Areas of Unrest

6 June 2000 - The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg

QOTD: "Which is not to say that I did not have a sense of myself as a Jew. I went to Hebrew school; I became a Bat Mitzvah; I felt guilty on the High Holidays. I understood that my cultural heritage was characterized principally by text study and persecution, two traditions I upheld in college by learning to deconstruct literature and continuing to feel like a victim." - Melissa Levine

Reading: Richard Selzer, Taking the World In For Repairs

Listening to: the original Broadway cast recording of Damn Yankees

I saw the most wonderful movie last night. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg is a documentary about a man who has long been idolized among American Jews. Born in the Bronx to immigrant parents, Greenberg became the first Jewish sports hero in America. In his career with the Detroit Tigers, he suffered ongoing anti-Semitic taunts, and just retorted by playing better than almost anyone else in the game.

The movie is only partly biography. There's plenty of footage from his baseball years, along with interviews with him recorded in the last few years of his life and interviews with friends, family and fans. (I particularly liked one woman who was, essentially, a groupie. It was also amusing hearing Walter Matthau say that he joined the Beverly Hills Tennis Club just so he could hang out with Hank.) But the movie is also about what baseball meant in America in the 1930's and 40's and how it affected the immigrant experience.

To that end, there are clips from films and television shows, as well as newsreel footage and more interviews. In fact, the film starts with footage of children playing ball in the streets, with the background music being "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in Yiddish. Baseball was the American experience. It was unthinkable not to be a fan of your local team. Playing the game, following your team, listening to the games on the radio - all was part of the transformation from greenhorn to real American. While it got a laugh, there's a serious message from the interviewee who said that seeing Greenberg play persuaded him he could be something other than a presser in the garment district.

The other thing that came across was the image that baseball players were supposed to have. They were expected to behave well towards the fans and to put the game above everything else except the country. Nobody thought it strange that Greenberg would leave the Tigers and enlist in the Army. The pendulum may be swinging back, but there was a long period when all you ever heard about baseball was players brawling in bars or getting in trouble with drugs or, at the very minimum, whining over multimillion dollar contracts while charging kids for autographs. It's pretty hard to imagine Jose Canseco (my personal candidate for most greedy, selfish jerk ever to play the game) organizing a charity game for disabled veterans.

It's gotten better in the past few years. One could argue that Cal Ripken, Jr. is no great player, but he comes across as an "aw shucks" type of guy. And he was the first player in ages who got media coverage for dedication to the game, instead of for drugs and domestic violence. We are back to stories about home run races and bringing baseball to poor Dominican kids.

But baseball will never be as important to America at large as it was in the 1940's. There's too much competition with other sports, for one thing. And there's the change in the media so that fans watch the cable sports shows and only a handful of local games are televised on broadcast channels. (The Atlanta and Chicago superstations are a notable exception.) Hardly anyone thinks to listen to games on the radio, even though that was one of the great experiences of my childhood.

Which reminds me of a cute story from junior high. One boy in my class used to listen to the Mets games during math class. He had one of those pocket transistor radios and the old fashioned sort of ear plug (now entirely obsolete as the walkman style headphones are more comfortable and give better sound quality). Our math teacher didn't catch on, until he made a comment to another teacher about what a pity it was that poor Mike had to use a hearing aid at such a young age!

Nowadays, few of my friends pay any attention to baseball. I've found the fellow Red Sox fans at work, of course. (Just hang a pennant on your office door and they'll find you, actually.) Soccer is the sport that kids play - from the playgrounds of East L.A. to the schoolyards of the tony beach cities - and the immigrant parents still follow their futbol teams back home, instead of assimilating into the ever dwindling crowds at Chavez Ravine. (I should note that it is somewhat understandable that Latino Los Angeles would be disdainful of the Dodgers, given the displacement that came from the building of Dodger stadium. But the story is similar in most other cities.) Our teams are more multicultural than ever, but baseball is no longer the unifying American experience.

We're not going to go back to the America of Hank Greenberg's era and I wouldn't want to. The movie makes the negative side of that era quite clear. But it was still wonderful to see a sweet and entertaining movie like this. I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the Jewish immigrant experience, baseball or just American culture.