Big Don Newcombe: Fastballs, Highballs and the Long Road Back

As a teenager, Don Newcombe was an unemployed high school dropout with few prospects. From those unglamorous beginnings, he led an extraordinary life of accomplishment and celebrity as a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers--though not without his fair share of failure and despair. This book is the first biography of Don Newcombe, recounting all the good, the bad and the ugly of his several careers, and the esteem he earned. With little formal baseball training, Newcombe became a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, winning the game's highest awards. He was Jackie Robinson's teammate and his partner in breaking the racial color lines in baseball and American society. As a sergeant in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he trained doctors how to be soldiers. He became one of the first Americans to play professional baseball in Japan. Newcombe was also an alcoholic who drank himself out of baseball, destroyed the business he had built, and nearly lost his family. Recovering by sheer force of will, he found a new career in job training for underprivileged youths. He later returned to the Dodgers (then in Los Angeles) as their first director of community relations, and stayed with them for the rest of his long life, traveling the country as an apostle of sobriety. This unvarnished biography presents both sides of a complicated player who overcame adversity to find success in baseball and beyond. Read more