Charlie Manuel stays true to his roots

Editor's note: This story, published in the Daily News on March 7, 2005, details Charlie Manuel's upbringing, including his close relationship with his mother, June, who died early Friday.

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BUENA VISTA, Va. - You have to pass a sign proclaiming this town the home of the new Phillies manager, this small burg by the Maury River, which eventually connects to the Chesapeake Bay.

It is an hour from Charlottesville, hard in the Shenandoah Valley, a little more than an hour from the West Virginia line. This is the womb from which Charles Fuqua Manuel sprang upon the world, 6-foot-4 of ornery, affable hillbilly. Here, "Fook" - so nicknamed by his pals because of the middle name he shares with the family doctor - began to become the wise and patient teacher of baseball.

At 61, life has used him hard. But when you talk to him, he seems little the worse for wear after a marriage, two children, a divorce, and a tumultuous baseball career chosen over basketball, his first love. Baseball took him to 12 states and two Japanese cities. He was tough enough to play three seasons in the majors with a 2-inch bone spur in his left heel, tough enough to play 2 days after Jerry Reuss shattered his jaw, broke his nose and knocked out six teeth when he hit Manuel with a pitch in a minor league game.

Manuel chuckled at the irony that he is cast as Larry Bowa's cool-headed replacement, considering Manuel says he used to manhandle his minor leaguers and exploded at some point nearly every night.

"I had a terrible bleepin' temper," Manuel says.

With the help of life's pains, and a 6-year immersion in Japanese culture, Manuel has mellowed. He has survived a heart attack, quadruple bypass surgery, a blocked and infected colon, kidney cancer and a life of others mocking his accent, assuming his ignorance.

"People have always talked about my accent," Manuel says. "I've never changed it, never been ashamed of it. That's exactly who I am."

That's why he's still "Boona Vista," through and through and forever. That, and this: He loves the sign, to be sure. But the sign takes second place to his favorite landmark: a replica of the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue.

Says Manuel as he enters the town, "I think that's one of the coolest things about Boona Vista."

Just to the northeast of neighboring Lexington, nestled into the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lies Virginia Military Institute. As a high schooler, Manuel would sling his basketball shoes and a bag with a bologna sandwich over his shoulder and run the 8 miles to VMI barefoot to play pickup basketball all day long.

The Maury River runs along Route 60, which connects the towns; it's the river where, as a boy, Manuel fished with a cane pole. Just to the northeast of Buena Vista, tucked into the side of another mountain, is a clearing where Manuel and his brothers and their friends would spend hours as boys, hitting rocks with sticks.

They built fires there and played basketball into the night, shooting at a hoop nailed to a pole. His friend, Bobby "Flash" Huffman, who now owns a painting business, tells a story of when he and "Fook" went there and "Fook" killed a squirrel from 100 yards with a shotgun.

That's where Manuel prepared for life before high school, where he would become a basketball and baseball star. The baseball field behind Parry McCluer High School has shrunk; only a few hundred can watch games there now; at one time, there was enough seating area to handle 2,000. The rightfield fence used to be 330 feet; now, it's 295. And there is only a field where there once was a playground.

"You could hit a home run if you hit one in the monkey bars," Manuel says.

Lovingly, Melissa Martin, 49, his companion for 10 years and now his fiancee, watches Manuel help a photographer set up a shot of him posing at the field. It is a nippy and wet January day. Manuel wears a dress shirt and slacks, but when the woman with the camera suggests building a platform to improve the shot, Manuel gives no thought to ruining his clothes. He picks up an old tire with each hand and lugs them to the proper site; then, in shiny shoes, he stands on them. And Martin's eyes shine.

"People tend to judge him or classify him because he's Southern," Martin says. "He's just very comfortable with who he is."

Says Phillies slugger Jim Thome, whom Manuel mentored since Thome was drafted in 1989: "He's the definition of, 'What you see is what you get.' "

What you get differs little from what you got when he lived in Buena Vista.

Manuel points to the corner of the gym at Parry McCluer, where he once hit a last-second jump shot to give his seventh-grade team a win. He couldn't afford sneakers.

So he played barefoot.

He signed a 3-year contract in October to manage the Phillies. Still, he drives a 1999 Chevy Suburban with 123,000 miles on it. He lives in the same home he bought in 1996 in Winter Haven, Fla., spring home of the Indians.

The blood runs true there.

His mother, June, lives in the same warm, brick, four-bedroom home in Buena Vista she's occupied for the last 40 years. She turned 84 on New Year's Day, and by all evidence she's got plenty of life left; she's spry and sharp and mobile, and her mother, Ruby Edmonds, lived to be 100.

"Shoot," Manuel says, "I look older than Mama."

The third of 11 children, Manuel never lived in that house, though his parents always owned it. When the Twins signed him, the Manuels lived a few blocks north of Pentecostal Holiness Church, where Charles Sr. would preach on Sundays. He died at 43, when Charlie was a 19-year-old senior, so his mother sold that house and moved down the street, where June housed nine of the kids in the three-bedroom house - three bunk beds in one bedroom, two bunk beds and one large bed in the other.

Manuel's father, an evangelist, opened four churches before he died of problems related to his diabetes and bad heart. After his death, Manuel spurned offers to play college basketball at Penn and North Carolina so he could accept the $20,000 signing bonus from the Minnesota Twins to help his family. His mother offered no false sentiment.

"I thought he'd be better off if he signed the contract," she says.

In his presence and in his absence the kids turned out fine, to June's delight. Many live nearby.

"They're all alive. They all have good jobs. And they all have two or three cars," she says, beaming. "And none of them have been in jail."

"Well," Manuel says, devilish grin spreading, "I've been close a few times."

The murder that he and his brothers used to commit in their back yard might get him jailed these days. The object of their football games was less finesse and more aggression. You had the ball, you were fair game for pile-ons; you break a run, you'd better be on the open side of the field. There was no greater moment in a contest than when somebody got smeared into the side of the brick house.

"I like football. It's the one game you can play mad," Manuel says, the grin now crooked, indulgent. "We had broken bones, split lips, guys get knocked out. We used to tell people around town, 'You want to make a man out of your son? Send him down to our house for a weekend.' "

And heaven help the boyfriends his sisters brought home.

It wasn't all assault and battery, of course. The fellowship of a ballgame on TV drew the masses, too.

"There would be so many boys inside the house I'd have to go outside," June says.

Always, Charlie was the best of them. He couldn't stand it any other way. In eighth grade he told his friend that he wanted to play high school ball the next year: Not on the freshman team, not on junior varsity, but on the varsity. He knew Johnny Snyder was the best basketball player in the high school, and that Snyder would be a senior when Manuel hit high school the next year, but Manuel wanted to play. Not on a freshman team, not on junior varsity; on the varsity.

So he practiced all summer on the makeshift basketball court behind his daddy's church - a basketball court occupying space that his father planned to use to expand the building but wouldn't, considering it was Charlie's only hoop. Sure enough, Manuel made the varsity team as a freshman.

"I had to be better than [Snyder]," Manuel says.

June says, "Even then, I don't think he realized how hard he worked. That's what got him where he is."

Pushing himself to work got him where he was, when he spent parts of six seasons in the majors before landing in the Japanese leagues for six more, during which he hit 189 home runs, 49 in the 1980 season, then a record for Americans in the Pacific League, and won the league MVP award the year before, also a first for an American. Pushing others to work drew him to coach when he came back to America.

His brother Roger, 3 years his junior, found that out when Manuel was a senior in high school. On the same court where Manuel made himself good enough, he pushed Roger.

"I want to be as good as you," Roger told Charlie.

"Why do you want to be just as good as me?" Charlie replied. "Why don't you want to be better than me?"

The undiagnosed bone spur hindered Manuel's major league career, but that's not why he failed. From 1969 to '75, he got into just 242 games, often as a pinch-hitter - a role his ultra-intense personality did not fit.

He didn't help himself. "I was kind of a whiner," he says, more likely to concentrate on what he deserved and why than on what he needed to do to get it.

He didn't blame the Dodgers for selling him to the Yakult Swallows of Japan's Central League - he's grateful for it, in fact. There, in his introductory physical, the bone spur was discovered. He played on it for a few weeks until it came through the callused skin on his heel and required surgery to remove.

While he convalesced, a nurse presented him with a book on the Japanese perspective of World War II. It was a window to the culture's emphasis on discipline and duty and control, all areas in which Manuel found himself lacking. His experience in Japan helped him cool off in his six seasons, the first three and the last in Yakult, the other two in Kintetsu, in Japan's Pacific League. Manuel's tension and temper had made him a lousy choice to pinch-hit, a poor player in the spotlight.

He says: "They taught me to play the right way. I became more self-controlled. I studied the game more. I became a more positive force. I was defeated before I stepped into the batter's box."

Yakult manager Tatsuro Hirooka saw that problem. After Manuel delivered an uninspired rookie season, with a .243 average and 11 home runs in 84 games, he pulled Manuel aside.

"He told me if I hit the ball in the game the way I hit it in practice, we'd have a pretty good player," Manuel says. "He told me to relax. Focus. Concentrate. He slowed me down."

Over his next five seasons, Manuel batted .311 with 178 home runs and was able to find his wa, his harmony.

"Japanese culture taught me there's more to life than just me; that no one's better than me, and I'm better than no one," Manuel says. "I started looking at everything that way."

Well, not everything. Not right away.

"I could still get as mad as anybody alive," says Manuel, who found managing in the minors a whole new test of his patience. "I used to get fuming mad at my players. I'd pick 'em up and throw 'em. And umpires? I cussed them out all the time. I was always getting thrown out."

Constant arguing also frayed at his marriage. The birth of his second child, Julie, in 1979, extended the marriage until 1994, through his minor league managing career. Eventually, Manuel says, he figured, "Maybe she would be happier if I just left." And so he did.

That was a long time ago, before he met Melissa Martin in 1995, before she stood by him through the ailments and surgeries and the scares. Now, little makes Manuel angry.

That, certainly, will be tested.

Manuel, fired in the 2002 season during a regime change in Cleveland, has never known anything like managing a historically bad baseball team on the East Coast. He has not known the cruelty when things turn sour: The constant criticism and the scrutiny, the mocking of his accent and his mannerisms.

Even then, he says that he won't change the way he talks or walks or approaches his life.

"I can block that out," Manuel says. "I learned that in Japan, too."

Besides, if "Fook" changed too much he'd eventually have to change back. He told Melissa on the January trip to Buena Vista, "I'd like to get a little place here somewhere again. Get away."

And go home.