The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg Page A

from the machines. It was more than the hero worship lavished on a small-town quarterback, a native son. In its first fifty years, the local high school had never selected a cheerleader or elected a homecoming queen from the mill village. It was not just locality at play here, but class. These boys were of their blood, and their struggle.
    They played only on Blank Saturday. The hands were paid every other weekend, lining up at the office to get their pay after a half-day’s work on Saturday afternoon, and the games were played on the Saturdays in between. It was, say the few old men who remember it, more than a mere baseball game. It was as intense as a revival, as violent as a coliseum, and as wild as a prison rodeo. The air smelled like a carnival from the concession stand and the tethered livestock—mules mostly, saddled and tied up to the hedges and fence rails—and if someone had just thrown in a goat-roping and a midget wrestler, it would have been complete.
    On the day of big double headers, the railroad ran a special train from Piedmont to Jacksonville, and what few cars there were, in the depth of the Depression, rolled up to the field groaning under the weight of passengers. Children walking to the game through the village streets would beg to ride on the fenders and running boards, so by the time the big Chevrolets and Packards finally made it to the game they were festooned with dirty-faced little boys.
    It was one of the few times that the town people and the village people mixed, a free show in a time when all the money was tight. The team played to full bleachers, which was probably only a few hundred then, but seemed like a lot more. An hour before gametime the stands began to fill with men in overalls and women in flower-print dresses, not just cotton millers but tenant farmers and day laborers, sharing rough-lumber slats with bow-tied deacons from the First Baptist Church. The surrounding trees filled with little boys, and every now and then a sinner would take a pint bottle of bootleg liquor from inside the bib of his overalls and take a slash.
    Ken Fowler, whose mother was a school teacher in Jacksonville then, was one of the little town boys who ventured into the village every day there was a game.
    To say he will never forget it is like saying he will never forget Christmas, or his first kiss.
    “Now and then someone would try to hang a mascot, a nickname on the team, but the players always rejected it. That was considered prissy,” said Fowler, who is in his middle seventies now. “If you’re a real man, you don’t want to be called a tiger or cardinal or cub. This was hard competition among really hard men who had lived some pretty hard lives.
    “There was an aura about the games. You can’t see it on film and it can’t really be described or explained. You truly had to be there to understand. The world could consider them, the mill workers, whatever it wanted to. But they knew they were something when they played these games.”
    The Nine entered the field like conquering heroes. On game days, Hammett said, the players did not yuck it up with their buddies in the morning on the cinder streets, but waited inside their houses, so they could make an appearance.
    Then, just before batting practice, they came walking along the unpaved streets, along A, B, C, and D streets, to cheers. More little boys ran beside them, dreaming, because in the world of a mill village, this was as good as it would ever be. They even asked Hammett and the others for autographs.
    Some of them warmed up with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from their lips, but it was deadly serious, out in that dirt, and if there was not a little blood mixed in it was considered a dull day. They liked to fight and they were good at it, but so were the men they played, the steelworkers, rubberworkers, soldiers and such, so brawls were bloody, ugly, but quick.
    But all that was a sideshow to the great baseball. They turned double plays