My childhood sports heroes were:

• Joe Willie Namath
• Walt “Clyde” Frazier
• Muhammad Ali
• Jim Bouton.

Yes, Jim Bouton.

He authored “Ball Four,” one of the most influential books of the 20th century.

Indeed, Bouton’s Ball Four was the first real “kiss-and-tell” sports book. It was an immediate best seller and was ranked third on Sports Illustrated’s top 100 sports books of all time. Indeed, when the New York Public Library celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1995, Ball Four was the ONLY sports book included among 159 titles in the library’s “books of the century” exhibit.

I inhaled Ball Four when it was published.

Bouton’s provocative prose tore away the patina of sainthood that had been bestowed on baseball players from day one (whenever that might have been).

To borrow Howard Cosell’s signature phrase of the era, Bouton told it like it was.

He reported on Mickey Mantle’s battles with alcoholism, called Carl Yastrzemski and Roger Maris loafers and said Whitey Ford routinely scuffed baseballs to make them move in unnatural and illegal ways.

The baseball establishment saw Ball Four as pure heresy and detested Bouton for what he’d done. He was forever branded as the Benedict Arnold of the National Pastime.

But Bouton didn’t care. He was hip, cool, intellectual and a counter-culture liberal who wasn’t afraid to advocate for Civil Rights, take a stand against the Vietnam War and provide his POV on the first signs of divisiveness in our country.

I could write a book about Bouton. Instead I decided to honor his passing on July 10th by remembering my day with him in 1985.

At that time, Bouton had exited baseball but reinvented himself as a successful entrepreneur.

Knowing that little kids idolized Big League ballplayers and mimicked their every action, Bouton developed Big League Chew.

BLC was an immediate hit with kids and parents alike. In essence, Bouton shred bubble gum into tiny strips that looked exactly like the chewing tobacco that was stuffed inside the cheek and gums of almost every player.

He also created MLB-quality baseball cards for kids that were included in Big League Chew packets. I had one made for my son right after he was born. It looked just like a real baseball card and, the flip side of Chris Cody’s BLC card, contained his vital stats (22 inches long. 18 pounds. Cried right handed. Projectile vomited out of the left said of his mouth, etc.). It became an immediate family keepsake.

Fast forwarding to my encounter with Bouton, he was searching for PR firms to publicize his runaway product and visited with us.

Meeting Bouton was beyond cool. I immediately cited mega sections of Ball Four to him, asked him to elaborate on the more salacious tales and generally sucked up big time to my idol.

Bouton told my boss he wouldn’t need to meet any other firms if I could be his day-to-day lead. Talk about a walk-off home run! I was in heaven.

We had Bouton’s account for about six months and generated some decent publicity, but Big League Chew turned out to be a one-hit wonder. Sales dwindled, Bouton ended our relationship and we both went our separate ways.

I still treasure my personally signed edition of Ball Four.

As you’ll see, he signed it “Smoke ‘em inside.” That’s the advice one of his managers had provided to Bouton on how best to pitch to Frank Robinson, a future Hall of Famer, who was absolutely tearing up American League pitching in his 1969 MVP season.

Bouton’s manager, Joe Schultz, said of Robinson: “You can’t pitch him low, Jim. He’ll crush anything high and if one of your patented knuckle balls doesn’t knuckle, he’ll hit it 600 feet to dead center. Hell, smoke ‘em inside!”

Hilarious advice if you follow the sport.

I adored everything about Jim Bouton and, in my own way, tried to emulate a few of his irreverent approaches whenever I wrote about a profession that sometimes takes it far too seriously (that would be PR, btw).

In fact, I thought of Bouton a few years ago when I was being introduced as a guest lecturer at BU’s superb school of public relations. The professor, a longtime friend (and role model), said to his students, “I asked quite a few people to best describe Steve Cody in one word. Almost all said “iconoclast.” I dug that (and I’d like to think Bouton would have been proud of me for earning that sobriquet).

R.I.P. Bulldog and smoke ‘em inside!

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The words in the headline aren’t mine. They belong to the master showman, publicist and flim-flam artist of the 19th century: P.T. Barnum. 

I stumbled across Barnum’s highly relevant quote as I tore through a superb new book: Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous With American History.

Written through the eyes of author Yunte Huang, Inseparable not only tells the amazing tale of Cheng and Eng, but reads like a modern-day Asian American’s de Tocqueville-like tour of antebellum America.

First, some way-cool facts about the twins and their times:

• Their early touring success in the 1830s enabled them to build a house near Mt. Airy, NC, where they not only married two local sisters, but went on to sire 10 children, two of whom fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
• The twins saw themselves as the equals of the landed white gentry of the South and were alleged to have grossly abused the 30 or so enslaved people they owned.
• Before Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee Nation heading West on the horrific “Trail of Tears,” the tribe owned no fewer than 20,000 enslaved black people of their own!

Now back to P.T. Barnum.

The Bethel, Conn., native was a huckster from the very beginning.

Clerking at his father’s country store, Barnum instinctively realized he could con his customers. He came up with the idea of a lottery in which the highest prize would be $25. The minor prizes consisted solely of worthless glass and ware. The tickets sold like wildfire, and Barnum had found his passion in life: separating fools from their money.

Barnum quickly latched onto the notion of showcasing America’s curios, oddities and freaks (which sated Victorian-era America’s unquenched thirst for the salacious).

And so, he built The American Museum in New York which, in its day, was the equivalent of Disneyland. Americans from near and far saved their hard-earned money to observe:

• Joice Heth, a toothless black woman publicized as being 161-years old and George Washington’s nurse (after she died, an autopsy revealed she was no older than 80 and had never been within 50 miles of Mt. Vernon). A classic Barnum scam.
• General Tom Thumb, a 25-inch-tall teenager who weighed all of 15 pounds.
• The twins (but accompanied by their perfectly “normal” grown children in order to subliminally titillate viewers to conjecture about Cheng and Eng’s sex life).

The twins became Barnum’s pièce de résistance and reinforced his instincts to continue to prey on his target audience’s willingness to be scammed by bogus attractions on the off chance they might occasionally view the real deal.

Now getting back to the untruth headline, allow me to share two other Barnum observations:

“When people expect to get something for nothing, they are sure to be cheated, and generally deserve to be.”

“Advertising is my monomania. When an advertisement first appears, a man does not see it; the second time he notices; the third time he reads it; the fourth or fifth he speaks to his wife about it; and the sixth or seventh he is ready to purchase.”

Advertising was Barnum’s version of misinformation and disinformation. Some of it was real, but most of it was smoke and mirrors.

And to tie this time travel blog back to the present, I submit a link to the Institute for Public Relations’ outstanding new study on disinformation, showing that both Democrats and Republicans view disinformation as a major problem in our culture – on par with gun violence and terrorism.

Afterword: It seems to this blogger that, as we approach the 2020 election cycle, one camp has its advertising message locked and loaded a la Barnum while the other flounders helplessly to construct a coherent, memorable narrative that will accomplish what Barnum did so many years ago.

The Democrats need a latter-day Barnum to manage their campaign. And regardless of the eventual rallying cry, the Dems could sure use the twins. They could run as vice presidents who simultaneously appeal to far-left progressive wing of the party who want free college for everyone, and the middle-of-the-road Joe Biden camp.😎

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Today’s guest blog is authored by Peppercomm’s amazingly amazing Courtney Tolbert. I do hope you will read it and share your thoughts on her POV…

Why would women need a separate professional networking platform? I imagine this is the number one criticism that Sophia Amoruso’s new “Girlboss” platform will receive. It’s a fair question. After all, women are free to use existing platforms like LinkedIn, why not just capitalize on the features and networking opportunities there? I would tackle this question with one of my own – why do minority or underrepresented groups tend to form their own advocacy groups? 

While college educated women are no longer the workplace minority in terms of numbers, a pay gap still exists, and they still fight corporate stereotypes that hold them back professionally (i.e. mothers can’t or won’t go back to work after giving birth). The answer to the aforementioned question would be: women need to connect and work together with other successful and capable women who understand why and where they are coming from professionally – and arguably more important, where they would like to go with their careers.

There are existing professional networking platforms that focus on women a little more such as Bumble Bizz; however, Girlboss seems more enticing to me because from the preliminary stages, it is interested in the longevity of one’s career. When signing up for the platform, users are prompted to answer three questions: “I’m good at ____,” “I’d like to learn ___,” and “I’d like to meet ___.” These are seemingly simple questions, but they get you thinking about where you are and where you want to go next, at least they did for me.

This post is not meant to serve as an ad for Girlboss, though I think the platform holds a lot of promise. It is meant to draw attention to the fact that while women have made amazing strides in the professional space, we are still not treated the same as our male counterparts. It is to highlight available tools and networks that women can take advantage of while we continue to strive for professional excellence and work smarter and harder. Girlbosses unite.

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