Stargell took you back to the front lines when he spoke of the day a Klansman greeted him at the gates of the ballpark in Plainview, Texas, by putting a shotgun to his head and daring him to play.
Stargell played, anyway, only to be all but undone when he mistook the backfire of an automobile for the shotgun blast he was promised if he took the field. "I went to my knees, my kidneys got weak," Stargell once told me during an interview.
"But I played an outstanding game," he continued. "I had made up my mind that if I was going to die, I was going to die doing what I really wanted to do. I didn't want to go back to the projects in California. I wanted to play baseball, in the worst way."
Eulogy for Willie "Pops" Stargell
Claire Smith
Philadelphia Inquirer 2001
