Picking fruits and vegetables day after day in the Florida sun will make a man think about the future. Buck O’Neil was out there for a time as a young man. One scorching day he was out picking celery on a farm near Sarasota when he stopped and shouted to the skies: “Damn, there’s GOT to be something better than this.”
For Buck O’Neil that something was baseball. He would spend his life around baseball.
Thirty years later, the young man in the field was Calvin Peete. He was an eighth-grade dropout with a permanently bent left elbow after a childhood accident.