Customer Reviews

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chief Bender's Burden reads like a novel. Swift's style is fluid and never dull. He has managed to reconstruct Bender's life through impeccable research. The book's most exciting parts are the play-by-play of games Bender pitched. Details, including which pitches Bender threw, make this book an excellent read. What is most impressive is the daunting task of research included in telling Bender's story. Yet, Swift does not get bogged down in details and allows the story to unfold in a natural manner.

Tom Swift has written an outstanding book that shows how Bender's life story is about more than just baseball...It's about the experience of Native Americans during Bender's era. His book is an exciting and informative read that should be of great interest to both baseball fans and students of American history. As one who uses baseball history in education, I warmly recommend it.

Rabbi Shmuel Jablon, www.rabbijablon.com

Speaking as a former archivist, "Chief Bender's Burden" is an archivist's dream: well researched with an exquisitely detailed bibliographic essay, and an index! But more than that, it is a book lover's dream. It is the brilliantly written story of a unique American, "the pitcher who looked in the face of pressure and winked." Author Swift replays the Deadball Era games with the enthusiasm of a modern day radio announcer. The inclusion of Bender's quotes on page 128 and 211, and paragraph one on page 275 alone make this book a gem. More than baseball history, it is pathos and glory and inspiration.
Beverly Hermes

It took a swift kick in the pants for Albert "Chief" Bender and his brother to leave home in northern Minnesota on a train to Pennsylvania to find a new life. Author Tom Swift has meticulously researched the life of this baseball Hall of Famer. Names from baseball's glorious past including Connie Mack, Eddie Plank, Eddie Collins, Frank "Home Run" Baker, Rube Waddell, and several others are brought back to life in this biography. Bender's success as a pitcher can be traced to his ability to control his pitches, and remain calm in the face of adversity which included taunts regarding his native-American heritage. Connie Mack otherwise known as the Tall Tactician or the Lean Leader was a perfect manager for the temperament of Bender who always referred to him as Albert. Whenever Mack needed a crucial victory it was Bender who received the nod. Bender arrived with the Athletics during the 1903 season and pitched through the 1914 season. The Athletics underestimated their opponent in the Fall Classic, George Stallings' Boston Braves. Bender disappointed Mack by not taking the time to scout the Braves when told to do so. To be kind, Bender thought it to be unnecessary to scout minor league hitters. When the Miracle Braves knocked Bender from pillar to post Mack removed him from the game. It also ended Bender's stay with Mack's white elephants. Bender briefly knocked around the Federal league in addition to very brief cups of coffee with some major league teams, but for all intents and purposes his career was over. Various illnesses and alcohol led to a premature end.

It thought author Swift did a marvelous job in capturing the era of turn-of-the-century baseball in addition to Bender's post-baseball career, most notably his coaching of players on the early 1950s Athletics such as Bobby Schantz, Eddie Joost, Joe Astroth, and Lou Limmer who I remember as baseball cards. Bender also made himself available to give speeches to various groups to help out others in any way he could. If you enjoy baseball history you need to read this book. To me the funniest line in the book is when the author described eccentric pitcher Rube Waddell as "a walking carnival." Those familiar with Waddell know what I'm talking about. Author Tom Swift is to be commended for writing a biography of a Hall of Famer who has often been overlooked.

Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack said if he had to pick one pitcher to hurl one game, it would be Chief Bender. "Bender is the greatest money pitcher the game has ever known," stated Mack.

Bender pitched for the A's from 1903 through 1914, winning 193 games. In his final three seasons with Baltimore of the Federal League and the Philadelphia Phillies, he won just 19 games. Eighteen when he made his major league debut, Bender was burned out by the age of 30. His last major league appearance came in 1925 when he pitched one game for the Chicago White Sox.

Bender was the son of a white father of German-American descent and an Indian mother, thought to have been a member of the Mississippi Band of the Ojibwe. Author Tom Swift focuses on what he terms Bender's "silent struggle," how he endured racism and stereotypes associated with Indians.

Although he was often portrayed as a cartoon Indian figure, Bender was "refined, articulate and esteemed." New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson said Bender had "a cool head, a fine arm and plenty of courage."

Even though not much is known about Bender's early life, Swift spends nearly the first third of the book describing what life must have been like for him growing up on the Minnesota prairie and later attending the Carlisle School for Indians. Because Bender said little about the racism he had to deal with, Swift is left to speculate on how the star pitcher must have felt and reacted. How much of his silent struggle was responsible for his battle with alcohol? No one knows for sure.

Swift uses Bender's opening game of the 1914 World Series against the Boston Braves as the thread that runs through the book. That was the first World Series game Bender failed to complete. Was Bender ill, drunk or hung over? Swift also examines some of the theories why the A's were swept by the Braves in one of the biggest upsets in baseball history.

Swift does a good job of shedding light on Bender's major league baseball career and his life after he left the majors. The biography is interesting and well-researched.

Swift takes a realistic look at whether or not Bender, who never led the league in wins, ERA or strikeouts, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. He was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1953.

This is the best biography I have read. It provides important details about an player important in baseball history, and also illuminates the history of many Native Americans and how they were assimilated into society in the late 19th early 20th centuries. This is one to purchase and keep.

Bender's name and statistics are familiar to anyone who has studied the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Tom Swift's book provides us a look at the remarkable man to whom those statistics and the Hall of Fame plaque belong.

Bender rose above the prejudices great and small that were directed at him throughout much of his life. Swift explains this in his dissection of Bender's early life. And he makes no bones about "the Chief's" warts, including bouts with the bottle. The book puts proper emphasis, however, on his on field career and his relationship with his managers, including the legendary Connie Mack, and with his many prominent teammates and opponents.

There are some shortcomings, not all of them necessarily avoidable. I wish there had been more information about his wife, Marie, a Caucasian woman who adored Bender for all of their long lives together. Maybe that information just isn't available. I, too, had some problems with the telling of the 1914 World Series in segments, with flashes forward and back to other times and issues. Finally, a little niggle: why does Swift insist on using the name "Schrecongost" for the Philadelphia catcher. Ossee Schreckengost? True, that was his birth name, but he used the latter spelling throughout his diamond career and it appears thus in the box scores and on contemporaneous baseball cards and other memorabilia. Not a word of explanation from the authors or editors.

All in all, if you love old time baseball you will love this book.

"Chief Bender's Burden" by Tom Swift is a great story, well written about a Native American baseball player turn of the century into the middle teens of the 20th century. He played for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics and they were world champions for a number of years. Bender was a big game,money pitcher who was at his best in pivotal late season and post season games, ie ( Lew Burdette, Milwaukee Braves; Curt Schilling Arizona d-backs, Boston Red Sox). Baseball was truly a national pastime then, where every community with enough people to field a team, had one. Swift does a great job trying to be accurate in every detail. However, it was the era of Grantland Rice and other great writers whose descriptions were the only reports, other than box scores, of the games. Swift includes fantastic examples of their writings. A compelling read about baseball and society during that time in our country.

Even if readers are not affectionados of baseball, Chief Bender's Burden offers the bonus of a sensitive glimpse into some of the realities that can be masked by America's favorite pastime. Tom Swift has a distinctive gift for weaving play by play details into a larger tapestry of human brokenness and accomplishment. His honesty and integrity are refreshingly manifested in background and research notations.

First off, must say that Charles Bender deserves a full-length, heavily and well researched, aimed at thinking adults biography and this is all of those things. Certainly the best book available on Bender, and likely the best ever written about him. It certainly deserves the audience it is slowly finding and the praise offered to it is well-founded. I just with it had been better written. Swift is a good historian, places Bender well in his times and makes the most of the sources available to him. However, his facility with language is a bit creaky a bit too often and his turns of phrase are often clunky and awkward. And that said - if you are remotely interested in Bender, baseball history, Native American identity and assimilation in the early 20th Century,or the social history of the same period, you reading will be rewarded. This is a very good book, just not an exceptionally well-written one.