Interview: Andrew Maraniss

Interview: Andrew Maraniss

By Scott Bolohan

Just over twenty years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, prospect Glenn Burke arrived in the majors with the same Dodgers team. After putting up eye-popping numbers in the minors, Burke became an instant hit in the clubhouse and started in the World Series as a rookie. But there was another side of Burke that he tried to keep hidden—he was gay. He didn’t tell anyone in the organization, but they would soon figure it out. While his teammates accepted him, it was a different story with the higher-ups.

Dodgers Vice President Al Campanis offered Burke $75,000 to get married to a woman. He turned it down and was traded to the A’s. He spent two seasons in Oakland before retiring rather than continue trying to play under the homophobic Billy Martin.

Andrew Maraniss’ new biography, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, details Burke’s rise to the majors and fall into drug use and homelessness. The book also details the backlash toward gays in the ’70s, putting into context the added stress Glenn faced as a professional gay baseball player.

We chatted with Maraniss about the life of Glenn Burke, how he invented the high five, and whether baseball is ready for an openly gay player.

How did you become interested in writing about Glenn?

I’m a huge baseball fan. I taught myself how to read by reading baseball cards when I was five years old. I worked for the Tampa Bay Rays, their first season in ’98. My first two books were also about sports and social issues. My first book, Strong Inside, was a biography of Perry Wallace, who was the first black basketball player in the SEC. My second book, Games of Deception, was about the first Team USA Olympic basketball team at the Nazi Olympics ’36. I was looking for another story that was nonfiction, sports, but also had a social message to it. I felt like the first openly gay baseball player was a story that would be really interesting to report and timely. Having done just a little bit of reading and research about Glenn Burke and seeing how fascinating person he was—an inspiring person, but also with a tragic ending dying of AIDS—it seemed just to have all the elements that would make for a really interesting story. And I felt that was the case the deeper I got into the research and writing of the book, I hope people feel that way when they read it.

Why don’t we all know about Glenn Burke?

He was written about a bit when he came out of the closet publicly in 1982 in Inside Sports magazine, he was on a live Today Show interview with Bryant Gumbel. When he was dying of AIDS in the ’90s, people kind of rediscovered him and wrote some stories about what happened to this former major league player. He sat on his deathbed with an author named Erik Sherman and they wrote an autobiography together that was self-published in ’95. His name has been out there a few times throughout history, but all of that was pre-social media days. Also, I think that just the sportswriters haven’t been writing much about gay athletes throughout time, especially gay male athletes. I think the story was not something a lot of sportswriters would have been attracted to. It’s a shame, he’s been dead for 26 years now. On one hand, I’m excited to have this opportunity to introduce his story to people. On the other hand, it’s a story that should be more widely known by people at this point. But those are the types of stories that I enjoy writing. Most people had not heard of Perry Wallace before, or if you haven’t read my book, you probably haven’t heard of him. But he was a fascinating figure. He’s the Jackie Robinson, essentially, of Southern college sports. The ’36 Olympics have been well documented, but most people don’t know, that’s where basketball started in the Olympics. People know Jackie Robinson story. But I’m interested in telling a story that most people have not heard before. That’s what made Glenn’s story appealing to me.

Glenn was a complex character. He certainly had an ego, and yet he was beloved by his teammates. Talking to some of the guys who knew him, how would they describe him?

I’m old enough to remember those ’70s Dodgers teams. They were together for years. Steve Garvey at first, Davey Lopes at second, Bill Russell at short, Ron Cey at third. Reggie Smith, Dusty Baker, Rick, Monday in the outfield. Glenn is a rookie and the strength of his personality was that immediately he was the most popular player in this clubhouse. They said that in a long baseball season, it’s important to have people around that take some of the pressure off. And Glenn was funny. He loved music. They could hear his boombox coming a mile away. When they would go out to discos to party after games, he was the best dancer on the team. His teammates loved him and they were starting to discover that he was gay. And it didn’t bother them, especially his Dodgers teammates, things changed a little bit when he was traded to the A’s. His Dodger teammates were heartbroken when Glenn was traded. There are articles at the time talking about players crying at their lockers. But it was the management, Tommy Lasorda, Al Campanis, that didn’t want a gay player around. It wasn’t his teammates. He was universally beloved by his teammates.

You look at his numbers in the majors, and they’re not overwhelming. But look at his minor league numbers and he was a legitimate prospect. What went wrong?

Glenn hit over .300 five times in the minor leagues. He sets stolen bass records in two different leagues. Junior Gilliam, who was a longtime Dodger player and coach, said he had the potential to be the next Willie Mays. That’s really high praise right there. We’ve seen tons of players who had potential and never panned out, so it’s not unusual that Glenn didn’t become the next Willie Mays. Some people want to take shots at him and say he wasn’t run out of the game for being gay and he basically did it to himself by not being a good enough player. I don’t think that’s the case. And that’s not what players like Dusty Baker believe. They said he was an outstanding defensive player. Dusty said he got as good of a jump on a ball as any centerfielder he had ever seen. He had a great arm. He was a good enough player as a rookie to start two games in the NLCS and Game One of the ’77 World Series. He earned those spots.

He never really got a chance to play every day. It was hard to break into that Dodger outfield with Smith, Monday, and Baker. Rick Monday was hurt a decent amount, and when he was hurt and Glenn was playing every day, he hit over .275 and a base stealer. In the ’70s if you were a good defensive player and a base stealer, that was enough as an outfielder in the majors. You didn’t have to hit 30 home runs to start in the outfield. With the A’s, Billy Martin said he wasn’t going to let a gay player on his team. So I think it’s unfair to say that Glenn played his way out of baseball. He wasn’t welcome on both of the franchises that he played for, and even when he did get to play, that sense that you’re not wanted, that you can’t be your full self around your teammates, I think that had a cumulative effect baseball being such a mental game. How could he be his best when he had all of that circling around him?

Baseball is probably the hardest game to play. Hitting is described as the hardest thing to do in sports. When you have managers saying they’re not going to let an F-word on their team, that they’re not going to let you contaminate your team, how do you thrive in that environment? There were more Black players in the major leagues than there are now and they were looking out for each other. On road trips, the Dodgers would go to lunch with the Pirates or the Reds or whoever they are in town with, and Glenn wasn’t even able to take advantage of that support network. Also, because he was uncomfortable. If they were going to go out after a game and go looking for a girl or something, he didn’t want to be part of that. If they were having lunch before a game, he couldn’t really say what was on his mind and get support for it, because what was on his mind was how hard it was to get a gay player in the major leagues. I think that mental aspect is critical to understanding what Glenn was really up against, and how difficult it was for him to be trying to play this game, while also having one eye over his shoulder, wondering if people were going to figure out who he was and what their reaction was going to be.

One of the most powerful parts of the book is you contextualize the story within the times. People like Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative showed there were genuine stakes here for Glenn.

That’s really important to me in my books to put the story into the context of the times and the place that these characters are existing. The ’70s were an important period, both in the gay rights movement and the backlash to that movement. Showing that backlash was important to me. You can understand as a reader, this apprehension that Glenn would have about what people were going to think and do if they found out who he really was. Anita Bryant was leading anti-gay rights campaigns in Florida. At the same time, Glenn was in Florida for spring training and her followers are accosting gay people on the streets, killing them in some instances. In California, there’s the Briggs Initiative, which would strip gay teachers of their right to be employed and also would allow schools to fire anyone that supported those teachers. So here’s an employment discrimination bill in California when Glenn is a member of the Dodgers and the A’s and these elements of this culture at the time have a direct impact on Glenn’s life. It wasn’t really a stretch to write about them and to show how they would be things that he was thinking about and having to deal with at the time.

With the Dodgers in particular, his teammates were very accepting. There’s always been this stereotype that the teammates won’t accept you. But that wasn’t the case with Glenn at all.

When I interviewed Dusty Baker and Davey Lopes, they talked about how popular he was in the clubhouse even as a rookie on these veteran teams. There are articles at the time he was traded to the A’s. I think Don Sutton and Steve Garvey were seen crying at their lockers. These were guys who had figured out that Glenn was gay, but they did support him. The other sort of stereotype you hear is about how it’d be a distraction to a team. I try to point out in the book, there were hundreds of distractions around the Dodgers back then. Tommy Lasorda was inviting Don Rickles into the clubhouse minutes before playoff games just to rip on the players. His office was full of Hollywood celebrities like Frank Sinatra, right before games. When Glenn was playing for the Oakland A’s, Charlie Finley was the owner and had mechanical rabbits delivering baseballs to the umpire. I mean, MC Hammer was the vice president of the A’s at that time, talk about distractions. They were being welcomed into these clubhouses. Glenn was no distraction. He was a ballplayer.

What was Glenn’s relationship like with the high five?

The first high five was in the last month of this 1977 season. The Dodgers had three players who had already hit 30 home runs or more Dusty Baker was stuck on 29. And if he would hit one more homer, they would become the first team in major league history to have four players with 30 home runs. And just like a movie, it comes down to the last homestand of the season. Baker doesn’t hit one in the first three games. It’s the last day of the season. JR Richard is on the mound for the Astros, a great player, and the Dodgers and Dusty couldn’t touch him. His first two at-bats, he doesn’t homer, but his third at-bat he does. Dodger Stadium is going crazy. And Glenn Burke is on deck. And he’s just sort of lifted up by the joy of that moment and holds his arm up, waving it towards Dusty, and Dusty slaps it. And that’s considered the first high five. Who knows, somebody in 1942 might have high-fived somebody, but it wasn’t at a Major League Baseball game. It was the Dodgers that coined the term ‘high five’ and started using it in their marketing for several years afterward. It’s kind of like the A’s and the Bash Brothers. They were putting ‘high five’ on their scoreboard and on their game programs and explaining to people how to do it. It just seems so crazy now. And the Dodgers made a lot of it even after they hadn’t traded the player that invented it.

He was proud of it. One of his friends, after Glenn had passed away, said, “Imagine being the first person to feel that sensation.” That fit Glenn’s personality so well. He was so supportive of other people. He was so typically happy. I also talked to some of his minor league teammates who said they weren’t surprised that he invented it because they were doing similar things, even as minor leaguers. And it sort of came from this hand jive thing that they were doing in the East Bay when Glenn was growing up.

Glenn’s life doesn’t really have a happy ending. What do you hope readers take away from reading your book?

Glenn’s life certainly does not have a happy ending. He spends time homeless, on the streets of San Francisco, and he died in incredible pain of AIDS. But that doesn’t mean that his story couldn’t have a happy ending. The last chapter of the book talks about a scene where he’s being honored on the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, which honors gay, lesbian and transexual figures throughout history. The speaker is saying to the crowd that these incredible, successful LGBTQ people can be found all around us, even at home plate. I think that’s one of the messages of the book, is that everybody has the right to pursue what they’re interested in, and what they’re good at, and that that right shouldn’t be taken from them simply because of who they are. I think the country is changing in some ways where someone like a Glenn Burke would be much more accepted and freer to pursue their career now. I hope that’s a takeaway of the book also is developing a sense of empathy in certain people. If gay kids are reading this book, I hope that they see Glenn as a role model in some ways. I mean, he wasn’t a role model in all ways, and I think that he would admit that with some of the trouble that he got into off the field, but the courage that he had just to be himself. At his funeral, the minister said that Glenn died in truth and that he told the truth about who he was. All my books, one of the takeaways I hope is about standing up for other people. When you see someone being mistreated, you have a choice of whether to ignore it and say that it’s somebody else’s problem or to actually stand up and do something about it. I hope that’s a takeaway, and that’s certainly needed today.

Baseball is not the most progressive sport. You look at women’s sports and there are a number of gay athletes who are very popular. We don’t have an out gay baseball player. If Glenn broke in today, do you think his story would be different?

I hope so. You don’t know. On his deathbed, he said that he hoped that this would make it easier for a player in the future. You haven’t seen too many people walk through that door like Billy Bean did, but that was after he had retired. I interviewed Billy Bean for the book, and I asked him that question. He does a lot of work in major league clubhouses and thinks that attitudes are changing quite a bit. I think you saw that last year when Thom Brennaman made those remarks on the Reds broadcast and a lot of major league players immediately said that wasn’t acceptable. I do think that it would be likely that players would be more supportive, but you don’t know. I think it would depend on the makeup of a particular team, the strength of the probably the team leaders, the manager, the owner of the team, it would have to be the right situation. What Billy Bean said is that professional athletes have a very short window. Their average careers aren’t that long, they have to make money while they can. The gay players have to make that decision whether it’s worth it or not, to risk not only their salary with the team, but the potential endorsements. I think that if there was an active openly gay baseball player, they likely would get a lot of endorsements. I think their jersey would probably become the best-selling jersey that season. But it’s easy for me to sit here and say it. I think it’s a whole other thing entirely for someone to make that decision knowing the amount of scrutiny that they’re about to come under, the media attention that’s going to come their way—some of which will be welcomed, some of which will be unwelcome—and how it might affect the team. I think there are so many things on these players’ minds that a lot decide it’s not worth it, and if they are going to come out, they’ll do it after their playing days are over.

Andre Maraniss is a New York Times-bestselling author of narrative nonfiction. He first book, Strong Inside, about Perry Wallace, the first African-American basketball player in the SEC, won the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award. His second book, Games of Deception, is the story of the first U.S. Olympic basketball team, which competed at the 1936 Summer Games in Nazi Germany. His latest book, Singled Out, was released March 2, 2021.

Scott Bolohan is the founder of The Twin Bill. He never thought he would miss high fives, but here we are.