"I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshiped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us."
The piped-in organ sounds and the service begins. The Durham Bulls, Triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, trot out onto the verdant green of their stadium's field, framed by tobacco warehouses, a blue monster in left, mostly full seats and inflatable amusements for children. Fans chatter happily and a Little League team sits anxiously mid-way up behind first base. They've come from all over the Triangle to the heart of downtown Durham to see their Bulls climb into the International League playoffs again.
They're there, in that park, on this day, because two men scraped together a few thousand dollars for a new investment. They're there because the infield dirt and the shiny, white bases are not so far from another park just to the north. That one's blue and yellow seats are faded and its concrete is splintering and stained with rust where the rebar peeks through. This one's are new and filled with cheering fans. Both parks are chapels of baseball, one the mother and the other the child of the movie that for many people encapsulates the sport: Bull Durham.
On the 15th anniversary of its premiere in downtown's Carolina Theater, Sports Illustrated's No. 1 sports movie of all time still touches viewers and inextricably bonds itself to the image of the team and city that give the film its name. Durham now is more likely to evoke images of baseball players, families at the ballpark and timelessness than it is of tobacco, poverty and slavery. And it all goes back to two men whose lives collided randomly or through fate, touching off a theme of fortuity that would color all events to come.
"Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses each other. I mean, it's all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction and timing."
Miles Wolff and Thom Mount got together by happenstance. In 1979 Wolff was looking to purchase a minor league ball club, but he had spent the last years bouncing from one baseball job to another amassing minimal savings. He wanted to resurrect the Durham Bulls franchise, which had begun in 1902 as the Tobacconists but had been out of business for years, and place it in the Single-A Carolina League. So he began talking to family and friends in an attempt to raise the required $30,000 initial investment. One friend on the West Coast declined the chance to invest in the club, but put Wolff in touch with Mount, who had invested in other minor league teams.
Wolff talked with Mount, the President of Universal Pictures and a native of Durham who had grown up watching the Bulls when they were the affiliate of the Houston Astros. Mount signed on and put in $5,000.
"Hey, someday we'll make a movie," Mount told the baseball man.
"Sure Thom, any time you want," Wolff deadpanned back. And that was all he thought about it.
Wolff signed a player development contract with the Atlanta Braves and the Bulls began play in 1980 in colorful old El Toro Park, which the Bulls--when they were in the "on" of their on-and-off existence--had used since 1926. Mount had the Universal art department design the team's uniforms and logos.
"On the surface at least, it was a completely foolish and romantic quest," Mount says now with a laugh. "Although there was business logic, the business logic followed our hearts."
But the business logic touched more than their hearts; attendance in that first season reached 150,000, doubling Wolff's predictions. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, the Durham Bulls were always at the top of the standings--at least in attendance. By the second half of the decade, crowds were regularly exceeding the capacity of the 5,000 seats in the park at the corner of Washington and Commercial Streets on the northern edge of downtown. Yet, as the team grew steadily more popular in Durham, an event that would radically and permanently change the franchise and the town was stumbling toward fruition in California.
"Well, Nuke's scared 'cause his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. We need a live roo... is it a live rooster? We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove, and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present. That about right? We're dealing with a lot of shit."
The big break came from ancient Greek theater.
Ron Shelton, a promising young screenwriter that Mount had worked with at Universal and brought to his own production company in 1983, hit upon the key ingredient that had been lacking from the baseball movie the two had been planning for years. They had conceived of it as a story about second chances: Young players on the way up and old players on the way down. But it never quite clicked.
Until Shelton saw it: "Lysistrata in the minors." The writer would apply the central plot theme of Aristophanes' play: The Athenian women engage in a sex strike to force their warrior men to make peace with Sparta and end the Peloponnesian War. They would apply this theme to a minor league groupie/mystic withholding sex from her warrior/baseball player and the movie would work. Mount was enthusiastic and Shelton rewrote the script.
Mount gave the starring role--Crash Davis--to his friend Kevin Costner, who was just approaching stardom. Shelton's directing experience was limited to the second unit on a few movies, but "I felt he'd worked long enough and hard enough, and he had a vision that was unimpeachable, and he should direct the damn thing," Mount says.
So with a star and a director, Mount began shopping the project. The responses were less than encouraging. "Most of the places we went said, 'Kevin Costner's not a movie star. Ron Shelton can't direct. This thing ain't funny.'" Mount chuckles. "Lots of other charming commentary." Eventually the mini-major studio Orion took the project, but provided it with considerably less funding than Mount wanted. He then added a relatively unknown actor named Tim Robbins on the recommendation of the casting director, and Susan Sarandon after she lobbied hard for the part and overcame Orion's wish for a more glamorous star.
As all baseball fans who have watched the movie know, Costner could actually play baseball and Robbins could not--so the lawn outside Mount's office at Columbia became home to a baseball practice as the actors worked on their pitching.
The only remaining question was where to film the movie.
"When somebody leaves Durham, they don't come back."
Thom Mount grew up in Durham. His father went to Duke Law School and was friends with former Duke President Terry Sanford. The younger Mount treated the campus like his second home. He also spent countless hours watching the Bulls.
"The ballpark was one of those places in the city where there was great democracy," he says, his mellifluous voice rolling the words out like poetry. "It was one of those places where the black and white citizens of Durham mingled freely. The unanimity of support for the ball team overcame the distance between the smart people and the rednecks. You could have an organized, fun, really peaceful evening for almost no money--and good barbecue, beer and hot dogs."
Looking at the script for what would become Bull Durham, Mount realized he wanted to film the movie in Durham. It would be cheap, he owned the team there and it was home. But his writer/director was not convinced. "Well, I don't know if we're gonna shoot in Durham," Shelton told his producer.
"Well, I don't know if I'm gonna let you not shoot it in Durham," Mount replied. But they compromised and Shelton went on a tour of the minor league teams Mount owned--the Asheville Tourists (where Crash would end up after being cut from the Bulls), a team in Anderson, South Carolina, and the Bulls.
Wolff, the Bulls' owner and Shelton's host, believes the writer fell in love with the old ballpark and its grittiness, and thus chose Durham. A battle was averted and the production company descended upon Durham. Filming began in the fall of 1987, but the natives were not impressed.
"We thought it was going to be a huge flop," Wolff says. "We didn't think the people knew what they were doing." Although he provided the "movie people" with El Toro Park for virtually nothing and supplied the actual team's uniforms and a handful of the team's players, Wolff still saw them wasting money by minor league standards. "There's the scene where Nuke is playing a guitar on the bus. Well, they went out and bought an expensive guitar," he says, his voice still taking a tone of incredulity 16 years later. "We said, 'We could get you one.'"
They forgot to hire an actor to play the minister in the wedding scene, so Pete Bock, Wolff's deputy and movie liaison, played the role--because he was the only one who fit the costume. In the movie, he drawls, "I now pronounce you man and wife," and now still receives residuals from the film.
By Mount's standards, however, production ran smoothly--though not perfectly. The fall was unseasonably cold, so players' breath is sometimes visible in the movie, and the grass died, forcing the production crews to paint the field's grass green each day. For some scenes, they had to paint the trees. "It is, after all, Hollywood," Mount says dryly.
He still had to squabble with Orion about the film's name. "We decided to call the movie Bull Durham because we didn't want to call it The Durham Bulls," he says, before linking the title to the old tobacco of the same name and to the bull pen. "I felt a huge affinity for making a movie that I cared about emotionally with the name Durham in the title. It seemed important to me." Orion was not crazy about it, but relented. Still, Wolff and the other Bulls people had low expectations. They heard rumors that Orion was down on the movie, concentrating its baseball efforts on Eight Men Out, a film about the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
"We thought it would probably never be released," Wolff says. "Until we had the grand opening that spring, it was sorta 'Well, if that comes out it'll be nice.'"
"Why's he calling me meat? I'm the one driving a Porsche."
In the spring of 1988 the big shots associated with the movie, the team and the city gathered in the Carolina Theater for the movie's premiere. Wolff was chafing in his black tie and was too nervous to get a good read on the movie. He left unsure whether he had liked it or not. But he went back to a regular theater with his wife shortly thereafter to see it again. With his nerves gone, he was left rolling in laughter. He realized the movie was wonderfully funny, and he knew his business had just gotten more valuable.
That season, attendance took its yearly jump but with more curiosity seekers mixed amongst the baseball lovers. The biggest gains came in merchandise sales: In the two years after the movie's release, they jumped from $50,000 per year--already a large amount for a minor league team--to $500,000.
Bull Durham did not touch just the Bulls; it set off a national re-blossoming of interest in the minors. The number of minor league parks built skyrocketed after the film and towns began clamoring for their own franchises. It was a full-scale cultural phenomenon.
"If you ranked the most important things for minor league baseball, Bull Durham has to be number one or two," Wolff says.
But if the burning obsession with minor league baseball that gripped municipal governments across the country was sparked by a lightning bolt from North Carolina's piedmont, somehow Durham remained fire proof.
"Strikeouts are boring, besides that they're fascist. Throw some ground balls. It's more democratic."
Even as the movie was coming out, Wolff and Mount knew the Bulls needed a new stadium. El Toro Park was too small, lacked amenities and was crumbling. So they began assembling a project to build a new stadium in the heart of downtown on the site of the old American Tobacco factory. The stadium became the centerpiece of a massive redevelopment plan that included major commitments from Glaxo, Duke, the Durham Life and Science Museum, and the American Dance Festival.
Durham city officials supported the project, but it was an election year and they put the financing to a public referendum to avoid a fight. City voters approved it, but residents of the county overwhelmingly voted "no" and the referendum failed.
Wolff remembers discussing the failure with members of Durham's government. "The city manager Orville Powell said, 'That sets Durham back 20 years,'" Wolff recalls mournfully. "They're still trying to find tenants for American Tobacco. We had everything in place."
Disheartened by his failure at politics and the complications of city-county battles, Wolff decided--and Mount agreed--that it was time to sell. If they could not get a new stadium, the club no longer made financial sense. It was time to make it someone else's fight. Jim Goodmon, President and CEO of Capitol Broadcasting Company--a Raleigh-based media conglomerate--purchased the Bulls in 1991 and began planning to move the team to a site near Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
"We knew we were going to lose the Bulls if we didn't build a new stadium," says Howard Clement, the longest-serving current Durham city councilperson. "And many of us, including Howard Clement, didn't want to be on board if the Bulls left Durham. We didn't want that to happen on our watch. So we put up or shut up."
Putting up entailed using certificates of participation to borrow more than $15 million without a referendum and financing the construction of a stadium next door to the site for the original plan. The rest of the original revitalization plan had evaporated, however, as the prospective tenants had invested elsewhere.
"A good friend of mine used to say, 'This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.' Think about that for a while."
Unlike the American Tobacco project, the Bulls thrive--consistently ranking among the top few minor league teams in the country in attendance and winning International League Championships.
They also help reinforce a positive image for the city. "You can't have better tourist advertising than Bull Durham," Mount says. "It makes Durham look like this charming, romantic town, with this promise of a good time at the ballpark and life and fun and spirit about it."
Tonight, while El Toro Park sits rusting and run-down across town, many families, retired folks and college students have followed this promise to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park--the shiny edifice that looks like a minor-league Camden Yards.
Children run through the inflatable obstacle course behind the right field bleachers and the famous "Hit Bull, Win Steak" bull--originally a prop for the movie that has since become a tradition in left--flares its red eyes and snorts smoke when the Bulls win. The crowd files out into the cooling Durham night and the warehouse-shadowed streets.
"Owning a baseball team is like owning a painting," Mount says softly. "You don't actually ever own it. You're just the steward of it for a period of time, and it keeps going."
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