Buck O’Neil’s failure to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame is shameful. Few people in the history of baseball have done more for the game than the great man from Kansas City. By not electing Buck to the Hall of Fame, the committee did him and the game they profess to love a grave injustice.
Typically, Buck’s response to the selection committee’s rejection was dignified and gracious. But anyone knowing Buck would not have expected any other reaction; he is a person of consummate grace and dignity. His response to the committee’s indignity was fueled in the fiery furnace so many black Americans have faced in their lives, indignities no child of God should ever face but from which the character of Buck evolved with the strength of steel.
A National League executive was asked how this could happen. “Too often, baseball people think only about what a player did on the field. In Buck’s case, their focus was so narrow and constricted they ignored what he has become: the game’s foremost ambassador. Moreover, they apparently forgot that without Buck and Ken Burns” – who produced the baseball series for PBS – “few people would have known of the Negro leagues.” He might well have added that Buck was a great player.
I’ve known some extraordinary people – Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm Muggeridge, George Plimpton, Alan Simpson, Gloria Steinem – but no one has impressed me more than Buck O’Neil. When we first met in 1993, I had recently attended a birthday tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the ceremony, a combined black church choir sang, “God is a good God, God is a great God, He can move any mountain … .”
I repeated those words to Buck. I then asked, “But God didn’t move the mountain of slavery. He didn’t move the mountain of discrimination or racial injustice.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Buck answered, “That’s true, but God gave us the power to climb those mountains!”
Over the years I’ve been with Buck in many places: Denver, Boston, Indianapolis, Albuquerque, San Diego. But wherever Buck goes, people react the same, with affection and admiration. I’ve also witnessed, at ballparks around the country, the obvious devotion that major and minor league players have toward Buck. Black, white, Latino – they all love Buck.
Once I brought Buck and Roger Kahn (who wrote “The Boys of Summer”) to my grandson’s second-grade class. Roger spoke about Jackie Robinson. Buck talked about his life growing up in Florida, of becoming a Negro Leagues player. At the end of his remarks, he invited a young black girl to sit beside him. He told her how important her education would be, how hard she needed to study. He then said he wanted to come back when she graduated from elementary school, middle school and high school. He said he wanted to be there the day she graduated from college!
The effect of this was deeply moving, so great are Buck’s interpersonal skills with people of all ages.
Three years ago, Buck went to Boston to speak at the Red Sox’s annual birthday tribute to Jackie Robinson. The night before, there was a small dinner for Buck attended by team officials and members of the media, including baseball writer Gordon Edes of the Boston Globe. When the dinner was over, Edes said the chance to be with Buck that night, to hear his stories, had been one of the highlights of his life.
Buck O’Neil will do that to you.
On another occasion, Buck was in Indianapolis to dedicate a park in the memory of Oscar Charleston, the man Buck says was the greatest ballplayer he ever saw. The night before the dedication, Buck spoke at a dinner for the senior partners of a major Indiana law firm. When the program was over, one of the partners asked another, “Who do you think was the smartest person in the room tonight?” The other answered, “Buck O’Neil.”
O’Neil may not have made Baseball’s Hall of Fame, but make no mistake about it: He’s already in a place of far greater importance, one that greatly transcends the realm of sports: the Human Hall of Fame.
George Mitrovich is president of The Denver Forum. He also chairs for the Boston Red Sox The Great Fenway Park Writers Series.
