Nate “Bo Bo” Smalls saw the end of the Negro Leagues.
Knight Ridder Newspapers

DANVILLE, Ill. – Nate Smalls positioned four of his teenage players in a row near second base, ready for a drill no other baseball coach is likely to duplicate.

“Just catch the ball that’s comin’ to you!” he hollered. “Don’t reach for anything that’s not comin’ at you!”

Standing beside home plate, Smalls carefully tucked four baseballs against the palm and long fingers of his left hand. He repeated his instructions, then wound up and thrust the left hand forward.

The baseballs came flying out like fireworks, floating in four distinct trajectories toward the fielders.

David Rangel, Chris Gaston, Collis Lillard and Smalls’ grandson, Chris, all got their gloves on a ball, but two fell to the ground. The four teammates had never attempted the trick before.

But for Smalls, it was a replay from bygone days on faraway fields.For that instant, he was no longer a Pony League coach. Instead, he was once again “Bo Bo” Smalls, star pitcher and entertainer on the Indianapolis Clowns.

For 22 years until 1986, he was known first as “Lefty” and then as “Bo Bo” on the Indianapolis team that was a vestige of baseball’s Negro Leagues.

Before the first Major League All-Star Game in 1933 at Comiskey Park, its organizers, including Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, knew that a year before, despite a lack of publicity, a big crowd had attended a Negro League All-Star Game at the same park.

This week, as the baseball world comes to Chicago for Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, the Negro Leagues are being recognized with an exhibit at the FanFest at McCormick Place.Officially, the Negro Leagues were founded in 1920, foundering and reorganizing as they rose from the mire of segregation. Competition included All-Star and World Series games.Over the years, such games showcased talented athletes such as Paige, Josh Gibson and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Their only impediment to playing Major League Baseball was the color of their skin.

Jackie Robinson broke that barrier in 1947 as the majors’ first black player. But the door didn’t swing open far enough or soon enough for many of his peers.As a result, the Negro Leagues continued with competitive teams until 1963.

By the time 19-year-old Smalls broke into the diminished Negro League in 1965, it had faded to one team. The Indianapolis Clowns played no true home games, barnstorming the country and Canada. Even in Indianapolis, Smalls recalled, “we played in different stadiums.”

From game to game, his attire varied from a standard baseball uniform to a blonde wig, pink skirt, bra and white shoes, to, on one rare and risky occasion, a white sheet of the kind traditionally reserved for a Ku Klux Klansman.He says there were times when his shortstop took the field in a folding chair, and once when Smalls sent all his fielders to the dugout and struck out the side. It was a dramatic flourish that an early mentor, the great Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige, encouraged him to try.

Most of Smalls’ history is oral. But he has a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that includes photos of two of his improbable teammates, a dwarf named Dero Austin who played second base, and a one-armed first baseman named Steve Anderson who hit left-handed with a customized short bat.

Sitting on the front porch that runs the width of his tidy Danville home, Smalls spoke affectionately of those barnstorming days. Without bitterness, he recalled how he and teammates pooled $3 a day meal allowance apiece to buy enough bologna, peanut butter and loaves of bread to sustain everyone.The Clowns were akin to basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters “except that we played good teams that could, and did, beat us sometimes,” Smalls said. “We won about 75 percent of our games.”

Smalls remembered a particularly tough opponent and venue, an all-white team on a makeshift diamond in the mountains of Tennessee.

“They tripped us and elbowed us in the game,” he recalled. “Then, about the fourth inning, two pickup trucks came down the road, filled with Ku Klux Klansmen in white robes. Some of our kids were panicking, especially when Klan members heckled us with racial slurs from behind the backstop.

“My style was always to ad lib for a laugh. I snuck over to a nearby yard where a lady had some sheets on a clothesline. I bought a white one from her, poked two holes in it for my eyes, went up in the stands and joined the hecklers. When the guy next to me saw my hands, I took off my “hood.’ It got everybody laughing.” The tension was sufficiently defused. “After the game, the Klansmen wanted to give us fish and beer,” said Smalls. After a short pause and impish smile, he added, “We declined and left.”

Even on his porch, the 56-year-old storyteller was still entertaining, drawing a laugh from longtime friend, Rev. R.J. Davis, associate pastor of Danville’s Philadelphia Baptist Church.

“Every time I think I’ve heard all his stories, he tells me something new,” said Davis, amused at Smalls’ description of how some catchers would wax their mitts to make pitchers’ fast balls “snap loud even if they couldn’t throw that hard.”

At the peak of his barnstorming career, Smalls was the Clowns’ top salaried player, making about $150 a game and playing nearly every day over the three summer months. It was only enough to supplement his salary from the grain processing plant that employed him for 34 years until retirement two years ago in Danville. That is where he and his wife, Anita, met and married, raised four daughters, and now have 11 grandchildren.

Smalls came to the Indianapolis Clowns from his Savannah, Ga. hometown with few expectations. He figures he’s come a long, satisfying way from there.

Danville is not a Major League city, but it has been a stopover toward that destination. Some 70 major league players or coaches-from Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and Carl Erskine to Dave Stewart, Cecil Cooper and Darrin Fletcher-played in Danville Stadium.

The dark green refurbished stadium attracted Hollywood’s attention in the summer of 1991. Actors and extras took the field and stands for the filming of “The Babe,” the Babe Ruth biopic starring John Goodman. In the pretend world of movies, Danville Stadium played the role of Boston’s Fenway Park and Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field.

“We’ve got a lot of baseball players to celebrate,” said Jeanie Cook, executive director of the Danville Area Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.

Bo Bo Smalls, whose Clowns did play a few games in the old Comiskey Park, never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues or test himself against its All-Stars. He says he got a tryout with the Kansas City Royals and was assigned to their minor league system before the Clowns ownership intervened and held him to their contract. But he insists those are not his biggest regrets about his pro baseball career.

As much as he loved playing and entertaining, he said, “The hardest part was getting beat and still having to clown.”

He also regrets that a fight he had with one his idols, Clowns shortstop “Birmingham” Sam Brison, led his old teammates to not invite him to join them as actors on “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings” filming in 1976. “I’ve seen the movie twice, but I can’t watch it again,” Smalls said. “I should have been in it, too.”

No one agrees more than Dr. Layton Revel, a Texas chiropractor whose fascination with the Negro Leagues led him to pursue the subject and to found the Center for Negro League Baseball Research in Carrollton, Texas. “From our perspective, Bo Bo was the last great star from the Negro Leagues’ teams,” said Revel. “Bo Bo was a legitimate star baseball player who never made any money at the game.. He saw the end of black baseball.”

baseball in America.

“He lived the final chapter.”