OPINION:
It’s John Wayne’s 117th birthday on Sunday, the day before Memorial Day. On the screen, he was often the soldier who fought America’s enemies. In real life, he never served in the military and actually filed for a draft deferment in World War II, a source of controversy at the time.
He lives on, though, as a fictional American hero in films, as a cowboy, on the battlefield, and even in the press box as, yes, a newspaper sports writer.
The Duke appeared as a sports writer named Mike Cronin in a 1955 half-hour television drama called “Rookie of the Year,” directed by Wayne’s frequent collaborator, four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford.
The tale centers on baseball’s greatest crime, the 1919 Black Sox scandal that saw eight members of the Chicago White Sox accused of being paid by gamblers to throw the World Series.
The scandal happened more than a century ago and the television episode itself is almost seven decades old. But the message resonates today, perhaps more than ever, with baseball’s embrace of legalized sports betting and the Shohei Ohtani bookie scandal.
The 1955 teleplay opens in a small Pennsylvania town, in the newsroom of the Henryville Post Gazette. A copy boy named Willie is checking the teletype for details of the starting pitchers for the upcoming World Series, which of course features the New York Yankees.
There is, predictably, a crusty small-town editor named Cully.
“Willie, tell Mike Cronin I want to see him right now,” says Mr. Cully.
Willie finds Wayne’s sports writer typing away at his desk. He tells him Mr. Cully — “Old Iron Lungs” — wants to see him.
But “Old Iron Lungs” has to wait. Cronin has a call into the press box at Yankee Stadium to a fellow reporter working for the New York Globe. He tells the New York reporter that he’s got a big story — a story so hot the ambitious Pennsylvania sports writer figures it will land him a job in the Big Apple. “The biggest sports yarn since David kayoed Goliath,” Cronin says.
The New York reporter says he will call Cronin back between innings.
As soon as Cronin hangs up, “Old Iron Lungs” does what newspaper editors did back then. He yells at Cronin for taking too many days off, and then he yells at him for making personal phone calls.
Too which Cronin responds, “I’ve been taking it here for 10 years. Stuck. Trapped. I’ve got just three words for you Mr. Cully — Drop dead.”
The story goes back in time three days before, when Cronin traveled to New York for a Yankees game and saw for the first time in person, the “Rookie of the Year” from the teleplay’s title — the baseball phenom at the center of the story, “Lynn Goodhue,” played by Wayne’s son, Patrick Wayne.
Cronin can’t help but see similarities between the young star and “Buck Garrison” — the drama’s fictionalized version of the real-life Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Cronin: “He was Buck Garrison all over again. Buck Garrison, probably the greatest natural ball player except for the Babe in the history of the game. He ran like Garrison, hit like Garrison, and when he struck out he did what Garrison never failed to do — that little trick of reversing his bat and bouncing the handle on home plate.
“It was crazy. It couldn’t be. Someone besides me must have spotted the same thing, had to. You don’t forget a player like Buck Garrison.”
Cronin goes into the clubhouse after the game and meets Goodhue.
During the conversation, he asks Goodhue how he learned to play, and he says from his father. Cronin asks if he ever heard of Buck Garrison, and Goodhue says he remembers hearing about him from the Black Sox scandal. Wayne gets an autographed baseball from Goodhue.
He leaves New York and heads for Goodhue’s hometown of Coaltown, West Virginia.
The film comes back to the present, with Cronin at home, waiting to tell his big city newspaper pal about his scoop: Goodhue is the legendary Buck Garrison’s kid.
But when Cronin answers a knock at his door, he is faced with a woman holding a gun — Goodhue’s fiancée (played by Vera Miles).
She had helped Cronin find Buck Garrison during his visit to Coaltown, but now she begs Wayne’s character not to print the story — it would ruin the young player.
“How can a man be so evil? How can you honestly be so evil?” she asks.
“I’m a newspaperman. I don’t make the facts — just report them,” Cronin replies (who among us in the news business hasn’t said this when described as evil).
The story shifts back to Cronin arriving in Coaltown. He meets the fiancée, who tells him where to find Larry Goodhue — Lynn Goodhue’s father, who is, as we know now, is Buck Garrison. He is at a local park, teaching kids baseball.
Cronin approaches him: “Hello Buck. Your boy gave me this Sunday (the autographed ball). He’s good Buck, but he will never be as good as you were.”
Garrison: “That’s where you’re wrong, mister. He’s already better now than I ever was.”
Cronin: “I’d like to quote you saying that.”
Garrison: “A newspaperman. No newspaperman ever did me any good, before or after the trouble.”
Cronin: “It’s our job to print the news.”
Garrison: “It had to come out sooner or later.”
Cronin: “It’s a great story, Buck. Only one question — does the kid know?”
Garrison: No, he don’t. You better go write your story mister. Go ahead. Print it. You don’t think I’d beg now, do you?”
But while newspapermen may be evil, John Wayne is not. Dahlberg convinces Cronin (without the gun) not to print the story.
It turned the Yankees press corps all knew the story, and chose not to print it. Still, Shafer sets Cronin up with a story for the Globe, and good triumphs over evil.
As Cronin leaves his hotel, he walks by the offices of the Henryville Post-Gazette and throws the autographed Lynn Goodhue ball through the second-floor window, where it hits his editor on the head, and the story ends.
It’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s John Wayne as a sports writer, and all of us with press passes should all be walking a little taller today.
• You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
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