Gerald Wood ’66
Subject: Smoky Joe Wood, baseball pitcher
Book: Smoky Joe Wood: The Biography of a Baseball Legend
Q : This book took 10 years to write, with exhaustive research. When did you know it was going to be good, going to be worth all that effort?
A: I wondered if there were any living relatives of Smoky Joe Wood and found this Web site about him that warned that you not use it to try to get in touch with the family. So I wrote that guy, he told me to write a letter to the executor of the estate, so I sent it and sort of forgot about it.
One night the phone rings and the voice on the other end says, “Hello, my name is Bob Wood. I hear you’re interested in the work of my father.” I was so excited I took off and nearly kicked the cat into the door. Bob invited me to visit.
Two visits later he comes in with a shoebox and about 20 audiotapes of interviews people had done with his father.
I spent the next four months transcribing every one of those tapes, and I thought, This changes the whole game, because now I have his voice. Once I knew what he sounded like, I could read into that voice what his attitude was.
So I made sure I had a chapter where I quoted him a lot—where I had his voice, where I could describe his temperament. I knew that he could be blunt and funny in a rough, very male way. You could hear so much in that voice. [Wood does a riff on the phoniness of Hollwood Westerns in Smoky Joe’s voice]. He was a debunker. And he was a sort of Victorian gentleman. No matter how old he became, he always stood when a woman walked into the room.
The book took 10 years to finish. I told my wife, “If I ever say I want to write another biography, you have my permission to put a bullet in my brain.”
But if you’re true to the experience you’re a perfectionist, and you’re dogged. When something new would come up, I’d pursue it. That got rid of some of the myths, made the book better.
Smoky Joe Wood won the 2014 Seymour Medal from the Society of Baseball Research. Hear our conversation with the author at WM Online.