Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

Larry Tye. Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. New York: Random House, 2009. Cloth, $26.00. This is the West, sir, proclaims character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford's cinematic ode to the closing of the American frontier. When legend becomes fact, print the Baseball, much like Hollywood's Old West, is replete with tall tales of heroic warriors performing great deeds. And, truth be known, don't we often prefer the legend to the fact? Babe Ruth hitting home run is so mundane, but calling his shot during the World Series is different matter altogether. No life is more shrouded in myth of Leroy Robert Satchel Paige. One of baseball's greatest hurlers, the enigmatic Paige is truly the stuff of legend, much of it created--and promoted--by the man himself. With Paige, it is especially difficult to separate the factual from the fanciful, as the stories of his exploits have been repeated so often they take on the aura of truth. For Paige was, as Larry Tye points out in his masterful biography, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, a fastball wrapped in (vii). Tye confronts the Bunyanesque image of Paige head-on. In his efforts to unwrap the riddle was Satchel, he interviewed hundreds of Paige's surviving teammates, friends, and relatives, among others--the number is so extensive the book refers readers to his website for the complete source list--and consulted plethora of primary and secondary sources. As result, he has produced compelling, eminently readable, and exhaustively researched biography of the pitcher and his times. Tye succeeds in unearthing the facts behind some of the more notorious Paige inventions. Among others, he definitively establishes the date of Paige's birth (July 7, 1906), the truth of Paige's first two marriages (he married his second wife while still married to his estranged first wife), and the real author of Paige's rules for staying young (ghosted by Richard Donovan and attributed to Paige in three-part story appearing in Collier's Weekly in 1953). More importantly, Tye explores the rationale for the Paige mythology and, in doing so, makes the real man even greater than his legend. Paige intentionally created his larger-than-life persona to call attention to himself, Tye argues, because he knew that, despite being the fastest, win-ningest pitcher alive, being black meant he would never get the attention he deserved (x). But, by doing so, he, more than any other African American player, helped move African American baseball out of the shadows of the game. His success against teams, for example, drew the attention of sportswriters, thus giving national mainstream exposure to the black game. By filling the stands wherever he pitched against teams, he proved white fans would turn out in droves to see black superstars (xi). And by regularly defeating these teams, he demonstrated to the baseball establishment that Negro Leaguers could really play ball (xi). …

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