His Most Prized Possession Was That ’54 Eddie

Eddie died Sunday. He was “Eddie” to all of us growing up in Santa Barbara, where he was a god, where his exploits on the football and baseball fields inspired a generation of young boys. I was one of those boys.

In the early ‘50s when Eddie broke in with the Boston Braves, my father would drive me to the small house west of the highway where Mathews grew up. His mother would wave.

“Just came to see Eddie’s house,” my old man would say. His father wasn’t around--something about a problem with the bottle, though I wouldn’t know what that meant until years later.

Then came ‘54, a year that to most men of my generation meant one thing--Willie Mays’ catch of Vic Wertz’s screaming line drive to deep center at the Polo Grounds. Giants in four. I mean, what else happened in ‘54?

Well, the first-ever issue of Sports Illustrated was published in ’54 and Eddie was on the cover, caught in mid-swing during a night game at Milwaukee’s County Stadium. My father brought it home and presented it like a religious icon. What a swing he had--Ty Cobb himself called it the best in baseball. “His swing was so pretty he even looked good striking out,” it was said.

If you lived in Santa Barbara--or Milwaukee, because the Braves moved there from Boston--you knew early on that two young hitting stars were about to become the most potent 1-2 home-run combination in baseball history. Two kids, really, Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews. With one “t”, Mathews--that was a big thing for us kids. Spell his name right. He’s our guy.

My brother named his cat Ralph Kiner. I named mine Eddie Mathews.

That, ‘54, also was the year we started collecting baseball cards. Every kid I knew had two to three hundred before I could convince my father to drive me to Dave’s Market to buy my first pack--everybody knew that Dave’s Market had the best cards. The curious thing was that nobody yet had collected an Eddie Mathews. Did Topps Chewing Gum Co. intentionally restrict the number of Eddies distributed in Santa Barbara so that we kids would keep forking over the nickels as a kind of madness swept through the 8-year-olds, a feeding frenzy in our search for the first Eddie? We knew nothing of price fixing or corporate stock manipulations. But we knew something was up.

Then one day my father just pulled over to Dave’s Market and accompanied me inside, announcing to Dave that “this was my son’s first pack of baseball cards and we expect Eddie will be in the pack.” I was embarrassed. I knew that wasn’t how it worked. You couldn’t demand or expect that anybody would be in a pack and, in fact, most of my friends had collected a dozen or so Bob Oldis cards (he was a backup catcher somewhere or other) to every Stan Musial. We were sure the decks were stacked with utility guys. We kind of understood that was the way the world worked.

It was like having your father show up on your first date, and then having him announce it was time for the girl to kiss you. We paid our nickel and my father insisted we open the pack right there, in front of God and Dave himself. I knew the face of Bob Oldis or Solly Hemus or Thornton Kipper or Dave Jolly would greet me. But no, there he was.

Eddie. Right on top, under the powdery gum. Eddie against a light blue background. The 1954 Topps card design, the greatest baseball card design ever. Eddie, powder-blue sky, the Braves logo . . .

“There,” my father said, “Eddie.”

Kids from all over town came to see my Eddie. Stared at it. Tried to touch it, but I wouldn’t let them. They had Willie and Whitey and Mickey. But I had Eddie. He was our guy.

He was my guy.

The next year, ‘55, means only one thing to baseball people. The Dodgers at last won the Series. To me it also was the year Eddie got arrested for drunk driving for the first time. It was a somber night at our dinner table and my father brought up the subject first in a kind of preemptive strike--he knew I’d read about it in the sports page when the evening paper arrived.

“Eddie did a bad thing,” my father said with the gravity of sharing a family death. “He had too much to drink and went out driving. He has a little trouble with the bottle, ya know.” I think we prayed for him. But we remained his loyal followers and I learned a lesson early. Certain people can teach us certain things--nobody can teach us everything. Your athletic heroes should be just that, no more, no less--and that is plenty. I would later grow to understand what having a “little trouble with the bottle” meant.

And then, in ‘57, when I was 12, a kind of Road to Damascus reverse conversation took place. And Eddie was at the center.

We didn’t have a television until that year. We couldn’t afford one and didn’t need one--until the Braves were in the World Series against the Yankees. We hated the Yankees--other than the Braves, we were a Dodger family. My father bought a television from Ott’s, the local department store. “Always buy local,” he said.

The first great religious crisis of my life came Sunday, Game 4. The Braves trailed the series, 2-1, and Game 4 was scheduled during Sunday church. We never missed Sunday school or church. Never, ever, wherever we were.

We went to Sunday school and, afraid even to think about the game, headed into the First Baptist Church sanctuary for the 11 a.m. service, dreading as always the boring, endless, dry sermons and hymns sung out of key.

But no, my father whisked us away, tossed us in the old Buick station wagon with my mother and drove straight home to watch the game. Nobody spoke.

The illicitness of the act cannot be overstated. The guilt. The danger. We were skipping church to watch a baseball game. We were skipping God for Eddie, a guy who had a little problem with the bottle.

We watched the game in virtual silence. Had lightning struck our house, we would not have been surprised. We would have gone to hell and deserved it. My father was rarely nervous in those days, but on this day, he fidgeted, paced, sweated.

And in the 10th inning Eddie hit one deep over the right center field fence and the Braves won. A few days later our Eddie made a great backhand play off the bat of Moose Skowron and the Braves were champions of the world.

We had been liberated from the iron grip of an angry God by Eddie, a man who probably never had been in a church. Our Sundays became more relaxed, and a couple years later, my father couldn’t be found in a Sunday morning church service.

“I got my own church,” he began saying. And we listened.

Five years later in high school, I won the batting title at Santa Barbara High and was awarded the Eddie Mathews Bat, which was the school’s trophy for best batting average. Of all the trophies, plaques and honors I’ve received, this is the only one I can actually locate. It’s the only trophy you can carry out to the backyard and take a few cuts with.

I never hit any balls close to where Eddie hit them in high school--up on the barranca near the swimming pool, there’s a spot that old-timers point to--but one year, at least, I earned a bat with his name on it.

The great Henry Aaron said in his autobiography that Eddie used to deck anyone making a racial remark in Aaron’s direction. Eddie wasn’t making a statement about race, but about teams. If you were on Mathews’ team, he’d kill for you. If you were on the opposing team, well, good luck.

“I believe in the church of baseball” was a line I wrote 30 years after his home run freed us from evangelical prison. Scouting my first movie as a director in Durham, N.C., I saw Eddie sitting in an empty dugout, clearly hung over, dragging on a cigarette. He was a long-time member of the Hall of Fame by then, and hanging on as a minor league scout for the Braves.

The bottle had taken its toll, the cigarettes were endless. Finishing a career in small motels in small towns in the South, just as he had started. But now he was watching young players, filing reports, spending more nights in bars in towns like Asheville and Lynchburg and Bluefield.

I wanted to go over and tell him all this, but I didn’t. Who was I but another guy who batted .500 in high school but couldn’t handle a professional breaking ball? I had another career now, another life. Let him sit there, alone, in whatever peace he’d found.

I wanted to go over and try to explain about the Road to Damascus and Pauline Doctrine and that powder-blue background and ask him if he understood the significance of his home run in Game 4 of the ’57 Series.

But he’d have just said, “Hell, the guy hung a curveball, I caught it pretty good. Can I buy you a beer, kid?”

In a flash, it’s 1954 and I can see the guy at Dave’s Market looking up at my father when Eddie’s face appears on top in the pack of cards. That little smile, those matinee-idol good looks, and, of course, the powder-blue background.

Eddie was my guy.

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Ron Shelton is a screenwriter/director for movies such as “Bull Durham,” “Blaze,” “Blue Chips,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Cobb” and “Tin Cup.” He grew up in Santa Barbara, was a standout high school baseball player and had a minor league baseball career that soon led him into the film-making industry.