Reaching for the
STARS
By Anthony Manuel Caravalho
I
Photo courtesy of SQTV
n 1973, Ron LeFlore was signed to play professional baseball, even while still incarcerated at Detroit’s Jackson State Penitentiary. Now, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his historic signing, another former convict has a chance to get signed professionally. All San Quentin alum Austin “Baby Bo” Thurman needs is a team willing to embrace his rehabilitative efforts. The legend of LeFlore started when famed Tiger’s manager Billy Martin visited “the Pen” to see the hotshot inmate perform. Martin immediately recognized the prisoner’s baseball talents, and the rest, as they say, was history. In the 1970s, America was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy as well as the tumult of the Vietnam War. It was also a time of renewed 20
WALL CITY
SUMMER 2022
attention on US prisons, particularly pertaining to race, with the killing of George Jackson at San Quentin and the Attica uprising, both in 1971. Against this backdrop, Martin signed LeFlore, who went on to a successful major league career — being named an All-Star in 1976 and leading the American League in stolen bases in 1978 and 1980. Even Hollywood loved the prison-to-the-pros story, making a TV movie with LeVar Burton playing LeFlore. A story with similar potential began on a cold February morning in 2019 on San Quentin’s “Field of Dreams,” where incarcerated ballplayers have competed in America’s pastime for the past 102 years, the oldest prison athletic program in the country. Warm-ups for the first day of try-outs began as San Quentin A’s spiritual leader,
Carrington Russelle, played catch with a man never seen on the field before. The unknown prospect’s name: Austin Thurman. The morning dew turned to rain, potentially hampering the day’s activities, when something happened that had not been seen in the previous seven months of workouts. Russelle and Thurman were throwing darts to one another from 250 feet away. Team manager Richard Williams, was beaming. If you knew Williams, then you knew his smiles came around about as often as Haley’s Comet. The impression of Thurman’s 250-foot warm-up throws with Russelle on that wintery first day prompted memories of two other legendary arms witnessed in baseball lore: The first memory — the legendary Roberto Clemente. Before the Hall-of-Famer’s tragic death in 1972, he threw a ball
