Fouled Away

Written By Bernie Weisz/Historian March 12, 2010 Pembroke pines, Florida e mail address: [email protected] title of review:"A size 6 Shoe, Size 18 neck, Blacksmith Arms: A "Sawed-Off babe Ruth" who Extinguished himself With his Own Talent. Tiny Feet, an 18" collar and size 6 shoes juxtaposed with a barrel-chest, blacksmith arms and tree truck thighs and short legs. At 5'6" and weighing 195 pounds, he was a physical oddity that prompted Baseball Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen to view Lewis Robert Wilson, the subject of Clifton B. Parker's biography "Fouled Away" as follows: "There was something comic about Hack Wilson. He looked like a sawed-off Babe Ruth. He took a lot of ribbing from opposing bench jockeys, and writers called him the "Pudgy One", but there was no denying his talent and fans took to him immediately". Parker's book is filled with tragedy, showing how Hack Wilson, a man of alcoholic extremes and described by sportswriter Thomas Holmes as: "perhaps the most malicious mauler known to baseball science, the most incorrigible exponent of brute strength verses a pitched ball" could hit rock bottom nearly one year after winning Major League Baseball's Most Valuable Player Award. There are photos interlaced within this tragedy that can make the strongest of hearted cry. Wilson's only son and sole carrier of his bloodline, Robert Wilson, is shown with Hack throughout the book, the victim of a bitter divorce between Hack and his first wife, Virginia Riddleburger. The reader can see the love and pride Hack had in these photos for his only son and love of his life. When Hack died on November 23, 1948 in a Baltimore, MD. hospital with what the death certificate read as "internal hemorrhaging, pulmonary edema and cirrhosis of the liver", his body laid unclaimed for three days. When Robert was contacted about his father's death, his only response was "Am not responsible". Like picking up a book about Lou Gehrig, the reader knows automatically that this story could only have a tragic ending. However, unlike the former, how many baseball fans have heard of Hack Wilson? And how did this man, a product of the roaring twenties, with Prohibition, Al Capone and the eventual Stock Market crash get the moniker "Hack"? Clifton Parker points out that it was either Wilson's resemblance to former Cub Lawrence H. "Hack" Miller or from an old time wrestler named George Hackenschmidt. Regardless, the nickname stuck. Parker tells of how Hack's father, also named Robert Wi

שנה

2000

שפה

English

הוצאה

McFarland & Company

מהדורות

1

עמודים

232

ISBN

9780786408641

מקור הנתונים: Wikidata