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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Category Archives: Cuba

Charleston Chronology

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography, Brown Dodgers, Cuba, Early Life, Harrisburg Giants, Homestead Grays, Indianapolis ABCs, Indianapolis Clowns, Lincoln Stars, Managing Career, Philadelphia Stars, Philippines, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Toledo/Indianapolis Crawfords

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Oscar Charleston

I had intended to include in Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player a chronology of Charleston’s life. I thought it would be particularly helpful in Oscar’s case, given how peripatetic he was, and given the errors floating around in the online ether. But including it would just make the darn book too long, said the University of Nebraska Press, no doubt wisely. So I have now included that chronology here. You can navigate to it using the top menu of the site.

As always, if you spy any errors or have any questions, please let me know.

So, that fight with a Cuban soldier (or soldiers) . . .

12 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Cuba, Cuban baseball

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Cuban League, John Holway, Oscar Charleston, Santa Clara Leopardos, Ted Page, Webster McDonald

The 1923–24 Santa Clara Leopardos have become an integral part of the Oscar Charleston legend, in part because of a truly spectacular fight that Oscar ignited on January 19 at Almendares Park in Havana, during the first game of the Gran Premio Invernal season.

I have been researching this incident for the book, and here is what I think happened:

It all started when Oscar, sliding with typical fury into third base, spiked Manuel Cueto, the third baseman, cutting him badly. As Cueto lay there in pain, his brother, a soldier, leaped out of the stands behind third base and charged Charleston. Soon, both Cuetos were taking swings at Oscar, and before long several other soldiers, or perhaps policemen, had run onto the field—either to join the fray, as the later legend has it, or to break it up, as is much more likely. (Contemporary Cuban news accounts refer to Oscar getting into a fight with just one soldier.) Oscar defended himself as best he could, and by all accounts acquitted himself well. A post-fight newspaper photo in his scrapbook shows him standing calmly next to a policeman, no worse for the wear. Manuel Cueto was not as fortunate; he was carried off the field by teammates and taken to the emergency room. Charleston was hauled off to the police station.

At first, Oscar suffered badly in the Havana press, which published a number of articles accusing him of dirty play (Charleston proudly pasted some of these pieces in his scrapbook). The cartoonists had a field day, illustrating in comic fashion Oscar’s slide into third, the chaotic fight that followed, and the punishment Oscar was to receive; one ends by showing him hanging from a noose labeled Liga—League. Rumors spread among fans that Charleston had it out for native Cuban players and, indeed, that he had hoped to seriously injure one of them before he left the island that winter. Many citizens were outraged at the thought of a Cuban soldier being assaulted by an American player.

Yet Oscar had not only a legion of fans by this time, but also numerous well-placed friends. Both groups were quick to spring to Oscar’s defense. A telegram reached him the next day, assuring him that all Santa Clara stood behind him. A friend named Salvador Castillo y León wrote Oscar a personal letter encouraging him to ignore the criticism being heaped upon him in the papers. Oscar had always been known for his “gentlemanly conduct.” The injury was an accident—and in any case was part of the game when a fielder chose to block a base. The soldier, meanwhile, had “dishonored the uniform” and would be appropriately punished in a court of law. Castillo y León enclosed a flyer that fans were circulating in support of Oscar. It repeated the claim that Charleston, who was well-known for his gentlemanliness, was being ill-used by the Havana press for his role in the incident at Almendares Park, and it called for fans to boycott the two newspapers—El Pais and El Sol—that were most strident in their criticisms of Charleston’s play.

Another of Oscar’s friends, Hilario Franquiz, wrote to La Prensa on January 24 that Oscar was a “perfect gentleman” too “decent” and “cultured” to be legitimately suspected of intentionally trying to hurt someone. He conveyed with his letter one from Oscar, in which Charleston said (in Spanish) that if he wanted “to hurt a man, I would do it nobly,” not by using his spikes. (Anyone who knew Oscar would have known that much, at least, to be true.) Nor was he prejudiced against Cubans. “I esteem a man as what he is, as a man, as a human being, without taking into account” ethnicity or other extraneous matters. After all, Oscar and his fellow Negro leaguers knew all too well what it meant to be judged in such a manner. Finally, Oscar met with representatives of the Cuban military, explained that he was only acting in self-defense, and insisted that he meant no disrespect to the uniform of the Cuban Army, for which, as a veteran himself, he had only admiration. In this meeting, Oscar’s charm and sterling social reputation once again served him well. His explanation was well received. The Army even announced that it would discipline Cueto the soldier for his role in the incident.

The fight was a big deal, but Oscar was hardly scarred by the event. Indeed, besides memorializing it extensively in his scrapbook, he seems to have laughingly retailed it far and wide once he returned stateside. The day Charleston got into a melee with a bevy of soldiers and spent the night in jail became a tale that would often be told, in various exaggerated forms, down through the years. Webster McDonald, who wasn’t there, told Negro leagues historian John Holway decades later that Oscar had whipped three men that day. “Grabbed one and swung him around and knocked the others down,” said McDonald. Ted Page, who wasn’t there either, told Holway, “There were a dozen or more soldiers, and he stretched them all over the park, just laying them out.” Oscar must have really enjoyed spinning this yarn. “He told us about how he was down in Latin America and there was one fight that they put him in jail overnight,” said Wilmer Harris, recalling a conversation with Oscar that must have taken place in the late 1940s. “Said he rattled the cage all the time he was in there, scared ’em to death.”

That was Oscar: always entertaining himself by rattling the cage.

Charleston and McGraw

30 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Cuba

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Blanche McGraw, Cuban League, John McGraw, Oscar Charleston, Santa Clara Leopardos

The great John McGraw allegedly said that Oscar Charleston was the best player he had ever seen. To my knowledge, no one has ever produced a good source for that quote, but if McGraw did believe that, he may have come to that conclusion in the winter of 1924.

McGraw and his wife Blanche were regularly spending a few weeks in Cuba every winter by that point. One assumes they took in some ballgames, at least whenever Mac got tired of the racetrack. In the winter of 1923-24, Charleston was playing center field for the Santa Clara Leopardos, now commonly considered the best team in Cuban baseball history. McGraw would have been aware of how that team was demolishing the competition.

Anyway, it seems that the two men may have had occasion to discuss baseball together. A couple days ago I was looking more closely at this passenger list of the SS Cuba, which arrived in Key West on March 1, 1924 (apologies if you have to zoom in to read the names). Oscar and Jane Charleston are in rows 19 and 20. Who is listed in rows 29 and 30? None other than John J. and Blanche McGraw. I wonder if the two couples spoke during the passage? Indeed, could they have, or was seating on these ships segregated?

charleston-florida-passenger-list-030124

Those Santa Clara Leopardos

11 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Cuba

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Cuban baseball, Oscar Charleston, Roberto Gonzalez Echavarria, Santa Clara Leopardos, The Pride of Havana

On a per-person basis, Oscar Charleston was much better known in Cuba than he ever was in America. In the 1920s, the latter part of Cuban baseball’s Golden Age, he became a legend there.

Roberto Gonzalez Echavarria writes in The Pride of Havana that “in the recollections of my elders and in journalistic lore, the greatest team in the history of Cuban baseball, the equivalent of the ’27 Yankees in the United States, [was] the 1923 Leopardos of Santa Clara.” Echavarria means the 1923-24 team, which destroyed the league so thoroughly that in mid-January they were simply declared the champions and the teams reorganized to play a second season that officials hoped would be more competitive.

The Pride of Havana

This second season’s games were played in Almendares Park in Havana. It was a huge diamond. The left-field fence was more than 500 feet away, and the right-field fence was 400 feet away. Echavarria writes that his “uncle Oscar, as a boy in Belen, the renowned Jesuit prep school in Havana, used to sneak into Almendares Park on Sunday afternoons. Until his death my uncle had engraved in his memory the figure of Oscar Charleston, the greatest player he had ever seen, sprinting through the outfield of that stadium.”

Charleston always left a lasting impression.

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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