The Little and the Beleaguered
“I don’t think this book happens without Alex Kotlowitz’s book,” a writer named Daniel Coyle was telling us this week. The book Coyle has just published is called Harball: A Season in the Projects; it’s about Little League ball at Cabrini-Green, and an article adapted from it appears in this issue of the Reader.
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Inner-city children in danger became a preoccupation of the Chicago papers when Dantrell Davis was murdered at Cabrini-Green in 1992. What separates Hardball and There Are No Children Here from that largely admirable journalism is the books’ painstaking observation of specific kids over time–which required not just going there but being there. Hardball adds an appealing strain of adult–the coaches, “white, college-educated young men with short hair, suburban backgrounds, and orthodontically corrected teeth.” The kids remind us of who we once were, and, as Coyle observed, “the coaches are like we are.”
Thanks to Oprah Winfrey, Kotlowitz’s book became a TV movie. With its added ingredients of sports and yuppies, Coyle’s has already been sold to Paramount for half a million dollars.
Because of that, not despite it, he’s now an “apostle” for gun control. “Because every second you’re there all it takes is one pull of a kid’s finger,” he explained. “It would be a very different place if Cabrini were as tough and violent as it is with no guns. You can handle the concept of someone coming up and beating you up. But that’s different from the threat of someone, from a place you can’t see–the coaches would nervously joke about how they would imagine a scope on their back.”
If Coyle is the invisible but omnipresent coach in a book in which every coach is secondary, the movie will be different. “In the book the kids were the center,” Coyle said. “For this movie it’s going to be much more a focus on the coaches. That’s the way they’re writing it for several reasons, one of them being their own commercial sense. If you want to make it a successful movie you have to have a bankable personality, and there aren’t too many bankable 12-year-old personalities. I don’t think anyone’s suffering under the illusion this will be a documentary.”
Last November an op-ed piece Garza had written for the Tribune showed up in Spanish in Domingo. It had arrived there via the small Hispanic Link News Service, which is distributed to subscribers by the giant Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Garza says she called Domingo, talked to her Tribune editor, then told Hispanic Link that in the future anything of hers it picked up had to be embargoed in Chicago.
