It’s so hard to unhitch James Earl Jones from the seminal scene in the movie ‘Field of Dreams.’ First, it involves a dramatic rendering of a speech. If James Earl Jones were reading the menu at Waffle House, you’d sit through it in pure rapture until he decided he was finished. The man could deliver a line.
Second, though, that scene, the “people will come” scene — that’s the whole ballgame. That is almost everything that the movie, based on the brilliant novel by W.P. Kinsella, was pointing toward in all of the moments that preceded it. And Jones’ performance elevates all of it and negates the mawkishness that seeps into other scenes in the film. He even nails the low-key great lines, like, “For it is money they have, and peace they lack.”
So yes, no one will separate Jones, who died Monday at age 93, from the heart of one of the most famous sports movies ever made. But if you can believe it, that actually shorts James Earl Jones’ contributions to sports media during his rich, varied career.
Jones is certainly Terence Mann, who first torments and then assists Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella character. But more than a decade before that film, Jones played the slugging catcher Leon Carter, one of the featured roles in the all-time underrated “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.”
And well before any of that, Jones played the lead in “The Great White Hope,” a 1970 film centered around a boxer named Jack Jefferson, a character based on the champion prize fighter Jack Johnson. Jones previously starred in the Broadway play that begat that movie; he won a Tony for the play and was nominated for an Oscar for the film.
He was, of course, Mr. Mertle in “The Sandlot,” and he famously recited the national anthem while accompanied by a choir at the 1993 MLB All-Star Game. If you visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, you will hear Jones’ thundering intonations as he narrates the history of those leagues over vintage film footage. A University of Michigan alum, he lent his pipes to the football team’s hype video, which is played before every home game.
Jones, that is to say, was immersed in sports media in ways that go beyond any one movie, no matter how well known. But it’s the thread that runs through his theatrical assignments that makes his career choices so fascinating.
Jones once said that he felt his contribution to the civil rights movement lay in the roles he played that dealt with racial issues. He had many such roles, and it’s noteworthy how often they were in movies about sports, at least nominally.
“The Great White Hope” was the fictionalized study of Jack Johnson’s successful but self-destructive career as a Black boxer in a white industry. “Bingo Long” was about a barnstorming baseball team filled with ex-Negro leagues players, but the movie’s real underpinning was the segregation of the sport and the struggle for equal pay.
Mr. Mertle, the (mostly unseen) junkyard owner the kids all feared in “The Sandlot,” was revealed to be not only kindly, but a former player and friendly rival to Babe Ruth back in the 1920s — but of course he could not play in the same league as Ruth.
Even one of Jones’ most dramatic acting roles, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play “Fences,” saw him playing a sanitation worker whose dreams of a baseball career had been thwarted by racial segregation.
Time and again, Jones was honored for his work, and eventually that voice – so unmistakable – carried him to a place beyond ordinary theatrical fame. But in his own way, Jones was also building a legacy of telling important stories, not just entertaining ones.
He was Darth Vader, sure. But he was more. And Jones understood sports, both on stage and in film, as one way to process his own American experience – but also as a way to share that experience with people who might not otherwise be interested in hearing the story.
That isn’t a novel idea; it’s been done by innumerable artists through American history. But few have executed it so well. The fact that it worked so often is an ultimate testament to Jones’ excellence at his chosen profession. We’ll be hearing the voice for a long time to come.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
