He Was No Angel

HENDERSON, Nev. —  Physically, recent years haven’t been kind to 63-year-old Bo Belinsky, the onetime playboy-pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels.

He has been battling bladder cancer for a couple of years. His left hip was replaced in 1998 and now he needs a new right hip. Deep creases frame the still-handsome face, which once captivated some of Hollywood’s most beautiful women.

Cancer treatments, he says, have left him with reduced energy.

You ponder the irony here.

Reduced energy?

Bo Belinsky, who with his Oscar De La Hoya looks dated the likes of Mamie Van Doren, Tina Louise, Juliet Prowse, Connie Stevens and Ann-Margret?

Bo Belinsky, who on May 5, 1962, arose at the crack of noon, having spent the night with a woman he’d met in a Sunset Strip bar, then went to Dodger Stadium and threw a no-hitter at the Baltimore Orioles?

Bo Belinsky, who cruised Los Angeles in his candy-apple red Cadillac convertible and who literally had to fight off women, to the point of preventing them from breaking into his apartment?

Physically, not so hot, he says. But spiritually? Never better.

“For the first time in my life, I feel like everything’s going to be OK,” he says, adding he became a born-again Christian in 1998 and joined the Pentecostal church.

At lunch recently, Belinsky grins at the incongruity.

“Can you imagine?” he says. “I had to come to Las Vegas to discover Jesus Christ.”

Fast Start

Belinsky lives in Las Vegas and works in nearby Henderson as a field director for the Findlay Management Group, which operates a chain of car dealerships.

How different for the onetime New Jersey pool hustler who could also pitch a little.

To start with, he was a holdout before he had ever pitched a major league game.

The Angels, in early 1962, had drafted Belinsky, a career minor leaguer, out of the Baltimore farm system, paid the Orioles $25,000 for him, then offered him a $6,500 contract for the 1962 season. Bo wanted $8,500.

“I can make $6,500 shooting pool,” he told Angel General Manager Fred Haney.

A standoff ensued, and Belinsky, with his pool cue, flew to the Angels’ spring training site at Palm Springs for talks.

But first came a masterful piece of public relations work by the Angels’ publicist, Irv Kaze, now a sports-talk radio host.

Belinsky had done some phone interviews with Angel writers and he was such a good interview the writers began praying Belinsky could pitch too.

Kaze met Belinsky at the Palm Springs airport and drove him to a hotel pool deck, where he’d made certain the writers would be there by setting up two portable bars.

“We knew when we drafted him that Bo was a character,” Kaze recalled. “What we didn’t know was, could he pitch?”

Kaze said that the moment Belinsky stepped off the plane, “I knew I had a winner.”

In his 1973 book, “Bo--Pitching and Wooing,” Maury Allen asked Kaze to describe Belinsky’s appeal.

“He’s a handsome SOB, there’s no getting around that,” Kaze replied. “He’s got that lean and hungry look, like [women] like to mother. You can almost feel the animal sex in him. It didn’t surprise me that he could really turn on the girls.

“And when he opens his mouth, he’s charming as hell. A lot of it is BS, but Bo knows it and so does everyone else. You can’t help but like the guy. He’s a rogue, but he’s a delightful rogue, an entertaining guy to be around.”

Belinsky’s performance that day was a classic.

First, writers wanted to know how a New Jersey pool shark could have such a great tan.

He told them he applied a mixture of tincture of iodine and baby oil to his face and let the sun burn the iodine into his skin.

“You can’t be too dark,” Belinsky advised them.

He told wonderful stories of travels on the Eastern seaboard as a teen, hustling pool games. Then there were stories of beautiful women and romance in places like Caracas, Venezuela.

When asked about his sharp clothes, Belinsky said they were $200 custom suits made of English wool by a Caracas tailor.

“They were really $150, but I figured they wanted a round number,” Belinsky said years later.

He wore a gold watch, a diamond ring, expensive shades and sharp suede shoes.

And on almost every garment, including his boxer shorts, he had a BB monogram.

Later, when Los Angeles writers were no longer enthralled, the crack was that it stood for bases on balls.

And yes, he could pitch. At least, for a little while.

When he pitched his nine-strikeout, four-walk no-hitter at Dodger Stadium--the Angels called it Chavez Ravine--on May 5, 1962, he boosted his record to 4-0. It was the first major league no-hitter pitched in Los Angeles.

Said Angel relief pitcher Tom Morgan, “I’ve seen six or seven no-hitters, but this was the only one where not one ball was hit hard. Not one.”

Belinsky was 25 that night. He would pitch seven more seasons in the major leagues but would win only 18 more games. He was 28-51 when he retired in 1970. Almost the day after the no-hitter, he was a comet already in descent.

His Angel career effectively ended in a Washington hotel room at 3 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1964. He got in a beef with Braven Dyer, the late Times sportswriter. Belinsky punched Dyer, 64, and knocked him out. The Angels suspended him immediately, then shipped him off to Hawaii of the Pacific Coast League.

At the end, in 1970, after he had exceeded the patience of the Angels, Phillies, Astros, Pirates and Reds, those who had followed his career wondered why he had never developed into a premier pitcher.

Said Bud Furillo, a writer who covered the Angels in the Belinsky years:

“Buzzie Bavasi once told me Bo had a million-dollar arm and a 10-cent head. He said if Bo could get his head where his arm was, he’d be on his way to the Hall of Fame. He had every pitch, he just never really worked at being a great pitcher.”

Belinsky recently confirmed that assessment.

“I had talent,” he said. “But I had some real shortcomings in the dedication department.”

Kaze, who worked for major league teams for 15 years, put it this way: “Bo was the only major leaguer I ever met who, it seemed to me, didn’t really care if he pitched in the major or minor leagues.”

After his baseball career ended, Belinsky married and divorced Playmate centerfold model Jo Collins. He also married and divorced Weyerhaeuser paper heiress Janie Weyerhaeuser. That union in 1976 produced twin daughters, with whom Belinsky today has no contact. He also is out of touch with his younger sister, Lorraine.

The Hustler

Robert Belinsky was born in 1936 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Polish Catholic-Russian Jewish parents. His father was a day laborer who late in life opened a TV repair shop in Trenton, N.J.

Belinsky’s first mentors were Trenton pool-hall characters Cincinnati Phil, Norm the Farmer and Goose McDonald.

“I started out at Russo’s Pool Hall, when I was 14,” he said.

“I swept the floors, brushed the tables, watched and learned a lot. I started beating older guys. Goose was a great pool shooter, the best around. He gave me free lessons.

“Goose and Joe Russo took me to Newark in 1953 for a match at a place called Steele’s, a second-floor pool hall. This guy I was to play was a big horse player and all the money he had was always in his pocket. Everyone did that. No one wrote checks then.

“I beat the guy easy. We won $2,200 and Goose and Joe gave me 10%.

“Later, Norm the Farmer took me on the road to small towns in North and South Carolina and Georgia. Norm would wear farmer overalls, and he was great at just standing around a pool hall and looking stupid, like a gas station attendant or a delivery guy.

“But he never missed a thing. He was great at spotting shooters who weren’t as good as they thought they were and who had some money on them. We won a lot, but the hard part was getting out with the money. If Norm sensed trouble, he’d give me a signal and we’d just leave. That’s where the Paul Newman character in ‘The Hustler’ was all wrong. He was too cocky, too smartass.

“First of all, you never walk in a pool hall with your own cue. You use a house cue. And you drop the chalk at least once during a game. You gotta sell the idea that you’re really struggling with your game, in over your head.

“The secret to great pool shooting is gathering a sense of momentum to your game, a sense of pace and concentration, and being an actor. Really, I always understood pool more than I did pitching.”

His years of touring, often in Cincinnati Phil’s 1948 green Chevy, gave the teenage Belinsky a sense of excitement baseball would never provide.

They slept often in the Chevy and survived on candy bars and hot dogs. Money for gasoline was a constant problem.

“I loved every single minute of it,” Belinsky said.

“When you’re 17, nothing is unpleasant. It was all new and exciting.”

Cincinnati Phil, Belinsky said, was “a freak athlete.”

“First of all, Phil was maybe the greatest Ping-Pong player in the world,” Belinsky said.

“He made a lot of money at it. He was great at cards, pool and picking horses. He could also run backward faster than most guys could run forward. He won money at that too.”

A Sober Present

Belinsky speaks of his pool-hall years as perhaps the best of his life--and the middle part as a nightmare.

After he left baseball, he became addicted to alcohol and other drugs. He hit bottom one cold morning in 1976, just outside Akron, Ohio. He awoke under a freeway bridge, clutching an empty Japanese sake bottle.

“That was it, the last time,” Belinsky says. “Haven’t had a drink for 24 years.”

Today, as field director for the car dealerships, Belinsky travels to each, coordinating charitable projects. He lives alone in a Las Vegas home four blocks from the Sahara Hotel.

He remains a close friend of fellow Angel pitcher Dean Chance, and they talk on the phone at least weekly. Chance, who lives in Ohio, is a sometime boxing promoter and makes sure that Belinsky has good seats for major Las Vegas fights.

Besides his Findlay salary, Bo gets about $3,000 monthly from baseball’s pension plan.

“I’m comfortable, but not to the extent that I can make mistakes cash-wise,” he says. “No one has to pick up tabs for me. I’m blessed.”

And, he adds, for the first time in his life, there is no steady woman.

He laughs, then adds, “My psychiatrist told me it’s OK to be a little lonely, to be a little bored.”

How, you ask, can he be “at peace with myself,” when he has no contact with his twin daughters, now 24, or his sister?

“When I said, ‘Everything is going to be OK’ with my life, I meant it in the sense that now I can handle disappointment,” he says.

“I went through a major period of depression three years ago, and that ended when I became a born-again Christian. Now, I can handle it. I haven’t seen my daughters since 1989, and I’ve talked to my pastor about that.

“I pray for them. I’ve turned everything over to the Lord.”

About a year ago, Belinsky asked Chance to help him contact his daughters. Chance called their mother, Janie Weyerhaeuser. Nothing doing. No contact.

“I just wanted to say hello, to let them know they had a father who cared for them, who prays for them,” Belinsky says.