I love baseball and, by extension, baseball movies.
And, don’t worry. If you’re not a sports fan, this “Pub Chat” is not really about sports, so please, hang with me, and don’t be hustling over to the funny pages quite yet.
This is actually about a great actor who we lost on Monday at the age of 93.
James Earl Jones just happened to play a key role in my favorite baseball movie of all time, “Field of Dreams.” Though, in fact, the man himself once told Bill Francis, senior researcher at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, that it was not, in his mind, a baseball movie.
“I wouldn’t rank it as a baseball movie at all,” the man with that deep, lush voice told Francis. “It’s about fathers and sons. When a child is born, especially a male child, mama is the primary companion and papa is secondary. But one day papa says, ‘Let’s go out in the backyard and play catch.’ That’s the first bonding that many male children have with their fathers. And that’s what this movie is about, I think, that first bonding between father and son.”
I agree. Or at least I wouldn’t argue with Jones, who in his prime was about 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds. Linebacker size, in other words.
Yessir, is what I would say to the man who besides that baseball/non-baseball movie starred in such renowned........