LOCAL Houston | The City Guide MARCH 2016 | Page 56

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MONTE IRVIN
A BASEBALL LEGEND
Houstonian CHRIS IDOL visited the late MONTE IRVIN about once a week at
Irvin’s apartment at the Treemont Retirement Community, where Idol — who had
met the National Baseball Hall of Fame inductee at a sports collectibles show,
where Irvin signed cards for dozens of wide-eyed kids — would sit with Irvin
as the baseball great listened to the students at a nearby learning academy play
with a huge smile on his wizened face.
“He loved to hear the kids’ laughter,” Idol says of Irvin, who passed away
January 11 at the age of 96. “He was so kindhearted.” With Irvin’s death, the
Hall of Fame’s last living link to the great Negro Leagues — the tight-knit network
of African-American baseball players, teams and organizations that existed during the national pastime’s shameful segregation era — was lost to the ages.
Irvin was born in Alabama but spent most of his professional career with the
Newark Eagles and spent his earlier retirement years in Florida before moving to
Houston to be closer to his daughter. Fortunately, Irvin was able to break into the
major leagues in 1949, roughly two years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s
color barrier, mainly with the New York Giants, helping to lead that squad to a
World Series title in ’54 with his potent bat. Irvin retired from the game in 1956,
and 17 years later, he entered the hallowed halls of Cooperstown after being
selected by the Hall’s Negro Leagues committee.
Irvin, however, was just one of Houston’s connections to segregation-era AfricanAmerican baseball. All-black teams sprouted up in the city soon after the color
line was drawn in baseball in the late 1880s. By the first two decades of the
20th century, the Negro Leagues scene was flourishing, with some teams joining
regional black leagues and even garnering some media ink. “For years, Houston
has boasted good colored baseball,” the Houston Post reported in June 1912
about a Houston Black Buffaloes game, “and many figures of its miniature diamond world have emerged from obscurity to fame.” Over the years, aggregations like the Greyhounds, Cotton Clubbers, Black Aces and Sunflowers came
and went, but it was the Black Buffs who had the most staying power and success, even reaching the Negro World Series twice.
AUTHOR MIKE VANCE, whose book, Houston Baseball: The Early Years 1861–
1961, discusses the city’s African-American hardball past in addition to the
organized baseball, says researchers often neglect the Space City’s rich heritage.“It has absolutely been overlooked by historians, both locally and nationally,” Vance says. “On the national level, it is the usual East Coast bias you find in
sports reporting. Locally, I couldn’t tell you, but overall, much of written history
about the city has been focused on business leaders. The book that we did, and
specifically my chapter on Black Baseball, is the first time almost any of that material has been thoroughly covered in publication.”
Life in black baseball was arduous, to say the least — seemingly endless barnstorming trips across the country, sleepless nights on the bus because no hotel
would accept them, often playing for peanuts, if they got paid at all. It tested a
player’s or manager’s meddle, and it turned thousands of boys into men.
To come full circle, Houston got its first — and, as it turned out, only — taste of
top-level Negro Leagues play in 1949, when the Newark Eagles, Irvin’s old

team, moved to the Space City for their last two seasons during black ball’s twilight. Irvin
never played with the Eagles in Houston; he was thankfully off and running in his majorleague career by then. But Irvin’s legacy, like that of the Negro Leagues themselves,
remains strong in Houston, largely because the athletic great was so friendly, open and
happy to greet and speak with fans of all ages. Idol, Irvin’s friend, often took the legend
to Astros games, where Irvin — who occasionally accompanied Idol to the latter’s son’s
Little League® games, again reflecting his devotion to local youth — threw out a ceremonial first pitch and, in his own humble but passionate way, regaled attendees with stories
of a golden era that was both deplorable and glorious, grueling and rewarding.
“Everything he got, he worked for,” says Idol, whose admiration of and fondness for
Monte Irvin continues to grow even after the hardball heavyweight’s passing, “and it never
went to his head. When he talked about the game, he got emotional. It kind of put life
in perspective for people.”

www.baseballhall.org/hof/irvin-monte
BY Ryan Whirty
Photography Courtesy of Baseball Hall of Fame

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