Ramblin' with Roger

In late 1963/early 1964, I kept seeing this guy, nicknamed by the press The Mouth or the Louisville Lip, named Cassius Clay, who would be taking on Liston for the title. I don’t think that anyone took him too seriously as a contender, even though he’d won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome as a light heavyweight. But he beat Liston and became the heavyweight champion.

Then he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. This seemed peculiar, foreign to most Americans, black and white. Indeed, many fighters, including Liston and Patterson, as I recall, kept referring to him as Clay, as much as a taunt as anything. (I always gave props to the late ABC Sports commentator Howard Cosell, for during their sometimes contentious relationship, he always referred to the boxer by the new name he had chosen.)

I was intrigued by this new champion, who hung out with the Beatles:

although John Lennon indicated that he preferred Liston.

What REALLY caught my attention, though, was when, after being reclassified 1-A, Ali, for religious and personal reasons, refused military induction. As a result, he was unable to box in the United States, and was stripped of his title for three years, starting in 1967. This seemed to me at the time hugely unfair of the boxing commission. But it was him daring to challenge the US government (and ultimately winning), thus challenging the conventional wisdom of naturally going to fight in an American war, that radically changed my whole mindset about war, and led to my pacifist leanings. I was also affected by Martin Luther King’s eloquent opposition to the Vietnam war in 1967, that famous “betrayal” of Lyndon Johnson.

Ali would regain the title against George Foreman in 1974, but by 1978, boxing had become an alphabet soup of competing boxing commissions, and I stopped paying that much attention. Still, I was thrilled, and startled, to see Ali light the flame at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and I truly enjoyed the piece the late Ed Bradley did on him for “60 Minutes”, when Ali feigned narcolepsy, during which he jabbed at the reporter. When the joke was revealed, Bradley laughed heartedly, and Ali had an infectious grin.

And yet, with all of that, I almost always end up buying for myself the CDs I didn’t get. There was only one I REALLY wanted, and that was Highway Companion by Tom Petty, recommended by both Lefty and Nik. However, I SO hate paying postage on Amazon packages, so I also ordered Corinne Bailey Rae’s debut album, based on a couple co-workers’ recommendations, and Other People’s Lives by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, based entirely on Lefty’s recommendation. If/when I get to Borders with that JT return, I’ll get whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. I’ve listened to Petty and Rae once each, and at work, not always the most conducive venue, and Davies will shed the shrink wrap today.

Don’t want to talk about slavery. “My people never owned slaves; they came to this country after the Civil War. How is that relevant? Besides, slavery is so 1865.”

Don’t want to talk about white skin privilege; that makes too many people uncomfortable, as one debates whether it even exists.

Don’t want to talk about prejudice. “The Civil Rights Movement took care of that. Besides, that was mostly in the South anyway, wasn’t it?”

Don’t want to talk about obscure black people “nobody ever heard of before. If they were REALLY important, they’d be in the REAL history books.”

Sure the heck don’t want to talk about reparations.

I know: we’ll do something with music and dance and food, which will make everyone feel good.

I recall reading recently someone suggesting that we have a REAL dialogue about Iraq in this country, as though we haven’t (and our leaders ignore us anyway, but that’s another matter.) Yet I don’t know what a real dialogue about race would look like in the 21st century.

If I sound a little peevish, in a Morgan Freemanesque sort of way, well, maybe I am. But I’m not of the “I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man” school of thought. Race matters, still.

My wife and I were watching ABC’s World News a couple weeks ago, and we saw how a young filmmaker named Kiri Davis had replicated Dr. Kenneth Clark’s black doll/white doll experiment of a more than a half century before in a movie called A Girl Like Me; also, here. It was Clark’s study that helped bring about Brown vs. Board of education. When we saw the ABC piece, we both wept.

So, as we start the 45-day “month” of Black History, think about how people of different ethnicities can get real without rancor. And please let me know what that looks like.

However, there is, as lawyers are wont to say, another bite of the apple: the Veterans’ Committee. Currently comprised of living Hall of Fame members, and award-winning writers and broadcasters, the committee votes every two years. The vote in 2003 selected no one; Gil Hodges, the manager of the 1969 World Series champion New York Mets, and umpire Doug Harvey came the closest to the 75% threshold. The vote in 2005 also selected no one, with Hodges and long-time Chicago Cubs third baseman Ron Santo each coming up short.
(The person in third place in 2005, Tony Oliva of the Minnesota Twins, was one of my favorite players in the day, an eight-time All Star, who led the league five times in hits, four times in doubles, thrice in batting average, once in slugging percentage. He and Willie Mays both batted .211 in their last seasons according to one source; I’m not saying he’s Willie Mays – who is my favorite player – just noting it.)

Here’s the 2007 Veterans Committee ballot. A lot of familiar names from my childhood. Here are some stats on the players, and mini-bios on the non-players.

The one name I had never heard: Cecil Travis. “His career batting average of .314 is a record for AL shortstops, and ranks third among all shortstops behind Honus Wagner (.327) and Arky Vaughan (.318).” Cecil Travis, who played 12 years for the lowly Washington Senators, 10 before World War II, then after suffering frostbite at the Battle of the Bulge, two unremarkable post-war seasons.

Here’s the weird thing, though: on the HoF web page, it appears that you can look up every player who was voted upon by the BBWAA – we’ll call it the traditional way. Even those folks with zero votes show up. But there’s nothing indicating voting for Cecil Travis.

What’s a librarian to do but to contact the Hall of Fame directly.
I looked back at the voting rules and did not see anything that would have kept him off a ballot. If you go back to the voting results of the late 1940’s, there is no player listed that received zero votes. If he would have received one vote, he would be listed.

If you have further questions, let us know. Thank you for contacting the Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Late 1940s? Shouldn’t it be the early 1950s, after the five year wait? I wrote back and asked.

The five-year waiting rule did not come into effect until 1954. No specific guidelines were set as to who was eligible for consideration nor to which committee would consider whom. The 75% majority was necessary for election by either committee, which continues today. A one-year wait had been in effect from 1946-1953 and no wait was specified before then due to WWII.

So, Cecil Travis’ name presumably came up in the late 1940s and he received no votes? As a guy I know wrote me: “They were still catching up to all the old-timers. Not surprised he didn’t get votes.” Yeah, but ZERO votes?