The Ticket Out; Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

by Michael Sokolove

• ISBN13: 9780743226738
• ISBN10: 0743226739
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-03-30
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

The year was 1979 and the fifteen teenagers on the Crenshaw High Cougars were the most talented team in the history of high school baseball. They were pure ballplayers, sluggers and sweet fielders who played with unbridled joy and breathtaking skill.

The national press converged on Crenshaw. So many scouts gravitated to their games that they took up most of the seats in the bleachers. Even the Crenshaw ballfield was a sight to behold -- groomed by the players themselves, picked clean of every pebble, it was the finest diamond in all of inner-city Los Angeles. On the outfield fences, the gates to the outside stayed locked against the danger and distraction of the streets. Baseball, for these boys, was hope itself. They had grown up with the notion that it could somehow set things right -- a vague, unexpressed, but persistent hope that even if life was rigged, baseball might be fair.

And for a while it seemed they were right. Incredibly, most of of this team -- even several of the boys who sat on the bench -- were drafted into professional baseball. Two of them, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Brown, would reunite as teammates on a National League All-Star roster. But Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out is more a story of promise denied than of dreams fulfilled. Because in Sokolove's brilliantly reported poignant and powerful tale, the lives of these gifted athletes intersect with the realities of being poor, urban, and black in America. What happened to these young men is a harsh reminder of the ways inspiration turns to frustration when the bats and balls are stowed and the crowd's applause dies down.

Just as Friday Night Lights portrayed the impact of high school sports on the life of a Texas community, and There Are No Children Here examined the viselike grip of poverty on minority youngsters, The Ticket Out presents an unforgettable tale of families grasping for opportunities, of athletes praying for one chance to make it big, of all of us hoping that the will to succeed can triumph over the demons haunting our city streets.

The year was 1979 and the fifteen teenagers on the Crenshaw High Cougars were the most talented team in the history of high school baseball. They were pure ballplayers, sluggers and sweet fielders who played with unbridled joy and breathtaking skill.

The national press converged on Crenshaw. So many scouts gravitated to their games that they took up most of the seats in the bleachers. Even the Crenshaw ballfield was a sight to behold -- groomed by the players themselves, picked clean of every pebble, it was the finest diamond in all of inner-city Los Angeles. On the outfield fences, the gates to the outside stayed locked against the danger and distraction of the streets. Baseball, for these boys, was hope itself. They had grown up with the notion that it could somehow set things right -- a vague, unexpressed, but persistent hope that even if life was rigged, baseball might be fair.

And for a while it seemed they were right. Incredibly, most of of this team -- even several of the boys who sat on the bench -- were drafted into professional baseball. Two of them, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Brown, would reunite as teammates on a National League All-Star roster. But Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out is more a story of promise denied than of dreams fulfilled. Because in Sokolove's brilliantly reported poignant and powerful tale, the lives of these gifted athletes intersect with the realities of being poor, urban, and black in America. What happened to these young men is a harsh reminder of the ways inspiration turns to frustration when the bats and balls are stowed and the crowd's applause dies down.

Just as Friday Night Lights portrayed the impact of high school sports on the life of a Texas community, and There Are No Children Here examined the viselike grip of poverty on minority youngsters, The Ticket Out presents an unforgettable tale of families grasping for opportunities, of athletes praying for one chance to make it big, of all of us hoping that the will to succeed can triumph over the demons haunting our city streets.

Author Biography

Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and their three children.

For more information about Mike Sokolove or this book, visit www.michaelsokolove.com

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. ix
Prologue	p. 1
Paradise	p. 7
Go West, Then Keep On Going	p. 20
Crenshaw	p. 50
No Way We Lose	p. 75
Chasing Darryl	p. 93
Leaving L.A.	p. 148
Called Out on Strikes	p. 189
The Good Stuff	p. 218
Family	p. 241
Acknowledgments	p. 273
A Note on Sources	p. 275
Index	p. 279
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One: Paradise In the tiny backyard of the Strawberry house at 6034 Seventh Avenue, a grapefruit tree produced an abundant harvest each spring. Darryl and his four siblings -- two brothers, two sisters -- would pluck the fruit off the tree, peel the dimpled skin back, and slurp it down right there in the yard. Then they would run back out on the street or to the nearby park and resume playing ball, juice still dripping from their faces.Their house, in the middle of a block lined with tall palm trees, looked like tens of thousands of other dwellings in inner-city Los Angeles: a stucco-faced bungalow with three bedrooms, a small kitchen and eating area, and a patch of green in front and back. (The smallest of these types of houses came prefabricated from an outfit called Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, and were sometimes referred to as "democratic bungalows.")Most of the Strawberrys' neighbors also had at least one fruit tree in the yard -- grapefruit, fig, avocado, orange -- along with some shrubs and at least a modest patch of flowers. This was typical of just about any neighborhood in Los Angeles; the city was developed, above all, around the ideal that it should stand as a bucolic alternative to New York and the other old cities back East -- that it must never become just another teeming metropolis. And what better way to make this point than to give even the poorest residents at least a sliver of paradise?"The poor live in single cottages, with dividing fences and flowers in the frontyard, and oftentimes vegetables in the backyard," Dana Bartlett reported in The Better City, which was published in 1907. Bartlett observed that Los Angeles had some "slum people," but "no slums in the sense of vicious, congested districts."The Strawberrys had come up from Mississippi. The Dillards, a whole family of plumbers back in Oklahoma -- fathers and sons, cousins, in-laws -- migrated en masse to start life and business anew in Southern California. The Browns made the pilgrimage from Mississippi, the Whitings from Texas, the McWhorters from Alabama.With just two exceptions, the families of the Boys of Crenshaw all came from down South, post-World War II. In Los Angeles they lived in single-family houses, rented in most cases. They drove cars and had driveways. Most kept a little garden plot to grow vegetables and greens.The sense of roominess in Los Angeles, all the attention given over to flora and natural beauty, was not a ruse, not precisely. Much about Los Angeles really was superior to the crowded cities of the East and Midwest, and still is. Even now, the common reaction of a first-time visitor to L.A.'s inner city is to look around at the greenery, the rosebushes, the purple-flowering jacaranda and statuesque birds of paradise, and say: This is South Central?But there was also something undeniably slippery about the landscape; the whole L.A. experience seemed a violation of some truth-in-packaging law. Historian Carey McWilliams seized on this in Southern California: An Island on the Land, a 1946 book still considered a standard text on the development of Los Angeles. McWilliams wrote of the "extraordinary green of the lawns and hillsides," while adding, "It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real."It is not easy to keep in mind how young a city Los Angeles still is, with its current tangle of freeways, its nearly four million residents, and its dense concentrations of wealth, glamour, and power. Its history begins in 1781, five years after the American Revolution, when forty-four pioneers ventured north from the San Diego area, at the direction of California's Spanish governor, to establish a settlement on the banks of what is now called the Los Angeles River.The land was exotic -- "a desert that faces an ocean," McWilliams called it -- as well as impractical. For its