Last month, as the 2016 baseball preseason was kicking off, I attended the 23rd annual NINE Spring Training Conference in Phoenix. Those who ran the event did a first-rate job; the presentations were generally illuminating; plus, I got to (finally) meet and get to know so many interesting people as well as see three ballgames in three days in three different ball yards! You can’t beat that!
As for the presentations, quite a few emphasized baseball and film, baseball and popular culture, and baseball and the business of mass entertainment. One of them spotlighted Andy Razaf, a songwriter who is not as fondly recalled as a George and Ira Gershwin, a Cole Porter, or an Irving Berlin. But in his day, Razaf’s credits were impressive. He was, for example, the lyricist for a number of Fats Waller standards, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose.” As Daniel Anderson noted in his presentation, Razaf also has a sports connection and, throughout his life, according to Anderson, Razaf “never lost his passion for baseball.”
In 1921, when he was in his twenties, Razaf published a poem in the New York News, an African-American paper, in which he paid homage to the Continental League, a small Boston-based integrated association which included five Caucasian and five African-American teams from various Eastern cities. This of course was a quarter century before Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues and, in his poem, Razaf argued for that assimilation. He wrote: “The Baseball Park is soon to be a place where players white and tan, shall demonstrate pure sportsmanship and man will love his fellow man.” Now back in 1950, three years after he first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, there was a biopic titled THE JACKIE ROBINSON STORY. Andy Razaf lived a fascinating life, on various levels, and I would love to one day see a film produced with the title THE ANDY RAZAF STORY.
Documentaries also were screened at the conference. One, by Jon Leonoudakis, is titled HANO! A CENTURY IN THE BLEACHERS. It is an informative, loving portrait of sportswriter Arnold Hano, who has been publishing since the early 1930s: a man who over the years has met and talked with Babe Ruth, John F. Kennedy, and John Wayne. Indeed, Arnold Hano has lived a long, fascinating, and colorful life. He now is 93 years old, and it was a special treat to meet and speak with him-- and look to my right while watching HANO! A CENTURY IN THE BLEACHERS and see the man himself sitting a couple chairs away.
YurikoRomer presented a sequence from her documentary-in-progress, whose title-- DIAMOND DIPLOMACY: U.S.-JAPAN RELATIONS THROUGH A SHARED LOVE OF BASEBALL-- tells you all you need to know about its content. Another of Romer’s films that I was privileged to see but which was not screened at the conference is the appropriately titled MRS. JUDO: BE STRONG, BE GENTLE, BE BEAUTIFUL. This one is a heartfelt, enlightening documentary on the life of the legendary Keiko Fukuda, a single-minded woman who in her youth was obsessed with judo, which at the time was primarily a male domain.
Fukuda never married, and instead devoted her life to judo. This explains why the film is titled MRS. JUDO... She eventually became a 10th degree black belt, and here she is onscreen recalling her life and times at the ripe young age of 98!
Rob Edelman has authored or edited several dozen books on film, television, and baseball. He has taught film history courses at several universities and his writing has appeared in many newspapers, magazines, and journals. His frequent collaborator is his wife, fellow WAMC film commentator Audrey Kupferberg.
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