‘For Love of the Game’: A family saga, a rediscovered manuscript and an unlikely movie
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Jan 9 '23, 15:07
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Cody Stavenhagen
Jan 9, 2023
“He stood up, shaking his head. ‘The thing you care for. That’s where real pain comes from. …'”
— Michael Shaara, “For Love of the Game”
The writer was gone, so the son and the wife were left sorting through the chaos.
There is so much to process when a loved one dies. The shock, the grief, the memories, good and bad. There also is the stuff, all the possessions left, as remnants of a person’s life and legacy.
So there were Jeff Shaara and his mother, Helen, sorting through the files stuffed in folders and drawers. Most of what they found were letters, a paper trail of a disgruntled author’s both illustrious and failed literary career. Michael Shaara won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Killer Angels,” a work of historical fiction that brought the Battle of Gettysburg to life. It became the inspiration for the 1993 movie “Gettysburg.”
That novel was published in 1974, on the heels of the Vietnam War. Few people wanted to read about generals. It was never a commercial success in the elder Shaara’s lifetime. He wrote two other books that never found an audience. He published a plethora of short stories and taught writing at Florida State. But his files were filled with letters to and from publishers and editors. His papers now reside in a special collection at the Broward County Library, showing Shaara going through at least nine literary agents and using different publishers for each of his novels.
In the letters Jeff found, Michael’s temperament jumped off the page.
“He was always in a fight with somebody,” Jeff Shaara said recently on the phone. “His relationship with publishing was adversarial. Going through that was sad and interesting at the same time, just to see who he was picking a fight with.”
Michael had divorced Helen after 30 years of marriage, though they still lived together. Jeff was estranged from his father for the final 15 years of the man’s life. Michael died of a heart attack in 1988. He was 59.
Past all the letters and the arguments, the son recovered something else: An old manuscript, held together by a paperclip. The title: “Billy Boy.” It was Michael Shaara’s baseball novel, one he had pitched to publishers with no success. Jeff had heard mentions of the manuscript. Michael talked about it often to his daughter, Lila. But the story had never found a home in print.
I forgot all about this, Jeff thought as his eyes peered up and down pages of old-school typework, rife with crossed out lines and suggestions from an editor. His father wrote everything on an old Royal typewriter. Pecked at the keys with two fingers. Hated it anytime someone tried to change his words.
“Knowing the kind of guy he was, if he got really disgusted with something, he’d throw it in the trash,” Jeff said. “We’re actually very fortunate that he kept one manuscript in his files.”
Jeff read the entire manuscript, impressed at both its poignancy and its staccato simplicity. “Billy Boy” told the story of a baseball pitcher at the end of his career, a great athlete reckoning with the idea of moving on. It is also a love story, about a man grappling with losing a woman, who must come to terms with his fears and insecurities in order to grow up, to have a purpose beyond throwing a round ball into a mitt.
Jeff and Lila were handling their father’s estate. They contacted various publishers and told them about the story.
“It wasn’t, ‘Oh my god, look, here’s a manuscript,'” Lila said. “We knew about it. But after he passed away, his currency went up a little bit, and we could sell it.”
Perhaps, Jeff thought, getting the manuscript published could help repay some sort of emotional debt.
The posthumous work became a novella, thanks to independent publisher Carroll & Graff. Then it became a movie, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Kevin Costner. They called it “For Love of the Game.”
The novella deals with many of baseball’s timeless tropes: a passion for the sport, the difficulty of letting go.
The story behind the story delves deeper into another of baseball’s themes: fathers and sons, their combustible nature, the ties that bond them together even when they drift apart.
Michael Shaara always dreamed of becoming a baseball player. He played the game in high school and had a short stint at Rutgers University before his arm failed him.
He grew up a fan of the 1930s New York Giants and remained loyal to his team even after the franchise bolted to San Francisco. Jeff Shaara grew up in a house with a baseball-obsessed father. He soon found himself following the exploits of Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal.
“Living in Tallahassee, Florida, where football is god, he was a baseball guy,” Jeff said. “He could care less about Bobby Bowden.”
Michael, Jeff said, fancied himself as a man’s man, a bit of a walking writer cliche longing to be Hemingway. Once, Michael claimed, Hemingway was in town and stationed at a hotel bar. Michael got word from a friend, brought the famed writer a beer and talked about the craft late into the night.
Michael’s life was full of grizzled writerly machismo: He was a member of the 82nd Airborne in the late 1940s and briefly worked as a police officer. He went 17-1 as a professional boxer before a doctor warned him further fights would cause him to go blind. His first published novel, “The Broken Place,” told the story of a boxer searching for his place in life, channeling his wandering ways through the ring. The book received some critical praise but never sold.
Shaara’s career wandered in similar ways. He jumped between genres. Twenty cups of coffee and three packs of cigarettes per day. His magnum opus, “The Killer Angels,” was inspired by a great-grandfather’s letters and a family trip to Gettysburg, when Michael found himself moved by the haunting battlefields.
Michael suffered his first heart attack at 35 and, so claimed, was lifeless for 55 minutes before he was revived. He wrote a magazine piece in the Saturday Evening Post about his encounter with death, a story that won a journalism award from the American Medical Association. The heart attack, though, led to a lengthy recovery.
As he began working on his Civil War novel, Michael went back to Gettysburg. He brought along a teenaged Jeff for a purpose. Michael longed to see the battlefields, to put himself in the same place as his characters. He had Jeff climb up hills and crawl through bushes, doing the physical tasks he no longer could. Jeff reported back with detailed descriptions of the landscape. He called the trip the best time he had ever had with his father.
Their relationship changed in the years that followed. Michael suffered a brain injury in a Vespa accident while traveling in Italy in 1972. The accident led to another difficult recovery. He was hospitalized for more than a month and suffered hearing loss in one ear and some degree of permanent brain damage. He often struggled to process words he would read on a page. He struggled to write and had to relinquish his teaching, the part of his career in which he took the most pride.
“Some of that ‘miserable writer’ thing had to do with the last 15 years of his life,” Lila said. “He was dealing with this, and nobody could do much for him.”
As Jeff grew older, tensions arose between father and son. Their shared stubbornness and Michael’s own issues eventually made the damage irreparable. In a 1982 The Washington Post profile titled “The Ordeal of Michael Shaara,” Michael claimed his son was dead.
“(Jeff) just walked out around the time of the accident,” Helen Shaara said in the article. “He was in a different phase of his life. His father never got over it.”
“He was a man with some real problems,” Jeff says now. “He was manic-depressive. He was a few other things, and he would never take anybody else’s advice. He always knew more than the doctors did. He was a difficult man.”
Lila Shaara still feels sympathy toward her father and the brain injuries she feels cut his career short. But she agrees he could be blunt and opinionated to a fault. He often rubbed people in the publishing industry the wrong way. “They don’t read the stuff,” Michael had said of publishers. “It’s all the subject matter, the formula, the track record.”
“It was hard,” Lila said. “The stress, I think it ultimately killed him.”
In the years father and son were estranged, Jeff moved to Tampa, where he started a business dealing rare coins and precious metals.
Meanwhile, Michael’s career continued its oblong path. “The Killer Angels” became a revered work but not a financial success. He continued writing short stories and published another novel, “The Herald,” a strange sci-fi tale with a meandering plot that reflected Michael’s decline.
The writer eventually worked on another project: “Billy Boy.”
He shopped the baseball tale around to various publishers but had no takers. It was a novella, the eventual paperback only 152 pages. At least one agent remarked: Where’s the rest of it?
“I think ‘For Love of the Game’ is his fantasy,” Jeff said. “That’s what he would have loved to have done in his own life.”
The novella’s main character, Billy Chapel, is a bit different than the Costner character in the movie. He stays more true to the overgrown boy image — more pure of heart, less dark. The love affair takes a different course, too. Chapel and his lover, Carol Grey, meet at an upscale party, not on the side of the road. The book version of Carol (renamed Jane in the movie) is equally as fearful of commitment as Chapel, the relationship seemingly less toxic.
The book still features its weak points — a contrived reporter character, an awkward love scene on a plane — and sometimes reaches too hard to be high-brow literature. Chapel in the book listens to Brahms, dislikes Tolstoy, references Shakespeare and Hemingway, the old pitcher on the mound like Santiago out in the sea.
The book has spots where it shines, too. It is short and succinct and sweet and relatable. An excerpt from a Los Angeles Times review is printed proudly on the cover: “Moving, beautiful … If Hemingway had written a baseball novel, he might have written ‘For Love of the Game.'”
In 1991, Jeff sat for a lunch meeting in New York, when the book’s publisher slid a copy across the table and Jeff held his late father’s work in his hands for the first time.
“I can remember getting very emotional about that,” Jeff said. “This is a gift I could give to my father that he couldn’t give to himself.”
Not long after the book was published, the phones lit up. Jeff Shaara eventually reached a deal with Universal Pictures. The screenplay stayed in limbo for seven years, but the studio continued picking up its option. Finally, when Costner got involved, production ramped up.
It was surreal, then, when Jeff Shaara entered Yankee Stadium in November of 1998. It was a bitterly cold day. Plans to film in October were dashed because the New York Yankees staged a run to the World Series.
Jeff sat in the Yankee Stadium seats as a glorified extra during the filming process, over the left shoulder of lead actress Kelly Preston. In the film, Preston’s character is wearing a sundress while sitting in the bleachers; Jeff remembers the film crew running over and wrapping her in an immense parka after each cut.
“I play the role of ‘a disgruntled Yankees fan,'” Jeff said. “I’m supposed to sit there scowling.”
In the pantheon of baseball movies, “For Love of the Game” does not reach classic status. The movie was panned in some reviews for its sappiness. The relationship between Chapel and Jane (changed from Carol in the book) often feels hollow. There are more forced plot points — Jane’s runaway daughter, Chapel slicing open his hand — that don’t exist in the book, filler because Michael Shaara’s work was so short.
But the film nonetheless has a special place in the heart of some of the game’s more sentimental fans. “For Love of the Game” featured a screenplay written by Dana M. Stevens and was picked up by director Sam Raimi, a native of metro Detroit who turned the fictional Hawks into his beloved Detroit Tigers.
“I was simply moved by the screenplay,” Raimi said in 2001. “It was moving and simple and I love baseball.”
Although Tom Cruise was once floated for the possible lead role, Costner took over to star in his third baseball movie, following “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams.”
The movie, for all its imperfections, was filled with behind-the-scenes nuggets and Easter eggs. It also features some of the best pure baseball action of any movie in the genre.
Several major-league stars partook in the filming process: Ricky Ledee, Dave Eiland and Juan Nieves, who is now an assistant coach for the Tigers. Augie Garrido, the famed Cal State Fullerton and Texas baseball coach — a longtime friend of Costner’s — makes a cameo as the Yankees’ manager.
Vin Scully plays himself, calling the game on a national broadcast. Scully, per a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview, was not a fan of the movie’s script when he first saw it. He agreed to do the film after coming away from a meeting with Universal executives with a positive impression. At one point, he told Raimi to dial down the game’s closing scene, to make it less overwrought and more believable.
Scully also improvised many of his lines, calling the game as he normally would. He gives arguably the film’s best performance. “He isn’t pitching against pinch-hitters. He isn’t pitching against the Yankees. He’s pitching against time,” Scully says in the film. “He’s pitching against the future, against age, and, even when you think about his career, against ending.”
Costner, meanwhile, did all his own work on the mound, supposedly throwing 200-300 pitches per day for 18 days during the filming. On The Bill Simmons Podcast, Costner said the Yankees’ team trainer assisted him throughout, even bringing him various pain relievers so he could continue pitching. At one point, Costner said he vomited from the pain.
Upon the film’s premiere, Lila Shaara avoided watching. She recalled her experience with “Gettysburg,” how it was strange and painful to watch her father’s dialogue and scenes appear onscreen.
Lila has still never seen the film in its entirety.
“I heard him talk about (‘Billy Boy’),” Lila said. “I listened to him work it out. And I don’t know that I can watch it without feeling really weird. It sounds strange to say, but whether they did a good job or they didn’t, it would still be hard.”
During one scene aboard the Tigers’ team plane, Costner’s character picks up a copy of “The Killer Angels.” It was a tribute to Michael Shaara.
Not long after “Gettysburg” hit theaters, Jeff Shaara ventured to his father’s grave. He brought a cassette player. He sat and listened to the film’s soundtrack.
The movie was released in 1993, five years after Michael’s death. “The Killer Angels” suddenly became a No. 1 bestseller.
As Jeff managed his father’s estate, he had been involved in the project. And soon, he received a request from director Ron Maxwell and Ted Turner, who owned New Line Cinema (as well as the Atlanta Braves). They were interested in creating more Civil War films. They wanted a prequel to “Gettysburg,” as well as a sequel. They wanted material for the film to be based on a meticulously researched book, just like “The Killer Angels.” Jeff found the idea interesting and wondered if they could find someone willing to take on the task.
All the while, Jeff had been wrestling with his own emotions. And after more time and reflection, he had a wild thought. He called Maxwell.
What if I wrote the books?
“I had never written anything before,” Jeff said. “That’s not false modesty.”
Maxwell replied: I’ve been waiting for you to say that.
Lila Shaara said she was surprised to see her brother become an author, given the family history and the fact Jeff had never vocalized any sort of writerly ambitions.
“It also made some sense,” she said. “He had some demons to exorcize.”
In 1996, Jeff Shaara published “Gods and Generals,” a 500-page prequel to “Killer Angels” that follows the same key characters in the earlier days of the Civil War. He went on a 59-city book tour. He would often hold up a copy of his father’s book and tell Michael Shaara’s story.
Healing came posthumously, too.
“There’s a lot of things …” Jeff said, his voice trailing off. “Without getting into skeletons, there’s a lot of forgiveness there, there’s a lot of tolerance there.”
“Gods and Generals” became a major motion picture. Jeff, though, often felt guilty, suddenly reaching the sort of financial success and public recognition his father never got. He even remembers his mother (who died in 2016 at age 88) asking him, Why are all the good things happening to you?
“I had a really hard time going all over the country holding up a copy of ‘Gods and Generals’ and saying, look what I did,” Jeff said. “Because I knew full well that if my father had been alive, Ted Turner would have gone to him. I never would have ever become a writer.”
“My life has taken a pretty strange turn that way, and I don’t know what my father’s attitude about that would be.”
Now Jeff makes his career as an author. He has published 19 books, found resting beside “The Killer Angels” in bookstores. For much of his career, Jeff would tour the country, standing in front of crowds and talking about Michael, the estranged father who charted this path. A friend once asked Jeff why he never talked about himself.
“That never occurred to me: ‘Gee, these people are coming to a book signing because they want to know about me,'” Jeff said. “It took me a while to accept that. It’s almost like I felt I had a huge debt to him, to make sure I kept his name out there.”
Lila Shaara, an anthropology professor at Penn State New Kensington, eventually published two fiction novels of her own in 2006 and 2008.
“I couldn’t not write,” she said. Then she added: “I don’t know how he would feel about it.”
After years of work, Jeff recently convinced publisher Ballantine Books to put a paperback edition of “For Love of the Game” back in publication.
“It’s always broken my heart,” Lila said, “that people who like ‘The Killer Angels’ don’t know about his other books.”
Today Jeff sells paperback copies of Michael Shaara’s final work on his website. He fills every order himself. He signs every copy: For my father’s legacy
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