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Out of Left Field |
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 Pee Wee Reese |
A heartfelt Reese family story
of TheColumnists.com
I covered the Brooklyn Dodgers in the last few years before they deserted Brooklyn for the riches of Los Angeles in 1958. I got to know Pee Wee Reese, the admirable captain, the shortstop. Like almost everybody who knew him, I loved him. The Dodgers of Pee Wee Reese have been immortalized as “The Boys of Summer” and if there was anybody who was the heart and soul of that fabled team, it was Pee Wee Reese, the gentle man from Louisville.
In 1991, a few years after Reese had been inducted into the Hall of Fame, I was at the ceremonies in Cooperstown for the induction of Bill Veeck, the roguish baseball owner who was, like Reese, one of the best people I came across in more than 40 years as a reporter. Reese’s son Mark, a documentary film maker in his early twenties, was in Cooperstown with his father to make a film about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
At one of the Hall of Fame festivities, I approached Mark Reese somewhat hesitantly. To the son of a man I loved I said, “All of us who covered the Dodgers loved Pee Wee. But sometimes the man who is beloved by outsiders is not necessarily regarded with the same reverence by a son or daughter.” Haltingly, perhaps fearfully, I continued, “Is Pee Wee the same kind of person for you that he was for us?”
Mark Reese looked at me, hesitated a moment, and then said, “More so.”
Mark’s documentary, “The Boys of Summer,” was acclaimed. And now he has produced another film that is a tribute to his dad and some others. It is called, “Boys in Winter: The Toughest Season.” It is a film that is loving, warm, yet sad and sometimes painful as a son records the lingering death of his father--with his mother tending to her cancer-stricken husband. There is, also, a subplot involving Reese’s teammate, Carl Erskine, and his love for his Down Syndrome son, Jimmy.
As the Dodgers’ mainstay
Reese had a droll sense of humor. He would look on wryly at times
when Duke Snider or Jackie Robinson were carrying-on in the clubhouse
about slights, real and imagined. He would explain with a rueful
expression about the all-too-many times he struck out on a curve
ball on the outside corner of the plate. “I let it go because
it wasn’t a strike,” he would say, and smile because
he knew the ball was a strike.
Reese’s drollery is never more evident than in the midst
of his pain here. He has had both testicles removed because of
prostrate cancer, and he says to the doctor, “You gotta
have a few balls--and I don’t have any. [a chuckle) Jesus,
they took those sons of bitches away. God damn, they should have
left something with me, shouldn’t they?”
He spent the last 10 years of his life fighting cancer. We see him slowly putting on a Dodgers uniform for an oldtimer’s game, saying, “It’s no fun when you get old.” Shortly after he has learned he has cancer, he tells his wife, “I’m gonna beat this thing, I know I am….it’s the toughest thing I’ve done in my life, getting out of this mess I’m in.” And later when he is chair-ridden, he tells the inteviewer, his son, “I never thought there was something I couldn’t do gracefully. If I could get up from here right now, throw this fuckin’ thing [crutch] away over there, I’d be happy.”
Carl Erskine, a fine pitcher and teammate of Reese in the 11 years he pitched for the Dodgers, calls Reese, “The Captain.” He jokes with his friend, saying, “Didn’t you used to be Pee Wee Reese?” And he is shown lovingly with his handicapped son. He kisses the teen-aged Jimmy and says, “My buddy.” He likens the fight of his son and people with Down Syndrome to the fight for acceptance by Jackie Robinson when he broke baseball’s color line with the Dodgers in 1947.
Reese is admired for many things, not the least of all, the fact that he, a southerner, helped ease the way for Robinson by befriending him when he was under assault by bigots. When Robinson was being pilloried by Reds players and fans in Cincinnati during fielding practice his first season Reese made a point of walking over to the black man and putting his arm around him. That aspect of Reese is acknowledged on his plaque in Cooperstown and on his gravestone in the Louisville cemetery.
In the film there is a scene in infield practice that wakes up the echoes, Robinson flipping a ball from behind second base to Reese crossing the base and throwing on to first base in that distinctive three-quarters sidearm motion to complete a phantom double play.
Pee Wee talks about his father, who evidenced the bigotry of his time, once showing him a tree where blacks were hanged. His sister, tending to Reese toward the end, talks of referring recently to that “little nigger boy Tiger Woods” and Pee Wee saying, “Don’t say that.”
Heywood Hale Broun, who
covered Reese back then, adds a bit of his own eloquence to it
all. He says, “I think the Brooklyn Dodgers are important
because I believe that sport is a shared delusion. A group of
people get together and decree that a thing is important--and
because they think it is important, it becomes important.”
When Pee Wee was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he told the
crowd, “If they had a Hall of Fame for wives, my wife would
have made it. I wore No. 1 all the years I played and she was
No. 1 in my heart.”
Dorothy Reese is at the heart of the film, tending to Pee Wee,
encouraging him, reminiscing, honoring him at the grave site.
On Aug. 14, 1999 she was sitting with him. “He squeezed
my hand three times, which meant ‘I love you’…and
he didn’t say anything more,” she said.
Mark Reese, 44, was nervous when he first showed his mother his
film, “But she was pleased,” he said. “She had
a tear in her eye and said it was a beautiful film.”
A recent low-budget film on baseball immortal Hank Greenberg
was received so well, it got into general movie release. This
one, with a haunting musical accompaniment by the ubiquitous
David Amram, is in that class. It deserves to be seen by a public
from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.
© 2002 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©
2001 by Jim Hummel.
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