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Morris: Ex-USC coach back as author
Posted on 04.24.09
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IF YOU GO
WHO: Authors Bob Reising and Brett Friedlander
WHAT: Book signing for “Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham”
WHEN: Today, 5-7 p.m.
WHERE: Barnes and Noble, Forest Acres
For most of his life, Bob Reising has been unable to separate his loves of baseball and literature. He has combined the two interests to co-author a book, “Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham.”
Few USC fans probably remember Reising as the Gamecocks’ baseball coach during the 1964 and ’65 seasons. He might have touched more lives as an English instructor those two years at USC.
Whatever the case, he found the best of both worlds through a different avenue.
“I loved recruiting,” says Reising, who will be in Columbia today with co-author Brett Friedlander to sign copies of their book. “One of the attractions for me in athletics was recruiting, which many people hate.
“I always loved to recruit. I loved to try to get young people to see the advantage of an education while simultaneously playing athletics. I thought the combination was ideal, and anyone who had ability academically, as well as athletically, I loved to approach. I could talk about both pretty authoritatively.”
These days, Reising is a professor of education at the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, Ky. His remaining connection to baseball is as somewhat of a historian. In addition to the book on Moonlight Graham, Reising continues to work on a book about Jim Thorpe.
Reising remembers well his two years in Columbia. He arrived believing USC could win a national championship in baseball despite every sign to the contrary. Reising was hired at an annual salary of $5,000, a paltry sum considering his many duties. The school paid him to teach English full-time in the fall, then coach baseball and assist in football and basketball recruiting in the spring.
Reising soon learned baseball was the third sport at USC, behind football and men’s basketball. But it was a distant, distant third. For the most part, the baseball team was assembled by cherry-picking the best athletes from other sports. Many football players used baseball as a way to stay in shape during the spring.
Nevertheless, Reising used his connections with professional baseball scouts to establish a recruiting base.
“I very quietly and appropriately talked with big-league scouts about whom they might recommend,” says Reising, whose eloquent sentences speak to his English teaching background. “(Scouts) were informal pipelines, conduits, if you will. Not that I couldn’t spot talent on my own. But they were very, very helpful gentlemen, basically recommending or alerting me to people who had pro potential but who were not yet ready for the pro game.”
Reising’s first USC team went a respectable 15-12, noteworthy because it was the Gamecocks’ first winning season since 1952 and its best season since the 1950 club went 16-9. Then Reising went about assembling what Collegiate Baseball dubbed the top recruiting class in the Southeast.
Among those in the freshman class of 1965 were Billy Reitmeier, Larry Womack and Mike Fair. The prize of the class was Fair, a three-sport star out of Greenville who was not certain which sport he wanted to concentrate on at USC.
Reising, of course, believed Fair could help most in baseball. So, Reising assisted football coach Marvin Bass in Fair’s recruiting. When Fair, now a state senator, signed with USC, he was awarded a scholarship for baseball. It was a mere technicality. A few days after signing, Fair says he received a pair of football cleats and a football in the mail from Bass.
That ’65 freshman class proved to be the nucleus of the 1967 club that posted a 21-8 record, the most wins in school history to that point. By then, Reising was gone from USC, having left for “personal” reasons. He later coached two seasons at Furman and served as an assistant at Duke.
Eventually, Reising landed at North Carolina-Pembroke, where he developed an interest in the story of Thorpe. While speaking several years ago about Thorpe, Reising met Friedlander, and the two were intrigued that Thorpe and Moonlight Graham both played right field for the old New York Giants and both had a connection to Fayetteville, N.C.
In their book, Reising and Friedlander reveal details about the life of Graham, who played only one inning of major league baseball yet made his way into the W.P. Kinsella novel “Shoeless Joe.” That book was the basis for the movie “Field of Dreams,” in which Graham is a central character.
For Reising, the research and writing of the book proved to be a marriage of two of his loves, baseball and English.
Listen to Morris Tuesdays from 4-5 p.m. on ESPN Radio 93.1 FM
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