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Show ' SPORTLIGHT : -i j Shoeless Joe Always Good Copy I By GRANTLAND RICE - NEW YORK No other game has turned out as many odd or different characters as baseball has furnished. fur-nished. The list of distinct personalities is a long one. I mean such players as Dizzy Dean, Germany Schaefer, Rube Waddell, Ossie Schrcck, Larry McLean, Babe Herman and many others. One of these waa Shoeless Joe Jackson, who died recently.. Shoeless Joe ("Oh, the brave song bis black bat sung") v.as on the quieter side. But the Carolina Crashsmith was always a good story. There was the time Joe, lifetime average .356, reported , to some small team in East Tennessee. Some time ago, Hyder Barr related the following yarn about Jacksob'i first game there. "The ball park was terrible," Barr said. "It was full of rocks. the time he played for less. This Isn't as much as a big league rookie gets today. It wasn't toe hot for a .410 hitter. Charlie Dryden, one of the great baseball writers of all time, certainly cer-tainly the most humorous one, found Jackson an endless source of copy. "Joe didn't read too smoothly," Dryden said one day. "So when be got a letter from his wife Joe used to chuckle as he pretended to read. Then he'd slip me the letter and say, "Want to read something funny?" I'd read It back but frequently fre-quently It wasn't anything to laugh at, like asking for dough." Ty Cobb one day told me a tragic story about Jackson. They had been good friends in the major leagues. Long after Ty was through with baseball he dropped by Greenville where Jackson lived. Cobb talked a few minutes about various unimportant things. Finally he said: "Don't yon know me, Joe? I'm Ty Cobb." "Yes, I know you, Ty," Jack son said. "But I didn't think anyone I used to know would want to recognize me again." Joe Jackson took a small amount of gambling money, largely because Crantland Rica broken glass and old cans. Finally after the fourth inning in-ning Jackson came back to the bench and said he was through. He was playing barefoot. 'What's the matter?' mat-ter?' the manager asked. 'Rocks and glass hurting your feet?' he knew he had been far underpaid. I don't believe he ever threw a game in that series and I saw them all. To me he was a great hitter and a good guy. The Training Stat Citrus fruit and sunshine, bowl games and flowers, are not Florida's Flori-da's only contribution to the human race. I have discovered again In roaming roam-ing its highways that Florida is also keen about Its record as a conditioner condi-tioner of men especially ballplar-ers. ballplar-ers. Who trained at St. Petersburg last spring? Well, the Giants, the Dodgers and Cardinals, for example, exam-ple, and they ran one, two, three in the National League pennant race last season. What team got its basic training In Florida for several years and had enough left to survive the "vest? The Yankees. "You don't suppose," a Florida ' resident said, "that the Yankees could have surlved Arizona to come along and win another pennant if they hadn't been in Flor'da for ten or fifteen years before?" All we know is that the Giants had trained all around the map without winning any pennants. They never seemed to be physically fit But last year, after training in Florida, they surviv t! an 11-game losing streak and a deficit of 13 games in middle August, and yet I won the pennant. . " 'Naw,' Shoeless Joe said. 'But they're fuzzln' up the ball so much I can't throw it.' " Cobb, Ruth and Speaker each told mo on radio interviews that Jackson was by all odds the greatest natural hitter that ever lived. Joe batted 1 ft-handed. "I decided to copy Jackson," Ruth told me one day, "because he looked more like a good hitter hit-ter than anyone else. I couldn't copy Ty Cobb's hand action because be-cause Ty was looking more for basehits than for power. "Jackson stood with his feet fairly fair-ly wide apart, his right foot shoved forward and the left foot back of the right. This gave him a good turn to start with. I changed this a little. I kept my feet closer together. 1 could get more leverage that way. But I was also more easily caught off balance by a left-hander. I had more trouble with left-handers than Joe ever had. He never had much trouble with anybody." Jackson and Money Shoeless Joe was never a big spender, but no man was more underpaid. He used to sew a ten or a twenty dollar bill in-the lining of his coat, to be sure he had some cash when needed. The years where he hit over .400 brought him small increases. I doubt that Jackson ever got over $4,500 a year, and most of |