Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella

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Overview

ROY CAMPANELLA was the backbone of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the late 1940s and 1950s, alongside such other Hall of Famers as Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider. An outstanding defensive catcher and a powerful slugger, Campy won the National League MVP Award three times. But everything changed on a rainy January night in 1958 when Campy’s car skidded off the road and he was left paralyzed below the neck. For the second time in his life, Roy Campanella would become a pioneer, this time off the field. Neil Lanctot’s Campy is the magnificent, authoritative biography of this exuberant, gifted athlete.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Baseball fans who saw Roy Campanella (1921-1993) will never forget the hefty Brooklyn Dodgers catcher. This squat, rotund Hall of Famer was not only a home run threat and a three-time National League MVP; he was also one of baseball's greatest all-time catchers and handlers of pitchers. All that ended abruptly in January 1959 when Campy's car skidded on ice in a crash that paralyzed him below the neck. This revelatory new biography by Neil Lanctot (Negro League Baseball) shows how this tragically debilitating accident actually began a second life for this hard-striving Boy of Summer. Though mostly out of the limelight, this heroic hemiplegic struggled tirelessly to recover partial use of his body. A great ballplayer; an unforgettable life.

Publishers Weekly
Considered by many to be one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, Roy "Campy" Campanella is as interesting for what he did off the field as for his accomplishments within the baselines. And Lanctot, who has written extensively on the Negro Leagues, does justice to the tale. Born in 1921 in Philadelphia to a Sicilian father and African-American mother, Campanella saw his love for baseball pay off at an early age when he joined a club in the Negro Leagues at age 15. His early baseball years, which also took him to Mexico and Cuba, not only gave him exposure to the ugly racism of the time but also the experience that he needed for the Brooklyn Dodgers to sign him in 1946. From there, Campanella won the MVP award three times and led the Dodgers to an emotional World Series win in 1945 after so many previous failures against the Yankees. Lanctot truly captures the reader by delving well past the statistics, analyzing the rocky relationship with teammate Jackie Robinson and the horrific car accident in 1958 that left him paralyzed. Lanctot paints Campanella as an extremely likable person, yet doesn't hold back when speaking about subjects like Campanella's failed marriages and infidelity. Impeccably researched, it's a defining book on "the only person in baseball history about whom absolutely no one had a bad thing to say." (Apr.)
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
The first clue that this is not the usual account of a baseball great is the cover photo depicting a forlorn if not troubled soul. Indeed, as the subtitle makes plain, there were two Roy Campanellas: the public one, best known for his multiple MVP career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, after years in segregated baseball, whose life was marked by a courageous battle after a paralyzing 1958 car accident, and the private one who confronted teammate Jackie Robinson and lived a long life after the car crash, an event that Lanctot (Negro League Baseball) describes from a fresh perspective. Richly documented and meticulously compiled, this definitive biography bares the soul of a boy of summer who symbolizes a distant period but who lived through an epochal transformation of the game and the country. Compelling reading for all baseball and biography fans.—G.R.
Kirkus Reviews

The author ofNegro League Baseball(2004) returns with a thorough, generous biography of a Negro League star, catcher Roy "Campy" Campanella (1921–1993), who joined the Dodgers shortly after Jackie Robinson.

For many pages, Lanctot offers few negative words about Campanella. The son of a blue-collar white man and an African-American woman, he grew up when Jim Crow still reigned in the South and conditions in the North were only marginally better. As a child, he quickly fell in love with baseball, a sport his athletic gifts fitted perfectly. He had feline reactions and could run, throw, hit for power and average and handle pitchers well. But as the author ably illustrates, stardom came after long tuition. Although his gifts were so prodigious that he was playing professionally at age 15, he worked ferociously hard and played whenever and wherever he could. On the road in the Negro League (and even later), he suffered enormous indignities—denied service in restaurants, hotels and other businesses—but somehow retained an ebullience that Lanctot highlights throughout. His teammates, black and white, liked and admired him—though the author focuses on Campy's deteriorating relationship with Jackie Robinson, a tension Lanctot attributes to differences in education (Robinson attended college) and in impatience with the pace of the civil-rights movement (Campy took a long time to become more assertive politically). Competition was also a major factor, since both men enjoyed celebrity and adulation. Lanctot, pricking any balloons of legend floating over Campy, continually mentions cases of inconsistency between the legends and the historical record. Painful reading, indeed, are the many pages Lanctot devotes to Campy's car accident (it left him a quadriplegic) and the arduous, stressful, depressing aftermath.

A bit tendentious early on, but a sharper critical lens makes the final sections memorable and wrenching.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781416547044
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Publication date: 3/8/2011
  • Pages: 528
  • Sales rank: 145,240
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.40 (h) x 1.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Neil Lanctot is a historian who has written extensively about baseball. He is the author of two books, most recently Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. He lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

FOR SOME CITIES, a World Series game is an all too rare event to be savored and debated for years afterward. But for a New Yorker in 1958, the Fall Classic was a predictable part of the October calendar, as humdrum as a Columbus Day sale at Macy’s or candy apples at a neighborhood Halloween party.

The great catcher Roy Campanella was a veteran of the October baseball wars. Between 1949 and 1956, his Brooklyn Dodgers had taken on the New York Yankees five times, coming up empty all but once. On Saturday, October 4, Campy was returning to Yankee Stadium for yet another Series game, but everything had changed since the last time he’d set foot in the House That Ruth Built. The Dodgers no longer played in their cozy ballpark in Flatbush but in a monstrosity known as the Coliseum a continent away. And Campy no longer played baseball at all because a January automobile accident had left him a quadriplegic. For the past five months, he had doggedly worked with the staff and physicians at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan to learn how to function in a wheelchair. He had now sufficiently progressed to leave the hospital on weekends.

His doctors had encouraged him to accept Yankee co-owner Del Webb’s invitation to attend Saturday’s game at the Stadium, although Campy was initially not so sure. He had not appeared in public since his accident, nor had he sat on anything except a wheelchair. Nevertheless, he set aside any lingering anxiety to make the early-afternoon car ride to the Bronx, where box seats behind the Yankee dugout had already been set aside for Roy, his wife, two of his children, and a male attendant.

When the family station wagon arrived at Yankee Stadium, Campy could not help but think of the times he had suited up in the locker room in the past. He had never liked hitting at the Stadium, but he had enjoyed his fair share of glory there, whacking a key single in the deciding game of the Negro National League championship game as a teenager in 1939 and a more crucial double in game seven of the World Series in 1955, the year the Dodgers finally bested the Yanks. Today, he would just be another fan.

Campy soon discovered his wheelchair was too wide for the Stadium’s narrow aisles. He had no choice but to be bodily carried by his attendant, two firemen, and a policeman. “I felt like some sad freak,” he later recalled. “It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. I felt ashamed.”

But the fans whose glances he so desperately wanted to avoid soon began to shout out encouragement. “Hi, Slugger!” one greeted him. “Attaboy, Campy!” yelled another. “Stay in there, Campy, you got it licked.” Before long, virtually every one of the 71,566 present realized that the fellow with the neck brace and “tan Bebop cap” being carried to his seat was three-time MVP Roy Campanella. “By some sort of mental telepathy thousands in the great three-tiered horse-shoe were on their feet and when the applause moved, like wind through wheat from row to row, I doubt if there were many there who didn’t know what had happened,” wrote Bill Corum of the Journal-American. “It was a sad thing. Yet it was a great thing too, in the meaning of humanity. No word was spoke that anybody will know. Yet it had the same effect as that moment when a dying Lou Gehrig stood on this same Yankee diamond and said … ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’”

Down on the field, the top half of the second inning took a backseat to the heartfelt hoopla in the stands. With the count 1-1 on Milwaukee’s Frank Torre, Yankee pitcher Don Larsen stepped off the mound as the players in both dugouts craned their necks to see what was causing the commotion and then began to join in the ovation themselves. Upon spotting Campy only a few yards away, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra flipped his mask and waved, while home plate umpire Tom Gorman offered “a clenched fist in a ‘keep-fighting’ gesture.”

Campanella, who had vowed beforehand that he “wasn’t going to cry,” struggled to keep his emotions in check. He smiled back at Yogi (who “kept looking back and hardly could resist the temptation to run over and shake Campy’s hand,” said one reporter) and winked at the mob of photographers who gathered at his seat. For the rest of that warm October afternoon, he tried to focus on the game, even trying to eat a hot dog without success, but he could not stop thinking about the outpouring of love he had just experienced. “It’s hard to explain the feeling that came over me. I don’t believe any home run I ever hit was greeted by so much cheering,” Campanella said later.

It was the first time he had received such applause in a wheelchair, but it would not be the last. For the rest of his life, his presence, whether in a major league ballpark or in front of a Manhattan deli, would evoke similar responses. He was no longer just a ballplayer but a symbol of something much more.

© 2011 Neil Lanctot

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 13 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted April 30, 2011

    Excellent and thorough look at Campy's career.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal. Easy to read and lots of tidbits about the Dodgers.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 17, 2011

    One of the best baseball biographies of 2011!

    Thorough and even-handed look at the Dodger great. Easy to read.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted May 4, 2011

    Even-handed look at the Dodger great

    A very thorough biography of Roy Campanella, with plenty on his Negro League days and a surprising look at the darker side of his personal life. Recommended.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted May 1, 2011

    Enjoyable and informative

    This is a well written, well researched book that is sure to please baseball fans, history buffs, or those who are simply curious and want to learn more about Campy and his times. It's extremely readable, in the vein of Laura Hillenbrand's book on Seabiscuit. Definitely recommended.

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