At Carver Park for Hank Aaron
Hank Aaron, the 755 home-run hitter of the Major League Baseball, is well known in Japan as Sadaharu Oh, a Japanese super baseball player, delivered more home runs than Mr. Aaron.
When the City of Mobile built Carver Park in 1945, the city’s first recreational park for African Americans, there were neighborhood baseball games after school and on weekends. Hank Aaron played against Willie McCovey and Billy Williams, who also went on to be Baseball Hall of Famers.
In 1948, when he was 14, Hank Aaron saw his hero Jackie Robinson when the Brooklyn Dodgers stopped Mobile. It was a time of separate schools, restaurants, hotels, drinking fountains, and baseball teams for blacks and whites.
In 1952, Ed Scott, Mobile Black Bears manager and part time scout for the Indiana Clowns, went to see an area game and noticed the hitting ability of a third baseman. After the game, Scott asked Henry Aaron to play for the semi-pro Black Bears. Aaron's mother was reluctant to let him play on a team of grown men, but relented.So, in late 1980s or early 1990s, a Japanese wanted to visit Carver Park. He drove to the City of Mobile with his Japanese wife, the first female Japanese Space Shuttle astronaut then under training in NASA.
http://www.examiner.com/article/mobile-alabama-hank-aaron-childhood-home-and-museum-and-the-hank
But he couldn't find the ball park. Besides, he felt somewhat uneasy because he could spot no European Americans in the city. However, he parked the car, left his wife securely inside, and stepped out into the street to ask somebody how to get to Carver Park.
He found a line of African Americans before a fast food shop. At the rear of the queue were several young African Americas, probably high-school students. So, the Japanese, actually a medical doctor working in Japan while his wife is being trained in the US, said to them, "Can you tell me how to get to Carver Park where Hank Aaron once played when he was a boy?" Young African Americans were grinning, but finally one of them said, "Two dollars!" The Japanese felt uneasy but gave him two dollars. Then they instructed him how to drive to the ball park.
The Japanese medical doctor and his NASA-astronaut wife reached the place, but they were disappointed since the place was desolate. No decoration and no notice plate indicating that this is the professional home of Hank Aaron.
And what is worse, while they were standing before an old fence of the park, a sports car coming and passing by at a high speed with a man shouting, out of a window, something at them in an intimidating manner. So, the couple realized that they were the only non-African Americans in the town. They left the glorious place for Japanese baseball fans in haste.
However, the Japanese medical doctor visited Carver Park again several years later, probably in the middle of 1990s.
He then sensed no danger in the city. Carver Park had new fences around its field. He thought that the US had changed, though his respect for Hank Aaron never changed.
Anyway baseball is one of channels through which Japanese and Americans could communicate with each other rather frankly. Even President Clinton praised Hideo Nomo, a Japanese MLB pitcher who achieved a no-hit/no-run game twice.
And maybe baseball contributes more to improvement of a racial aspect in the US rather than Olympic Games.
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He also has a reputation as a baseball aficionado to uphold. Bush is the first owner of a major league ball club (he had a stake in the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1998) to become president. An avid reader of box scores, he can tick off baseball stats like a TV analyst.http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2001-04-06/features/0104060178_1_pitch-elder-bush-president-bush
And he likes to flaunt his knowledge of the game. Meeting with mayors yesterday, Bush told the mayor of Boston, "I'm sure you're thrilled with the Nomo no-hitter," referring to Red Sox pitcher's Hideo Nomo's no-hitter against the Orioles on Wednesday night.)
President Bill Clinton, who acknowledged his fear of throwing the ball in the dirt, took a safe approach to the first pitch: the lob. Chris Hoiles, the former Orioles catcher, offered Clinton that advice before his first presidential toss in 1993, and it worked. Clinton usually threw (very slow) strikes.
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Act 2:7 And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
Act 2:8 And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
Act 2:9 Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
Act 2:10 Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,
Act 2:11 Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.