On the NBA Beat Ep. 193: "Mike Donlin" Book Special With Steve Steinberg

On the NBA Beat

Steve Steinberg, co-author of Mike Donlin: A Rough andRowdy Life From New York Baseball Idol to Stage and Screen, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

8:34-9:55: “Our interest is what was really ticking in the guy’s mind, what was he feeling, what was he thinking. And the years that we write about, and especially Donlin’s years, there were so many newspapers in New York City, more than a dozen of them. And in the early 1920s, by the way, they started merging. … These newspapers had a beat writer. And each of these newspapers had a sports editor, and each of these guys had their own connections. … You can sit at home and go online with some of these, Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, Genealogy Bank. But I found that there’s nothing that replaces going to the New York Public Library and just sitting there with a microfilm, which I think some people find a terribly boring thing. But I find it thrilling and exciting ‘cuz it’s like going back in a time machine; you don’t know what you’re gonna find.”

14:53-15:46: “I’ve heard from more than one person that when they read the beginning of the book they don’t like this guy very much, but by the end of the book they see another side of him emerge. … The fact remains that when you have these people that are more complicated it makes for a much more fascinating story. … I just find that the juices flow more when you have somebody who’s not so saintly.”

20:05-20:45: “Many famous actors in the ’30s and ‘40s, they got their start in vaudeville, just going out on the stage. You would go to a vaudeville theater, and over two hours you might see everything from a 9-foot tall Russian man to someone who had a beard that was 80 feet long to dancing dogs. And you would see a skit, and Mabel Hite would do these little skits, and they may be only 10 to 15 minutes, but the variety was the thing. These were variety shows, and it was a fascinating world of entertainment at that time.”

25:34-25:56: “This was a real love affair, and I think it captured the nation. They were maybe the first power couple, decades before that phrase even existed. But Mabel even understood it herself. And she was quite a businessperson even though she had this persona onstage of a wacky, goofy kind of person.”

31:20-31:56: “McGraw and Donlin actually had a pretty complex relationship also. It’s interesting to note that John McGraw was only about five years older than Mike Donlin. McGraw was a very young manager early on, so it was a little bit almost like being contemporaries. In 1905, maybe Mabel was dating Mike and controlled his drinking; that was the year they won the world championship, the Word Series, but you’ve gotta give McGraw credit for that [too]. McGraw felt he could control anybody, whatever the shortcoming of the personality flaw was.”

If interested, Mike Donlin is available for purchase⁠ ⁠here⁠⁠, among other places.