THE POWER OF THE CLOWN: Max Patkin’s autobiography, “The Clown Prince of Baseball,” written with Philadelphia Daily News sports columnist Stan Hochman, was published in 1994 by WRS Publishing, Waco, Texas. Ron Shelton wrote the book’s preface, which we are pleased to share here: “I walked away from baseball for twenty years, unable to watch a game or read the sports page. A lifetime dream of being a major league ballplayer died in the minor leagues – in some dusty town in a ballpark with bad lights, cramped dugouts, and dripping shower heads. I had to get on with my life, as they say, and so I went back to school, worked wherever I could find it, and filled out job applications by the thousands. Somewhere, sometime later, I started calling myself a writer because I had to call myself something. The problem was, of course, that writers needed something to write about, and what I really knew about was the minor leagues. But I thought I still couldn’t face baseball. “I drove to North Carolina to see if I could slip quietly into one of those dusty old ballparks and watch a game from a distance, to see if baseball still had a stranglehold on me, to see if I could face the past, the failure – to see, really, if I’d grown up. Loaded with invented sorrow, I slipped past the bleachers to see the field, and suddenly Bill Haley and the Comets was blaring on the worst and loudest speakers in the world, ‘one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock . . . “And there he was, Max Patkin, preening at home plate, spitting water, strutting down the foul line, dancing, writhing – the same routine I had seen dozens of times in my minor league travels twenty years earlier. I started laughing, and in many ways I’ve been laughing ever since. I was a kid at the ballpark again, and I wondered why I’d stayed away so long. The problem was not that I hadn’t grown up, but that I had grown up – too much and too soon. “Therein lies the power of the clown – he makes us laugh to remind us where we hurt, and somehow the pain is lessened. Since all humor is rooted in pain, Max’s and our own, the laughter he evokes in concert with the heroics of the athletes around him acts as both mockery and a tribute to their achievements. When you leave the ballpark, part of you wants to identify with the next Jose Canseco, knocking homers into the night sky of El Paso with a body chiseled by Michelangelo. But the rest of you is still smiling at the clown, because he is closer to us than any Hall of Famer. He is us. “I had many beers with Max in the minors, because even then the clown fascinated me. As the world was turning to video games and mass marketed, corporate-designed mascots that all looked the same and behaved the same, Patkin stuck with his version of a clown – one that did not need a furry costume. It was not a chicken or a swollen headed day-glo geek or a whatsit. It was a man. “With a fabulous face and the limber body of a too-tall dancer, this clown was human. There was nothing god-like or anthropomorphic about this clown. He was, well, sort of regular – like a baseball player. And while stadiums got domed and grass turned plastic and baseball went all to hell, Patkin continued showing up in minor league parks throughout the country, building what is surely the longest career of one-night stands in show business history. Big crowds, little crowds, no crowds – Max was the ultimate vaudevillian, never missing a show for over forty years. “Patkin coaches first base, then third base, continually interrupting the game, spitting water on the players, and presumably sometimes waving a runner in from second or telling him to hold at third – how many sports would allow a clown to do this? Only baseball. The game, affected and interpreted by the clown, continues on its way. “After a few days in the Carolina League, I returned home to California and announced to my friends that I was going to make a movie about baseball, the real game, I said, the way it used to be and is supposed to be still. Great, they said, what’s it about? I don’t know, I said, but I know one thing. It starts with Max Patkin.” (Photo: Max Patkin with Bill Veeck, 1976.)
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 20:09:20 +0000
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