AMERICA AT LARGE: In the 41 years since his 1961 suicide, Ernest Hemingway's star has somewhat faded in the eyes of literary critics and academics, but fascination with the Nobel Prize-winning author's private life has continued unabated.
A self-described "man's man", Hemingway was the sportsman incarnate. A one-time Kansas City Star sportswriter, he dabbled in bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises), boxing (in numerous short stories; a main character in The Sun Also Rises is a former collegiate boxing champion, and, in a posthumous memoir, Hemingway recalled his sparring sessions with Ezra Pound in a Paris gym), and the walls of the Hemingway Museum in Havana boast dozens of his big-game hunting trophies.
Hemingway's devotion to baseball nearly matched his enthusiasm for bullfighting. A recurrent theme in his signature work, The Old Man and The Sea, has the star-crossed fisherman steeling himself for his task by relying on the mental image of "The Great DiMaggio".
In pre-Castro days, the Brooklyn Dodgers held their spring training in Cuba, and in Peter Golenbock's Bums, the old Dodger pitcher Hugh Casey recalled a drunken evening at Hemingway's Havana finca at which the novelist produced a pair of boxing gloves and got himself beaten silly by a whole succession of baseball players. At the conclusion of the impromptu sparring sessions, Hemingway produced a matched pair of pistols and proposed fighting a duel with Casey.
In four decades worth of dissecting Hemingway lore, archivists had apparently missed the fact that, back in 1940, Hemingway had founded, sponsored, and coached a Havana youth baseball club called (in honour of his son Gregory) the GiGi Stars.
This information came to light in a letter from the author's grand-daughter Lorian Hemingway to the American adventure novelist Randy Wayne White. White, a former fishing guide who is active in a Florida old-timer's league which includes a smattering of former Major League players, determined to travel to Cuba to see if he could track down surviving members of Hemingway's old team.
White enlisted the support and participation of former Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill (Spaceman) Lee and former Detroit Tigers hurler John Warden, along with some of their Florida baseball-playing friends. Somewhere along the line it was also decided to round up a truckload of donated baseball equipment to use in re-establishing a contemporary version of the GiGi Stars.
On the surface it was a decidedly incongruous crew. Lee, a left-leaning lefthander whose politics have been described as radical, had previously, in defiance of the US State Department, undertaken goodwill trips to both Cuba and mainland China.
Warden was by all accounts a roly-poly, apolitical funnyman along for the ride. White, while not exactly aligned with anti-Castro forces in the US, had actually participated two decades earlier in the Mariel Boatlift, and had vowed that he would never return to Cuba while Castro remained in power.
Their adventure has been chronicled in a one-hour documentary film which will be aired on American Public Television later this year. Directed by Bill Haney and produced by independent filmmaker John McNeil, The Gift of the Game had its world premier at Boston's Fenway Park two nights ago, and proved to be a charming and heartwarming, if sometimes curious, work.
As anticipated, the baseball vagabonds encountered considerable resistance from both the American and Cuban governments. The US didn't want to grant them visas, and Cuban customs officials initially attempted to keep them from bringing the donated equipment into the country. Eventually they prevailed, and the result is a film that at times seems to be one part Field of Dreams, one part National Lampoon Vacation.
"America and Cuba are two cultures who disagree about virtually everything, and yet we're the only two nations in the world who love baseball with quite so much passion," said Haney in an interview last week. "I think the American players were surprised to find the soul of baseball waiting for them in Cuba."
The filmmakers had neither sought nor received permission from the Cuban government to record the adventure, so they relied on small, hand-held digital video cameras to create the illusion that they were merely shutterbug tourists.
The group eventually succeeded in tracking down half a dozen surviving GiGis, who generously shared their memories of being taught the finer points of baseball by the man they still refer to as "Papa". Lee, Warden, White and their roving band of aging gypsies also managed to scare up a few pick-up games with teams of elderly but surprisingly agile Cubans.
The purpose of the trip appeared to have been deflated, though, when a representative of the Cuban Sports Ministry interrupted one of their games and ordered confiscated, at gunpoint, all of the equipment they had brought along to outfit their proposed youth league. Turned out that the old catcher of the GiGi Stars was also the Communist Party captain of his village.
All turns out well in the end, though. No, Castro didn't order the gear returned to the Americans. Rather, it turned out that almost the instant the group had landed in Havana harbour, White had prudently bribed a local to store the main cache of equipment in a warehouse. What had been impounded by the authorities amounted to a ruse, and by the time the Americans took their leave of the small village the youth teams had been well stocked.
For all its fascination with Hemingway lore, White and the filmmakers are curiously circumspect in omitting any discussion of the GiGi Stars' namesake from The Gift of the Game.
Gregory Hemingway might have been a 10-year-old nascent baseball player in 1940, but by the time he died in the women's section of a Florida jail last year (after he had been caught wandering naked on a beach) he was an elderly transvestite who had adopted the name "Gloria". Gloria? What was wrong with GiGi?
