Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life in and Out of Major-league Baseball - Hardcover

Bean, Billy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569244863 ISBN 13: 9781569244869

Publisher: Marlowe & Co, 2003

Synopsis

A memoir by the Major League's only openly gay player illuminates a side of baseball that is seldom seen on television, or from the bleachers and details his disillusionment by the sport that shaped his life when he is forced to choose between his love of baseball and the man he loved.

About this title

Review

"A passionate memoir of the challenges Bean faced as a closeted gay athlete."--Sports Illustrated

"The courage Bean shows in telling his story is incredible."--Los Angeles Times

"A fresh and insightful book. . . . Bean excels at capturing the rhythms of the game. . . . In telling his story, Bean has lent a hand of support to other ballplayers who might now be facing the same decision."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A surprisingly honest account from a professional athlete . . . . This is a very good book to get a glimpse at what an athlete endures to play the game."--Gregg's Baseball Bookcase blog

"This gut-wrenching story is an amazing triumph of character over circumstances. Billy Bean is an inspiration."
--Brad Ausmus, manager of the Detroit Tigers and former MLB all-star catcher

"A story [told] with oral immediacy and winning personality. Sports claimed [Bean] long before homosexuality did, and his love of baseball gives the book its powerful charm."
--Booklist

"Billy Bean's book is candid, generous, and courageous. It adds a new dimension to the world of sports literature. Nice going, Billy."
--Jim Bouton, former MLB pitcher for the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots, Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves, and author of Ball Four

"Reads more like an Everyman tale than a manifesto, and is more effective for it."
--New York Daily News

"[Bean] tells a remarkable story of his unremarkable career--a paltry .227 average in the majors--and his wrenching struggle with his sexuality. . . . Bean's candor, self-effacing humor, and brutal honesty will win him . . . new [fans]."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Fluently written and compulsively readable, Going the Other Way is at once a briskly paced account of life in baseball and the fiercely moving chronicle of a divided heart. It's a major contribution to the literature of sport, straight or gay."
--Richard Greenberg, author of the Tony Award-winning play Take Me Out

"It took a lot of courage for Billy Bean to play baseball in the major leagues--and even more to write about it--with insight and humor."
--Peter Lefcourt, author of The Dreyfus Affair and Eleven Karens

Synopsis

Billy Bean is the first major league baseball player to publicly discuss his homosexuality and the first athlete in a professional American team sport to do so since all-pro football player Dave Kopay came out in 1975. By 1996, when Bean retired at age thirty-two from the game he loved after ten years as a pro ballplayer for the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres, he had become disillusioned by the sport that had defined his life. Bean found himself forced to choose between his love of baseball and the man he loved. It was an agonizing end to a career in which he struggled to make the most of his role as a utility player in America's most physically and emotionally demanding sport. But out of the premature demise of his career, Bean came to see what the game had taught him and helped him to understand what could be done to improve the major leagues for the next generation of young athletes, so they can navigate the challenges and rewards of the game on their own terms. Bean recently starred as himself on HBO's popular Arli$$ and appears frequently as a commentator on sports and politics on national TV.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marlowe & Co
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569244863
• ISBN 13: 9781569244869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280