Hurricane preaches to crowd

By Tom Hawthorn

Victoria Times Colonist, February 1, 2000

The boxer they called the Hurricane for the gale-force fury of his punches now prefers to fight with words, not fists.

Rubin Carter, 62, spent 19 years behind bars for a triple murder he did not commit. For much of that time, he was a forgotten man, languishing in a New Jersey jail as No. 45472. He raged at the injustice.

Today, he earns his living by delivering motivational speeches at $10,000 a talk. He is booked solid until the fall. Men want his autograph. Women gush: "You look like a movie star."

He has gone from inmate to icon, portrayed by Denzel Washington in the hit Hollywood movie The Hurricane; celebrated in a haunting and unforgettable Bob Dylan song; fawned over as a talk-show guest by Larry King and Oprah. He has addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and sat up until 2 a.m. with Bill Clinton in the White House.

"It seems like all the seeds that ever been sown in my life have alllllll come to fruition at one time," Carter said Monday in Victoria, punctuating his sentences with robust laughter. "I don't understand it, but I am enjoying it. I am truly enjoying it."

Carter still boasts smooth features, despite his time behind bars and in the boxing ring. He has an old fight scar over his right eye, the glass one, which he lost following a botched prison operation.

He wore a black leather jacket over a black turtleneck with black slacks and black boots Monday. His skin, as described in his searing 1974 prison autobiography The Sixteenth Round, is as "black as virgin soot."

He contends it was that skin, and the hatred it engendered, that led to his wrongful 1967 conviction in the cold-blooded shooting of a white bartender and two white patrons in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in his hometown of Paterson, N.J.

He won a new trial in 1976. During six months of freedom, he fathered a son, Raheem, with his first wife. But Carter was again convicted of the three murders and returned to jail, until a federal judge ordered him released in 1985 because the convictions were based on "racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure."

Hollywood has happy endings. In real life, matters of flesh and blood are less tidy.

Reeham Carter, 23, is in a New Jersey jail unable to make $75,000 US bail on a charge of assaulting his pregnant girlfriend. He has complained to local reporters that his father has done nothing to help him. The elder Carter has not commented on his son's plight.

Carter — Hurricane to old-time fight fans, Rube to his friends — blew into Victoria to preach a message of "hope, dreams coming true, dare to dream, overcoming adversity, the power of personal worth" to an audience of 800 at the McPherson Playhouse.

Carter's lectures — sermons may be a better word — are delivered in the rhyming cadence of a Baptist preacher, of which there are many in his family tree.

In a life that has taken him from the solitude of the "hole" in prison to the podiums of large theatres, from a jail cell to the Oval Office, perhaps the greatest irony is that a boy who once suffered from a debilitating stammer now makes his living as an orator.

Ironies abound in his life. His formal education ended in Grade 8, yet he immersed himself in the law while in prison. In a 45- minute meeting with reporters Monday, Carter quoted the Bible and Dostoyevsky, cited Nazi horrors and discussed current events, notably describing Texas Gov. George W. Bush as "Governor Death" for his support of the death penalty.

Carter went to Bush's state to press for the release from death row of Stanley Faulder, a Canadian executed last June for the 1975 murder of 75-year-old widow Inez Phillips. Carter is also the public face of the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted, a Toronto-based group.

He pursues what he sees as injustice with the same intensity he once used to chase men in the boxing ring. He has no use for jails.

"Prison is prison is prison," he said. "There are no humane prisons. They are inhumane."

To defenders, Carter's legal plight joined his cause to that of such cases of American racial injustice as Dred Scott and the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till.

To detractors, Carter remains a dangerous man. One, reporter Cal Deal of Florida, operates a Web site that states Carter "is a free man, although no judge declared him innocent of the bloody crime."

Later this month, Carter will mark the 12th year since the indictments against him were dismissed. He lives in Toronto, where he moved after his prison release to live with a group of Canadians who worked for his freedom. He recently applied for Canadian citizenship ("If any of you has any pull…," he quipped to reporters), and married Teresa Brabham in October.

It was while in prison, Carter said, that he transformed himself.

"I was bitter. I was as mean as a black bear in mating season. Had to be. Had to be in order to maintain my life. I was mean. But that hate began to eat me up. Eat me up. And I began to realize that I had to get rid of this hate. ...

"The movie says hate put me in prison and it did. It really did. And love busted me out. It did. It did."

Storm warning

Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, who once challenged for the world middleweight title, says boxing remains a way out of despair for poor youth.

"I think it should continue," said Carter, who was in Victoria on Monday to make a motivational speech at McPherson Playhouse. "That is the way out of depressed areas in the United States for disenfranchised youth. That's their only avenue. We gonna close that down, too?!

"We've already closed the avenues down of science and lawyering because they're not educated. We gonna close the world of entertainment down, too? Then, where's the hope?"

Carter, 62, was ranked No. 5 in his division when he was convicted in 1967 of a triple murder at a bar in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey.

He complained from prison that he had been railroaded, winning a convert in Bob Dylan, who championed the cause in a haunting, eight- minute ballad. In Dylan's words, Carter "coulda been the champion of the world."

Carter's story is also told in "The Hurricane," a movie starring Denzel Washington, and in "Hurricane," a biography by Boston reporter James Hirsch that was authorized by Carter.

According to the book, the one-time No. 1 contender no longer follows a sport he considers brutal. He regards boxers as "a class of noble warriors."

He once campaigned to make the sweet science safer by lowering the bottom rope and loosening the rope turnbuckles.

In his day, the 5-foot-8, 160-pound Carter had a sculpted physique and was known for a ferocious style that included a devastating left hook.

His appearance alone inspired fear in fighters. He shaved his head bald and wore a Vandyke beard that gave him a menacing countenance and a memorable presence on televised fights from Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday nights.

Carter was a fierce combatant, punching Florentino Fernandez so hard that the hapless fighter exited the ring head first, his body driven between the top and middle ropes and into the audience.

He became a boxer while serving as a U.S. Army paratrooper in Germany. His first professional fight came the day after he was released from jail for a purse snatching. He won a four-round decision.

As a pro, he compiled a record of 20 KOs. He was knocked out once by Jose Gonzalez. Carter also won seven decisions, lost 11 and had one draw.

On Dec. 14, 1964, he fought Joey Giardello in Philadelphia for the middleweight title. While many ringside observers felt he got the best of the champion, Carter failed to record the decisive victory usually needed to upset a champion.

Perhaps his most decisive victory came a year earlier when he knocked out Emile Griffith in the first round. Griffith later won the middleweight crown.

He once sparred with Sonny Liston, a fearsome heavyweight who stood five inches taller. When Carter removed his protective headgear at the end of the session, he was bleeding from both ears.

Seven years ago, the World Boxing Council presented Carter with an honourary championship belt, believed to be the only one ever issued.

On Monday, fans of the sweet science asked Carter to autograph copies of his autobiography, as well as a boxing glove (appropriately for the left hand). Publicist Dick Melville had the Hurricane sign a print that also bore the signature of former world champion Rocky Graziano.

"Beisbol' pilgrimage takes Monte Irvin back to Cuba

By Tom Hawthorn
The Vancouver Sun, March 26, 2005

HAVANA

The aged tourist hobbled down the steps of an air- conditioned bus before slumping into a wheelchair. His meaty fists squeezed a cane, which rested against knees scarred by surgery.

The great Monte Irvin was on a baseball pilgrimage to a land he had not seen in 55 years.

When last here, his hands gripped a bat, not a cane. Irvin was imported from the Negro Leagues in 1947 for the Cuban capital's legendary Almendares team. The hard-hitting outfielder was delighted to pursue his trade in a land where he would be (mostly) judged by the grace of his fielding and the power of his hitting, not by the colour of his skin.

Irvin, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, was returning to Cuba as part of a group of fanaticos de beisbol. The tour, led by Kit Krieger of Vancouver, spent seven days on the island attending ball games and visiting historic baseball sites. With Irvin in our lineup, the end of the week promised a highlight — Irvin's return to Estadio Latinoamericano, the ball park where he was once hailed as a god.

While most tourists come to Cuba in search of sun and sand, the closest our group got to a beach was the dirt around home plate.

Baseball is to Cuba as hockey is to Canada. The game is as much a part of everyday life as music and shortages.

Children play stickball on crowded barrio streets with bottle caps as balls and broom handles as bats. On our first day in the capital, an impromptu game took place beside our hotel, Armadores de Santander, a converted mansion across the street from the docks. Home plate was a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk of Calle Luz and first base was a ramshackle Chevy parked at the curb across the street.

Later, I would admire boys darting after flyballs among the many monuments on the lawns of the Capitolo, the replica of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The batters needed to hit line drives over the pitcher's head to keep the ball in play — pulling the ball, or slashing it to the opposite field would endanger passing traffic and risk losing the precious ball. Incredibly, batter after batter struck line drives to centre, perhaps explaining Cuba's extraordinary success at a game imported by American workers and sailors more than a century ago.

By visiting the island, Irvin, at 85, was returning to a place where he spent "two of the happiest years of my life." For decades, the island nation seemed inaccessible because of the feud between his native United States and Cuba under Fidel Castro. It took a Canadian to end his hiatus.

Krieger is the former president of the B.C. Teachers Federation and the older brother of the Province's editorial cartoonist. He is also a baseball fanatic, blessed with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game's rich history.

In the late 1960s, with his hair as wild as one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Krieger worked as a clubhouse attendant for the Vancouver Mounties. He even convinced management to let him be the starting pitcher for the final game of the 1968 season. To the amazement of his teammates, he gave up only one run in three innings of work. Then, he had to return to the clubhouse to clean up the dirty uniforms of the batters he had retired.

Krieger's annual visits, under the auspices of his Cubaball Tours, are held in February or March, as the National Series regular season comes to an end and playoffs begin. Sixteen teams are divided into Eastern and Western zones. Each of Cuba's 14 provinces has a team, as does the Isla de la Juventud, a Caribbean archipelago to the south of the island of Cuba. The final team is Industriales, the New York Yankees of Cuban baseball, a team based in the capital that often wins the national championship and which every other team wants to beat.

Most players wear the uniforms of their home province. (Imagine Wayne Gretzky as a Maple Leaf and Joe Sakic as a Canuck.) The system creates intense rivalries, often expressed by the crowd in crude but funny chants and songs about the failings of visiting teams.

In an age where professional baseball players are remote, the Cuban players are surprisingly approachable, so much so that they will sidle up to the stands for a conversation even as a game is being played.

Our first road trip took us west from the capital to the picturesque Valle de Vinales, where we played catch in front of a cliffside mural so poor in its execution as to be laughable. (The artist was an understudy to the brilliant Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera; perhaps he didn't study enough.) After that, we visited a tobacco farm before stopping for a pre-game coffee at the Hotel Pinar del Rio.

Refreshed and caffeinated, I wandered from the lobby bar and stumbled across a modest display tucked behind a stairwell. Plaques, posters and baseballs were housed without guard in glass cabinets, a baseball hall of fame for Pinar del Rio province.

After checking out the display, we counted two dozen young men in uniform sprawled over the lobby furniture. The visiting team was waiting for a bus to Estadio Capitan San Luis.

The ball park boasts natural grass, of course, with wooden seats and benches in a concrete grandstand. Admission for Cubans costs one, two or three pesos (for box seats, grandstand benches, and the bleachers). Foreigners pay with Convertible Pesos, meaning the cost is about $1.25, $2.50 or $3.75 (all figures Canadian), which is less even than a centre-field bleacher seat (about $8.75 US) at Safeco Field in Seattle, or even a general admission ticket ($8 Cdn) to Nat Bailey Stadium in Vancouver.

The estadio was notable for what it lacked: No souvenir vendors, no exploding scoreboard, no recorded music playing between pitches. A revolutionary slogan was painted on the outfield wall where advertising would have been in North America.

A vendor whose fist was filled with white paper cones cried, "Mani! Mani!" It sounded like "Money! Money!" He was selling roasted peanuts and this delicious treat costs peanuts.

A few days later, we sat in a dugout behind home plate at Estadio Jose Antonio Huelga in the eastern colonial city of Sancti Spiritus. A raucous young crowd seemed as interested in flirting with one another as watching a ball game. The park had its quirks: lighted foul poles and the inscription "HOME CLUB" painted in English over one of the player dugouts. The home team even had a costumed mascot, a yellow rooster, which at one point late in the game removed its head to peck at home plate.

One of the finer traditions of Cuban baseball comes after the fifth inning, as female attendants deliver a mid-game pick-me-up of coffee for the umpires.

Irvin did not join the tour group on the road trips, saying he had spent enough of his life riding a bus to far-off games. At 85, he had earned his rest in a city that had once welcomed him like a son.

Monford Merrill Irvin, who was the seventh of 11 children born to Alabama sharecroppers named Cupid and Mary Eliza, found in Havana a place where he could join whites on the baseball diamond as well as at the supper table.

He led Almendares to the 1948-49 Cuban championship and then to victory in the inaugural Caribbean World Series. (The Cubans spelled his family name as Irving, though Monte dropped the final letter to make it quicker to give autographs.) After those playoffs, at age 30, when his considerable skills had begun to erode, he was at last given a chance to play in the major leagues.

By then, he was a war veteran with nine seasons of professional baseball under his belt. He made the most of his belated opportunity, playing in two World Series for the New York Giants (losing in 1951, winning three years later), and coaxing a seven- season career from a body past its prime.

Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973, his autograph and his business card now include the shorthand notation, "HoF 73."

On this overdue return, the American ball player was hailed everywhere as Compañero Monte.

On one sunny day, Irvin delivered a load of baseball equipment to a team of eager 10-year-olds. The boys blocked ground balls and ran out every hit, their training in the game's fundamentals unaffected by seeing on television the cynical antics of hotdogging millionaires in the major leagues.

The children had not heard of him, but eagerly listened to his translated plea to respect the game, obey their coaches, and to play hard but fair.

A highlight of the tour was the reunion of Irvin with 92-year- old Almendares teammate Conrado (Connie) Marrero, a cigar-chomping right-hander whose slider earned him five seasons in the major leagues. (The club's ruggedly handsome first baseman was Chuck Connors, who would go on to stardom as television's The Rifleman.) Marrero, who is known in his homeland as The Hillbilly, for having been born the son of a farmhand, is never without a cigar in his mouth. "Baseball in Cuba," he told his old teammate in Spanish, "is life itself."

Finally, Irvin was ready to return to the Estadio Latinoamericano, the temple of Cuban baseball. He told us a story about winning a refrigerator at the park after hitting a game-winning home run. He didn't have much use for it, as he was renting an apartment, so he happily sold the appliance for $100 to a fan after the game. At 85, Irvin's knees may be gone, but his memory remains as sharp as a line drive.

Beneath the grandstand, he admired a bust of Martin Dihigo, known in Cuba as El Inmortal, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time, who retired in 1945 before the major leagues were integrated.

A mural on the wall included a portrait of Marrero, who is revered in his homeland.

Irvin hobbled out into the grandstand. As others fussed with his wheelchair, he quietly walked with his cane to the backstop behind home plate. He stared at a field he had last seen more than a half- century ago, where one of his many homers once earned him a refrigerator. He lifted his cane in both hands to take a swing at an imaginary pitch. He thought no one was watching.

Didn't you use to be… Doug Ault?

Doug Ault was the star of the Toronto Blue Jays' first game. I interviewed him for the Globe and Mail's "Where are they now?" column in 1988. Ault died in 2004, aged 54. (Toronto Star photographs.)

By Tom HawthornThe Globe and Mail, April 1, 1988

It was a chilly April afternoon 11 years ago when a tall, blond Texan became the toast of Toronto.

Snow was falling, and a wicked wind blew in from Lake Ontario. Baseball, the summer game, was making its major-league debut in Toronto.

The hometown Blue Jays were an expansion team staffed by rejects and retreads scavenged from the other ball clubs. Among the cast of castoffs was an unheralded first baseman.

Doug Ault had all of nine games' experience when he walloped two home runs to lead Toronto to a 9-5 victory over Chicago on the club's first opening day.

"It was like winning the World Series," Mr. Ault said recently. "I tell you, if it had been snowing all year, I might have hit 50 home runs."

He hit only nine more homers that season, and was destined to return shortly to the shadows of obscurity.

He was demoted to the minors, retired as a player to become a manager, and last fall was demoted to an even lower level of the minors.

When the Jays leave spring training in Florida to play this season's opening game on Monday in Kansas City, Mr. Ault will stay behind to manage the club's Class A farm team in Dunedin.

"It's a lot more challenging down here," he said. "Down here in A ball, you have to stress the basics. You repeat yourself a lot. But it's more rewarding, too, when you see a teen-ager you managed making the big leagues in two or three years."

Mr. Ault made the major leagues as a 27-year-old rookie after years of travelling the minor-league circuit. He might have been condemned to a life in the minors had the Jays not taken him as their sixteenth of 30 picks.

(Catcher Ernie Whitt, who will likely be behind the plate for Toronto on Monday, was taken next. Pitcher Jim Clancy, the team's third pick, is the only other original Jay still with the team.)

The Blue Jays were hatched on April 7, 1977, on an Exhibition Stadium field carpeted with snow. Before the game started, Chicago infielder Jack Brohamer used a pair of catcher's shin guards as skis and two bats as poles, and glided in the snow from first base to second.

The Jays sold 44,649 tickets to the game, but that many people were never in the stands at the same time. A monumental traffic jam caused many to miss the first pitch (a called strike thrown by Toronto's Bill Singer), while frostbitten thousands fled early.

Anne Murray sang the national anthem, fans baptized the stadium by sipping from mickeys, and Mr. Ault jumped on an inside slider in the bottom of the first inning. The ball finally came to a stop in a $2 seat in the sixth row of the left-field bleachers.

Mr. Ault so liked the pitches thrown by Chicago's Ken Brett that he swung at an outside fastball in the third inning, this time sending it over the right-field fence.

"I remember the fans were waiting on something to happen," Mr. Ault said. "I hit that first one and it just kind of got them going. All of a sudden it was like it wasn't cold at all, like we were in Florida and it was 80 degrees out and we were going to win our first baseball game."

Mr. Ault was not the only hero in the messy barn-burner of a game. Right-handed pitcher Jerry Johnson was credited with the win in relief of Mr. Singer, who when he left the field was cheered despite surrendering a generous supply of hits (11) and runs (4) to the visitors.

Fortunately for the home side, Chicago was just as solicitous. They stranded 19 of their own baserunners and allowed the Jays 16 hits, including two singles by Vancouver-born third baseman Dave McKay and a pinch-hit homer by Al Woods in his first major league at bat.

When the snow had cleared, Toronto was victorious. The fans who had opened the game chanting "We want beer!" ended it with the cry, "We're No. 1!" For one day, they were. But the Jays lost 107 games that season to go with only 54 wins.

"The other 161 games were anti-climactic," former team president Peter Bavasi (now president of a sports-news information service in New York) says today. "The first one was definitely something special."

Making the big leagues is never easy, and Mr. Ault's journey was more arduous than most.

Despite hitting a spectacular .473 to lead all college players in 1972, he was ignored by scouts. He was a contact-hitter satisfied with singles playing a position where scouts expected homers. He hit right-handed and threw left-handed, another oddity.

"I was a weirdo, no doubt about it," he says. "Certainly didn't make things easier for myself."

He ended up playing for the Glacier Pilots of Anchorage, Alaska (where he once saw the sun set and rise during a lengthy double-header), and later took the field for teams in Gastonia, N.C.; Pittsfield, Mass.; Spokane, Wash.; and Mexico City. In the off-season he worked as an itinerant roughneck on oil wells in the North Sea and in Louisiana.

Eleven years after his heroics, Mr. Ault is still asked by fans about what he acknowledges was the greatest day of his career. Of course it was not such a great day for the pitcher he made a patsy of, Ken Brett.

"I don't think he was too happy with me," Mr. Ault said. "I remember playing first base that day, and I could hear him yelling at me from the bench: 'You got lucky!' It was opening day and I guess he wanted to win. But he gave me his best stuff and I hit it."

Years later, the hapless hurler was still bothered by the homers.

"I made a hero out of him," Mr. Brett once said. "For one day at least, I made him the toast of Toronto."

Jack Brohamer of the White Sox skis on catcher's shinguards at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto in 1977. Boris Spremo photograph.