‘Full of jokes, full of crap’: Satchel Paige’s great-nephew recalls fishing buddy, getting a prized heirloom

As part of Major League Baseball’s upcoming event at Rickwood Field, AL.com and The Birmingham News will be producing weekly stories that showcase the history of Rickwood Field, and history of baseball in the state of Alabama.

“Rickwood: The legacy of America’s oldest ballpark” takes a deep dive at stories from the Negro Leagues to MLB icons playing at the historic venue, and how things are progressing as “MLB at Rickwood Field” takes place on June 20, 2024 between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.

Christopher Grove looks down at his hand, sees a bronze ring from an obscure minor league championship of 51 years ago and smiles knowing he doesn’t so much have a piece of baseball history, but a family heirloom from a long-lost fishing buddy.

“He was just a normal, everyday guy,” said Grove, 75, a Mobile resident, talking about his great-uncle, who is also one the greatest professional baseball pitchers of all-time -- Satchel Paige.

The ring belonged to Paige and was given to him as a member of the 1973 Tulsa Oilers of the American Association of the minor leagues.

“Full of jokes,” Grove said, chuckling. “Full of crap.”

Grove, whose grandmother Inez was the youngest of Paige’s 12 siblings, might be one of the last few remaining people left who had a personal connection with Paige. The famed pitcher died in 1982 at age 75, while living in Kansas City.

Paige, a Mobile native who often returned to his hometown to visit family including Grove, has a 20-plus-year career in Negro Leagues that included a three-year stint with the Birmingham Black Barons in the late 1920s. The story of the Negro Leagues, and the Black Barons, will be embraced during a June 20 Major League Baseball game at historic Rickwood Field.

The game will pit the San Francisco Giants against the St. Louis Cardinals and both teams will wear uniforms that pay homage to their histories of the Negro Leagues. The game, a first for Alabama, will also honor Willie Mays, whose career started with the Black Barons in 1948. It will also honor Juneteenth.

Bartering a ring

Paige went on to have one of the most storied, unique, and fascinating professional baseball careers that culminated in 1971, with the recognition as the first Negro League superstar to be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Two years later, as a pitching coach for the Oilers, he received a championship ring that wound up in Grove’s possession while the two were in Mobile and engaged in a bit of streetside bartering next to Paige’s pick-up truck.

“I had a diamond crystal pocket watch, and was wearing it when he said, ‘I want that watch, boy,’” Grove recalled the interaction recently with AL.com. “I asked him, ‘what will you give me for it?’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. I said, ‘I don’t want any money.’”

The bargaining continued. Paige knew his grand-nephew was a budding photographer, and was into the newest and shiniest camera equipment. Paige had received some equipment from a TV station and made a follow-up offer to Grove.

“I said, “I don’t want that either,’” Grove said.

“He said, ‘what do you want?’”

Grove pointed to the ring.

“‘I just got this ring,’” Grove recalls Paige’s incredulous response.

“I said, ‘I don’t care,’” Grove responded. Paige then took it off, and replied, “You drive a hard bargain.”

Grove was then handed a piece of baseball history.

Paige, though, ended the transaction under one condition.

“It cannot ever leave the family,” Grove said he remembers Paige telling him.

Philliniece Raine, Paige’s sister-in-law and a teacher at Murphy High School, has retold that story before with her students and can remember the friendly great-uncle and nephew relationship Grove had with the legendary pitcher.

Raine witnessed the transaction go down between Paige and his great-nephew.

“I’d never seen that much money before in my life,” Raine said about Paige’s initial offer to Grove for the watch. “He opened up the trunk and had a portable bar with these different liquors and Johnny Walker Red, and the camera kit.”

Tulsa Oilers - 1973

The ring that is in Grove’s possession now dates to a “fascinating team and season,” according to longtime sports journalist Barry Lewis of the Tulsa World.

Paige, two years removed from his Hall of Fame induction, “was not the traditional pitching coach” for the Oilers.

Paige, however, did spend a lot of time putting on a show in Tulsa, sitting in his famed rocking chair while seated in the bullpen, Lewis said. Paige was with the minor league club from 1973-1976, representing the pitcher’s final years in professional baseball and following a pitching career that spanned an astonishing five decades.

The rocking chair was a trademark for Paige. In 1965, at the age of 59, Paige tossed three scoreless innings in a Major League Baseball game for the Kansas City A’s against the Boston Red Sox. He had the rocking chair set up in the bullpen and in the dugout during the game.

“Satchel was in uniform at most of the home games that year and was in his rocking chair in the bullpen, and would offer some advice, but a big part of his role when he was with the Tulsa Oilers from 1973-76 was for PR, sign autographs, run a baseball camp, etc.,” Lewis said.

The Oilers were an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, were filled with future Major League standouts including Keith Hernandez, Bob Forsch, Al Hrabosky, and Bake McBride. Others on the team included future MLB players like Jim Dwyer, Marc Hill, Larry Milbourne, Mike Nagy, Bill Stein and John Wockenfuss.

Lewis said the 1973 team underachieved for most of the season before rallying to win a final-night doubleheader to get over .500, winning their division. They then won a seven-game championship series over the Iowa Oaks to win the American Association championship, and to advance to the Junior World Series. They lost that series to the Pawtucket Red Sox with future Hall of Famer and Red Sox legend Jim Rice hitting a home run in the clincher.

The 1973 season was also highlighted with an old-timer’s game, which Lewis wrote about in 2010. That game pitted the Satchel Paige All-Stars against Bob Feller’s All-Stars. The Hall of Famers in that game included Paige, Feller, Lloyd Warner and “Cool Papa” Bell.

Paige was the pitcher in the game, and “went the distance for his squad of Negro League stars” occurring 25 years after Paige made his Major League debut at age 42 with the Cleveland Indians in 1948.

Transcending racism

Paige was beloved in Tulsa during his time there, Lewis said. It was a remarkable circumstance, given that there was still considerable racism around the city at the time.

Five years earlier, Tulsa’s then-batting champion Jim Hicks was unable to get housing due to discrimination. Black people were not welcomed in some Tulsa restaurants, Lewis said.

The race issues stemmed from the white supremacist terror called the Tulsa race riot or Black Wall Street massacre that occurred in 1921, one year after the Negro Leagues were initially founded.

“Satchel seemed to transcend all that … and his presence added excitement to the Tulsa baseball scene,” Lewis said. “He could entertain fans at the ballpark with his stories, whether it was about trying to find out his real age or talking about how fast ‘Cool Papa’ Bell was.”

Paige spent his entire life defying the pitfalls of racism and Jim Crow. The celebrated mysteries about his age was a product of racism in the South and an upbringing in Mobile where Paige’s youth was marred by rock-throwing fights with white boys, and a six-year sentencing at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers near Montgomery at age 12.

Larry Tye, author of “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend,” said Paige transcended racism “partly by ignoring it.” According to Tye, Paige “knew the pitfalls of Jim Crow better than anyone,” and by his later years, was able to transcend racism because “he was the world’s most talented and entertaining baseball player, and because he was wilier and faster than most of the racists who would have held him back.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t suffer,” Tye said. “He did, all his life, and it hurt even more at the end, given all he had done for America and the world.”

Grove recalls Paige transcending racist segregation in Mobile, while the two would go on fishing trips. He remembers going to a “white-only fishing camp” on Fowl River years after the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

But if Grove was with Paige, they had access. “He said to me, ‘I’ll see if I can get you in there.’” Once they arrived, and Paige made his introduction, the white owners “would open the door.”

Mobile relationship

Tye, in his research on Paige, said that “as fun as fishing was, visiting Mobile was not easy” for the pitcher. Memories of growing up in poverty, and the death of some of his siblings, were haunting reminders of what life might have been like had Paige never become a baseball icon.

His brother, Wilson, was supposedly a better ballplayer than Satchel. But Wilson Paige, who declined invitations to play baseball outside of Mobile, “turned to the bottle much the way their father had,” wrote Tye.

“That said, Mobile in a sense rescued him,” Tye told AL.com, adding that Paige’s “bad behavior on its rough streets landed him (at the detention facility near Montgomery)” where he would meet up with Edward Byrd, who taught Paige the fundamentals of how to pitch.

Said Tye, “As he famously said looking back at his time in reform school, ‘Those five and a half years there did something for me – they made a man out of me. If I’d been left on the streets of Mobile to wander with those kids I’d been running around with, I’d would have ended up as a big bum, a crook … You might say I trade five years of freedom to learn how to pitch.’”

Paige would never leave Mobile permanently. He would visit his sister, Palestine, and Grove can remember the two siblings bickering. Palestine’s home, at 957 Selma St., received a “Banner & Shield” marker through the Mobile Historic Development Commission in 2022, for its connection to Satchel Paige.

Grove said that Paige was most at ease while the two were fishing – removed from the celebrity that had become his life.

“We didn’t even talk baseball,” Grove said about their time together fishing.

But even around the family there were moments in which Satchel was the star.

Deborah Grove, Chris’ wife and Raine’s sister, said her father doubted his future son-in-law’s familial connection.

“I told him that Chris was related to Satchel Paige,” Deborah Grove recalls at the time while dating Chris. “(My father) said, ‘get out of here with that.’ Then Chris said, ‘I’ll be right back.’ And he came back with Satchel.”

“Her daddy didn’t believe me,” Chris Grove said. “But I took him there and everyone was like, ‘you weren’t lying.’”

Recalled Deborah, “My dad was into music mostly, but he was a baseball fan. He played music by ear, and Satchel stood there and watched my dad play piano.”

Grove, in the past year, has been intrigued by what Mobile is planning to do with the creation and installation of a statue of Paige. The statue will join the city’s five other homegrown Hall of Famers – Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Ozzie Smith, and the NFL’s Robert Brazile – outside the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center on Water Street. The statues are part of “Heroes Plaza,” an approximately $9 million project under construction and set to open later this year.

“They are erecting a statue of Satchel with the other guys, and they have a few other things around town, but I hope one day they really stress what he’s done for baseball,” Grove said.

He added, “Everybody still asks me about him. I would just say, though, he would come down here to relax. This was his home. He was a down to earth guy. He was just Satchel.”