nostalgic comments and moved on — I'm sure the FOX MLB folks would have preferred that — but he didn't sugarcoat a damn thing:

“Coming back here is not easy,” he said. “The racism when l played here, the difficulty of going to different places where we traveled… fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

”People said to me today, ‘Do you think you’re a better person, do you think you won when you played here and conquered?’ I said, ‘You know, l would never want to do it again.’ I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say ‘THE N*ER CAN’T EAT HERE!’ I would go to a hotel and they would say ‘THE N*ER CAN’T STAY HERE!’

”We went to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the N word, ‘He can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out… He said, ‘We’re gonna go to the diner and eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted’… Finally, they let me in there.

”Fortunately, I had a manager, Johnny McNamara, that, if I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat. We’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and find a place where l could stay. Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan… Joe and Sharon Rudi, l slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless l got out.

”I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The year l came here, Bull Connor was the sheriff the year before, and they took minor league baseball out of here because in 1963 the Klan murdered four black girls at a church here and never got indicted. The Klan. Life magazine did a story on them like they were being honored! I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

”At the same time, had it not been for my white friends, had it not been for a white manager and Rudi, Fingers and Duncan and Lee Myers, I would’ve never made it. I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight somebody. I’d have got killed here, because I was ready to beat someone’s ass and you’da saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”

Thanks to my pal William Nichols for the full transcription — you can also watch the clip below. (There’s an unbleeped version out there that’s even more powerful, but I can’t seem to find it on YouTube.)

Big props to Reggie for saying all of this on national television. As others have pointed out, he was not describing life in the Negro Leagues or during the Jim Crow era; Reggie played minor league ball in Alabama a full twenty years after baseball was integrated, over a decade after de jure segregation was outlawed, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

I’ve seen some people complaining online that the incidents Reggie spoke of “happened a long time ago,” and were therefore somehow inappropriate (or you know, “divisive”) to bring up. But they certainly happened during my lifetime, and I'm not that old… and frankly, I don't know how anyone could ever truly “get over” that kind of experience.

Plus, if we're going to have a night celebrating the Negro Leagues (and we should!), we should also talk about why the Negro Leagues existed in the first place: Institutionalized racism. There are far too many people in this country right now (many of them in elected and appointed positions) who would clearly be all too happy to sweep the ugliness of this country’s racist past under the table, while at the same time returning Blacks and other minorities in this country to second-class citizenship. And without pushback, without glaring and uncomfortable reminders of what life was like not all that long ago, when racism was totally acceptable in this country, they WILL succeed. We desperately need the people who were there back in the day — people like Reggie — to share their experiences loudly, and without pulling any punches, while they’re still here and able to do so.

As I've written in my baseball books and elsewhere, Reggie Jackson is (as Isaac Hayes once sang) “a complicated man,” someone who has done both incredible and facepalm-worthy things on and off the field. The Reggie documentary that’s available on Amazon Prime does a very good job of peeling back some of his many enigmatic layers, and of detailing the virulent, soul-crushing racism that he was forced to deal with on his way to becoming a superstar ballplayer.

Unfortunately, a lot of old-school baseball fans didn’t watch the Reggie documentary, simply because they didn’t like him when he played; and thus, they missed out on hearing that important part of his (and America’s) story. But by speaking his mind on national TV this past Thursday night, Reggie reached a lot more people than that documentary ever could. Hopefully they heard him loud and clear.

#BeLikeReggie

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