During 2009, after a long stretch of writing for the Washington Post largely about politicians, I wanted nothing more than to-do a story about baseball. I sought an interview with a Dodger legend I hadn’t seen in person since my youth in Los Angeles, Maury Wills, who, in 1962, had broken Ty Cobb’s legendary single-season stolen-base record and whose absence from the Hall of Fame had long struck me as a historical oversight.
I flew to Los Angeles, where I sat in an empty and very hot Dodger Stadium with the then-seventy-six-year-old Wills, hoping for an hour of his time. He talked for the hour and then the next three. He was indefatigable.
He recounted his chase of Cobb before moving on to discuss the Dodgers’ pennants and World Series titles during his playing days, his famous teammates, his childhood in segregated Washington, DC, his career’s great highs and lows, the 1960s, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, his struggles to get paid fairly during the height of his stardom, his post-playing life, his successful rehabilitation from drugs, and his work with the Dodgers in the decades since.
By the end of that month, after the publication of my story in the Post, another discussion with Wills, and interviews with many of his former teammates about their own experiences, I decided there was a book to be written about this group of Dodgers and their odyssey during the turbulent 1960s.
No one had a larger role in enabling me to see the literary possibilities than Wills and Wes Parker. Like Wills, Parker candidly spoke about his difficult past as well as his triumphs, proving to be deeply insightful about both the game and larger social forces at work in the 1960s. The two men were expansive, eloquent, and blessed with encyclopedic minds. For the next few years, both Parker and Wills participated in a series of long in-person interviews. In addition, they made themselves available for telephone discussions when I was at home in the Washington area. (I’d conservatively estimate that, in Wills’s case, our interviews lasted more than twenty-five hours; in the case of Parker, it was more than forty.) They were as giving and passionate as subjects can be.