George Will, The Ultimate All-Rounder: G. H. Ruth and the Rebirth of American Cricket (Society for American Cricket Research: 2022, xx+280 pp., $19.95)
In late November 1921 George Ruth boarded a steamer bound from New York to Southampton. He traveled second class, which, as he reminisced years later, “cut me out of high society”. He was in such a dismal mood that “high society” might have been more grating than enjoyable. A year earlier, he had been receiving a princely salary as the star “pitcher” (equivalent to bowler) for the Boston American League baseball team, which stood in the top tier of its sport. Baseball had then been so popular that it was known as the “National Pastime”. Its championship set of matches was called the “World Series”, which no one thought pretentious.
A year later, that world had collapsed under the impact of a gambling scandal, the culmination of years of fixed matches that had steadily undermined public faith in baseball as a sporting event rather than a scripted entertainment. In 1921, all first-tier baseball clubs lost money. Several went bankrupt. The survivors slashed salaries in the hope, which turned out to be futile, of escaping the same fate.
Too proud to accept lower pay, Ruth gambled his future on the thinnest of hopes. He had received a letter from the secretary of the Warwickshire County Cricket Club, which had been mired near the bottom of the league table since the post-war resumption of county championship play. The English gentleman apparently had no notion of the difference between cricket bowling and baseball pitching. He had merely read newspaper accounts saying that Ruth was a prodigious pitcher who was currently without a contract. He offered the American a chance to try out for Warwickshire, assuring him that, if added to the team, he would enjoy “a suitable emolument”.
Ruth, it seems, thought that “emolument” meant compensation of an exceptionally high order. He knew nothing about cricket except that it was played with a bat and ball and involved running after the ball was struck. His introduction to the game, related by Will with zest and jest, left both him and the English players in a state of confusion.
Despite that ill-omened start, Ruth rapidly mastered bowling. He also displayed a talent that he had never been of much use to him in baseball: the ability to strike the ball at high velocity for such distances that, after one of his blows, a teammate exclaimed, “That wasn’t a six; it was a dozen!”
Ruth had always been able to hit baseballs solidly, but once he became a professional player, he had no occasion for exercising that skill. Just after his debut in 1914, the “major” American and National Leagues, faced with a rival aspirant to that status that had adopted the name “Federal League”, had sought to make their own games more lively by excusing pitchers from appearing as batsmen. An “assigned substitute striker” took what would have been the pitcher’s turn at bat.
Ruth entered the professional ranks as a pitcher and was kept out of the batting order as a matter of course. His batting prowess thus remained a light hidden under the proverbial bushel. On the cricket ground, it suddenly blazed forth.
Ruth himself always despised the ASS rule. In an interview after he had become famous, he declared that, if he had been allowed to bat, he would have hit more “home runs” (the baseball counterpart to sixes) than anyone ever had before and that his hitting would even have saved the sport from eclipse. “They could’ve cleaned out the rotten apples who fixed games, and the fans would’ve come to see me knock the ball out of the park,” he boasted.
Will delicately questions Ruth’s faith in home runs’ drawing power. “Even the mightiest sluggers hit no more that about a dozen during a 154 game season. If Ruth had doubled that total, the prospect of seeing him ‘knock the ball out of the park’ once in every six or seven games would have been a paltry attraction, even if, as was hardly likely, baseball enthusiasts had come to care more about home runs than stolen bases, hit and run plays, and skillful sacrifice bunts.”
The story of Ruth’s unprecedented success at cricket – only the immortal W. G. Grace rivals him – is well known. The Ultimate All-Rounder fills in one large gap: the true story of the series of events that led to the all-rounder’s return to America.
Ruth had married at about the same time that he began appearing in “major league” competition. The union was not a success, and he left his American spouse behind when he journeyed to England. By 1927, the greatest of his English cricket years, he had her out of his mind entirely and was sharing a flat with a London socialite, Lady Viola Selfridge-Wimsey. His split with his first wife was mutual. She had moved into the home of a childhood sweetheart. The Ruths had not, however, bothered with a divorce.
When news of these irregular domestic arrangements became the topic of malicious whispers, British society was appropriately shocked. Ruth was in South Africa at the time for a Test match series. He led England to overwhelming victories in the first two matches. Before the third, he was abruptly dropped from the squad. Not surprisingly, he fumed, then was childishly delighted when South Africa drew the third match and won the fourth by four wickets. Asked to return for the final match, he refused. Instead, he impulsively booked passage to America, abandoning English cricket and Lady Viola forever.
His mistress’s influential relatives hushed up the scandal. Her name was never connected with Ruth’s by the press, and the official story, universally believed until George Will uncovered the truth, was that a Negro baseball team, the only sort that still existed in the United States, had made Ruth an offer too lucrative to be refused, only to be unable or unwilling to fulfill its terms.
The Negro League offer was spurious. Ruth’s economic distress was real. Then he caught the break that changed his life and the course of American sports history.
His success as an American in a quintessentially “English” sport had given him a modicum of celebrity, so he was able to eke out an income by public lectures and ghost-written newspaper articles. At an appearance in Chicago, he met a young entrepreneur named Abe Saperstein, who, at age 26, was already promoting a basketball team that would become the famous Harlem Globetrotters.
Saperstein had been born in London. Although his family immigrated to America when he was five years old and he had never played cricket, he saw importing his native country’s native sport as a great opportunity. Since the demise of “major league” baseball, the summer months had been devoid of popular sporting events beyond horse racing and boxing, neither to his mind a “wholesome family sport” that could fill a stadium with tens of thousands of spectators. He proposed to Ruth the creation of a barnstorming cricket club that, if successful, would form the nucleus of a professional league.
The new venture presented many challenges. While cricket had been somewhat popular in 19th Century America, it had all but died out by the 1920’s. To have two sides to take the field, Ruth and Saperstein had to form a two-headed club, “Ruth’s Champions” and “The King’s All-Americans”. Ruth used his old baseball connections to find players. Saperstein found venues for the games and handled publicity. The opening match, in New York on July 4, 1929 (coincidentally Saperstein’s 27th birthday) drew a crowd of over 15,000.
The Great Depression, arriving a few months after that debut, proved to be less of an obstacle than might have been expected. Will attributes cricket’s New World success to two factors. One was Ruth’s charisma. The second was the pace at which Americans played the traditionally leisurely English game.
The Ruth-Saperstein club’s matches lasted only one day but almost always completed two full innings. As George Will puts it, the result was “a happy mean between the frenetic speed of baseball and the tortoise-paced English cricket. Baseball’s most serious weakness had been the way in which a match was over almost before it began. Even when the sport was at its pinnacle of popularity, spectators thought that they were not getting their money’s worth, a dissatisfaction that clubs often tried to alleviate by scheduling two games on the same day. Cricket, on the other hand, as played by Ruth’s Champions, nicely filled the day, beginning at nine o’clock in the morning and continuing until shortly before the dinner hour. Saperstein made sure that lunches of high quality and large quantity were available at reasonable prices. Beer, which could be purchased throughout the contest, was yet more profitable, albeit at some cost to gentility.
Discussion of cricket’s progress between the revival in 1929 and Ruth’s death in 1948 would be otiose. That is familiar ground, which Will covers adeptly, if without major revelations.
The tome closes with an epilogue in which the author ruminates on why baseball dwindled. The reason was, he says, neither the 1919 World Series scandal nor the ASS rule that Ruth loathed so fiercely.
“The root cause of the sport’s failure,” he writes, “was the excessive velocity of play. To cure that malady, some means had to be found to slow the action down, to allow the spectators to ruminate on what was happening on the field, pop off to the refreshment tent for a Cornish pasty or a glass of ale, and digest the contest along with their food. A two-hour match is unsatisfyingly brief.”
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