If Eddie was the King, then Rich was the Prince

By Scott Benjamin

They say that the best jobs to take are the ones where the initial expectations are low and the potential for short to intermediate-term success are high.

The first part of that formula doesn’t apply when you try to succeed The King.

This is not about taking over the stage at the old International Hotel in Las Vegas for Elvis.

We’re talking about pitching on the mound where King Eddie Feigner reigned.

He formed a barnstorming four-man softball team – The King and His Court - in 1946 and proceeded to annex 9,743 victories, 141,517 strike outs, 930 no hitters, 238 perfect games, and raised enough money for local charities to finance a savings and loan. The itinerary included USO tours, community centers and prisons.

“Freak of nature,” his successor, Rich Hoppe, 75, said in a recent phone interview with Patch.com from his home in Los Angeles. “I knew that we would never see again. There was presence about him.”

Hoppe pitched for a couple of show teams before ascending to the Court. By the time he hurled their grand finale on August 27, 2011, he had played in nearly 7,000 games in 41 countries.

William Peace University (N.C) women’s softball coach Charlie Dobbins, a former catcher for the King and His Court, said, “If you had watched Eddie pitch in the ‘50s and ‘60s and then saw Rich pitch in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, you would not know the difference. Rich also knew how to capture a crowd.”

Hoppe met Feigner when he was a teen-ager in Bayonne, N.J. and toured with the Court in the Midwest one summer.

''He was an American living legend, bigger than the game itself,” Hoppe said. “The massive crowds, press, radio, television. He was in essence on the Mt. Rushmore of sports Icons.”

There were some similarities. Feigner served in the Marines during World War II, Hoppe in the Army during Vietnam.

However, Hoppe said pitching didn’t come naturally. For example, he switched from being a lefty to a righty.

“I never took a day off from defining and refining my role,” he said.

“Rich was very much a perfectionist. He was driven and determined,” remarked Dobbins, who formerly lived in the Danielson section of Killingly.

Hoppe’s second book, “Tales of the Last Barnstormer,” as told to Jim Droskinis. 313 pages, was published this spring. He dedicated it to Feigner’s son and daughter and included mini-profiles of many members of the King and His Court.

“Nobody practiced more,” Hoppe exclaimed. “Softball is for everybody. But fast-pitch is for athletes.”

So again, it is not easy to succeed someone whose victory column makes Cy Young’s look like that of a journeyman middle reliever, was the toast of the flyover precincts sometimes with populations of 318, and once struck out the Say Hey Kid, the Prince of McCovey’s Cove, base-stealer Maury, Brooks Robby, Roberto and Harmon The Killer in order.

Feigner not only threw a rising softball at 104 miles an hour, sometimes blind-folded, behind his back, through his legs, and even from second base – but as Curry Kirkpatrick wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1972, performed “vaudeville in the age of television.”

When a fan wears his Derek Jeter or Carlton Fisk jerseys in a restaurant, someone might comment for up to 12 seconds on how the Yankees or the Red Sox are doing in the standings.

They’re selling replica Eddie Feigner jerseys at www.kingandhiscourt.net to help finance a museum project in Washington state, near where Feigner grew up. If you wear yours, people want to talk for three and half minutes, and they’ll thank you afterwards for doing so.

Someone will take a picture of the jersey because his dad was a fast-pitch hurler in the 1950s and 1960s and played against the Court. Then 30 minutes later another guy wants to share that he got a walk while batting against the King and made it all the way to second base.

They paid admission to see Hank or Sandy or more recently Cal Jr. or Maddux – but the difference is that they were on the field playing against Eddie Feigner, and it resonates.

Hoppe explained, “Eddie said the opposing players and their fans see you tie your shoes and they see the sweat on your face. You stayed until every autograph was signed.”

Hoppe said Feigner, who died in 2007, once appeared at the ESPN ESPY Awards to throw a trick pitch.

“Magic Johnson was there and afterwards the autograph line for Eddie was three times longer than for anyone else, including Magic,” he declared.

Speaking of those cherished autographs - which considerably boost the price of the memorabilia - Mike Marshall, who for the Dodgers in 1974 became the first relief pitcher to win a Cy Young Award, wouldn’t sign autographs, telling youngsters they should instead seek an autograph from a teacher or youth coach.

Hoppe remarked, "He was speaking the truth – upside down.”

Also, the late Frank Deford, the Sports Illustrated writer and NPR commentator who lived in the Green Farms section of Westport, told FairPress in 1986 that people say “that athletes are overpaid based on their contribution to society and that it is Mother Teresa and Bishop Tutu that deserve the multi-million dollar contracts. But the system doesn’t work that way.”

Said Hoppe, “Elon Musk just became our first trillionaire. Tiger Woods and Lebron James were our first sports billionaires. That will now become common place as we as a society grow thirstier and thirstier for escape entertainment. Professional athletes, entertainers and the like are rare and gifted, but I do believe this world is upside down.”

He added, “Especially in this day and age of instant gratification social media, the tik tok, twitter mentality, we only view those in the brightest lights as our heroes when in reality, those behind the scenes, in the daily trench warfare of making a better world, unknowns around the globe in the line of fire putting themselves at risk for mankind. Yeah, we most definitely have to make this a part of our day-to-day consciousness.”

Baseball fans know that Nolan Ryan twirled seven no-hitters. Only the ones who would have run the table on ESPN’s “Stump The Schwab” could name any of the seven catchers for those gems.

(Well maybe those people that spent their summers in the bleachers at Bill Shea Stadium could name Jeff Torborg, the manager of the Metropolitans from 1992-1993. Heck, Torborg also caught Sandy Koufax’s perfect game.)

Likewise, the catcher to King Eddie and Prince Hoppe were far less recognizable than Paul Shaffer to David Letterman, even though Dobbins, who was one of the backstops, remarked that sometimes the battery-mates’ banter was similar to “Abbott & Costello.”

Hoppe remarked, “The catcher was always the home run hitter par excellence for the court, Kinzer, Keir, Mackin, Booth, Gerhke, Anderton, just to name a hand full, big men, great personalities, extremely funny, abundantly talented in many skills, they captivated the audience by just showing up. Between the King and I we had some 20 plus windups and deliveries and we never used signals, only glove movements and head faints. The catcher and pitcher were in simpatico in all aspects along with a running dialogue between us, the opposition and the audience. The catcher played a huge part in the success of the court.”

Kirkpatrick wrote in Sports Illustrated nearly 50 years ago that fast-pitch was fading. That trend has continued.

“Many years ago your dad or uncle taught you how to pitch or how to hit and you played for a Knights of Columbus team in the Industrial League,” said Dobbins. “That rarely happens today.”

Hoppe exclaimed, “In the heyday of the men’s game, elite players were given jobs, sometimes for life, the best pitchers and hitters always made a decent payday, but in reality, we all played because of the challenge of fastball.”

“The women got it right, took it to the next level as far as the teaching all aspects of the game, starting at a very young age, having travel teams, as a high school sport, affording college scholarships, even a pro league for elite level along with Olympic dreams,” he added. ''It’s now a billion dollar industry worldwide. If that door was ever open to young men like when I started, you would see such a groundswell of participants coast to coast!

Hoppe exclaimed, “Places like Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Chile, Canada, the U K, Germany, New Zealand, Australia and certain hotbeds here in the U S, there is still very high caliber fast pitch, 'for the love of the game', but no real financial backing except for maybe 30 teams that vie for the prestigious World Cup every summer, in comparison to yesteryear, a very small sample size as they say. Make this a college sport for men and there would be a half million applicants by Monday.”

Dobbins said it would be difficult to duplicate the King and His Court.

However, if the females have the right formula, what about four women on a touring softball team? It has happened before. Rosie Black was the hurler for The Queen & Her Court. She made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the team appeared in an RC Cola commercial and Ira Berkow wrote a New York Times column about them in 1985.

“It’s a hard life for anyone, male or female,” said Hoppe. “You travel through tornadoes, flash floods. I thought instead of having one show team, you should have two versions – each doing a schedule of about 30 cities each year.”

“Besides, today’s generation is into video games,” he lamented. “And there are 7,000 television channels out there.”

Ten years after the Court went out of session, Hoppe continues his exercise schedule.

“I run and lift light weights every day,” he said. “It is a regimen like breathing every day.”

But what about the younger generation”? Child obesity has been part of the vernacular for at least 20 years.

So instead of President Joe and his Republican detractors on Capitol Hill throwing javelins at each other over Build Back Better, why not take the proposed $2 trillion and build a new gymnasium in each school district to make it possible to offer Physical Education to each student 180 academic days a year and fund some colleges exclusively dedicated to P.E. to produce a corps of teachers to put them through the pacer drills, push-ups, squat thrusts and one-mile time trials?

If you teach English and Math each day, then why not Physical Education?

Said Hoppe, “I became a teacher at 52 years of age, although I toured every summer. I taught and coached a number of sports at two high schools and it was an amazing 10-year-experience for me. As my wife Julie before me, we taught special education kids all over the spectrum, and emotionally disturbed.”

“In my case, art, music and athletics were used as therapy with students,” he continued. “Although so bright in many cases, most coming from horrendous backgrounds, childhood obesity, highly processed foods, sugar power drinks, fast foods on every corner, 7/11's, Starbucks etc. We did so many classes on proper eating, but when your hood bodega only sells chips and soft drinks, nothing green or organic (extremely expensive), gaming all day on a couch, well you see the problem first hand."

Hoppe remarked, “I was a big brother to a 300 pound, 11-year-old bulimic for five years. He had a broken family, mean step mother, bad environment. I would take him grocery shopping then teaching him cooking skills, salads, vegetables, fish, chicken, little carbs. We put in the time. Today he is a svelte 170 lbs. at 6'1'', with two kids.”

He concluded, “America, we got our heads in the sand. I'm afraid we all need some Divine intervention.”

References

A KING WITHOUT A CROWN - Sports Illustrated Vault | SI.com

The softball King will get his throne | Brookfield, CT Patch