One of the most influential teachers I ever had didn’t, so far as I know, have any formal training as an educator.

Last week Jim Bouton, the person most responsible for persuading me that reading wasn’t just for nerds, passed away at age 80.

Back when I started my adolescence, which ended up lasting close to a quarter-century, I was willfully averse to reading. It required sitting still, and thus not dribbling a basketball, hitting a baseball, throwing a football, or doing other things I knew for a fact were far more important than looking at a bunch of words. No amount of effort on the part of any parent, teacher or anyone else who cared about me was going to change my mind on the subject; if it was literature, I wanted no part of it.

But in the spring of 1969, 30-year-old Jim Bouton was preparing to compete for a spot on the roster of the Seattle Pilots, an expansion team preparing for their first (and as it turned out, only) season of major league baseball. A mere half-decade removed from his status as one of baseball’s best pitchers (he had won a combined 41 games for the American League pennant-winning New York Yankees of 1963-64, including two in the ’64 World Series), the now sore-armed Bouton was also, unbeknownst to the team’s management and his prospective teammates, taking daily notes and subsequently transcribing them into a tape recorder in preparation for compiling a diary about the life of a professional baseball player, one which he hoped might someday be publishable.

Bouton’s opus turned out to be a runaway best-seller, and ultimately received remarkable critical acclaim. In 1995 the New York Public Library, celebrating its centennial, listed “Ball Four” as a “Book of the Century,” the only sports book named out of 159 titles. Seven years later Sports Illustrated rated it as the third-greatest sports book of all time.

But even before Ball Four came out in 1970 it was universally condemned by professional baseball’s establishment, most notably the sport’s commissioner, Bowie Kuhn. After some excerpts appeared in Look Magazine about a month prior to the book’s official release, Kuhn and his army of hidebound, reliably pliable sycophants in the sporting press (it wasn’t called “The Media” back then) loudly and ceaselessly proclaimed the material contained in Bouton’s book was so salacious it would ruin baseball, and by extension our great nation. It was in large part thanks to those shrill objections I decided I had to read Ball Four. However, I did not possess what a hardcover bestseller went for back then (a stratospheric $6.95!) and our town library hadn’t yet acquired a copy.

My father, who had without any discernible success tried to interest me in the works of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and Kurt Vonnegut, wasn’t a big baseball fan, but he recognized his oldest child was, which was why he brought home a paperback edition (priced at a far more reasonable $1.25) of Ball Four one weekday evening the following spring. Prior to handing it over after dinner that night, he cautioned me sternly, both about certain words used and some activities depicted in the book which neither he nor my mother endorsed.

I nodded soberly, thanked him, excused myself from the table, retired to the semi-privacy of the room I shared with my brother, and commenced reading. I finished the 371st (and last) page at about 5 o’clock the following morning, pausing only to deal with my sleep-deprived sibling’s protests about all the chuckles and bed-shaking belly laughs emanating from the top bunk.

These days the childhood friends I’m still in touch with laugh out loud when they consider both my present job (encouraging and honing literacy skills in young people), and my devotion to it, which is nearly as passionate as my own current love for the printed word is.  My being a reading teacher, one old friend says, is the equivalent of Hugh Hefner preaching abstinence, Frank Perdue endorsing vegetarianism, or Ralph Nader hawking Corvairs on a used car lot.

I had 20-20 vision back when I pointedly chose to avoid books. These days reading is one of my passions, but I am utterly unable to do so without the aid of glasses.

Even more ironically, I never personally met the man who brought about the 180-degree turn I made regarding my attitude concerning the consumption of literature. But I did send him a copy of an article I wrote several years ago which credited him with awakening my inner reader.

I can only imagine the smile on his face when he typed his electronic, one-line response to me: “Another young mind spoiled!”

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