Tris Speaker Never Forgot His Texas Roots
This article was written by Howard Green
This article was published in Texas is Baseball Country (SABR 24, 1994)
Damon Runyon never forgot his roots. Neither did Tris Speaker.
Bill McClatchey, sports editor of the Pueblo (Colorado) Star-Chieftain, wrote: “Damon became a Broadway legend, a national figure, but always remembered he was from Pueblo (after being born in Manhattan, Kansas, and spending most of his youth in Colorado).”
Coincidentally, the same could be said for Speaker, who earned “Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the 20th Century” accolades from the Texas Sports Writers Association. ‘Spoke’ never forgot the people “who lived and loved” in his hometown of Hubbard, a remote Central Texas farming community.
After leading the Cleveland Indians to their first American League pennant and World Series championship in 1920, Speaker went so far as to persuade the management to train in nearby Waxahachie in spring 1921, and even arranged for a practice game at the makeshift field at Hubbard. When he died at nearby Lake Whitney on December 15, 1958, he was spending a month with the homefolks. For years he also was an honorary member of the Hubbard Volunteer Fire Department.
Peerless in center field for the Red Sox, Senators and Athletics for a 22-year span — until Joe DiMaggio emerged to challenge him for that honor — Speaker was universally accepted as the greatest defensive outfielder of all time.
Hall-Ruggles Chapter member Howard Green had many fond memories of Speaker’s career.
“Before starting school at Swenson, Texas, in 1927, I felt a kinship for the Grey Eagle,” Green recalled. “He was my dad’s baseball hero. Dad could recite Speaker superlatives in the climactic Red Sox triumph over the Giants in the 1912 World Series, the tragic death of the Indians’ Ray Chapman, the immediate resurgence of Joe Sewell at shortstop, and the bitter fight with the Yankees and Chicago for the 1920 pennant. I also learned of Duster Mails’s acquisition late in that season, and his remarkable contribution to the championship as well as Speaker’s then-record 11 successive hits against the Yankees at the old Polo Grounds. Dad told me that no state can match Texas for producing players of the caliber of Speaker and Rogers Hornsby.”
“My mother once confided in me that it required one month for my parents to agree on a name for you,” Green continued. “She said my dad kept insisting on Tris, but in the end she won out with Howard. Like hundreds of other SABR members and thousands of Americans, I was the lucky recipient of a baseball inheritance.”