Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) Read Free Page A

when I drove her home, I’d have to hold the interior light button down with my hand when I dropped her off, so the inside of the car would stay dark and her parents couldn’t see who it was. Then she could get out in the dark and run in the door.
    Meanwhile, things were going on all around us. You know, I was thirteen years old when they held the first sit-in at the Woolworth’s counter in 1960. Negroes weren’t allowed to vote in much of the United States until 1965—we were still physically kept from voting when I was already in college! All that stuff that went on, all the murders in the South, the burning of the churches, the murder of Martin Luther King—that all went on when I was a teenager or in my early twenties.
    It’s hard to get across to some people—what that does to you. Many think of it as ancient history: “Oh, my gosh, that was so terrible.Forty years ago, I can’t believe it! That’s the way it was? My, my, what a terrible thing. That’s really too bad!” is what people would say.
    But my brothers and sisters, the six of us? We were raised in that era. Our youngest is sixty-two, my older sister is seventy-five, my brother is seventy-three. We were
raised
in that America. So it’s not something that you easily forget.
It’s part of who we are
. Part of who I am. You don’t just forget! You work at forgiving.
    As a kid, you tend to just accept that that’s how things are. But it still hurts. Growing up, all through my teens, I was raised as a second-class citizen. You’d have to be a psychologist to know all the different ways that impacts someone. I’m just a human being who felt the hurt in mind and heart.
    People ask you, “How did you feel about that?” and you almost want to say to them, “How do you
think
I felt?” I’d want to start swearing or something, because it’s hard to find the words, it’s not comfortable even to think about that again. You just want to get away from it emotionally. Invariably, though, something happens to remind you of the ugliness.
    My father used to tell us, “If you ever get in a race, if you ever get in a contest, make sure that you’re clearly the winner. Make sure that there’s no photo finish. Because if there’s a photo finish, you won’t win the race.”
    So now it’s 1966, and here I was, I had won going away. Danny Murtaugh said it. A white guy, been around baseball all his life, a great judge of talent. He said I was head and shoulders above the rest. And then the Mets drafted Steve Chilcott. I don’t want to disrespect Steve Chilcott, he got hurt. I’m sure he was a good ballplayer and a good guy.
    But that wasn’t why he was drafted first. He was drafted first because I was dating a “white” girl.
    I suppose I was surprised and I wasn’t surprised when I heard that from Bobby Winkles. The ironic thing was, the Mexican girl I was dating, her uncle—his name was Ferdie—told Frank Kush that he didn’t want me dating his niece.
    I married Juanita in the end. It didn’t work out; we were only married for about a year and a half. But it wasn’t because she was this much Mexican or I was that much black. It was because I wasn’t agood husband. I wasn’t from an institution of successful marriage, my parents were separated by the time I was six. I never knew much about marriage, never lived in the environment of marriage. I wish I had—at least I think so.
    If the Mets had only been willing to wait, or sign me because of my ability, I would have played with Seaver—and later maybe Strawberry and Gooden. That would’ve been fun. But what it came down to was, I wasn’t going to New York yet. I was going to Kansas City.

2
B IRMINGHAM
    T HE GREAT THING about Bobby Winkles was, as soon as he broke it to me that I wasn’t going to be the number one draft pick because the New York Mets disapproved of my dating habits, he also told me, “But there’s a guy, Bob Zuk, who’s a scout with the Kansas City A’s, and he loves