Baseball Fights, Beauty Queens and That Damn Pigeonhole
On August 4, 1993, White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura did something utterly justifiable that he now likely regrets. He took a fastball on the elbow from the hardest throwing pitcher in the game and charged towards the mound in retaliation. Waiting for him there was a 46 year symbol named Nolan Ryan. The ensuing fight was sloppy, ineffectual and one-sided. Ventura ran with his head down directly into the taller man's armpit. Ryan locked him in a headlock and delivered half a dozen soft rabbit punches to the top of Ventura's head. Players from both benches rushed out and met mid-infield in a tangle of bodies and bravado. In a few minutes it was over. This type of thing happens often in baseball. It was the third such bench clearing brawl in the span of seven days and the first of those was actually much more novel (There the Kansas City Royals Brian Mcrae tweaked baseball tradition after he was hit by not running towards the pitcher but running towards the opposing dugout to try and punch the manager who had ordered that he be thrown at).
Eighteen years later only the Ryan-Ventura fight remains culturally relevant. It is tethered to Ventura's name ad infinitum. There are countless online videos depicting or spoofing the fight (in pretty much all cases, it's from the 'old man kicks the ass of the younger man' angle), and footage of it is brought up reliably on sports shows every August 4th and sometimes on July 14th: Robin's birthday- a gift that keeps on giving. The moral here would seem to be: Challenge a legend, end up a footnote.
See, Nolan Ryan is one of the most popular players to ever play the game- the flawed archetype of a power pitcher who holds several all-time records both positive and negative. Four in particular by a very wide margin:
He pitched seven career no-hitters (3 more than anyone else)
Notched 5,714 strikeouts (15% more than anyone else)
Walked 2,795 men (52% more than anyone else)
Was stolen against 757 times (38% more than anyone else)
The seven no-hitters are probably his greatest achievement, but it should be noted, that even in those games, at his finest, Ryan walked 26 men. The thing about legends though is that even their flaws only add to their mystique. Ryan's weaknesses as a pitcher: his less than pinpoint accuracy and his disinterest in holding men on base, only burnish his reputation as a stubborn fireballer, someone who relished the mano-a-mano confrontation with the batter above all else. He wanted to blow it by you every time. Nolan Ryan as myth, especially when you add in his remarkable longevity, is the epitome of toughness.
Robin Ventura is the epitome of nothing really, except for maybe an unquestionably good but not quite great baseball player. In 1987 at Oklahoma State he set the Division 1 baseball record by hitting in 58 straight games (a mark that still stands) and the next year was selected as college baseball's player of the year . That same summer, he won a gold medal with the USA baseball squad in Seoul. As a professional, he was a reliably valuable player, a two time all-star and six time winner of the gold glove award and only four men have hit more than his 18 career grand slams. If the Baseball Hall of Fame, like basketball's, took into account one's amateur and international career than Robin Ventura is a borderline Hall of Fame candidate. As it stands though, he's not even in the conversation. The Hall is generally reserved for the top 1% of major league baseball players (a club of which Ryan for all his flaws is easily regarded to be a part of). Ventura, by advanced metrics and the view of many observers is comfortably nestled between the top 2% and 3%.
So, back to that one instinctual moment in 1993. I said that Robin 'likely' regretted it. I don't know this to be true. I only suspect it. In that game, he had already knocked in an rbi single off Ryan giving the Sox the lead. It was his second time up and Ryan in apparent retribution for that earlier hit, plunked him hard on the elbow, the same elbow still sore from taking a fastball just two weeks before. In the video, you can see Ventura take a few steps towards first base, then abruptly toss his helmet and bat and run straight to the mound. He would say not long after that he didn't regret it because someone had to stand up to Ryan for his headhunting. Asked what he would have done differently, he joked: 'I should have taken the bat'. But now, years later, I'd love to know his honest opinion. Was it worth it, to take on a symbol if, in many ways, that one act overshadows the rest of a fine career? Take away that one fight and he's best known for a record hitting streak. With it, he's better known as an embarrassed foil in the last season of a much more famous man's career. He had nothing to gain by taking on a myth. If he wins the fight, he's a clear villain and Ryan is tough for taking punishment. If he loses, he's a joke and Ryan is even more of a cowboy hero (self-aware of this image, he said afterwards that the he grabbed Ventura the same way he wrestled steers on his Texas ranch).
What irks me is the types we cast each man into in service of an easy narrative: 'tough Ryan' doesn't run from a fight, 'weak Ventura' runs into fights he can't handle. Because he was a better player, critics will always give Ryan the spoils of the protagonist. But if Ryan was not quite so great, perhaps just a little less great, the roles could easily be reversed.
If just 5% of Ryan's wins had ended up in the loss column, if bad run support or back luck flips just a few of those games, then he's a pitcher with a sub .500 record who likely doesn't stay around long enough to become quite the legend he became. He'd be just as much a cautionary tale- a man who walked too many men and challenged too many hitters, gave up all those steals, didn't do the little things that 'real winners' do when taking just a little off his fastball would have made him more effective. Suddenly, he's a selfish athlete who squandered some of his great talent in service of stubborn pride. He's still tough, sure, but arrogant as well. In that comparison, the consumate professional Robin Ventura fares much better. If we shift history just a little, some of the critics would surely line up on his side.
I'm diminishing Ryan in this argument even though he was always one of my favorite players. Why? Because, you can't diminish him. He's the same man, regardless. It's only his legend you can chip away at and that legend tends to diminish the reputations of anyone not worthy of their own. How much would it eat at you if you were Ventura, if you worked very hard and established a successful career only to find the general public often thought of you merely as a buffoon in someone else's story? I'm guilty of this kind of over-simplification myself. I love those big hero-villain narratives (see: essay, this) and the folklore they become. If I was trapped in one though, on the wrong side, it would seriously piss me off.
This is when I think of Vanessa Williams. She's a fantastic example of flipping easy typecasting and disrupting a narrative that was already writing itself. It was supposed to go like this:
Act 1- A beautiful and talented young woman from an ideal family rises up the beauty pageant ranks to become the first black Miss America.
Act 2- With the world seemingly at her feet, a dark secret emerges. She violated the pageant rules by posing for nude photographs. She loses the crown and with it 2 million dollars in endorsement money. She's a national laughingstock, has only $30,000 to her name and that name, itself, is now soaked in shame.
Act 3- She repents for the mistakes she made and decides to begin lecturing other women on how to avoid the pitfalls of temptation. She becomes a quiet symbol of grace and bouncing back from adversity. Although she'll always be known for a scandal, she will be secondly known for weathering it and becoming a better person.
Thing is, Act 3 while partly true, is only a fraction of, and not quite, what actually happened. Vanessa Williams subsequent career actually condenses everything above into just the first couple of chapters in her life story. Far from a quiet victim, she went out and sold in excess of 5 million records as a popular singer, starred in more than a dozen movies, and received multiple Emmy nominations for her work in television. Any one of those things would give her the most successful post pageant career of any Miss America winner. Doing all three, after having the title taken away just seems to make a sham of the whole concept of beauty pageants. The one woman ever declared unworthy of holding the Miss America title seems to be the only one who ever really mattered beyond the title itself.
I can easily see, Ms. Williams laughing at her critics, then and now. I wish to see her smiling, straddling a success much higher and more enduring than that which they took from her. I hope to find her laughing that hearty 'eff you' laugh that you can give when you know you're far better than the simple-minded purists who judged you, who told you that you were sinful and wrong, when you'd only posed for photos, private at that. I looked for this laughter, this joyful winning perspective. I couldn't find it.
All the interviews I've found, in which she's discussed the scanda,l display a woman who was seriously hurt and who is still, it appears to me, seriously driven. Maybe that's how you sell all those records and turn yourself into a legitimate actress, gaining more acclaim in your late 40s than you did in your aesthetically breathtaking prime. Spite, not laughter seems the force that made this happen. I don't mean spite in just a purely vindictive way. I mean spite as in 'in spite of', the type of resolve that makes you refuse to be a helpless figure in your own story. The type of resolve that makes you feel like you can change the ending or continually extend it, living ever present in a new act that will be even better than anything that came before. Laughter in regards to the scandal wouldn't have been appropriate for Vanessa Williams . She endured a real national shame, something condescending and evil at it's heart- condemning a young woman for an artistic choice made at the age of 19 (and the photos were interpreted by the photographer and model as art. Personal interpretations beyond that vary so widely as to be quite meaningless). She felt real pain and she apparently channeled that in such a way that it still drives her to this day. She couldn't just laugh away the typecasting, not then. She needed to destroy it by sheer volume of success. That accomplished, she could laugh now, and perhaps she does but I can't tell. She's still moving too fast.
Back to Ventura. So, he got punched by an old man. He's still one of the best players in the history of the Chicago White Sox. Some have called him the greatest college baseball player of the last 30 years. In speculating on his possible regret, I applied my own biases, the biases of someone without his success, and also I'm looking from a distance. From my vantage point, Ventura is a disrespected man, but he likely encounters fans every day in his life who shower him with praise, tell him how much they loved to watch him play. In reality, if he gets laughed at on occasion, he probably just laughs right back. He had that attitude shortly after the altercation and why wouldn't he? His was no real national shame. Laughter was the appropriate response to what was nothing more than just an embarrasing highlight. All these years later, that's still all it is. And if a younger person who has never heard of Robin Ventura, sees that clip, and decides to look him up, they'll probably notice that he was a damn good baseball player and nothing can change that. If the same youngster, reads about Vanessa Williams, they'll notice that the whole Miss America scandal, and all the pathetic people who attacked her back in 1984, wound up as just a small chapter in her remarkable life. That's how it goes: Challenge a legend, end up a footnote. And the real moral to the story I think is this:
There's two great ways to deal with critics. Sometimes it's best to laugh them off and ignore them, sometimes it's best to spite them and use them for fuel, but no matter how you do it, just remember: they're not even in a great story, just watching one from afar. Time will wash away their opinions like the chatter after a play.
Postscript:
On October 6, 2011, a few months after this was originally written, Robin Ventura was named the manager of the Chicago White Sox. Vanessa Williams is still working regularly in television, film and on Broadway.