Rickwood

Throw the ball...

Rickwood was built in 1910, making it the “oldest active professional baseball park in the US.” In July of 2022, we took visiting relatives from Frankfurt, Germany, to visit Rickwood, peeking over the fence and through the cracks to see the legendary baseball field. I noticed a sign that said Rickwood would be opening in the summer of 2024, and I thought how great it would be if we could get our adult son, who lives in Los Angeles, to a game at Rickwood. This could be a goal, a wish, or something achievable. Maybe. Worth a try? Why not? But planning anything is tricky.

My son loves baseball. He played in high school but without much success. I wasn’t very encouraging. I remember a blisteringly hot day in the Valley and John Marshall High School was playing some team, and I was doing freelance editing in the stands to pay bills and trying to pay attention to a tedious game. The coach let him play a few innings that didn’t go well. But this isn’t about the coach, who wasn’t very encouraging either. This is mostly about my son who loves baseball.

Once during the heyday hot summer of Mark McGwire when I was pregnant with our youngest, my son glanced down at my calves while the Dodgers played the Cardinals on TV (the summer of 1998 when McGwire hit 70 home runs) and our boy was so excited with McGwire up at bat, that he said, “Mom, watch! Look at him! He’s going to get another home run. Just watch! Hey Mom, oh my God, Mom! Look down! You’ve got Mark McGwire calves! Awesome! So cool!”

It was a huge compliment coming from a nine-year-old.

My father, Joe Madden, a college and professional football coach for thirty years, and Tommy Lasorda, manager for the Dodgers, died a day apart in January of 2021, and Hank Aaron also died that same month and year. Somehow their three deaths inspired our son, then 32, to take up baseball again in a serious way. His grandfather played baseball as a boy and once dropped his red baseball cap out of the top window of the Washington Monument. Dad said he wanted to watch it float to the ground. Below is a picture of Dad as a boy on a St. Anne’s 8th-grade field trip in Washington DC, the one in the trenchcoat. His best friend, Ralph Hawkins, is behind him making faces. Dad and Ralph grew up to coach in the NFL, Ralph with the Seattle Seahawks, and Dad with the Detroit Lions.

My dad played baseball or football with all the grandkids, teaching them how to throw, drop back, and focus. Eye on the ball! My husband threw the baseball with our boy. I played catch with him too, but I preferred cool black box theatres for our kids’ play rehearsals over sweaty practice fields and gymnasiums - I’d grown up going to three football games a weekend, so I was trying to over-correct like I had some control. I wanted them to have literature, music, plays, art, and then okay, yes, sports in their lives.

Local Theatre

But it wasn’t only sports in my childhood. Once my mother took a drama class with her friend, Norberta, whose husband, George Haffner, was also a coach. Mom and Norberta got all dressed up for the class in high heels and earrings, mothers out on a weeknight trying local theatre in Pittsburgh in the 70s. Fran, the drama teacher, made them get on the dusty floor and be dishdrains. They didn’t like this at all in their cocktail attire. After class, they told Fran their husbands coached Pitt football and instead of the usual fanfare, Fran said in a bored voice, “Football coaches. Masters of the obvious.” Mom told the story for years, adding she decided to stick around and do props for “Man of La Mancha,” directed by Fran, who had Mom cut up thousands of little leaves for the autumn scene where the leaves had to cascade from the rafters. Soon, Mom recruited all of us kids to cut the tiny leaves with her, and we played the record from the musical. She would sweep up the leaves after each show and save them, so she wouldn’t have to cut a bunch of new leaves. She said, “One night your father showed up with a broom to help me sweep. It was such a surprise to see him there and sweet too. Norberta didn’t go back to drama class. Once was enough.”

PROJECT ROOM KEY

During COVID, our son lived in different hotels in a program called Project Room Key. It was a relief because we knew where he was, he was off the streets, and we could meet him for Wednesday night suppers. We’d pick him up or meet him in parks around Los Angeles and make sure to have the baseball and some mits with us. Baseball was a way of keeping things from spinning. Throw the ball, even if it’s getting dark. Throw the ball. Throw the ball. As a boy, he made tons of balls out of duct tape for us to pitch to him on the street to avoid breaking windows.

Throw the ball. Pitch it!

As a coach’s daughter, “Throw the ball. Put some spin on it. Eye on the ball!” was the refrain of our lives. Be it a baseball, a football, or a basketball, we threw them all as kids, pitching, tossing, lay-upping, dribbling, kicking, passing, bouncing, and catching the ball or not.

Focus. Concentrate. Look alive!

Dad used to say, “Soft hands. Catch it with soft hands, you big turkey. Soft hands."

Rickwood Field

So it was two years ago when we took my sister-in-law, Celina Lunsford, and her husband, Bill Miller, to see Rickwood Field. Celina and Bill had never been to Birmingham and wanted to explore some history of the city, baseball, and Civil Rights, and they suggested Rickwood.

It was a hot day in July of 2022, and we’d just held the celebration of life for Mama Frances, in Nashville, Celina’s mother and Kiffen’s mother, our children’s grandmother, mother of thirteen children. This short film “Mama Frances Family Pope” captures my late mother-in-law made by her daughter, Nancy Lunsford, several years ago. It has nothing to do with baseball but everything to do with family.

Anyway, after we visited Rickwood Field, we sent a note to our son who not only loves baseball but knows a ton of information about Negro League Baseball and Willie Mays too. One of his favorite books is “Pitch by Pitch” by Bob Gibson.

He also loves Jackie Robinson. And for a few precious days when our son came home from jail last spring in 2023, he wanted to see “The Jackie Robinson Story” at the TMC Festival in Hollywood where Jackie Robinson’s granddaughter was there to speak about her grandfather playing himself in the film.

Plans

We told our son about the opening of Rickwood Field two years hence, and then, a year later, we sent another reminder - something like, “Hey remember, Rickwood Field is opening next year. We could be there together. Think about it. Let’s make it happen.” We sent him pictures of his aunt and uncle at Rickwood.

I wanted to toss out some lifelines or goals, so maybe we could work together with him to get him to Rickwood Stadium and see a game. But planning anything with our son is like planning a trip to the moon, and trips to the moon can be tricky, so this wishful plan of bringing our son from Los Angeles to Rickwood Field last week didn’t happen. Still, I wanted to go anyway, and then I could tell him about it and send pictures, so my husband got tickets.

We parked at the Rising Star Baptist Church for twenty dollars and walked over to Rickwood Field where the music was playing, and soon the George Washington Carver High School Choir sang a beautiful rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Two Sporting Events in 15 Years

Sitting in the stands at Rickwood, I realized it was only my second sporting event in Birmingham in 15 years, which sounds ridiculous but true. When our youngest child moved with me from LA and began school in the sixth grade at Homewood Middle, this child came home from the first day of school and said, “We played the name game at school to get to know each other today, and it was weird. So why are some kids here so patriotic about their state, and why do the teachers roll their eyes at the kids who like the color auburn?”

I tried not to laugh. “What did you say?”

“I said I like books, but everybody else said, ‘I’m Cody and I like Alabama,’ or ‘I’m Avery Jane and I like Auburn. I don’t get it.”

This kid was a little cultural anthropologist, so I explained about football in Alabama. When I told my dad the story, he said, “Good God Almighty, take that kid to a football game!”

And so I did, a few years later when the UAB football program was on the verge of collapse due to shady dealings with the Alabama Board of Trustees. We went to the old Iron Bowl Stadium to see the UAB Blazers play the Marshall Bison. It meant waking this kid up on Saturday morning to see a football game. We called Dad from the game, so he could hear the sounds of football in a stadium where he had once coached the defensive secondary for Tennessee.

The UAB Football team is thriving again. So are the Birmingham Barons, even though they lost to the Montgomery Biscuits by a single run that night, 5-4.

But it was also during the Barons-Biscuits game that Willie Mayes passed away at the age of 93, which was just so odd and surreal - all the headlines had been about him wishing he could be there for the Major League Baseball game coming up that same week between the Giants and the Cardinals. His son, Michael Mays, had been on the news all week talking about his dad who’d joined the Birmingham Barons at sixteen.

On our way home, we stopped to get gas and saw our son’s doppelgänger who came straight up to the car and wanted to talk to us, borrow a shirt, just a shirt, not ask for money, and was lovely and cheerful, talking about growing up in Birmingham and the craziness of life and coincidences, and did we have a shirt he could borrow or not.

Then he said, “Y’all don’t look like you’re from around here.”

We told him we’d recently moved from LA, and he said, “LA! That’s wild. I was there once. Wild place. Did you even like it?”

We talked a little more and drove away, but I couldn’t help myself. I called out the window, “Hey, call your mom.”

He looked at us and said, “Are y’all stoned?”

When we got home, I was tired and turned on Netflix to escape and it was the Gene Wilder documentary. My son’s nickname growing up was Willie Wonka because of how much he looked like Gene Wilder. Once at a Halloween parade in high school, the announcer only introduced him as - "Man with hat and cane," which enraged him. "I'm Willy Wonka! I'm Willy Wonka," but the moment had passed in the sea of thousands of high school kids.

Anyway, as “Remembering Gene Wilder” flashed on Netflix, I said, “No way,” and my husband said, “We don’t have to watch it.” But of course, we did because sometimes life comes at you all at once. The documentary is beautiful and hilarious - and you should see it if you want to see the creative genius behind Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or cry with laughter watching Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn together in Young Frankenstein and cry over gorgeous Gilda Radner, whose birthday is today and you could watch her documentary too. Later, my sister reminded me that our parents took us to see all of Mel Brooks’ films from Silent Movie to Young Frankenstein to Blazing Saddles - a rare treat to all go to the movies together as a family and also to see our parents laughing uncontrollably and then reciting the lines at each other on the way home in the car.

And maybe call your mom too.

We sent our son pictures of the night at Rickwood Field, and he wrote back a few days later: “How was the game? Love you so much.”

And then he sent this picture of a Birmingham Baron.

We also learned that now finally, Major League Baseball “has officially added the players’ stats from the Negro Leagues to its historical record, a move that allows Black players’ contributions to be credited alongside their white counterparts.”

Rickwood Field, June 18, 2024.

Here is part of a letter about baseball that my son sent me on my birthday in the fall of 2022. He loved talking about this tornado in Boyle Heights and tying it to Cyclone Joe Williams.

Dear Mama, Happy Birthday! I finally ordered some pencils and paper to write you back. Alabama sounds like a very blustery autumn day. There are a few things I want to write down to remind you on paper of some recent events prior to my incarceration, etc. One, on the day they canceled the team I joined for the amateur baseball league, I witnessed a tornado, a cyclone, over in Boyle Heights. (The color) lavender, that I believed must have touched down in Evergreen Cemetery. Another fellow I spoke to mentioned gusty winds he experienced by the freeway onramp near Mariachi Plaza. I was standing dumbfounded, unaware that my season was canceled, in front of Gless Street, a block from Clarence Street on 4th Street, looking up the hill at this sight. Coincidently, or rather, profoundly, it was the site of the old Negro Baseball League Ball Park for the Los Angeles White Sox. I had also been chanting and reminded of Cyclone Joe Williams, or Smoky Joe Williams, saying "Cyclone" and listened to the winds begin to howl. He was reputed to have the best fastball ever. At dawn, over Boyle Heights - CYCLONE!!!