Like the Beatles did shortly before him, Nolan Ryan performed at Shea Stadium and sang on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The former is a well-known and well-told part of Ryan’s life, the early days of a Hall of Fame career that eventually launched the Ryan Express like a rocket ship. The latter, when he and the entire list of 1969 Mets World Series winners sang “You Gotta Have Heart” in front of a national television audience, is lesser known and one of many surprising parts of a new documentary, ” Facing Nolan”, which will surely bring smiles.
“I thought it was the worst costume I’ve ever seen,” said Reid Ryan, the eldest of Nolan and Ruth’s three children and the film’s executive producer. Reid laughed and added, “I’m not sure the mustard costume ever was. I know he can’t sing, but it was funny.”
Nolan Ryan said that while it might seem like he and his teammates were lip-syncing, they were really singing.
“We were all thrilled to be on this show and what an honor it was,” Ryan said in a recent phone conversation. “But the highlight of the evening for me was that Eddy Arnold was there. I was a big Eddy Arnold fan, and that made the night special.
What’s both charming and disarming about the film, which began streaming on multiple services this week, is the startling humility shown by Ryan. A Hall of Fame pitcher who still boasts 51 major league records — according to the film’s tally — Ryan has a legend that easily fills his native Texas, but for some of his on-screen co-stars, he’s simply grandpa, who tells corny jokes and who, yes, can’t sing. And he loves it.
The praise for Ryan comes in interviews with fellow Hall of Famers. George Brett, Rod Carew and Dave Winfield are among those who offer accurate insight into the challenge depicted in the film’s title. Pete Rose too. When reminded that Ryan finished second to Baltimore’s Jim Palmer in the 1973 American League Cy Young Award voting after a record 383 strikeouts – of course, Ryan also led the league that year – there with 162 steps – Carew reacts as if hearing it for the first time.
“You’re kidding!” Carew exclaims when told that Ryan has never won a Cy Young.
Said Brett: “Nolan never won a Cy Young award? I thought he won three, four, five.
It’s all the more poignant now that some of the records he still holds include career strikeouts (5,714) and career no-hitters (seven; Sandy Koufax is second with four). Standing ovations and star-studded testimonials echo throughout the film, of course, but the insight of the family members is what stirs the emotions and gives director Bradley Jackson’s work its touching humanity. The surprising and solid backbone of the story is Ryan’s wife, Ruth.
“People say if you marry a baseball player, you really marry baseball,” Ruth Ryan says in the film as she visits Nolan’s childhood home in little Alvin, Texas, and checks on his progress. a tree he planted as a young boy. “There is a lot of truth in that statement.”
The two celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary last month, although after their second date in 1962 that milestone seemed as unlikely as Ryan’s eventual dominance after control issues plagued his early career.
It wasn’t exactly a romantic outing: He took her to Colt Stadium to see Koufax’s pitch.
“He didn’t want to talk to me,” Ruth said. “He wouldn’t get up.”
“We were seated behind the plate with a bird’s eye view of Sandy Koufax,” Nolan explained.
Although she says she was initially angered when former pitcher and scout Red Murff warned her that one day she was “going to have to share Nolan with the world”, Murff’s prediction came true. , and this movie is that story. With a generational fastball (“looked like bacon in a frying pan,” Roger Clemens says in the movie), it was only a matter of time.
What wasn’t inevitable was “Facing Nolan,” which is basically a video memoir of his wife and their three children and seven grandchildren disguised as a baseball documentary.
“He said no,” Reid Ryan said. “My mom said, ‘I’ve been everywhere with you, and you’re going to make this movie with me.’ If it wasn’t for her, this movie wouldn’t have been made.
Nolan agrees.
“I’m not really comfortable talking about what happened in my career and all of these things, and so I really discouraged Bradley and others from doing that,” he said. . “But my children kept me. They felt like it was something I should do for my grandchildren, and Ruth felt the same way. So I finally agreed to do it.
