The easiest thing for Lou Brock is the compensation — travel, food, you name it. The hardest? Kids want to race him. “I go into a town, get introduced, and a kid invariably will say, ‘You wanna race?’ And when they ask that question, normally they can beat you, because they don’t ask to be defeated.”
Finalist, Entertainment Feature, 2013 Great Plains Journalism Awards
NORTH LITTLE ROCK — Lou Brock. The sound of it calls to mind an idling dragster — L-o-u — suddenly stoked, spitting fire. BROCK!
Zero to 90 feet in under four seconds. L-o-u-u-u BROCK!
A sports reporter once tried to give the ballplayer a nickname. At the time, there was Mickey Mantle, “The Mick,” and Willie Mays, “The ‘Say Hey’ Kid.” So, whattya say? Lou Brock really would prefer to hear “Mr. Brock,” if it’s all the same.
Mr. Brock came through Little Rock in March to open the St. Louis Cardinals’ exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Center. He stopped by the Arkansas Travelers’ offices at Dickey-Stephens Park for an interview with the paper, and waiting for him was another Lou Brock. Louis Brock Holman. Call him, Mr. Junior.
This Holman kid couldn’t dislodge his fist from his mouth long enough to say “Hello, Mr. Brock” — if he could even say “Hello,” which he can’t, being of an age not yet one full year. “He’s not very fast,” his mom, Jennifer Holman, confessed.
It’s true he met Jesse Owens, and it’s true Owens changed his speed on the bases. This was in the early 1960s, and Brock was in Chicago with his first team, the Cubs.
He was training with the track team at the University of Chicago field house, and the sprinters were beating him off the line something terrible. When Owens showed up, the ballplayer took the opportunity to complain, “‘Mr. Owens, I’ve been told I’m fast. The newspapers say all these things. I can’t even keep up with this track team.’
“He said, ‘Sonny, your problem may be getting started. There’s a technique to that, and I’ll show you.'”
Most people want to get up speed with their feet, Owens said. Uh-uh. Do it with your upper body. Explode in one movement. Most sprinters’ first strides are short, choppy. They’re driving with their arms.
“That was a breakthrough,” Brock recalls. “I use the expression, ‘Once I get started.’ There is a time element to ‘once I get started.'”
So the great Jesse Owens helped the great Mr. Brock get started stealing.
THE BADGER
L-o-u-u-u BROCK.
Forget the sound of his name and consider the words. You’ve got a felicitous combination here, too.
“Lou” isn’t a word we’re familiar with, but it’s there, in the Old English Dictionary, a Scottish derivation of the word low.
Lou Brock came up low, low-country. He was born the fourth boy-child and seventh of nine children to Paralee Brock in El Dorado. His father left before he can ever remember, and when Lou was 2, Paralee moved the Brocks to Collinston, La. She worked as a domestic servant and a sharecropper. The boy spent many a sunny summer day pinching cotton from its brambly basket and stuffing it into a sack. He matriculated to all-black Southern University in Baton Rouge on an academic scholarship — but even then, between high school and college, he was a field hand.
His gifts were quantitative — math, chemistry, science — and he wanted to be an engineer, but graduating near the top of his Union High School class proved a bit like being the brightest firefly on the Fourth of July. He managed just a C+ after the first semester, and his financial aid hinged on his making a B every term. It was all over.
In a last ditch effort to stay in school, he hung around the baseball team hoping to get on as a scholar-athlete. At tryouts, he fetched fly balls in the outfield until he passed out from exhaustion, and that’s when the coach took notice. He gave him five pitches to hit. He put two or three — accounts vary — over the fence, and Southern kept him on.
After hitting .545 his sophomore year, he got picked for the 1959 Pan-American Games, and he never went back to school.
Brock is a name for a badger. What’s more, “it is a name, in later times, associated especially with the epithet stinking,” says the dictionary. It was employed as a metaphor for someone crafty. A tough, sneaky thing.
Like the badger, there is nothing outwardly fierce or terrifying about Mr. Brock, but put him in a fight for his life and he swells to ursine proportions.
“He rises to occasions like nobody I ever saw,” said Bob Gibson, himself a Cardinals’ October legend.
With a lifetime batting average of .293, and just 149 home runs in over 10,000 plate appearances, Brock made the Hall of Fame largely on the strength of his 3,023 hits and 938 stolen bases, which put him 14th (at the time of his induction) and first, respectively. But now look at his performance in 21 World Series games, a lot for any player not wearing Yankee pinstripes. Brock hit safely 34 out of 87 times at bat, four for home runs. His .391 batting average is tops for a man with so many plate appearances. And he stole 14 bases in 16 tries and scored 16 runs.
Over the phone from spring training in Jupiter, Fla., Cardinals broadcaster Mike Shannon called Brock “tough” twice to be understood. “Lou Brock is one of the toughest major leaguers that ever played the game. Not only physically, but mentally. This guy was really, really tough.”
And sneaky? Well, if by sneaky you mean dishonest, no, he isn’t that. He’s a Christian minister, a philanthropist, a man not given to cussing or challenging other men. But if by sneaky you mean calculating, advantage-seeking, by golly, yes. The man admits as much in the title of his autobiography, “Stealing Is My Game.”
And here’s a story Brock tells in the book.
“One day I met [pitcher Juan Marichal] in the airport, and he comes up to me and says, ‘Ah, Lou Brock. You are good hitter. You always hit very well against me.’
“‘Nah, I don’t really,’ I said, knowing full well I damn near owned him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I keep record. You hit me better than .350.'”
“Well, it might have been a little better than that, I thought to myself. Don’t undersell me, Marichal. But I still sort of marveled at this terrific pitcher coming on so modest with me. I said, ‘No, Juan, I always have trouble with you. You got a damn good screwball, you know that?’ Sweet talk for sweet talk.
“Well, don’t you know he started giving me nothing but screwballs after that day, and my average against him dropped almost out of sight for a while. He’d tricked me, same way I like to trick other guys. I learned something from that. Don’t ever tell a pitcher anything.”
HALLS OF FAME
For all his speed, L-O-U B-R-O-C-K is fastidious about his signature.
Of all the first-ballot Hall of Fame players, only Ty Cobb and Mel Ott require fewer turns of the pen.
Yet, he takes his time with a marker and a baseball, even when Travelers’ General Manager Pete Laven plops down a box of them.
His signature is big and muscular — voluptuous “L” and “B” followed by exceedingly legible “ou” and “rock’; then, in a smaller print beneath, “HofF ’85.”
I asked Brock how many Hall of Fame induction ceremonies he has attended, but what he heard was, How many Hall of Fame ceremonies have you attended that ended in your induction?
“I guess, four.”
There’s the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Incidentally, that’s the only sports ring he wears — this hulking signet, off-center with a diamond, engraved on one side with “Outfielder” and on the other “Lou Brock” — despite his owning several Cardinals World Series rings.
Then there are the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri state halls of fame.
Wait, he says. Next month he’ll be inducted into the National College Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I guess that’ll be five.”
Inside the Cardinals exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Center, Lou Brock’s role in the history of the team is not overstated. In fact, aside from a maquette (a scale model) of his bronze statue outside Busch Stadium, there are only a couple of photos. Far more space is given over to the long-gone Ray L. Doan All Star Faculty Baseball School in Hot Springs, Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean and his brother Paul “Daffy” Dean; there are even some seats from Ray Winder Field, the old Travelers stadium from the days when they were a Cardinals farm team.
But when it came to opening the exhibit in early March, the organization brought Mr. Brock in to give the keynote address.
He is a captivating presence. It’s more than mere star power. It’s spiritual.
“Every player of my generation wanted to be a Yankee or a Cardinal,” he says. “They wanted to win championships, and the Yankees and Cardinals won championships. Now, players ask, ‘Can I make history by being the all-time best at my position?'”
(He was speaking of the still-fresh defection of Albert Pujols from St. Louis to the Los Angeles Angels.)
So, the game has changed, but “the cheer we hear on the field, it’s the same cheer. It’s all about baseball. Baseball has that thing about it that asks us all to be kids. That’s when all of us started out with a dream.”
AN ARKANSAN?
In March at the kickoff of the exhibit, Mr. Brock reminisced about KMOX, the old AM station that broadcast the ballgames down through Arkansas and as far as Collinston, La., where he grew up.
“Celebrate the marriage between Little Rock and the Cardinal.”
The what?
Lou Brock is forever saying baffling things that one would chalk up to absent-mindedness in an athlete 72 years old, were it not an athlete who has never been absent-minded about anything.
So, it’s not the Cardinals but the “Cardinal,” Mr. Brock? As in, the vigilantly guarded name of Stanford University’s teams?
But there are two birds perched there on the bat on the front of the jersey. Since the days of the Deans, two birds.
We can’t go any further excusing the man without addressing his greatest transgression against our state.
Some time after baseball, Brock was broadcasting with legendary Cubs-Cardinals announcer Harry Caray when Caray asked him, “How’d you get out of Arkansas?”
The Hall of Famer snapped back, “You know Arkansas is known as the Land of Opportunity — the first opportunity I got, I got out of Arkansas.”
A day or two later a telegram arrived postmarked Arkansas, Brock remembers. “It said, ‘Mr. Brock, we still love you. Even after a statement like that. But we have to live with it. Will you please refrain?'”
Oh, that shamed him. He never made the comment again.
It’s a small consolation, but last fall, the American Diabetes Association in Little Rock invited Mr. Brock to its Celebrity Kiss a Pig fundraiser. (Brock is involved in everything from stop-bullying campaigns and Joplin tornado relief to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.)
The ballplayer committed himself back when it looked like the Redbirds wouldn’t make the playoffs, let alone the World Series. He was to arrive the Friday ahead of the Saturday gala, but that night turned out to be the deciding game of the Series.
Friends and family, even his wife, told him the charity would understand if he stayed in St. Louis. He didn’t. He went to Little Rock.
With his help, the event raised almost $80,000.
“He likes reliable people,” said Ernie Banks, the Hall of Fame shortstop for the Chicago Cubs who was Brock’s teammate early in his career.
“I’ll tell you,” Banks said, “if he didn’t like a guy he’d just stay away from him. No fights, no mean words. … Anybody who promises him something and doesn’t deliver — even if he’s late for an appointment — well, Lou will say nothin’; he’ll just drift away from the guy.”
SELF PORTRAIT
DATE OF BIRTH: June 18, 1939, El Dorado.
WHAT I SAID TO MYSELF THOSE 10,000 TIMES I STEPPED INSIDE THE BATTER’S BOX: See the ball.
NUMBER OF BASEBALLS I’VE SIGNED: It’s not known.
NUMBER OF BASEBALL OPENING DAYS I’VE BEEN A PART OF: Subtract from ’85 to about ’90 when I didn’t go to any, subtract that to the 48 years I’ve been in the game — 42, 43 probably.
NATIONAL ANTHEMS I’VE HEARD: Almost as many as I’ve heard, “Play ball!” There is not a game where the umpire does not say “Play ball,” and it’s very rarely a game where the national anthem is not played.
I ALWAYS TRAVEL WITH my cell phone, now. It used to be a watch.
ON THE NATIONAL PASTIME: Every April, there is a noise level in America, and it’s baseball. Baseball is the background music in our lives.
ON THE YANKEES: The Yankees won 27 World Series? In fact, they only won about 12 or 13. They bought the rest.
ON THE DESIGNATED HITTER: It’s un-American.
THE NUMBER OF HANDS OF BASEBALL PLAYERS I’VE SHAKEN WHO WERE BETTER THAN ME? Quite a few. Quite a few.
CAN AN AVERAGE BASE STEALER TRAIN TO RUN FASTER AND, SO, BECOME GREAT? I don’t think a person can increase their speed, but they can improve it.
MY CHOICE OF FRAGRANCE IS Escada Pour Homme.
THE LAST TIME I WAS MOVED TO TEARS BY BASEBALL WAS the sixth game of the World Series.
IN ’68? No, 2011.
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Balance.
Originally published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 20 May 2012
