Hoop Dreams

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/ / CC BY 2.0

Baseball wasn't Sweet Lou's first love. Like most every boy raised in Lexington, Kentucky, he dreamed of playing basketball for Adolph Rupp at UK. The oldest of five children, four boys and one girl, Louis Brown Johnson graduated from Dunbar High in 1951—three years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown v. the Board of Education. His father was a laborer, a custodian at the university. His mother earned what she could as a cook in the fraternity houses near campus and in a local high school. "We didn't starve," said Johnson in the March 1966 issue of Sport magazine, "but there wasn't any caviar or silver spoons either."

The Lexington of his youth had a community of black merchants, doctors, lawyers and insurance salesmen. It had a black-owned baseball team—the Lexington Hustlers—that fielded a few white players. But Sweet Lou was acutely aware of the boundaries of his world. "You learned Yes and No. Weren't no Maybes," he said.* "Yes, you can. No, you can't."

As a child, Sweet Lou idolized Alex Groza and Wallace "Wah Wah" Jones of the Kentucky's back-to-back championship teams of 1948 and '49. But the lavish perks that Adolph Rupp, the Baron of the Bluegrass, dangled in front of star athletes—the education, the future, the glory—were not open to young guards from Lexington's Pralltown neighborhood. Boys like Johnson were not permitted to freely walk the campus much less set foot in the arena. Rupp paid plenty of lip service to the ideals of integration, but he refused to do anything that might upset the South's precious status quo. He walked Pralltown's streets, handing out tickets to the circus, but refused to part with a single basketball scholarship. Long after his peers in the Southeastern Conference had advised him to integrate the team, after the president of the university had pressured him to do it, he did not have the courage to do so—not even for a once-in-a-lifetime recruit like Connie Hawkins. "I'm sorry he didn't see fit to open the door to blacks," Johnson's high school coach S.T. Roach said.** "With his stature, he could have made all the difference in the world."

No, to set foot inside Rupp's famous arena, Sweet Lou Johnson had to dress himself up as a janitor. In his early teens, he donned a white jacket, grabbed a latrine brush and made his way across campus to the Coliseum. "I got to the floor of that arena," he said.* "Got to the floor with that white jacket. But I had no voice. I cheered silently."

In 1950, Johnson piloted Dunbar High's basketball team to a state championship. The all-white squad from nearby Lafayette High won a state title, too, the very same year. Johnson and his Bearcat teammates tailed them all over town, pleading for a showdown. The state's true champ was ultimately decided on a playground. "We beat their asses," Johnson said.


Source List:
*After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes: An Oral History by Cal Fussman

**And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Basketball Game That Changed American Sports by Frank Fitzpatrick

Sweet Lou's Story

I have this idea for a book about Sweet Lou Johnson.

Sweet Lou knows the value of a World Series ring.

He knows it better than Lenny Dykstra, the self-described financial wizard who hocked his 1986 ring in early October for $56,752.50. He knows it better than Jose Canseco, the best-selling author of Juiced who sold a World Series ring for $40,000 in 2005. In fact, Sweet Lou knows the true value of a championship ring better than any man alive.

When he joined the L.A. Dodgers on May 4, 1965, he was a nobody—a 12-year veteran of the minor leagues. A wispy outfielder with limited power and minimal speed. But Sweet Lou had one asset the managers of the 17 teams he'd played for failed to exploit—a huge heart. What followed was a storybook season, the six months when he endeared himself to Dodger fans with his timely hits, his daring steals, and an indomitable spirit that rallied the team to a National League pennant. On October 14, he completed the fairy tale by hitting the home run that decided Game Seven of the World Series.

For a man born in the South of the Great Depression, a black man who'd spent a lifetime battling the specter of racism, it was a delicious moral victory. Sweet Lou was a champion now, a member of the most select fraternity in America. No one could deny him that. But as he soon learned, a World Series ring can not save a man from misery. In 1971, two years into retirement, Johnson pulled his most prized possession from his finger and handed it to a drug dealer for $250 worth of cocaine.

That huge heart, the one that once pulsed with the joy of playing baseball, was now sick, so sick that Johnson felt compelled to silence it with alcohol and drugs. For nine years, he lived in a haze. And then he picked up the phone and dialed Don Newcombe.

Newcombe knew just how Sweet Lou felt. A league MVP, a Cy Young Award winner and the 1949 Rookie of the Year, the star pitcher had curtailed his own career with the Dodgers with alcohol. "I've been waiting for your call," he said.

Newcombe steered Sweet Lou to a rehab program in Arizona and, two months later, hired him to work in the Dodgers' community relations department, where the former outfielder labors to this day, teaching minor league players and teens about the horrors of addiction.

The saga of Sweet Lou Johnson might easily have ended there, but fate had another fairy tale finish in store for him. In 1999, nearly 30 years after Sweet Lou had parted with it, his World Series ring turned up in an unclaimed safety deposit box in Seattle. A Dodger fan spotted it in an auction listing and notified Sweet Lou's teammate Ron Fairly, who was working as an announcer for the Mariners. The Dodgers community quickly rallied to bring Sweet Lou's long lost trophy home to L.A.

"That's my history," a teary Johnson told Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times after he'd been reunited with his ring. "That's my life."

Great story, right? You can see the movie now. Here's the problem: Sweet Lou played only one more season of memorable baseball and I'm no Stephen King, which means the book would have to sell on the merits of the story alone. A number of publishers have already expressed doubts that Sweet Lou's life is rich enough to do that. I disagree, of course, but I won't argue. Not now. Instead I'll let you decide. Over the next few months, I'll share what I know about Sweet Lou's incredible run to the 1965 World Series, his subsequent trials and triumphs. If you like what you see, keep reading.

Here goes...