Striking Out: The strange story of Rube Waddell
When people sneer about modern sports, they’re almost never sneering about the right things.
It’s always about tattoos, or playing styles or the fact that women play it. What makes this even more frustrating is the fact that there’s no shortage of terrible things going on in the world of sports.
However, rarely are these backwards Tories sneering about the influence of nation states, or ingrained bigotry within the culture, or abusive practices behind the scenes. There is something they do have a point about, though, on the few occasions that they talk about it.
The truth is that the influx of money that sports leagues have seen over the last 40 years or so has changed the place that sportspeople take in the world. While athletes are closer to Gods today, they used to be people just like us, earning a fairly standard middle-class salary. Fun fact, the reason why footballers’ salaries are still talked about as earning “XYZ a week” is because a footballer’s wage used to be paid weekly, just like any other working-class job.
There is no shortage of stories of top-level footballers in the 1960s and 1970s heading to the pub with a lucky handful of fans after successful matches. Something which absolutely couldn’t happen today. Thus, back in the day, athletes could have had a genuine personality in a way that they’re actively discouraged from having now. The further back you go, the better the stories, but no one can hold a candle to the kind of mental shit that Rube Waddell pulled during his days as a professional baseball player.
Who was Rube Waddell?
Born George Edward Waddell in Bradford, Pennsylvania, Rube Waddell was what the language of the time would call “an eccentric”. A giant in his era, six foot one and over 200 pounds when the average height for an American man was five foot seven, his physique was thrown into sharp relief by his nature. He never quite got over his boyish enthusiasm for all the things he was passionate about, whenever they showed up.
As a boy, Waddell had no interest in schooling, but became obsessed with slinging rocks as hard and as fast as he could. This, combined with his natural athleticism, led to a love of baseball and a talent for the sport that led to him going professional as soon as he possibly could. It’s a sign of his generational ability on the field that not even his eccentricities could stop him from balling out. Like the fact that way into his adult life, if a fire truck passed the field, Waddell would immediately drop whatever he was doing to chase it, whether he was pitching, catching or batting.
That wasn’t the only thing that would cause that reaction, either. Waddell loved dogs as well, and rival fans of the teams he played for cottoned on that if he was on a hot streak, they could just smuggle a dog into the stands, hold the poor pooch up and wait for him to abandon the game just to pet the pup. These somewhat dull wits earned him the nickname “Rube” from his teammates, but made him a celebrity at the time. To the extent that during the offseason, when other players went back to work, Waddell found work as an actor. He wasn’t good at it, but he did get butts in seats, and that’s what counts, right?
Despite all his eccentric behaviour, exacerbated by a terrible drinking problem that plagued much of his short life, Rube Waddell maintained a thoroughly successful career. This was mostly due to a pitch that legendary baseball figure Connie Mack described as “the atom bomb of baseball long before the atom bomb was discovered.” You can’t deny that it would be nice to have a genuinely endearing figure like that in modern sports right now, wouldn’t it? Though throwing a game to go pet a dog would probably get annoying after a while.