The Short Life of Hughie McLoon
A True Story of Baseball, Magic and Murder
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"This could be a great work of fiction. The damndest thing is it’s all fact.” - Michael Farber, Sports Illustrated
It was a time of Prohibition, jazz, and gangland murder, and it was baseball’s age of magic, when even Hall of Fame players believed that rubbing the hump of a hunchback guaranteed a hit.
Broken and deformed by a childhood fall from a seesaw, Hughie McLoon never grew taller than forty-nine inches but he made himself one of the lucky ones. He was chosen as the batboy and mascot of the Philadelphia Athletics. Although the team finished last in each of the three seasons that the A’s rubbed his hump and Hughie tended their bats, he became a local celebrity. He loved the crowds and they loved him back.
Graduating from batboy to boxing manager, and running his own speakeasy while serving as a secret agent for the Chief of Police, Hughie was the toast of Philly until one summer night in 1928 he was caught in a murderous crossfire outside his tavern. Twenty-six years old, he bled to death on Cuthbert Street. The next day, 15,000 admirers lined up to see his four-foot corpse. The age of magic was now over.
The Short Life of Hughie McLoon is Allen Abel’s haunting and stylish biography of the most remarkable and beloved of the baseball mascots, and a new chapter in the complicated mythology of the American dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sportswriter Abel (Flatbush Odyssey) offers an animated look at the carnivalesque early days of professional baseball. Faced with "the maddening difficulty of hitting a speeding, spinning sphere with a hickory bat," players and managers cultivated a faith in superstitions, according to Abel. In the 19th century, sports teams began adopting human mascots ("preferably hunchbacked, dark-skinned, or at least unusually miniature") as good luck charms. Deformed by a horrid fall at the age of three, Hughie McLoon (1902–1928) became one of the era's best known mascots when he walked into the office of Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack in 1916 and offered to help the last-place team break its losing streak. Mack hired McLoon on the spot, and the A's won the second game of that afternoon's double-header. McLoon was with the team for three years before moving into the world of boxing, where he brought good luck to Tommy Loughran, Benny Leonard, and Jack Dempsey. He eventually became a respected boxing manager and ran his own bar at the age of 26, before he was struck down in a drive-by shooting. Abel's hypercaffeinated prose occasionally feels ill-suited to the sad aspects of the story, but his research is solid. Sports fans will savor this one.
