Word: semipros
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...bowlegged, ham-handed lad whose arms hung down to his knees, "Hans" Wagner was a Pennsylvania coal miner at twelve, a barber a few years later, when he came up to the light and air. Then in 1895 he tried semipro baseball. Big League managers who looked him over were scared off by his clumsy walking gait. Only Ed Barrow, who later built up the New York Yankees, stuck around to watch popeyed as the fleet-footed Wagner covered ground in tremendous toadlike leaps, smothered the ball in his huge hands. Barrow wasted no time signing the youngster to play...
Barefoot Boy. "Wally Moon," says Stanky, "is a typical Cardinal-type player"-which is another way of saying that baseball is Wally's life. From the time he was old enough to throw a ball, Wally worked out daily with his father, an unreconstructed semipro. After school, when the chores were done on the Moon farm near Bay, Ark., Wally and his father sweated over the fundamentals of baseball. When he was still a barefoot boy in blue jeans, Wally was playing Legion ball with the Jonesboro (Ark.) Juniors, and big-league scouts were already impressed with his speed...
...concentrated on sportswriting, soon moved on to other papers. While on the Atlanta Journal, he was harried by anonymous telegrams and letters from Anniston, Ala., all carrying the same message: "Cobb is a real comer . . ." Skeptically, Rice traveled to Anniston and watched a youngster named Tyrus Raymond Cobb play semipro baseball. The next day he began writing stories about the undiscovered outfielder at Anniston. As a result, Cobb was later signed by the Detroit Tigers and started on his matchless major-league career (20 years later, Cobb confessed to Rice that he had sent the letters and telegrams himself...
...junior music circles of Waukegan, Ill., where his father was (and is) a high-school music director. In addition to piano and violin, which he still plays, Otto learned the oboe, English horn, French horn and cornet. Otto also had other talents which his father, an old semipro pitcher, approved and encouraged. He won high-school letters in football, basketball and baseball, found time to play tennis and golf and win awards in Junior Olympic track and field events around Chicago...
...Fisher was screaming mad, and with reason. The Knights were mired in the cellar, they had forgotten how to hit, their best pitcher had just blown up. Things were so tough that Pop had athlete's foot on his hands. When Roy reported, a big, 34-year-old semipro from the sticks with a bassoon case in his hands, Pop sneered: "Oh, my eight-foot uncle, what have we got here, the Salvation Army band?" Said Roy: "The only music I make is with...