Many parents did not want their children to become ballplayers.

"They didn't want me to be a ballplayer," acknowledged Jesse Hubbard, "[they] wanted me to become a railroad man, a brakeman."

Buck O'Neil relates a similar story of his mother and father not wanting him to play ball, but to come back and finish school.

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When Buck was raised in Sarasota, Florida, he anticipated ending school in the eighth grade, like the rest of his generation.

"I walked by that white high school many a day," he recalled, "but I couldn't go in that school."

So after the eighth grade he went to work on a Sarasota celery farm, in the back-dirt muck of rural Northwest Florida. One day as he sat behind some packing boxes in the fields, he said, "Damn, got to be something better than this."

His father heard him and on the way home, said to his son, "J., you said there's got to be something better and there is something better, but you canÕt get it here." They talked on, and O'Neil's father insisted that the only route out of the fields was as an athlete.

"I haven't got any money to send you to college," he told his son, "but you're a pretty good athlete."

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Buck stated that 40% of Negro league players were college men, while many of their major league contemporaries were only high school graduates. The Negro League Baseball teams trained in black college towns and played all of the college teams.

Buck continually expresses his love of the game, but wonders what he might have been if he had completed college. One of his messages to kids is to stay in school.

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In his terms and in the terms of his culture, the Negro league player was a great success. The Negro Leaguer had more money, more attention, more lasting fame, and a richer life than almost all the rest of his contemporaries

When asked what he did with his life after baseball, Buck O'Neil states, "There was no life after baseball, I'm still in the game!"

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