God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(20)
The retractable pitcher’s mound was buried under a couple of steel plates. Two of my favorite ballplayers, Nolan Ryan and J. R. Richard, once stood on this spot. They were briefly teammates, although Ryan was the one who got the first million-dollar contract in baseball history, creating resentment on Richard’s part. Both could throw hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs and breaking balls at almost that speed, but the six-foot-eight Richard was by far the more intimidating pitcher. I never saw a pitcher so thoroughly overpower hitters. At the moment he released the ball, his right foot was almost off the mound and his hand seemed to be right in the batter’s face. His slider was probably the most difficult pitch in the game to hit. It was thrilling to watch him.
In both 1978 and 1979, he struck out more than three hundred hitters, a feat that only Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax had accomplished in consecutive seasons in the modern era. The following year was expected to be the season that Richard firmly proved himself to be the most dominating pitcher in baseball. He was thirty years old, and getting better every year. He won ten of his first fourteen starts. But then he began complaining about a “dead arm,” along with stiffness in his shoulder and back. He took himself out of several games when he couldn’t see the catcher’s signs. For weeks he complained of dizziness and pain. Because of his very public gripes about Ryan’s contract, fans turned against him, believing he was “loafing,” although he hadn’t missed a start in five years. Even the team doctors and staff didn’t believe him. The Astros reluctantly put him on the disabled list. “They said it was all in my head,” Richard later recalled. “They said I was unhappy, pouting about Ryan.”
On July 30, 1980, with an earned run average of 1.90, Richard suffered a major stroke from a blood clot in an artery leading to his right arm. Doctors had finally detected it several days earlier but decided it was stable, and so they did nothing. Richard never played in the big leagues again. After a couple of bad investments and two divorces, he was financially ruined. In January 1995, while Ryan was preparing to start his twenty-seventh season in the major leagues, a reporter for The Houston Post found Richard living under a bridge, about three miles from the Astrodome.
Ryan went on to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and served as president of the Texas Rangers. He is said to be worth $60 million. He is one of the most popular Texans of all time. Richard became a minister and got involved in serving the homeless population in Houston. They were two great players, but I wonder how their destinies would have differed if their plights had been reversed. One imagines that Nolan Ryan, the million-dollar man, and white, would have been treated as soon as he reported his symptoms. No one would have accused him of being a malingerer and a malcontent. No doubt he would have been rapidly attended to. Perhaps he would have been given better financial advice. On the other hand, Richard was always solitary and difficult. He was known to be using cocaine in his playing days. He was not as easy to make into a hero. Still…
I asked Judge Emmett if the fate of the Astrodome was that it, like its predecessor the Roman Colosseum, would become a venerable ruin. Emmett said he didn’t see that happening. Indeed, a few months after my visit, Emmett persuaded the Harris County commissioners to put up $10.5 million to design the redeveloped facility, which would include underground parking and a vast festival area. “The Astrodome’s days of sitting idle and abandoned are over,” the Judge promised. “I’m confident we can do it without a tax increase. A hundred million dollars more or less is easily doable in a county with a larger population than twenty-five states.”
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HOUSTON IS the only major city in America without zoning laws. You can build pretty much anything you want anywhere you want, except in designated historical districts. You’ll see some odd sights, such as a two-story family home adjacent to a roller coaster, or an erotic nightclub next to a shopping gallery, or a house made of beer cans. Solo skyscrapers suddenly pop up in residential neighborhoods. The absence of zoning is an artifact of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s, when zoning was viewed as a communist plot. But there was another group, of blacks and liberals, who saw an advantage in siding with the ultraright. “Zoning would have been used to keep people out,” Bill White, a former mayor, observed.
According to City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Houston now has the highest standard of living of any large city in America, and among the highest in the world: “Personal household income has risen 20 percent since 2005 in Houston, compared with 14 percent in New York, 11 percent in Los Angeles, and less than 9 percent in Chicago.” Parks are being renovated and expanded, and housing is affordable—60 percent below the average in Los Angeles, for instance.
Houston grew by 35 percent between 2000 and 2013, an astounding figure for an already mature city. It will soon bypass Chicago to become the country’s third-largest metropolitan area, behind New York and Los Angeles. “All the growth has been Latino, African American, and Asian,” the Kinder Institute’s Stephen Klineberg said. “Houston is now the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country.” One out of four Houstonians is foreign born, and no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority. “We speak one hundred forty-two different languages,” Sylvester Turner, Houston’s second black mayor, told me. “We’re seeking to be even more inclusive.”