He would star for the better part of two decades for the Pirates, evolving into one of the most iconic sports figures in a city blessed with numerous sports heroes. When his playing career ended, he remained tethered to the game, hovering in the broadcast booth for a year, before eventually agreeing to work as a special assistant in the Pirates’ front office. He was elevated to a coach under Chuck Tanner, and then when new Pirates ownership came in and dismissed Tanner, Stargell followed his old manager to Atlanta, where he started a new chapter in his life. Although things didn’t work out as planned—Tanner wanted to groom Stargell to take over as field manager when Tanner himself moved up to become general manager—Stargell earned a position in the Braves’ front office and spent most of a decade helping to teach the club’s prospects about hitting. And winning. Those who worked with him in the front office acknowledged his influence over an organization that went from being one of the worst in baseball to a team with an unprecedented run of 14 straight division titles.
That wasn’t all he did. In 1988, he became the 17th player to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He remained active, taking on speaking engagements at colleges and universities. He found time to indulge in several hobbies—computers, photography, deep sea fishing for blue marlin and using his compound bow. He also spent time shortly after retiring from the game touring with the Eastman Philharmonia and starring in a production known as New Morning for the World—Daybreak of Freedom, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Joseph Schwantner and featuring the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He received rave reviews and would go on to narrate other musical works in the years to come.
After a decade-long hiatus with the Braves in Atlanta, Stargell was asked to return to Pittsburgh and work with the Pirates in 1997. Overjoyed, he jumped at the chance and became one of the club’s trusted advisers. His failing health curtailed his activities but he managed to be on hand in the fall of 2000 when the Pirates announced that a 12-foot statue would be built to honor Stargell at the new PNC Park, set to open for business the following spring. He was moved to tears by the gesture. He stayed in town to see the club drop the curtain on his own personal power playground, Three Rivers Stadium, as the 2000 season wound to a close. By then, appearing gaunt due to his health issues, he received one final salute from the fans while surrounded by teammates and his old field boss, Tanner.
Then in early April, word filtered into the city that the mighty Stargell had passed—on the very day that the Pirates were prepared to make their debut in sparkling new PNC Park. If ever there was a day of mixed emotions, April 9, 2001, was it for Pirates fans young and old alike.
Willie Stargell has been gone for more than a decade now, but his story resonates with as much life today as it ever did. His on-field exploits guaranteed him immortality in the game of baseball; his numbers and upper-deck bombs ensure that he will remain front and center in any conversation pertaining to the game’s elite power hitters. His ability to lead, to steady and to inspire guarantees that any discussion of baseball’s most beloved and effective leaders will include mention of his name—and prominent mention at that.
His legacy will live on forever not just with teammates, opponents and fans of the game he so dearly loved—playing baseball was all he ever wanted to do for a living—but those who lived with him and loved him. The same inspiration and even keel that he offered his clubhouse mates, he provided for his five children and his grandchildren, and no doubt would have been a constant flowing source of love had he remained alive today.
Willie Stargell was not perfect, as his story will make clear. He was, however, perfectly human.
Chapter 1
In the Beginning
SO MANY VARIABLES go into making a man. In no way does the process resemble a mathematical equation, all parts logically fitting together and yielding a sensible walking, talking sum. It’s not a chemical formula, where each element can be scientifically extracted and scrutinized, weighed and measured, and assigned a certain value. A man’s makeup consists of elements, but putting a chemical or numerical value to each would be a fool’s task. Genetics plays a major role, as does the environment into which he is born and raised. Friends, family, co-workers and even adversaries mold and shape. Passions and interests help smooth out the rough edges and fill the gaps.
Wilver Dornel Stargell was a complex man—a man of wisdom and grace. A man of enormous strength and power. A prankster. A kind soul. A man to whom family and friends meant virtually everything. Above all, he was human. As a member of baseball’s hallowed Hall of Fame, he displayed feats of superhuman skills and coordination, yet displayed the same lapses in judgment and the same character flaws that the vast majority of humanity shows in its weaker moments. He was a real man, whose impact on the game of baseball and on those who had the pleasure of knowing him will only grow in time.
Coursing through the veins of this real man was the blood of two proud and largely misunderstood races—the black man and the American Indian, both of which he believed largely made him the man he ultimately became. Born in rural Oklahoma and reared for part of his childhood in the deep south of Florida, he came of age in the racial melting pot of the San Francisco Bay Area, largely protected by a unique environment while the turbulence of the 1950s swirled outside. Later, he used his notoriety to help raise awareness of a disease that affected scores of blacks as he pushed against the steely resolve of baseball’s establishment for more minority representation in places of power both on and off the field.
A genealogical record of Stargell’s life, contained in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ files, indicates that Stargell’s mother’s maiden name was Gladys Vernell Hunt and that his paternal grandfather was a Seminole light-horse brigade member named Tecumseh Bruner. The sketch maintained that Stargell’s paternal grandmother—Nora May Bruner—was the daughter of Eugene Walker and Dinah Walker and that both families were found in the Indian Territory in the Seminole County in the 1900 census.
According to the Pirates genealogical record, Stargell’s great-grandfather, Henry Stargell, moved from Georgia to Oklahoma around 1908. Georgia census records show the Henry Stargell family in Meriwether County, Georgia, in 1900 and 1880, and these accounts list 12 children born to Henry by his first wife, Victoria. In 1899, Henry was remarried to Dora Mitchell, and the two were shown to be living together in the 1900 census.
Although official baseball records place Stargell’s place of birth as Earlsboro, Oklahoma, there is some question about the day and year. The National Baseball Hall of Fame lists his birth date as March 6, 1940, but other sources list the year as 1941 and even 1942. Stargell maintained that March 6 was the day that his mother, Gladys Stargell, went into labor—but that he was not born until the following day, March 7. But Stargell held that the year was 1941—not 1940. However, his half-sister Sandrus said Stargell’s birth year was 1940. His unusual first name, Wilver, was a combination of his father’s “William” and his mother’s middle name, “Vernell.”
William Stargell left his wife, Gladys, before young Wilver was born, but the Stargell clan welcomed mother and son with open arms. And there, the first major male influence in Stargell’s life surfaced—his paternal grandfather, Wil, who served not only as a father figure to young Wilver but also to his young mother.
The Stargells, like most Depression-era families, struggled to get by financially. In 1942, Gladys married a soldier named Lesley Bush, and two years later the young family—looking to take advantage of wartime job opportunities out West—followed Bush’s family to California. Gladys’s marriage to Lesley Bush dissolved in 1945, and she and her son moved in with a step-aunt in the housing projects of Alameda. Gladys found work as a cleaning lady and in 1946 married a sailor-turned-truck driver named Percy Russell. But the young family’s life would be upended by an unexpected visitor—one of Gladys’s older sisters, Lucy, arrived from Orlando, Florida, and stayed with the family for almost a month. Sensing the young couple
could use some time to regroup, Lucy talked Gladys and Percy into allowing her to take 5-year-old Wilver back to Florida for a spell. They agreed on a one-year maximum stay, and soon Wilver and Lucy were on a train and bound for Florida.1
One year turned into six, and young Wilver spent much of his time doing chores for his aunt. But he managed to find opportunities to hone his nascent baseball skills, tossing stones to strengthen his throwing arm and using those same stones—as well as bottle caps—to develop his trademark hitting stroke. The youngster would simply toss them in the air and blast them with sticks—a pastime he would indulge in for years to come.
Willie Stargell, posing for a family photograph, at 26 months of age (courtesy Sandrus Collier).
Not much is known about Stargell’s six-year stay in Orlando, other than what he conveyed in his autobiography. Eventually, however, Gladys—with young Sandrus in tow—boarded a train in California, bound for Florida, and reclaimed her son. By then, at age 11, Stargell believed he had been strongly influenced by his racial makeup. In fact, he maintained that as part black and part Seminole Indian, he was bred as an “outcast.” As a Seminole, Stargell wrote, he had never experienced life in a conventional family, and being black, he felt “trapped within the confines of societal prejudice.”2
He also felt significant influence from his generation, one that emphasized togetherness. Even at a young age, he valued nothing more than friends and family. But baseball was a close third. He looked for every opportunity to improve his skills, even if conventional games or practices weren’t often in the offing. He even recalled swinging at imaginary pitches on the train ride from his Aunt Lucy’s place in Florida back to the Bay Area and his new home. There, in the island city of Alameda, the reconstituted Stargell family—Wilver, Sandrus, their mother Gladys, and Percy Russell—lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income housing project originally built for government workers who flocked to the Bay Area to fill hundreds of wartime jobs. Gladys toiled at a cannery and moonlighted as a beautician on the side, working out of the family apartment. Percy, meanwhile, provided the discipline and strength the young family needed. And as an added bonus, he shared with young Wilver a love for baseball that went back to his Alabama roots.
Stargell’s new neighborhood, known as the Encinal project, provided a safe, loving environment colored by its many races and nationalities. Because everyone was in the same financial boat, no discernible prejudice existed within the housing project. “We all struggled together,” Stargell wrote. “My mother termed our neighborhood ‘the family’—different households were that close with one another.”3 More than 40 years later, it would be another “family”—the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates—that would become synonymous with Stargell.
Nick Cabral, who befriended Stargell at a local Boys Club before they were teenagers and later attended Encinal High School with him, remembered Alameda as a wonderful place to grow up. “In the mid–1950s, with all this racial strife and changes, we were in our own little cocoon, contained on this island,” he said. “It was this perfect little nest. It was amazing. We were so protected by this community—we had a wonderful time growing up. Our high school was so diverse. One year we’d have an Anglo running for student body president, then an Asian, then a Hispanic, then a Hawaiian. It was a melting pot of a high school. It was special and it’s not a surprise that Willie came out of that environment. We were diverse with friends so young. We knew no different. We thought the whole world lived like this.”4
Willie, dressed as a young sailor, at 4½ years of age (courtesy Sandrus Collier).
The melting pot that was the Alameda projects and the lack of prejudice that prevailed would stand in stark contrast to the world Stargell would inhabit just a few years later. But in the meantime, he lived what appeared to be a rather typical young teen’s life—playing sports, spending time with friends and getting into a little mischief now and then.
Stargell found a haven of sorts at a local Boys Club, which was located in the west end of Alameda. Joe King, the Boys Club director, recalls Stargell joining the group at the age of 12 or so. In those days, no one referred to Stargell as Willie—it was always by his given name, Wilver. “In fact we’d always call him ‘Wil-i-ver’—we’d put that extra vowel in there,” King said.5
At the age of 13, Stargell and Cabral played on a Boys Club team that ultimately battled for the Bay Area Boys Club championship, against Columbia Park of San Francisco, at Seals Stadium, which was to become the first home of the San Francisco Giants after they relocated from New York in time for the 1958 season. “I can’t tell you what Stargell did but he must have done well because we won 8–1,” King recalled. “And Nick had a no-hitter going for six innings.” That would be the only year that Stargell would play for the Boys Club team; the next year he was off to Encinal High School, where he started playing as a freshman.
Cabral said the Boys Club was the center of life for boys ages 10 to 14 in the Oakland area. In addition to baseball and basketball, the club offered escapes that weren’t often available to inner-city youth like those who lived in Alameda’s Encinal, Estuary and Webster housing projects. “We’d walk over there to the club and pick up eight or nine kids along the way—and we’d stay all day,” Cabral said. On Tuesdays, youngsters would take field trips, one of which stood out in Cabral’s memory. “We had a doctor in Alameda who had a cabin up in the Oakland Hills. It was still urban—it was right in the city—but we thought we were in Yellowstone. These little black kids didn’t know where they were. Giant Oak Knoll Hospital was right down the road from the cabin—you could look down from the porch and see the hospital—but we thought we were in the wilderness. That was our life. It was a Norman Rockwell life.”
Throughout his pre-teen and early teenage years, Stargell’s love for baseball grew stronger, and despite the fact that only a few black ballplayers by that time had reached the major leagues, he was convinced he could make a career of it. Although he had moved from rocks and bottle caps to rubber balls and tennis balls to improve his batting eye, he wasn’t above hitting stones in a pinch. Curt Motton, who grew up in the Alameda projects and became Stargell’s teammate at Encinal High School—and ultimately played in the major leagues with Stargell and another fellow Encinal alum, Tommy Harper—recalled he and Stargell hitting pebbles with a stick on more than one occasion. “We wouldn’t do it religiously, but I know we used to do it,” said Motton, who died in 2010. Motton said Stargell apparently picked up the exercise from an older neighborhood player named Joe Wilson. “Joe gave him this technique—if you hit this pebble like this, this is what would happen,” Motton said. “One person would throw and the other person would hit. I can recall Stargell mentioning to me later that he thought that exercise had a lot to do with helping him develop into the hitter he became.”6
Motton first ran into Stargell when the two were about 12 years old, when Motton was delivering newspapers to Percy and Gladys Russell’s apartment in the Encinal Project. “One day I came to collect and when Stargell answered the door, he said, ‘My mama ain’t gonna pay you.’ He was just pulling my leg. That’s how we met.”
It wouldn’t be the last time Stargell pulled Motton’s leg. In fact, Stargell was perennially upbeat; at least that is the way Motton remembered him. “He seemed to be a guy who was always happy,” he said. “The people that he liked, whenever he saw you, his face would just light up. He liked to have fun. He was an easy person to like—outgoing, pleasant to be around. Even after he became quite successful, he didn’t change. Whenever we would bump into each other, it was always a pleasant surprise if we weren’t expecting to see each other. If I had gone to sleep for a long time and woke up and didn’t know he’d done the things he’d done in baseball, I’d think he was pretty much the same guy.”
When he wasn’t hitting rocks, Stargell was working on his game at nearby Washington Park. Those who played with and against Stargell can remember a few of the long balls he hit. “He was around 12 years old a
nd he was hitting the ball 400 feet-plus,” said Robert Earl Davis, a teammate of Stargell’s at Encinal High School and the school’s best all-around athlete in Stargell’s estimation. “When he was hitting them, he was hitting them over the fence.”7 And occasionally through a window. “There was this house with blue glass,” remembered Cabral, “and he just knocked it out.”
Motton, who was the leading hitter on the Encinal Jets team during the trio’s senior year of high school in 1958, said Willie’s scorebook featured no cheap hits. “As youngsters, we tended to evaluate ourselves based on our batting average. Looking back, Willie might have hit .400 and I would have hit .420 and Harper would have hit .480 or .500. If I got 25 hits, eight or nine of them were because I could run. Every one of Stargell’s hits was legitimate. If I played against good infielders, my batting average would have gone down. Willie could have played against the best infielders and outfielders and his batting average wouldn’t change. When he hit the ball, he really hit it hard and the ball really carried. He used to hit the ball over the fence in high school. I don’t recall him hitting any really long home runs—balls that would make my mouth drop, like he did when he got to the big leagues. But I do remember that he got the longest base hits. He didn’t run very well, so he would hit a single and it’d be longer than any ball I hit. It would be a long line drive.”
Willie Stargell Page 2