Customer Reviews

The High Hard One

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

 

 

I read The High Hard One while I was in high school, and then again about 15 years ago, both times in library copies. Immediately after I read it the second time our local library purged it, and I have been looking for a copy ever since. This biography of Higbe stands out from all of the saccharine self-righteous hackneyed sports biographies to which we have been exposed. Higbe tells what it was like to be a working man and a baseball player. Higbe does not claim to have been a role model or a hero. He describes his life as he went from poverty to major league baseball to prison, and his skills, his gifts, and his personality flaws are all on display. He was not a nice man, but his life story sheds accurate light on the prejudices and beliefs of the people that fans turn into heroes. His willingness to look honestly at his life, even though that look was not complimentary, shows admirable courage.

It's interesting to read other people's reviews of this book. Kirby Higbe was my great uncle. I never met him- in fact, he was always referred to as crazy... but that just goes with being a Higbe, I think. I asked my dad for a copy of this book when I was younger, and he told me it would be impossible to find. Chances are, he just didn't want me to see any of the skeletons in the closet. It's odd seeing Uncle Kirby's face and seeing my dad, and uncle, and grandfather's features there. I think the book had a different meaning for me than it would for other readers. It was more a search for family history rather than learning more about baseball.

You've got to hand it to a man who admits if he could do it all over again, he would still oppose Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. And who uses his autobiography to mention he sold prescription drugs to inmates when he was a guard.
As offensive as his stances and actions are, you know you're not getting any pretenses with this guy. Higbe had only a seventh-grade education, so he had plenty of help from Martin Quigley in sounding eloquent, and Quigley does a good job there.
This isn' t a groundbreaking work, but it is a quick, enjoyable read.

Kirby Higbe (1915-1985) describes his 20+ years as a professional pitcher in this hard-boiled 1967 biography. This grade-school dropout rode a blazing fastball to 12 seasons in the big leagues. Readers learn about Higbe's hard-scrabble youth in South Carolina, pitching for company teams, signing with Pittsburgh in 1932, life in the minor leagues during the Great Depression, etc. Then we get his view on big league life (1937-1950) and the fast lane, pitching inside/beanballs and his wildness, Leo Durocher ("the best manager ever"), service in World War II, Jackie Robinson (Kirby respected him but still opposed integration), etc. Higbe won 22 games for the pennant-winning Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, and remained a solid pitcher until the late 1940's. Then came inevitable decline, a sliding road from part-timer, to high minor leagues down to low ones. Higbe continues and describes his postwar years, where he mixed modest jobs with convictions for writing bad checks and smuggling pills to inmates. A gruff but open man, Higbe admits his regret at never having gotten an education. This is a roughly-spoken biography, interesting, and informative.

Kirby Higbe was a hard throwing, hard living pitcher from South Carolina who made it to the Bigs in 1937 with the Cubs and played for the Phillies, Brooklyn, the Pirates, and the Giants before his career ended in 1950. These are his memoirs and for the most part reveal a time when the game was rougher, the players tougher, with the time between games (at least for Higbe and his crowd) spent mostly lifting booze glasses at local saloons and chasing women. Hig keeps the details sketchy (few names are mentioned except for relating incidents on the ball field) and even there rarely delves beneath the surface. He developed a wicked knuckleball later in his career that kept him pitching longer, but when he was released in 1950 things went downhill for him pretty fast. Frequently in the book he rues not getting a high school diploma and is forced to work menial jobs and even spend time in prison for writing bum checks. When the book was first published in 1967, Higbe was living off his baseball pension ($209.93 a month) and like Dickens's Macawber "waiting for something to turn up." (He died in 1985.)

The best chapter is the one where Higbe decries the way the game now frowns on pitchers throwing inside heat or hitting batters, which he views as taking away the pitcher's most important weapon: intimidation. The saddest parts are his post-baseball days and his decision not to play with Jackie Robinson when he came up in 1947, thus initiating his trade from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh. Regarding the latter, he says he based his decision on being a Southern boy who "never lived or played with Negroes and didn't see any reason to start then." He says at one point he never regretted his stand, and he praises Robinson as a player. Hig is not one to go into much detail on anything, especially regarding second thoughts or inner feelings (except about not getting an education, which is almost his mantra), so it's difficult to get an accurate reading about all this from his point of view. Anyway, the book is fairly interesting, though in a cursory sort of way; one wishes Higbe had opened up a little more, especially about other players, the teams, and his personal thoughts.