Bookshelf review: Campy

April 28, 2011

The Two Lives of Roy Campanella, by Neil Lanctot. Simon and Schuster, 2011.

My first thoughts when I heard about this book was, “It’s about time.”

Roy Campanella was a three-time NL MVP and a Hall of Famer, yet aside from It’s Good to Be Alive, his own ghostwritten autobiography, there have been no “adult” books about one of the greatest players of all time.

Thankfully, Lanctot, a history professor at the University of Delaware, has remedied this with Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella.

Along with Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and, to a lesser extent Dan Bankhead, Campanella was on the point when it came to African-Americans not merely playing but excelling in “organized” baseball.

Lanctot spends much of his 500-plus-page book on Campy’s development as a young teenager coming up through the Negro Leagues through his stardom and eventual decline as one of the dominant players of his era.

He focuses on the relationship between Campanella and Robinson. At first boon companions, the two All-Stars had a falling out over what Campanella perceived as unfair distribution of post-season exhibition game payments which reduced them to barely tolerant teammates. In addition, Robinson has historically been regarded as a progressive, always seeking to better the lot of African-Americans, while Campanella was more of a “go along to get along” type, not wishing to rock the boat, at least not during his playing days. (Is it telling that the cover of the book depicts an unsmiling visage for a man general regarded as happy-go-lucky?)

All athletes have two lives: the first comes during their youth and playing days; the (hopefully) longer one, afterward, when they or someone else decide they can lo longer do the job. (Speaking personally in my 50-and-over softball league I’ve noticed a sharp decline in my throwing abilities. I used to have a cannon, now it’s a painful cap pistol. It’s all relative, I guess. At least I’m still playing.) Certainly the life of a catcher is fraught with injury, from minor muscle aches to broken bones. Not to mention the fact that black players seemed to wear big targets on their uniforms that attracted fastballs from sharpshooting pitchers. Lanctot asks on several occasions whether such actions were racially motivated; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Hurlers were a lot more inclined to throw at batters “back in the day.”

The end of Campanella’s career was especially tragic: he was rendered a quadriplegic in a car crash in January, 1958. The story circulated at the time was that he was driving home late one night from the liquor store he owned and hit an icy patch on the road. That was the circulated story; speculation held that he may have been coming back from a lover’s tryst and perhaps fell asleep at the wheel. Of course, in the family-friendly fifties, the media kept such lurid notions off the pages. (These days, those unfamiliar with Campanella couldn’t be blamed for wondering if the subtitle had some sexual or more nefarious connotation.)

For fans the “boys of summer,” reading Campy is like waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop: You know what’s coming, but not how it will be presented. Although the “Two Lives” is technically accurate, Lanctot — who has written extensively on black baseball, including Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution and Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-1932 — doesn’t introduce that second phase until 60 pages from the end of the narrative. The title of the chapter that introduces the accident is fraught with foreshadowing, like dramatic music in a TV show. Nevertheless, the author does a sober job of condensing years of suffering and small triumphs as Campanella is forced to adjust to his situation and the emotional and physical stress it had on him and his family. It would be an impossible situation for the majority of the population, but how much moreso for someone whose life and work was defined by his physicality?

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