The president as sports nut

The first chapter in Paul Zingg’s book A Good Round: A Journey Through the Landscape and Memory of Golf describes a visit to Esalen Institute, the famous New Age retreat center overlooking the Pacific in Big Sur. He went there to attend a workshop on golf as a kind of spiritual practice—the Zen of golf, if you will.

Like Zen, golf is very much about concentration, and Esalen challenged Zingg’s concentration in many ways—with stunning ocean vistas, gorgeous flowers and, oh yes, naked human bodies.

On one occasion, workshop participants were led to a small rise and told to loft some balls over a water obstacle below, a swimming pool. Just as Zingg was getting ready to swing, a man and a woman, both naked, entered the pool and began swimming across it—doing the backstroke.

The couple waved to the golfers. Go ahead, they yelled. Don’t worry about us.

Zen-like, Zingg concentrated. His shot cleared the pool.

Paul Zingg is, of course, the new president of Chico State University. He’s a historian by training and an administrator by profession. He’s also a 6-handicap golfer who started caddying at age 13, at the Essex Country Club in New Jersey, and has been playing ever since. And he’s a writer who’s authored numerous articles on sports as well as two books on golf and a biography of 1920s Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Harry Hooper (1993’s Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life) and co-authored, with Mark Madeiros, a history of the Pacific Coast League titled Runs, Hits, and an Era: The Pacific Coast League, 1903-58 that came out in 1994.

Zingg played varsity baseball, basketball and golf in college, at Belmont Abbey College, in North Carolina. What this means is that, for the first time in its modern history, Chico State University is being led by someone who not only has played and loves sports, but also understands their cultural value and has written extensively about them.

Golf, some say, is both a sport and a path to enlightenment. This is the school of golf as mystical pursuit, popularized most famously by Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, who in 1972 wrote Golf in the Kingdom, his novelistic account of playing a wild round in Scotland with Shivas Irons, a fictional golf shaman who convinces Murphy that his swing reflects his soul.

Zingg’s two golf books (his most recent, In Search of the Golf Gods: An Irish Journey, is nearing publication) are in this vein. In A Round of Golf he even pays homage of sorts to Murphy by attending the Esalen workshop before heading off to Scotland to tour the links there and meditate on golf, its history (particularly in the land of its origin) and the joys of a round well played.

As its title suggests, his newest book continues both the quasi-mystical themes and the format of his earlier meditation on golf, only this time in Ireland. Zingg’s contemplations are well balanced by his descriptions of the courses and their challenges, as well as stories of players who’ve walked the fairways before him.

These are impressionistic books, nicely crafted personal essays rather than histories or analyses. Zingg cites George Plimpton’s observation that the smaller the ball, the better the writing. “I’ve moved from basketball to baseball to golf,” he says. “Not sure if marbles is next….”

If golf brings out the contemplative in Zingg, baseball seems to bring out the historian. Runs, Hits, and an Era is an engaging history of the colorful Pacific Coast League, which in its heyday drew huge crowds to stadiums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle and other cities.

It was a quality league, almost as good as the Major Leagues, and launched the careers of such players as Ted Williams, Lefty Gomez, Minnie Minoso and Willie McCovey. Zingg and Madeiros’ book is a straightforward chronological history with nearly 100 pictures and lots of great stories about the players, announcers, owners and fans who made the PCL such an important part of West Coast life for so long.

His other baseball book, the biography of Harry Hooper, was reissued in paperback this year. (Like Runs, Hits, and an Era, it’s published by the University of Illinois Press.) It’s a major work, a 312-page portrait of a remarkable man who heretofore had been largely overlooked by sports historians.

Hooper was never a star, but he was a superb fielder (he still holds the record for most World Series assists by a right fielder) and a respectable batter, and he also was a team leader who played better under pressure, once leading the Red Sox to four consecutive World Series wins.

Hooper’s life is a classic up-by-the-bootstraps tale. His father was an immigrant sharecropper in California, a figure right out of Steinbeck. Harry was a good student and a better athlete, and he won a scholarship to St. Mary’s College, where he studied engineering and excelled on the baseball team. He went on to play briefly in the PCL, then, in 1909, joined the Red Sox, where he remained until being traded to the Chicago White Sox in 1924. He retired from playing in 1928, coached at Princeton for a number of years, then returned to California to become postmaster in Capitola. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971, at the age of 83. He died four years later.

Zingg says he was intrigued by Hooper as “Everyman” rather than “Superman” and benefited from having access to unique materials, including “scores of personal letters and correspondence” as well as Hooper’s diary from his rookie year with the Red Sox, which Ken Burns featured in his PBS television series on baseball. “His was a story just waiting to be told.”

Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life is a valuable look at the early history of the Major Leagues at a time when they were being transformed from a ragtag—and not very respectable—collection of regional leagues into the admired professional leagues we know today through the story of one of their most intriguing players.

These books, as valuable as they are, aren’t big sellers, and Zingg hasn’t made much money from them, but he doesn’t seem to care. "They’re labors of love," he says, smiling broadly. "I enjoy writing them."