AMBITION
MY STRUGGLE TO FAIL AND SUCCEED IN BASEBALL, POLITICS, HOLLYWOOD, WRITING . . . AND THE ROCKY PATH I'VE WALKED WITH CHRIST
The Education and Autobiography of
STEVEN TRAVERS
COPYRIGHT (2011) by STEVEN TRAVERS
Book Description
The editor of the San Francisco Examiner once said, “Steve Travers is an educated athlete who knows how to get inside the player’s heads. When that happens, greatness occurs.” Thus does it manifest itself within these pages.
Steven Travers is the Forrest Gump of baseball’s “steroid era”; a teammate of Jose Canseco in the A’s organization, a classmate of Mark McGwire at the University of Southern California, and Barry Bonds’s biographer. He is USC’s Rudy, in that the journey leading him to the school was as circuitous as Notre Dame’s famed football “walk-on.” The fact is there are few people today walking about the Earth with a story as colorful to tell as Travers’s. He has done more and varied things, traveled more divergent paths, experienced more highs and lows, and shot his arrow at the fickle target of success more than 100 other people combined.
“Development hell” in Hollywood. The giddy highs and layoff lows of a “dot-bomb.” The column is giveth, the column is taketh away. The authorized Barry Bonds autobiography, the big, bad world of New York publishing, and the truth about literary agents. For 16 years, Steven Travers has experienced the up-and-down world of the writer’s life . . . and lived to tell about it.
And that is just for starters.
Here is an American story of a man’s journey, of finding himself after years of dissolution, dripping with sexual adventure, hedonism, alcoholic pursuit of nightlife in the world’s capitols; a desperate, internal struggle to honor his faith in God and the constant battle to be a good dad after a nasty divorce.
The scion of a blueblood family with roots going back to the American Revolution that lost everything in the Great Depression, Steve Travers is the nephew of Colonel Charles T. Travers, a powerful, influential Republican who had the ear of Vice President Richard Nixon, California’s U.S. Senator William Knowland and Governor Ronald Reagan. He was a close personal friend with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Oakland Athletics owner Walter Hass. When Steve asked his uncle to give him an introduction, some help with a job under one of these famous men, his uncle’s response can best be summed up by the title of the 1987 film Less Than Zero. He would have to make it on his own.
Travers played in the greatest prep baseball program in the United States at California’s Redwood High School, where he achieved ultimate glory pitching for coach Al Endriss’s still-revered 1977 national champions. He earned a scholarship to college and was an all-conference pitcher, traveling the highways and by-ways of America and Canada in four years of collegiate and summer league ball. Told the Boston Red Sox would select him in 1981, the player’s strike ended the draft after just a few rounds. His dream appeared over until St. Louis offered him a contract.
Travers’s descriptions of minor league life and collegiate summer baseball are vivid snapshots of Americana in the tradition of Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times; Pat Jordan’s A False Spring; and the works of Roger Angell. Travers effectively realized as he was playing in such rural settings as Iowa, Nebraska, western Canada, the South, and other outposts, that he was carrying on a tradition voiced by the Frank Whaley character in Field of Dreams, who tells Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones that he heard about “town ball” teams traveling around the country playing baseball.
As he stared out the window at the prairies, mountains, valleys and rivers of North America, Travers instinctively realized he was experiencing a privilege others would pay millions for, from “fantasy campers” to over-30 baseball leaguers. His mental notes captured the sights, sounds, smells and emotions of this unique experience, layered by his historical perspective. These are herein captured, dripping in nostalgia. Few writers alive have the combined personal experience and magic touch for texture, character and color as Steve Travers.
After two years in the minors, he returned to college at the school of his dreams, USC, but the path leading him there was a crazy one. Only friendly counselors at two schools combined to make it possible, but Travers matriculated and graduated.
Never an atheist, having verbally committed to Jesus Christ at age 18, Travers nevertheless struggled against life’s temptations, often partying as if in homage to legendary Doors wildman Jim Morrison. After sowing his wild oats in a trip to New York City, Washington, D.C., London and Paris, talks with a company at the World Trade Center fell through, which reminded Travers of what might have been on 9/11, as did his blowing it with a beautiful Kim Basinger look-alike who “got away.” He returned to California, marrying his college girlfriend when she became pregnant. His daughter Elizabeth was born in 1985 and Travers settled down, buying a home in Orange County, California.
Inspired by a speech at USC by infamous Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, Travers endeavored to become an attorney, work for the CIA, and enter politics. He did enter law school and through employment as a paralegal with an Orange County law firm worked closely with powerful Southern California Republicans in the 1980s and early 1990s. When his marriage failed he dropped out of school, joining the Army.
After a memorable basic training experience, he returned to an Army Reserve unit in California marked by humorous anecdotes, government waste and strange behavior by officers and enlisted personnel. Divorced and depressed, fighting to stay relevant in the life of his daughter Elizabeth, he reverted to decadence marked by drunkenness and womanizing in the nightclubs of Los Angeles’ famed South Bay, and with his good friend Mac.
Trying to find himself, Travers coached baseball at the University of California and in Berlin for one year each. He lacked passion for it, instead continuing his destructive behavior while running a swath through the willing maidens of Germany’s historic old city.
More frustration followed when he teamed with an old friend to form a sports agency, which like the movie Jerry Maguire rested entirely on a large, hoped-for commission of the contract for an egotistical, selfish black athlete. Unlike the movie, the commission never materialized when for the second time the 1994 player’s strike had a profound, this-time utterly disastrous effect on his livelihood. Things were compounded when his friend-partner breached a contract, in effect stealing money from Travers and his father. A brief, wild fling with a porn star followed a predictable script, leaving Travers feeling morally bankrupt.
35 years old in 1994, Steve Travers faced a crossroads. He was a splendid failure; well educated, in possession of a resume to die for, but no tangible accomplishments or assets. He felt he had offended God. He was living a real-life version of the writer Hank Moody, the character played by David Duchovny in HBOs Californication. He hardly saw his daughter. He reaped what he had sown. He deserved what he got.
But God then gifted him with his passion: writing. Finding his life’s work, Travers began the painful process of divesting himself from a life of slutty women who never had his best interests at heart. Irony of irony, the gift came in the form of a baseball player best known for his wanderings with slutty women who never had his best interests at heart. Bo Belinsky, one-time playboy southpaw of the Los Angeles Angels, claimed that Hollywood wanted to make a movie about his life. After falling into disarray with drugs, even sleeping under a bridge, Bo found Jesus Christ and redemption. Travers wrote a screenplay about his colorful life.
“If I had known when I started writing what I was getting myself into, I might never have started in the first place,” Travers writes. “Then again, I would have. I had such passion for it nothing was going to stop me. I would not recommend all the disappointment and failure to anybody else. You have to want it in your heart and soul as I did. Nobody can teach that. If it’s not there, find another way to make a living.”
Bo filled Travers’s head with crazy stories about how Robert DeNiro and a host of Hollywood heavyweights were pounding his door down to make a movie, but Steve’s efforts found no such thing. Eventually, the script did well in a screenplay contest. A producer associated with the son and grandson of It’s a Wonderful Life director Frank Capra optioned it. He was off and running, or so he thought.
The “producer” was somewhere in between slow, incompetent and borderline shady. Travers moved back to Los Angeles with his beautiful blond girlfriend-with-a-past, Blake, living in a house near the ocean in Hermosa Beach. He was finally content, as he had his sweet Elizabeth on weekends after years of separation. For the better part of three years, Travers plied his trade, took numerous screenwriting classes at UCLA and other places, educating himself on both the craft and business of his new profession. He wrote 15 screenplays, made a living as a “writer for hire” and “script doctor,” experiencing what is known in the trade as “development hell.”
His Belinsky script, Once He Was An Angel, was never produced. He wrote a hair-raising script about an American Army unit trapped and surrounded by Germans during World War I’s Argonne Offensive. Based on a true story, it seemed destined to be his ticket when famed producer Edgar Scherick wanted to adapt it to a movie starring James Woods in the lead role.
But another script on the same subject by Hamburger Hill screenwriter James Carabatsos was also floating around town. The hardcore International Creative Management agents threatened. Scherick and Woods dropped out of the project. Scherick took a liking to Travers. He seemed to be his new “angel,” but after making Path to War for HBO died, leaving Steve without a patron.
After a dispute with a producer over money contractually owed, Steve began to realize screenwriting was a perilous way to make a living. Travers covered high school sports for the L.A. Daily News and the Los Angeles Times. After barely missing out on a column he almost talked Times sports editor Bill Dwyre into giving him with almost no experience, he landed a column with a start-up Marina Del Ray sports magazine, StreetZebra. He was the magazine’s star, writing monthly “distant replays” of great events in Los Angeles’ sports past, as well as the USC and high school beats. He seemed to have found his niche. But the magazine’s co-founders, flush in dot.com money, went through $10 million in short order in a frenzy of flashy parties, trips and dangerous sexual harassment of the company’s hot young female employees. It all crashed when the magazine folded amid the Internet bubble bursting in late 2000.
Also at this time, Travers met another porn star, Christina Angel, in a Rite-Aid drugstore around the corner from his Hermosa Beach home. The affair was very brief, but when Blake found out she called off their scheduled wedding. Travers did not know it at the time, but it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He had been living in sin, prohibited by Biblical principles from marrying after breaking God’s commandment by getting divorced the first time, in 1990. This event, and eventually the shock of 9/11, had the spiritual effect of finally forcing him to turn away from his sins far more than in his checkered past, with ultimately excellent results.
Travers landed on his feet as the lead sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, but the California economy was in the tank in the aftermath of the Enron scandal and an energy shortfall in the state. This ultimately forced the recall of Governor Gray Davis. The Examiner’s bold attempt to up-grade its content failed in a rash of cost-cutting measures, including Travers’s high salary.
However, the intrepid writer again landed on his feet. During his time as a columnist covering the Giants he established a positive relationship with slugger Barry Bonds. Bonds agreed to have Travers co-author his authorized autobiography. Then he dropped out of the project when publishing offers, poorly orchestrated by an agent at the William Morris Agency in New York, did not meet the superstar’s demands. Travers then wrote a biography, which made some Best Seller lists, earned critical acclaim, and was nominated for a Casey Award (Best Baseball Book of 2002). However, for the third time a (threatened) baseball player’s strike cost him money when his publisher delayed the book’s re-print in paperback until after the World Series.
Thinking publishers and agents would be coming to him, Travers over the next two years wrote a novel and a history book from his conservative political perspective. He was shocked to discover that was not the case. He did prodigious freelance work because “writer’s write.” Travers dealt with numerous celebrities, including baseball star Ernie Banks, basketball Hall of Famer Rick Barry, and conservative talk show host Michael Savage. His chapter on “The Writer’s Life” details volumes of anecdotes in which he was badly dealt with by unscrupulous and greedy types “stealing” hundreds of thousands of dollars from him after Travers came up with ideas that, until he thought of them and turned them into book offers, lacked existence!
In 2004 a chance phone call to a former USC football player, John Papadakis, revived a seemingly-dead book/movie idea: the 1970 USC-Alabama football game, thought to be the tipping point in the ultimate integration of the American South. Within a few months, Travers had an agent, a reputable publisher and a $50,000 book offer. Papadakis (and by extension former star Sam “Bam” Cunningham), who viewed the story as his, not histories, rejected it and began shopping for a new writer, ultimately picking Sports Illustrated’s Don Yaeger, leaving Steve Travers high and dry. But Travers remembered the words of USC assistant football coach Marv Goux, who exhorted the Trojans to, “Take what’s yours without asking,” and did just that. The publisher making the initial offer made a second one, this time just to the historian Travers to write a fair, balanced account of the politics and viewpoint not just of USC, but of Alabama as well. One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation was published in 2007.
The Travers and Yaeger-Papadakis-Cunningham books competed with each other evenly, but Travers’s work had opened the floodgates. His career, after so many setbacks, was up and running. He became a popular guest lecturer and speaker at USC, addressing students, parent’s groups, and making regular appearances in his friend Professor Dan Durbin’s well-attended class “Sports, Culture and Society.” He addressed the Pasadena Quarterback’s Club and alumni groups throughout the state. The book addressed the political issues of the Civil Rights Movement, most notably how football and the “palatability” of two California conservatives, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, played a major role in husbanding the South into the mainstream of America. This led him to address Republican groups, which included a speech on behalf of Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008.
In addition, Travers penned three more books on USC football history, including one in which coach Pete Carroll wrote the foreword, but in an act of great egotism, insisted on a last-minute change based on apparent changes in his marital status. It cost Travers and his publisher, Triumph Books, around $5,000. In 2010 One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation and The USC Trojans: College Football’s All-time Greatest Dynasty were re-released in paperback. One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation also was optioned and went into development with two heavyweight Hollywood producers, Kerry McCluggage (Miami Vice) and Barry Kemp (Coach, Patch Adams).
Between 2002 and 2010, Travers wrote 16 published sports books, seven with Triumph, a division of New York publishing giant Random House. He finally landed a good agent, Manhattan literary representative Ian Kleinert. After all the heartache of divorce, physical separation and anguish, Steve can thank God His greatest gift, his beautiful daughter Elizabeth Travers, is a success too, having grown up in Orange County, California, overcoming a mysterious teenage health scare before attending the University of Oregon, then landing an excellent job with a major corporation in Newport Beach; all the while lauding the perseverance of her father as one of her major inspirations!
This book is rife with the author’s literary influences. The crisp prose of Joan Didion. The hyperbole of Jim Murray. The social satire of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Forrest Gump meets Semi-Tough. Ball Four, Hunter S. Thompson, David Halberstam, Shakespeare . . .
At 51 years of age in 2010, Steve Travers can finally look back upon his life, piecing together the turning points and epiphanies shaping who he is, most notably how the 2000 “dot.bomb” failure of StreetZebra saved him from what would have been a disastrous, blasphemous marriage to a fallen women; how 9/11 led the Holy Spirit into his life more powerfully than ever before; leading him to a decade in which he has, if not completely turned away from his sins, greatly reduced his appetite and love for them; thus of his own free will reading the Holy Bible every single day (about six times cover-to-cover, Old Testament and New Testament in the six years hence). He describes how a Christian radio scholar, Brother Harold Camping, predicts the Second Coming of Christ on May 21, 2011, and Steve’s desire to let people know whether this event happens or not, Jesus is Lord and because of Him he has faith that maybe, just maybe, a wretch like Steve Travers can be saved, and so too can you!
Ambition: My Struggle to Fail and Succeed In Baseball, Politics, Hollywood, Writing . . . and the Rocky Path I’ve Walked With Christ is truly a confession, the story of transformation in which a narcissistic, self-indulgent young man, addicted to sinful acts with women and alcohol, for years lived life his way. It is that man’s witness and testimony to how through perseverance and faith in Jesus Christ, he slowly but surely, brick by brick, fell down and got back up time and time again, until his faith and willingness to turn his destiny over to God was rewarded, his life finally taking a turn for the better. This is the education of Steven Robert Travers.
AUTHOR BIO
Steven Travers, a former professional baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Oakland A’s organizations, is the author of 16 books, including the best-selling Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman, nominated for a Casey Award as Best Baseball Book of 2002; and One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game that Changed a Nation (a 2007 PNBA nominee, subject of the CBS/CSTV documentary Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture). He pitched for the Redwood High School baseball team in Marin County, California that won the national championship in his senior year, before attending college on an athletic scholarship and earning all-conference honors. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Steven coached at USC, Cal-Berkeley and in Europe; served in the Army; attended law school; and was a sports agent. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and was a columnist for StreetZebra magazine in L.A., and the San Francisco Examiner. His screenplays include The Lost Battalion, 21 and Wicked. He has a daughter, Elizabeth Travers, and lives in Marin County, California.
Books written by Steven Travers
One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed A Nation (also a documentary, Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture)
A’s Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Trojans Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Dodgers Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Angels Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
D’Backs Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real
The USC Trojans: College Football's All-Time Greatest Dynasty
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers
Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman
Pigskin Warriors: 140 Years of College Football's Greatest Games, Players and Traditions
The 1969 Miracle Mets
Dodgers Baseball Yesterday & Today
A Tale of Three Cities: New York, L.A. and San Francisco During the 1962 Baseball Season
What It Means To Be a Trojan: Southern Cal’s Greatest Players Talk About Trojans Football
God's Country: A Conservative, Christian Worldview of How History Formed the United States Empire and America's Manifest Destiny for the 21st Century
Angry White Male
The Writer’s Life
The USC Mafia: From the Frat House to the White House to the Big House
Ambition: My Struggle to Fail and Succeed In Baseball, Politics, Hollywood, Writing . . . and the Rocky Path I’ve Walked With Christ
Praise for Steve Travers
Steve Travers is the next great USC historian, in the tradition of Jim Murray, John Hall, and Mal Florence! . . . the Trojan Family needs your work. Fight On!
- USC Head Football Coach Pete Carroll
. . . Steve Travers tells us all about the exciting and remarkable football . . . that not only changed the way the game is played, it . . . changed the world.
- Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
Steve Travers combines wit, humor, social pathos and historical knowledge with the kind of sports expertise that only an ex-jock is privy to; it is reminiscent of the work of Jim Bouton, Pat Jordan and Dan Jenkins, combined with Jim Murray' turn of phrase, Hunter Thompson's hard-scrabble Truths, and David Halberstam's unique take on our nation's place in history. His writing is great storytelling, and the result is pure genius every time.
- Westwood One radio personality Michael McDowd
Steve Travers is a great writer, an educated athlete who knows how to get inside the player's heads, and when that happens, greatness occurs. He's gonna be a superstar.
- San Francisco Examiner
Steve Travers is a phenomenal writer, an artist who labors over every word to get it just right, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and history.
- StreetZebra
Steve Travers is a “Renaissance man.”
- Jim Rome Show
He is very qualified to continue to write books such as this one. Good job.
- Marty Lurie/Right Off the Bat Oakland A's Pregame Host
Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan, and a veteran of Hollywood, too.
- Lee "Hacksaw" Hamilton/XTRA Radio, San Diego
You've done some good writin', dude.
- KFOG Radio, San Francisco
[Travers is] one of the great sportswriters on the current American scene.
- Joe Shea/Radio Talk Host and Editor
Travers appears to have the right credentials for the task.
- USA Today Baseball Weekly
A very interesting read which is not your average . . . book. . . . Steve has achieved his bona fides when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like this.
- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San Francisco
This is a fascinating book written by a man who knows his subject matter inside and out.
— Irv Kaze/KRLA Radio, Los Angeles
Travers . . . established himself as a writer of many dimensions . . . a natural.
— John Jackson/Ross Valley Reporter
Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a loyal Trojan!
— Former USC football player John Papadakis
Pete Carroll calls you "the next great USC historian," high praise indeed.
- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles
You’re a great writer and I always enjoy your musings, particularly on SC football – huge fan!
- Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane
Steven Travers is one of the most accomplished sports journalists in our nation today and One Night, Two Teams is his defining work to this point.
- Strandbooks.com
Travers, a USC grad, portrays the game and USC’s victory as a tipping point in the integration of college football and the South, a triumph for the forces of equality . . . his larger view of the game hits home in most respects, and he provides a compelling account- drawing from dozens of interviews with participants, coaches, drawing from dozens of others - of a clash between two schools with decidedly different approaches to the composition of their football rosters . . . All in all, an intriguing premise and a well-told story.
- Wes Lukowsky, Booklist
The book is not just about sports but how sports and that September 1970 game in particular relate to the intertwining of sports, race, politics, history, religion and philosophy.
- Harold Abend, In Scope
One Night . . . is a tour de force.
- Marin I.J.
Travers combines wit, humor and historical knowledge in his writings.
- University of Southern California
Wow what a great job!!!! . . . I love the book . . . It's one of those you look forward to reading at special times . . . I can't say enough!
- Lonnie White, Los Angeles Times
This is a book about American society. It sheds incredible light on little-known events that every American must know to understand this country . . . In 20 years, people will say of this book what they said about Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer.
- Fred Wallin, Business Talk radio
Steve is the USC historian whose meticulous attention to detail is a revelation. He is the best chronicler of USC ever.
- Chuck Hayes, CRN Sports Corner
This is fabulous, just a terrific look at our history. Travers is one of the best writers around.
- Rod Brooks, Fitz & Brooks show, KNBR/San Francisco
You have created a work of art here, an absolutely great book. We love your work.
Bob Fitzgerald, Fitz & Brooks show, KNBR/San Francisco
When it comes to sports history, this is the man right here.
- Gary Radnich, KRON/5, San Francisco
Author Steven Travers discusses his new book . . .
- Orange County Register
. . . Join Steve Travers . . . at the autograph stage . . .
- ESPN Radio
. . . Steve Travers, author of One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation . . .
- Los Angeles Daily News
Steve Travers, a sports historian . . .
- Los Alamitos News-Enterprise
Hear this dynamic speaker tell how this famous game changed history.
- Friends of the Los Alamitos-Rossmoor Library
This is a fabulous book.
- Michaela Pereira/ KTLA 5, Los Angeles
Travers presents this particular game in 1970 as a metaphor for the profound changes in social history during the emancipation of the South.
- Publishers Weekly
. . . Explored in rich, painstaking detail by Steve Travers.
- Jeff Prugh, L.A. Times beat writer who covered the 1970 USC-Alabama game
You're a prolific talent.
- Curtis Kim, KSRO Radio, Santa Rosa
Is there anything you've not written?
- Vernon Glenn, KRON/4, San Francisco
You are the Poet Laureate of the USC Program! Please keep writing.
- Tony Pattiz, USC class of 1980
A's Essential: Everything You Need To Be a Real Fan offers a breezy history . . .
- Bruce Dancis/Sacramento Bee
What A’s Essential does give us in heaps is the history specific players and other A’s personnel . . . Travers manages to dig up plenty of interesting quotes and his knowledge of other writings about the A’s is voluminous. He finds enough fascinating material . . . interesting and add(s) to the reader’s experience with the book . . . A’s Essential can be a useful source to those who are students of A’s history
- Brian James Oak/www.atthehomeplate.com
As an Oakland fan, I was therefore interested to find A’s Essential when browsing on Amazon recently
- Matt Smith, MLB.com
(The chapter in One Night, Two Teams) on Martin Luther King - the description of the civil rights movement - your insights, the research - what an education I received from reading it. It should be required reading by every student in America! Every citizen. No wonder there were so many African Americans on the Mall a week ago! . . . I am sure there are many blacks who would say it is impossible for a white man to really understand the struggle. And, in one sense they are definitely right because you are not black. But, wow - I think you did an excellent job in bringing it together - telling the story and making me think!
- Dwight Chapin, former Nixon White House appointments secretary
Contents Page
“You can’t go home again” 17
Author Steve Travers cherished the love of his adoring granddaddy, who gave him the first impetus to be a writer and historian, but when Charles S. Travers passed away when Steve was 11, the youngster lost his innocence to a world of sin.
An American family 25
A blue blood family of patriots who fought in the Revolution, spied for Abe Lincoln in the Civil War, served in World War II and Vietnam, came to California for the 1849 Gold Rush, and Steve’s European mother’s side of the family.
The Don 50
Donald E. Travers rose from Depression poverty to graduate from Cal, serve as a Naval officer, become a successful teacher and coach, then an attorney.
The golden child 72
Steve is raised in a cultured California home of books, plays, museums and the opera, combined with sports and a rambunctious love of the outdoors.
Splendid ostracism 93
The arrogant baseball “superstar” and his “little league parents” make enemies with their ultra-competitive approach in liberal, I’m Okay, You’re Okay Marin County.
“Behind Blue Eyes” 118
The young Travers overcomes the terrors of junior high through sports success and a dogged insistence on his own superiority.
The battle of Redwood High 136
At an elite rich kid’s school in Marin County, the newcomer Travers struggles to re-invent himself beginning as a freshman (1973).
Skoal Man 169
Robert Scoal moves from L.A. to Marin, and his friendship with Steve is like a buoy in the roiling ocean of life.
Dynasty 185
Travers competes for rugged, legendary coach Al Endriss, whose Redwood baseball team was named “National High School Baseball Program of the Decade” (1970s) by The Sporting News.
National champions 222
As a senior, Travers accepts Christ as his Savior, while attaining ultimate prep glory pitching for the greatest team in Marin high school history, the mythic, still-revered national champion 1977 Redwood Giants.
Fields of my dreams 258
Steve takes his high school baseball pedigree to Southern California, strengthens his Christian beliefs during an Athletes in Action game, and then plays collegiate summer ball in Colorado, beginning a trek that takes him all over the American heartland in a modern re-enactment of The Glory of Their Times.
“Who among you will run with the hunt?” 277
In Santa Monica, California, the heart of the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” 1970s, the author falls sway to a Rasputin figure who leads him into a wild world of women and alcoholic excess, threatening to derail his baseball goals and even his mortal soul.
“Glory Days” 311
Steve barely evades disaster, “escaping” L.A. to re-prioritize at pristine Lake Tahoe, and with the help of a friendly college counselor lands a baseball scholarship and glory at the University of Nevada.
“O Canada” 353
More pitching heroics and Yukon-style adventure on a fast Canadian summer team.
Big man on campus in “The Biggest Little City In the World” 368
Riding high on college stardom, the All-American candidate Travers slumps and nearly blows his career opportunity in his all-important senior year.
The life 397
When the Major League players strike in 1981, Steve’s professional chances appear over until an admiring umpire and St. Louis Cardinals “bird dog” scout arranges for him to sign with the Cards, where he pitches the best ball of his life, leading the Appalachian League in earned run average (having another religious epiphany) until an injury derails him.
In the trim 431
Travers meets a wild man named Garth Henderson, a rich surfer boy who embarks on a non-stop ride of women and pleasure.
The “neon league” 444
Minor league life: travel, camaraderie, ribald humor, glamour, bars, groupies, and more fun than a human being should be allowed to have as the author struggles to “walk the walk.”
“In the wink of a young girl’s eye” 463
As in Bruce Springsteen’s song “Glory Days,” after becoming Jose Canseco’s teammate Travers’s pro aspirations end seemingly before they start when the Oakland A’s release him.
The hallowed shrine 479
A lifelong Trojan fan who for various reasons never attended USC, Travers rebounds from baseball disappointment to attain his goal of finally going to school there.
God is not a Trojan, but He has an apartment on West Adams Boulevard 494
Steve befriends great athletes at USC, watching epic battles between Mark McGwire and Randy Johnson with Arizona State’s Barry Bonds.
Big Mac, the Mick, and Mac 513
Now the classmate of Mark McGwire, mere months after he was Jose Canseco’s teammate, Travers has completed a trifecta, having a front row seat to the future of the “steroid era.” The intrepid author muses on further on friendships with disparate friends Mickey Meister and Kevin McCormack.
Horace B. Manners and the “B” stands for bad 528
Wild times and college hi-jinx with a cast of characters, misfits, great friends and a future captain of industry at a Damon Runyon-type dive bar.
“L.A. Woman” 547
Travers and a group of fellow Doors aficionados go on a Quixote-esque pilgrimage to find the Los Angeles of Jim Morrison before Steve graduates from USC, but the quest takes its toll on Steve’s Christian principles.
1984 571
After graduating from USC, Travers has the most momentous year of his life, traveling to New York City, Washington, D.C., London and Paris; “blows it” with a beautiful blonde in New York (“the one who got away”), almost goes to work in the World Trade Center, lands a good job in California, re-commits to Christ, gets married, and prepares for the birth of his daughter Elizabeth.
Rising son 607
Married, a father and an Orange County, California homeowner, the author is inspired by a rousing USC speech by infamous Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy to go to law school, work for the CIA, and enter politics, but after appearing to be on his way has a career set-back.
Love on the rocks 640
Travers relies on his faith, asking God to forgive him for becoming divorced while engaging in the terrible fight to maintain his rights as daughter Elizabeth’s daddy.
In the Army now 647
When his marriage begins to crumble, Steve leaves law school and a paralegal job with an Orange County law firm to fulfill a lifelong goal of military service, starting with a rugged training gauntlet at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
“Chairborne Ranger” 662
Humorous anecdotes, government waste and strange behavior by officers and enlisted personnel mark Steve’s career in the Army Reserves.
Wilderness years, Redondo Beach, Californication (1989-90): “Girls, Girls, Girls”670
Single again, Steve relapses amidst the decadent lifestyle of Hermosa Beach and . . .
Wilderness years, San Francisco (1991-92): Mac, “midweek drinkin’ ” and narcissism at the gym 694
. . . heavy partying with his pal Mac add too much emphasis on looks at the gym.
The Cal Golden Bears 715
At loose ends career-wise, Travers tries to get back into baseball as an assistant coach for the University of California, who make it all the way to the 1991 NCAA Midwest Regionals, but fall just short of the College World Series.
“Ich bin ein Berliner” 728
A surprise opportunity lands Steve in Germany for a year coaching a supposed “national” team, where he spends 90 percent of his money on wine, women and song, wasting the rest.
Jerry Maguire without the happy ending 753
An unscrupulous old friend steals from Steve and his family when they partner to form a sports agency, in which the 1994 baseball player’s strike ends their chances to negotiate the multi-million-dollar contract of Pirates outfielder Al Martin (the second time a player’s strike has terrible consequences on his career).
Be careful what you wish for 771
The author’s “last hurrah” as a swingin’ bachelor is a doosie when he has a brief yet scandalously wild affair with an adult film star that ends in a crazy weekend at the “porn convention” in Vegas, but when the relationship hits too close to home he realizes he is on the wrong side of the moral equation, and must re-commit to the Lord.
City of Angels 778
Steve’s prayers are answered when at 35 he unexpectedly finds his calling in life as a writer, ending years of personal and professional wandering, writing a screenplay about the life of playboy, bon vivant and former Los Angeles Angels pitcher Bo Belinsky.
On the Hollywood trail with “Dale the Snail” 793
The author’s screenplay is optioned by Dale Crase, who is associated with the production company owned by the son and grandson of It’s a Wonderful Life director Frank Capra, but initial elation is replaced by frustration over the incompetence of “Dale the Snail” (1995-98).
“The better angels of our nature” 820
Travers moves to Los Angeles with his beautiful new blonde girlfriend with a past, Blake, living in a house near the ocean in Hermosa Beach (happiness is finally his when he gets Elizabeth on weekends), but after being manipulated against his wishes into a marriage proposal, finds that breaking up with her was the best thing that could have happened.
LaLa Land, a.k.a. “development hell” 836
Travers writes numerous screenplays, dealing with the ruggedly competitive film world, earning money as a “writer for hire” and “script doctor,” leading him enticingly close to deals with major agents, producers and the actor James Woods, among many others; but a dispute with a producer over contractual money owed leads him to re-consider his options.
“Dot.bomb” 873
In 1999, Steve Travers finally attains his dreams as a writer when, after covering prep sports for the L.A. Daily News and Los Angeles Times, he lands a terrific job as the lead columnist of a fabulous sports magazine in the L.A. beach enclave of Marina Del Rey, but his faith is tested when within a month of each other he is fired as part of the magazine’s ultimate failure in the “dot.bomb” disaster of 2000, and as a result his wedding to Blake is called off.
The column 911
When Blake learns Steve has cheated on her with other women, she leaves him, he “lands on his feet” as the high-paying lead sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, but when that paper also downsizes in the wake of the Internet failure of the early 2000s, Travers finds himself out of work and at his all-time low point; but when 9/11 hits he realizes he could have been there had he gotten the job in 1984, and determines to walk a Christian path once and for all.
Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman 940
Having established good relations with the Giants’ slugger during his Examiner tenure (Bonds’s 73-homer year, 2001), the author gets him to agree to an authorized autobiography, but drops out of the deal when the offers are not high enough (Mel Berger of William Morris’s performance being “below sea level”), leaving Steve to write a Best Selling biography that is a finalist for a 2002 Casey Award as “best baseball book of the year,” and ultimately much media interest in his experiences with the three key players of baseball’s “steroid era,” Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds (but for the third time is affected by a baseball strike when the 2002 threat causes a delay in the book’s re-printing in paperback, costing him thousands).
The writer’s life 986
Hot off a successful first book, Travers thinks that publishers and agents will come to him, but rudely discovers otherwise when from 2002 to 2004 he writes a novel and a history book without garnering offers, fails to find representation, and then must survive writing freelance articles
Savaged 1013
In 2009-10, book offers and potential deals with celebrities (Ernie Banks, Rick Barry, Michael Savage) are “stolen” from him when he creates a million-dollar book deal that, until he thought of and created it, lacked existence.
Alabama vs. USC and the book that changed my life 1027
Finally, the path of long term literary success begins when his USC connections bear fruit, leading to the writing of a book about the seminal sports moment of the Civil Rights Movement (not until after legal wrangling among a variety of personalities), leading to the book’s development into a major motion picture with heavyweight Hollywood producers Kerry McCluggage (Miami Vice) and Barry Kemp (Coach, Patch Adams).
“The next great USC historian” 1075
Travers writes four books on USC football history, including one National Book Network “top 100 seller” (making him a popular speaker and lecturer at the school), but sees the ugly side of sainted coach Pete Carroll.
The cool of the evening 1090
After years and years of personal and professional struggle, Steve Travers hits the big-time, writing a total of 16 books, seven for Triumph, a division of New York publishing giant Random House; various histories and narratives; lands a top Manhattan agent (Ian Kleinert); and for the first time establishes himself as a bona fide American success story.
Sweet Elizabeth 1106
After all the heartache of divorce, physical separation and anguish, Steve can thank God that His greatest gift, his beautiful daughter Elizabeth Travers, is a success too, having grown up in Orange County, California, overcoming a mysterious teenage health scare before attending the University of Oregon, then landing an excellent job with a major corporation in Newport Beach; all the while lauding the perseverance of her father as one of her major inspirations!
Amazing grace 1110
At 51 years of age in 2010, Steve Travers can finally look back upon his life and piece together the turning points and epiphanies that shaped who he is, most notably how the 2000 “dot.bomb” failure of StreetZebra saved him from what would have been a disastrous, blasphemous marriage to a fallen women; how 9/11 led the Holy Spirit into his life more powerfully than ever before; leading him to a decade in which he has, if not turned away from his sins, greatly reduced his appetite and love for them; thus of his own free will reading the Holy Bible every single day (about six times cover-to-cover, Old Testament and New Testament in the six years hence); how a Christian radio scholar, Brother Harold Camping, predicts the Second Coming of Christ on May 21, 2011; and Steve’s desire to let people know whether this event happens or not, Jesus is Lord and because of Him he has faith that maybe, just maybe, a wretch like Steve Travers can be saved, and so too can you!
Index 1117
Styles 1167
Aliases 1169
There does not exist in the compass of language an arrangement of words to express so much as the means of effecting a counter-revolution. The means must be an obliteration of knowledge; and it has never yet been discovered how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.
- Thomas Paine
To Mom, Dad and Elizabeth;
In the end the only ones who really care
Some names have been changed, or last names omitted, in order to protect the guilty
“You can’t go home again”
I became a writer because of my grandfather, Charles Stevens Travers. Like most things in my life, I went about it ass-backwards. I do believe God put me on this Earth to write, but I can also state I probably became a writer only because I failed at most everything else I tried before that. It was kind of a desperation move, but then again God works in mysterious ways.
Somehow, the profound influence Granddaddy had on me did not truly permeate my conscience until I was in my mid-30s, but then again, better late than never. Every possible advantage was given to me. Good fortune reigned down upon me. I was born in the perfect time and place. I came from the right family. Every natural gift was bestowed upon me. Every door was opened wide. I grew up in the perfect environment and attended the best schools. When I was 31 years old I was considered a “golden boy” with a dazzling resume – USC graduate, pro baseball, law school, Army service, political connections/experience, married, family, homeowner - and unlimited prospects for the future. I still managed to fail.
I came from a family of succeeders. Failure was not an option, but I identified with a quote from Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in The Doors movie when he said there were times he felt like he had the “soul of a clown that forces me to blow it at the most crucial of moments.” I always blew it at the most crucial of moments. I still do.
But Granddaddy shaped me. He and my father, too, but looking back much of what my father did was a continuation of what his father did with him, and also with me. Granddaddy was born in San Francisco, California in 1880. His father was an attorney who set up his practice in San Francisco during a bustling time, the years after the Gold Rush when lawyers were needed to settle claims, disputes, land grabs and new legislative matters. It was still the “wild, wild West,” when outlaws roamed the streets; when sheriffs and courts were finally starting to “civilize” the post-Civil War American frontier.
San Francisco was a Barbary Coast city where anything went. In many ways, it owes much of its current reputation to this period. Anybody could come to San Francisco and stake his claim; to make a new life, to re-invent himself. The Travers family was of old East Coast hierarchy, but some members of the clan did decide to make their way out West, to start anew. Granddaddy gravitated towards journalism, writing for various newspapers. He was with the old San Francisco Call, for whom he covered the 1906 Great Earthquake. He was a contemporary of Jack London. He married my grandmother, Margaret Josue. They had three children; Charles (born in 1913), Dorothy (born in 1915), and my father, Donald (born in 1918). In the mid-1920s, my grandparents split up, eventually divorcing, a particularly devastating event for women with children in those days.
Hollywood sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere, as a thriving American industry in the years after World War I. Granddaddy decided to give it a try. He moved to Los Angeles, buying a house in fashionable Echo Park near where Dodger Stadium is today. His children came to stay with him, at various times living in Los Angeles with him in the Roaring ‘20s. My dad recalled the opening of the Bullock’s department store on Wilshire Boulevard in downtown L.A. as being an enormous event worthy of a parade.
My grandfather wrote screenplays for the silent movies and later for the “talkies” when the technology of sound changed the film industry forever. He also wrote stage plays, mainly for his brother Reginald, a Shakespearean thespian of Broadway and West Coast fame. Granddaddy started a magazine called Out and About in Hollywood, which covered the gossip and doings of movie stars in the 1920s and 1930s. The magazine was a pre-cursor to the modern Hollywood Reporter or Daily Variety. Prior to the Hayes Codes, Hollywood was full of titillation, even on-screen nudity. The press was every bit as salacious as today’s National Enquirer. Unlike the modern gossip rags, the public believed most of what was written.
The “it girl” of the era was the sensational screen siren Clara Bow, who apparently was rescued from an abusive childhood of poverty, elevated to stardom, quickly becoming the object of sexual fascination. The great movie star John Wayne was at the time beginning to make his mark on the silver screen. A former pulling guard named Marion Morrison for coach Howard Jones’s football team at the University of Southern California, he changed his name and now arranged for Trojan players to get extra work in those pre-NCAA days as extras and stuntmen. Silent films depicting Biblical flocks or Napoleon’s Grande Armée were made up for the most part of USC football players.
Apparently, Miss Bow threw rather extravagant parties at her hilltop home on Saturday nights. USC players were invited on occasion. The gossip trades got wind of it, blowing relatively innocent parties into wild sex orgies, with incredible details of powerful Trojan football studs servicing Clara’s endless sexual needs. Apparently none of it was true. All-American quarterback Morley Drury dated Clara once or twice but “nothing happened,” according to him. Nevertheless, the rumor had a life of its own. It lasted all the way to the Internet era, in which it as easy to find details as it is to discover it is not true. There is no record my grandfather ever promoted the rumor, but he was certainly part of the Hollywood scene in those days.
Eventually Granddaddy moved back to San Francisco. He became the editor/publisher of the Humane Society periodical, then president of the San Francisco Press Club. When I was a little boy my grandfather was still alive, a respected elder statesman of the Press Club, located downtown near Union Square. My mother and I went Christmas shopping there, as we did every year. My mother, an artist, took me inside the Press Club, then ventured upstairs to look at the art collection. She was at that time beginning a career as an accomplished oil painter. The “good ol’ boys” occupying the Press Club’s upstairs smoking room informed the ex-club president’s daughter-in-law in no uncertain terms the room was off-limits to women. That was that.
By the 1960s my grandfather was re-married to a spirited, lovely lady from Chicago named Lillian. They lived in an old-style wood frame house on Parnassus Avenue, located on the hill overlooking Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks from the UC-San Francisco Medical Center. Every Sunday almost without fail, my mother drove me from Marin County, where we lived, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and through the park, to Granddaddy’s house. It was the era of the famed “Summer of Love,” of the Free Speech Movement and anti-war protests on the Cal-Berkeley campus across the bay. I stared out the window, wide-eyed, at gyrating hippies, at half-naked girls, listening to the sounds of sitar music, or strains of The Doors, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. My mother sometimes even shielded my eyes from this manifest sin, explaining to me they were “all on drugs.” She warned me if I ever fell prey to drugs, my entire life would be over. Proof positive were the lost souls outside the car window on sunny Sunday afternoons in Golden Gate Park, on the way to visit my grandfather. It was the greatest anti-drug message of all time. I was terrified of drugs, convinced they were evil incarnate. By the time I was old enough to have a more . . . mature perspective, the most vulnerable period of possible experimentation I may have indulged in came and went.
We would park on the street and walk to the house, which was painted white. Lillian would answer the door, showering me with hugs and kisses and news, all blurted in rapid-fire manner as if everything needed to be uttered in less than a minute or be lost synapses in the air.
“Oh, how good to see you, dears . . . oh, your cousins were here a week ago . . . oh, your cousin Lisa’s grown, she’s starting high school and has a boyfriend . . .”
We ascended up a steep staircase, I always will remember the sensations of the place; a certain smell I associate to this day with old houses lived in by old people. Not unhygienic, as Lillian was a stickler for cleanliness, but quite distinct. The furniture and all the accoutrements gave the sensation of entering a time machine. When I visited my grandfather, it was no longer 1968 or 1970; it was 1930, or maybe 1940. This had a profound effect on me. My sense for history, an appreciation for things coming before me, started in that house because of those sensations.
A clock hung on the wall, loudly ticking the time away, which was totally irrelevant to me when I was in Granddaddy’s presence. There was no place I wanted to be, nobody I enjoyed being with more. My cousins – his various grandchildren – who visited him far less frequently than my weekly excursions, loved him, but they were part of the modern world, anxious to return to that world. I was part of his world, a part of the past. Right from the very beginning this was my nature, my character make-up. I was, if not a 19th Century person, at least an early-20th Century guy. This had a profound impact on me, my perceptions of the world, my relationships with people, the way I inter-acted with peers and they way they reacted to me, not always with pleasant results. Yet, this was my rock. I could cling to it. Because I visited my grandfather every Sunday, I was a part of history now.
The house had a back porch with a glorious view of Golden Gate Park and the city skyline beyond. Kezar Stadium was just down a eucalyptus tree-shrouded hill, so close 49er crowds could be heard on football Sundays. From the porch I caught the scoreboard results and even action from the 10-yard line into one of the end zones.
But before any of that, my first act was to run to my grandfather. He was old, in his late 80s, sitting in a rocking chair near the window. A big TV was a few feet away, but usually turned off when we arrived. Some light music played on the record player.
Granddaddy’s hair was receded. His face was craggy, angular, still aristocratic. He was well covered, wearing a blanket. His smile was pure. He loved me. He was kind. I hugged the old man. All was right with the world. If nobody ever looked at the clock and said, “Well, it’s time to go,” I would gladly have stayed there with him for all times. As it was, I had to be dragged, sometimes literally, away from him when indeed we did leave. The ride home was always a combination of melancholia; sadness the visit was over, a desultory week with my dumbellionite schoolmates ahead of me, but anticipation already building for the next visit.
I never sat there with my grandfather, unable to think of anything to say. We talked freely and easily, the very best of chums. He asked the usual questions, about school and baseball. Whereby those questions from my parents might be met with sullenness, Granddaddy was painted rosy scenarios and glorious portraits this boy’s life, mainly braggadocios descriptions of my little league exploits; a no-hitter thrown, a grand slam home run hit, a fabulous scoop-and-throw from the shortstop position to save a run from scoring.
He never found fault or criticism with me. I certainly loved my mother and father every bit as much as I loved Granddaddy, but that relationship was profoundly different. My parents knew all my faults in intimate detail, making no effort to hide this knowledge. In fact, they used it to knock me off course, even to embarrass or discredit me. Granddaddy knew only love. It was like Heaven, unencumbered by Original Sin. All my immoralities were forgiven in his presence.
I was a handful; a wild, active, athletic kid. I played all sports and was good at it, in need of physical outlet. Sometimes I ran about the living room, to Lillian’s consternation. She told me to stop acting “like a wild Indian.” Sometimes my mother left on a shopping excursion. I used her absence to “go crazy.” Lillian described my stomping, wild antics upon her return. I played innocent, showing no sign of the ”wild Indian.” But Lillian loved me very much. Her admonitions never carried any form of spite. She had no children of her own and was happy to have a youngster in her life. I am sure of all Granddaddy’s offspring I was her favorite, as I am sure I was Granddaddy’s. At least this was my distinct impression, and the truth I hung onto.
Lillian always produced crackers with a precise, cold slice of butter, some Vienna sausages, and apricot nectar. It was delicious and satisfying. I would eat and drink with my grandfather in contented silence. He would make a sound indicating the taste was pleasing. I would smile. It was glorious.
But what I remember best, and what had the most lasting impression on me, was the playing of sports board games. He gave me a football game and let me be California’s Wonder Teams, the Golden Bears of the great Brick Muller. It was an old game, tattered. It probably sat in storage for 40 years before he broke it out for me. None of my cousins showed the slightest interest in it, but to me it was the Holy Grail. I imagined wearing leather helmets, playing in front of a “fur coat and raccoon hat” crowd at Memorial Stadium. In keeping with the old ways I ran the ball. I had no use for the forward pass because I knew back in the day football more resembled full frontal infantry assaults. I was living in the 1920s courtesy of my grandfather. Granddaddy always let me win, delighting as I mounted an 80-yard touchdown drive with no time left to achieve glory.
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