Parody on Casey at the Bat – Chuck Connors

(Written on November 11, 1950 to commemorate the birth of Mike)

It looked extremely gloomy for the Connors pair at first.

Not having any young  ‘uns  was the feeling that was worst.

So when a year rolled by and nothing was a cookin’,

They felt quite sure that Nature had given them a rookin’.

Persistent in their efforts they wouldn’t take a rest,

With the hope which springs eternal within the human breast.

The thought if only something could be added to their zeal,

They’d revel in the glory of a brand-new baby’s squeal.

Another month went by and sad they were indeed

Until a trip to the Laurentians supplied the vital need.

When some weeks had flitted and they learned what had occurred,

They became extremely anxious for the coming of the third.

The happiness of those two, like the tidings of a bell,

Reached up in the mountaintops and sounded in the dell;

It struck upon the hillside, rebounded in the flat

For, BABY, WONDROUS BABY, was soon to be a fact.

There was joy in Betty’s manner in each and every place;

And pride in Chuckie’s bearing and a smile on Chuckie’s face.

When responding to the well wishes on Betty’s increased size

They knew their Laurentian trip had been very, very wise.

Ten thousand eyes were on them as the weeks just slipped away;

Ten thousand hands applauded the passing of each day.

And when the hour approached for the crisis to be met,

Defiance glared in Betty’s eye but Chuck was in a sweat.

The cravings of the mother-soon knew no earthly range.

And even Chuck, the dad-to-be, was acting very strange.

Once, while with the doctor, a tear had Betty shed:

“May I eat some onions?” --- “Not one!” The doctor said.

From her feelings down inside her there came a muffled roar,

Like the beating of the storm wave on a stern and distant shore,

“Oh, doctor, I want onions.” was Betty’s loud demand.

And it’s likely she’d have ate them had not doctor raised his hand,

With a smile of Christian charity the doctor’s visage beamed,

He soothed the rising tumult until happy Betty seemed.

And then the day arrived for Betty to depart

And Chuck was all flustered as he had been from the start.

Soon a nurse called him when Betty was in bed

And he sat and held her hand, wild thoughts in his head.

Then the time grew short and finally did halt

And when the nurse took Bet away he knew t’was all his fault.

Seconds seemed like hours and waiting just plain hell

And he prayed and paced and prayed that his Betty love was well.

When the doctor finally came, poor Chuckie was a wreck

And reached to take the outstretched hand before he hit the deck.

Oh somewhere in this favored land the gloom is inches thick;

Things so bad all over it just makes you sick.

But the Connors’ hearts are happy – filled with utter joy!

And the baby’s name is MICHAEL – yes, a little BOY!

**********

*Betty Connors, originally from Canada, became a citizen
in 1958.

Michael Connors, 13, the oldest son of Chuck Connors, became a full U.S. Citizen on 8/11/64, he was swore in at the Department of Justice in Los Angeles.  Michael was born in Canada while his father was playing baseball for the Montreal Royals.  This gives Michael dual citizenship. 
 

American Heritage Magazine

RED AUERBACH came from coaching high school. He told his players: “Hey, I hired you. I’ll fire you.”
For nonstop antics, though, nobody topped Chuck Connors, a six-foot-six Celtic forward who would end up becoming better known as a movie actor and television’s “Rifleman.” Those who played with or against him in that first season remember him as a garish character who was forever theatrically on. In the stands during a preliminary game, in a railway station, or in the aisle of a plane, Connors would without prompting start spouting Shakespeare, or “The Face on the Barroom Floor.” In Boston’s first season he was a publicity man’s dream, ever ready to spread the then-dubious name of the Celtics to servicemen’s clubs or radio audiences —any place where a ham would do. “‘Casey at the Bat,’ twenty minutes on Boston, little jokes, and stuff,” Connors later said. “I was the original Garagiola. I never got paid then. I just went wherever Howie McHugh told me to go. I was kind of making up for my bad basketball by offering that service to the Celtics during the day.”

Indeed, his game was not much to speak of. Connors could run, and he could rebound, but he was a poor shot, averaging 4.6 points a game while making only 24 percent of his field-goal tries at a time when 28 to 30 percent was respectable. His teammate Harold Kottman, who often guarded him in practices, would slack off Connors so noticeably that Connors was obliged to warn him: “Kottman, guard me, you son of a bitch or I’m gonna knock every tooth in your head out. You’re making me look bad.”

Al Brightman, another Celtic teammate: “He wanted to be an actor. And he was plying his trade on everybody all the time. He’d get on top of those lockers in train stations and even denounce Roosevelt. Which was real sacrilege in those days. But for Chuck, anything to get a crowd. ‘Now that I have you here’—and he’d go into his spiel.”

John Simmons, Celtic teammate: “I saw him once in a train station go up to this short guy—total stranger—four foot ten, maybe. Walk up to him and lift up the guy and say, ‘Dad, where have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.’ Six foot six, Chuck was, and had this big booming voice, and everybody would be laughing at this little guy that’s his ‘father.’ Or if he saw a girl in a department store, he’d come out with a quote like, ‘Glory be to God. And there she is—dawn on the hills of Ireland.’ And then he’d be off on his big routine with her.”

Connors: “Another one was: ‘Have you heard this, my dear … ?’ And then I’d lay one on. ‘If I were king— ah love, if I were king! / What tributary nations would I bring/ to stoop before your scepter and to swear / Allegiance to your lips and eyes and hair. / Beneath your feet what treasures would I fling: / The stars should be pearls upon a string, / The world a ruby for your finger ring / And you should have the sun and moon to wear. / If I were king… . But honey, I haven’t got any dough. Let’s go to your place.’ What poem? It’s one by FranÇois Villon. But I added some lines to it. His was too short.”

Connors and the Celtics often stumbled during the first season, and it sometimes drove their coach Honey Russell half-crazy. In St. Louis, when his team blew still another late-game lead to the Bombers, Russell left and made his way back to Boston on his own. His players wound up stranded in Buffalo, New York, during a blizzard. With time on their hands the Celtics proceeded to drink liberally at the train-station bar and then decided to huddle around a civic monument—a life-size bison built of cement and coated in bronze. In the tomfoolery that followed, the creature’s tail was severed from its body, an incident that made the newspapers and compounded the ill will Russell already bore his charges. When the players finally reunited with him back in Boston for a team practice, the coach was in a foul mood.

“And Honey was a rough man in his day,” said Connors. “Behind his back we used to call him the Chicken Hawk; his nose had been broken about six times. It looked like an S-turn in the road. But we loved the guy. He was tougher than nails. So anyway, he had all of us on the bench. And he started up about the antics in the St. Louis game and all the things we’d gotten into on the way back. And then he got into the fact we used to go to this bar called the Blue Moon a lot. It was right around the corner from the gym. And one of the players that went there was Harold Kottman. Kottman was six-eight, and he was very young. He was from Glasgow, Missouri, a real small town, and he wasn’t used to big-city life. He used to go down to the Blue Moon and cry in his beer to the bartender, saying what a sh— coach Honey was. Which somebody passed on to Honey. And God, mad as Honey was at all the rest of us, he was even madder at Kottman. So thank God for Harold. He saved all our asses. It didn’t make Honey so mad that somebody had pulled the tail out of the buffalo and all the other things we had done. But Kottman saying he was a sh— coach—that got him crazy. What he did was he told Harold if he’d get that six-eight ass of his up off the bench, he’d drop him right there. Well, no need to tell you, Harold stayed right where he was. Didn’t budge.”

It was an era when the balance of power lay with the coach. That would change, slowly, inevitably, as money monkeyed with the game’s hierarchy. Things were very different then. The game was not the rich-for-life proposition it is today. And with the war only recently ended and a peacetime optimism prevalent, the players, many of them ex-GIs, had a more innocent outlook than today’s athletes have. A recurring line in conversations with those pioneer pros is: “I would have played for nothing.” While that may be exaggeration, remember that most of the players then were working stiffs, not yet elevated to a capitalist elite by the soaring salary scale we know today.

So as the regular season counted down, the players carried on, enduring the public’s indifference, not to mention uncertainty as to the league’s future. The sixty-game schedule ended with Auerbach’s Capitols winning the Eastern Division by fourteen games, their margin of victory nearly ten points a contest. By contrast, Chicago—the winner in the Western Division—had an average edge of fewer than four points a game.

But in that antic first season what else would the fates decree but for Washington to be eliminated in the opening round of the playoffs? The Warriors, led by the jump shooter Fulks, won the B.A.A. title, and the team’s teetotaling coach, Eddie Gottlieb, celebrated by consuming the five martinis he had vowed to drink in one sitting if his Warriors triumphed. Knocked them back with no apparent effect.

That too was as it should be. For in the first season nothing added up. Things were always just a bit out of whack. Measured against seasons in the distant future—in terms of monetary and artistic success—1946–47 could properly be viewed as a colossal failure. The B.A.A.’s own president, Podoloff, would see it that way years later. And by his standards, it was.

Yet the league survived—and grew. In 1948–49 the B.A.A. absorbed the Fort Wayne, Rochester, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis franchises from its chief rival, the National Basketball League, and in August 1949 it was formally renamed the National Basketball Association. The following season, 1949–50, more surviving N.B.L. teams—from places like Anderson, Indiana; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Waterloo, Iowa—were added. The loss of those teams effectively killed off the N.B.L. and left the N.B.A. as the pro basketball league. Its recognition and financial success would grow slowly, making a quantum leap in the 1980s, when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson captured the public’s fancy and league marketing strategy exploited their popularity at the same time Madison Avenue did.

So 1946–47 remains connected in time to all basketball, linked to men like Honey Russell, who stood for the two-fisted approach of an earlier game, and to Red Auerbach, who was already out in front of the new game. The first season was a beginning—and a bumpy one. But beginnings are like that. For those who were part of that season, the spirit of it is what matters. It was, as Chuck Connors put it, “a night in the flower of a guy’s youth and enthusiasm. Where could he have had it better than to be among a bunch of ballplayers and playing ball? With people yelling and screaming for him.”

Thanks Turquoise for sending this article.

A BALL PLAYER'S PRAYER

God grant me wisdom,
to tell a strike from a ball,
to know where to throw
and never to fall.
Keep me always in the base line,
running straight and true
and I'll look for your sign,
to stretch one into two.

God give me vision,
to see every pitch,
so if a player needs help,
then I will see which.

Let me always hustle,
so I'll be at my best
and take pride in myself,
in sports and the rest.

God be my strength,
when I throw the ball
when I'm far from home plate,
or against a wall.

So I never miss a base,
please guide my feet,
bring me home safely,
so my job is complete.

When I help younger players,
let me always give praise,
so they'll see you in me,
in all of my ways.

God please guide our coach,
to be fair and smart,
to teach us to be good,
let it come from his heart.

Let me take a loss,
just as well as a win,
to do any less,
is surely a sin.

As long as I can play,
let me make my parents proud,
as proud as I am,
when they yell MY name out loud.

However my games end,
let me always have fun
and if Heaven has All Stars,
I want to be one.

When my games here are over
and my seasons are done,
let me play on your team.
just like your son.

Amen.

Don Drysdale

Sid Gillman

Walter O'Malley

Duke Snider

Chuck Connors

Chuck Connors
In Memory of "The Rifleman"
1921 - 1992
© 1992 David Fury

Chuck Connors Obituary

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The Golf Course

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The Basketball Court

Chuck Connors Star on
the Hollywood Walk of fame