Mar 7, 2022
Pat Jordan grew up in Fairfield,
Connecticut where, in the mid-1950s, he became a highly pursued pro
baseball prospect as a young pitching phenom in local Little League
and as a high school ace at Fairfield Prep.
On July 9, 1959, after being
pursued by more than a dozen Major League Baseball organizations
(MLB's first amateur draft didn't start until 1965), Jordan signed
a then-record $36,000 "bonus baby" bounty to join the National
League's Milwaukee Braves - where he reported to the McCook Braves
of the Class D Nebraska State League, playing alongside future big
leaguers Phil Niekro and Joe Torre.
Despite being one of the minors'
hardest-throwing pitchers at the time, Jordan floundered through
three seasons across obscure Braves posts such as Waycross (GA),
Davenport (IA), Eau Claire (WI) and Palatka (FL), and by the end of
1961, was out of the game for good - a victim of injury, hubris and
the realities of adulthood.
Baseball's loss was ultimately
sports journalism's gain, as Jordan pivoted hard into a prolific,
long-form, non-fiction writing career that began in earnest with
the publishing of 1975's clear-eyed memoir "A
False Spring" - which Time magazine called “one
of the best and truest books about baseball, and about coming to
maturity in America,” and Sports Illustrated has
consistently listed as one of the best sports books of all
time.
Like his brusque, straight-ahead
writing style, Jordan holds back nothing in this wide-ranging
conversation - featuring a multitude of stories featuring some of
modern-day sports' most fascinating characters such as softballer
Joan Joyce, Tom Seaver ("Tom
Seaver and Me"), pro volleyballer/hoopster Mary Jo Peppler
("Broken
Patterns"), Wilt Chamberlain, Renee Richards, and even the
56-year-old version of himself attempting a comeback with the the
independent Northeast League's Waterbury Spirit in 1997 ("A
Nice Tuesday: A Memoir").