“…The story itself was inspired by the writer Hamlin Garland, who was writing in the late 1800s. He wrote a short story about a man returning to his family farm. He had met with success in New York but his bother and his mother were beat down by the demands of the farm. In the Satchel Paige book, I created a fictional character, about the same age of Paige who also seems to be a rising start. Except he hurts his knee and can’t play any more and returns rural Alabama to work as a sharecropper. So Paige’s accomplishments, the myth he creates for himself, are seen through the experiences of sharecropper in the Jim Crow era south.”

Satchel Paige