With His Passing, So Went Bitter Memories

The man was walking along West 71st Street on Chicago’s South Side when he stopped, clutched his chest in pain, grabbed a white picket fence and slumped to the sidewalk.

A small crowd gathered, but he was dead before an ambulance arrived.

Later, at a hospital, it was learned the 65-year-old man was George Daniel “Buck” Weaver, one of eight Chicago White Sox players banned from major league baseball for life in the aftermath of the 1919 Black Sox World Series gambling scandal.

Buck Weaver’s 35 years of pain were over.

Of the eight Black Sox players whose major league careers were terminated by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Weaver’s case, as well as Shoeless Joe Jackson’s, for years generated considerable sympathy from baseball people.

Weaver was never found guilty of anything more than having “guilty knowledge” of the fix. Supposedly, he attended a meeting of conspiring players but took no part in the scheme. Yet he never reported what he knew to club management, either.

Weaver, once called by Ty Cobb “the greatest third baseman I ever saw,” hit .272 for his nine-year career. In the thrown 1919 World Series, his play was impeccable in the field and he hit .324.

For decades, he pleaded unsuccessfully with Landis and his successor, Happy Chandler, for reinstatement.

“A murderer even serves his sentence and is let out--I got life,” he said to writer James T. Farrell in 1954.

“I never threw a ballgame in my life. All I knew was win. That’s all I know. I can’t do nothin’ about it.”

Also on this date: In 1977, NBC announced it had paid $80 million for rights to televise the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But because of the U.S. boycott of the Games, the sum was later reduced to $22 million. (NBC’s tab for televising the 2000 Sydney Games is $715 million.) . . . In 1962, the Giants made Willie Mays baseball’s highest-paid player at $90,000 per year. . . . In 1920, Joe Malone of the Quebec Nordiques scored seven goals in an NHL game, still the record. . . . In 1993, Troy Aikman threw four touchdown passes and Dallas beat Buffalo, 52-17, in the Super Bowl. . . . In 1967, Eddie Tolan, double sprint gold medalist at the 1932 Olympics, died at 57. . . . Jackie Robinson was born in 1919.