I spent a lot of time with Ernie Banks in the last eight or 10 years of his life, some of it at his condo in Marina del Rey, some nearby on the deck of the Ritz-Carlton where we would drink wine and watch the beautiful boats and expensive women move by. I discovered something about Ernie then--rediscovered it, actually, from our days in Chicago--which was that beneath his let's-play-two, the-Cubs-will-thrive-in-two-oh-one-five bushwa, there was a thoughtful, reflective, complicated man.
If Ernie ever displayed this side of himself in public, I am unaware of it and even when he was among friends he made you work for it. I used to clock him while he was signing autographs, calling out to strolling couples to ask if they were married and generally making sure everybody knew he was in the house to see how long it would be before his attention could be turned to weightier matters. The over-under was usually 20 minutes.
Ernie was worth the wait, though. Once, when I pressed him to tell me how he really felt about never playing in a World Series, his smile was replaced by a resigned look. "Sometimes I'm at a Hall of Fame reunion," he said, "and I'll look around and see I'm the only one in the room who never played in a World Series. I've had nightmares about it. Once I even talked to a psychiatrist. There wasn't much he could say, just that I'd done the best I could and it wasn't meant to be."
Then there was his complicated relationship with Leo Durocher. Ernie said the only time he became truly angry was when Durocher intimated that he was at fault for the Cubs' famous meltdown during the 1969 pennant race. The real problem, Ernie said, was that Durocher was jealous of his popularity. "Leo thought he should be Mr. Cub." he said.
Not until both men had retired, and Durocher, sensing his mortality, embarked on a charm campaign, was the bitterness truly healed. "Leo attended a reunion of the 1969 team many years later," Ernie said, "and stood up and said, 'The one thing I regret about that year is the way I treated Ernie.' That made me feel good."
What is sometimes obscured in all the discussion of Ernie's preternatural cheerfulness is that there was a dark side to his life. He had to work his way through innumerable difficulties, personal and professional, that could have sunk a lesser man.
Ernie was looking at some pictures with his mother one day when they came across one of him sitting with his father in the dugout before a game at Wrigley Field. "That was the first time I ever saw him smile," Essie Banks said.
Essie was 16 years old when she married Eddie Banks, who was 35, in Dallas. Though Eddie's father was a minister who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, Ernie is not sure his father ever learned to read. He supported his ever-growing family -- Ernie was the second of 12 children -- by taking whatever menial jobs came along while Essie, who had wanted to be a nurse, cleaned houses. Theirs was a life of rickety shotgun houses, kerosene lamps and foraging for food the markets threw out -- chicken feet, ham bones and wilted vegetables.
Eddie, a taciturn man who distrusted white people and advised his children to steer clear of them, knew and cared little of the world outside Dallas. He didn't fly in an airplane until he was 70, when he traveled to Chicago to see his son play baseball. (Some of Ernie's brothers and sisters resisted his efforts over the years to have them visit him and never set foot on a plane.)
Disappointed with her husband's lack of ambition, Essie retreated into the life of her family and religion. When Ernie left home to play baseball, she would often call and read to him from the Bible. Yet she had abruptly stopped going to church herself and it wasn't until years later that she explained why. A minister had molested her when she was 12 years old, she finally told Ernie's wife.
Baseball was Ernie's ticket out of Dallas and he seized it with both hands. Exceedingly shy -- it would be years before he became the loquacious, ebullient Ernie Banks the world came to know and love -- he couldn't believe his good fortune as he barnstormed through the Midwest with the Kansas City Monarchs. To be 17 years old and riding a bus eating peanut butter on crackers and sardines seemed like a perfect life. And to make $300 a month besides? Why, it was a fortune, one he could share with his father and mother.
Yes, there were pitfalls -- Monarchs Manager Buck O'Neil told him which restaurants to avoid and warned him about "reckless eyeballing" of white women -- but Ernie learned to avoid them. And his older teammates quickly introduced him to some of the benefits the Negro Leagues offered. "I hit a home run in my first game and they told me to go into the stands and pass my cap around," Ernie said. "I made six dollars in nickels, dimes and quarters."
After two years in the Army, during which the armed forces were integrated and he became one of the first black noncommissioned officers to be appointed a base athletic director, Ernie returned to the Monarchs. He enjoyed playing with them so much that when the call came for him to join the Cubs he wasn't sure he wanted to go. His first major-league salary, $800 a month, eased the transition.
Banks and Gene Baker became the Cubs' first black players, and his more experienced teammate had to explain some of baseball's facts of life to him. "Some of the players are angry with you," Baker said. "They think you're hustling too much. They're in last place, Ernie, and just playing out the season. They think you're trying to show them up."
There were other things he had to get used to as well -- living in a city where he found himself surrounded by more white people in a week than he had ever met in his life, deciding whether or not to speak out on racial matters like Jackie Robinson, who was both a mentor and inspiration. (Uncomfortable with the subject, Ernie decided not to.)
It didn't take long for Ernie to work his way into Chicago's heart. In his second full season in the majors, he hit 44 home runs, a record for a shortstop, and was off to a career that would see him set records galore, win consecutive Most Valuable Player Awards in 1958 and 1959, play in 11 All-Star Games and finish his career with 512 home runs.
Ernie would wake me up sometimes with a phone call. "RON RAPOPORT!" he would shout. "I'm in Chi-CAW-go, the most beautiful city in the WORLD! Why aren't YOU in Chi-CAW-go! Chicago NEEDS you."
"Hello, Ernie," I would say. "What's going on in Chi-CAW-go?"
"The CUBS," he would say. "The CUBS are going on in Chi-CAW-go. Come on out here. Get on a plane."
This would go on for a time until he told me what he wanted, which was usually some fact for the documentary film he was always going to make or the timeline for 1969 I had sent him three or four times before. It was important somehow for him to know what else had happened the year the Cubs lost the pennant.
Ernie's place as the sporting symbol of Chicago was eclipsed, I suppose, by Michael Jordan, but to a certain generation he would always reign supreme. The quintessential moment might have come in 1967 when Pablo Picasso's massive statue of a woman -- or is it a dog? -- was unveiled in the Civic Center. Many of the city's residents were perplexed and one alderman was outraged. Why display such an ugly hunk of iron? he asked. Why not erect a statue of "a living symbol of a vibrant city" instead? Why not Ernie Banks?
The matter was settled more than 40 years later at the home opener of the 2008 Cubs season when a statue of Ernie was unveiled not in downtown Chicago, but outside Wrigley Field where it belongs.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced that Banks' statue will be moved from Wrigley Field to the city's Daley Plaza for a memorial this Wednesday, and remain there until Saturday.
Banks receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.