Fences (2016) is available at no charge on ROKU and can be rented/purchased on Amazon PRIME.
Disclaimer: This is not a sports movie.
Having said that, Troy Maxson, the main character in Fences, is a Black man who claims he would have made it to the Major Leagues but never got the chance because of the color barrier. That injustice has turned Maxson into a bitter man, who in turn directs his sour spirit at his son, Cory, a high school football player being recruited to play in college. Because Maxson’s dream of professional sports was squelched, he wants Cory to work after school rather than attend football practice.
Denzel Washington as Troy Maxson in Fences (photo courtesy Herald-Times)
If that sounds like a sports movie, it is only because I haven’t told you the other elements of this powerful drama, which was first a play.
I had never heard of the movie or the play until I visited the post office the other day. I wanted to buy a book of stamps, and the postal worker apologized because she had a limited selection — three different types of Christmas stamps and a stamp commemorating someone named August Wilson under the heading, Black Heritage.
I told the clerk that I would take the August Wilson stamps and that I had never heard of him. The clerk, who is Black, said to me that Wilson wrote the screenplay for the 2016 film Fences, which she described as very good.
I told her I would look into it. I was not disappointed.
If your library offers Kanopy or Hoopla, you can watch the movie for free on those streaming services. Wilson wrote the screenplay, and Denzel Washington, who plays the lead role of Troy Maxson, directed the film.
I conducted some research and discovered that the late August Wilson, alongside Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams, was one of the greatest American playwrights. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, and Fences is one of ten plays in Wilson’s magnum opus, The Pittsburgh Cycle. The cycle focuses on African American life in the 20th century, with each play set in a particular decade. Fences is set in the late 1950s.
Photo courtesy NEXTPittsburgh
Wilson has done his baseball homework. If you follow some of the players and statistics the characters or the radio rattle off, you can place the early part of the movie in 1957. The film is set in Pittsburgh, and Troy and Cory are Pirates fans. In one scene, the radio is tuned to a Pirates game, and the announcer says that Roberto Clemente is at the plate. He says Clemente is batting .249 with four homers and 24 RBIs. A quick check at baseballreference.com reveals that Clemente finished the season with a .253 average, four homers, and 30 RBIS. So we know we are hearing a game late in the 1957 season. Cory mentions that Hank Aaron has 43 homers. Aaron finished the 1957 season with 44 round-trippers, so again, we know that we are nearing the end of the season in September.
Troy claims he hit seven home runs off Satchel Paige when they were both in the Negro Leagues. The film doesn’t identify Troy’s teams, but he probably played for the Pittsburgh Crawfords (named after the Crawford Grill, a prominent nightclub) or the Homestead Grays, another Pittsburgh team.
Troy is no fan of Jackie Robinson. He claims there were 100 Black players better than Robinson who never got a chance to make the big leagues because they played earlier than Robinson. Troy is also not impressed by Aaron. He says that Clemente doesn’t get as much playing time as his white teammates because he is Puerto Rican.
Troy tells his friend and co-worker Jim Bono, “Take that fellow playing right field for the Yankees back then. Selkirk. Man batting .269. What kind of sense does that make? I was hitting .432 with 37 home runs.” Wilson got that detail right — George Selkirk played outfield for the Yankees in 1940 and hit .269 that season.
Viola Davis (photo courtesy IMDB)
Troy’s critical spirit is fed by the fact that he is a garbage collector rather than a big-league ballplayer. We find out that he was in jail for 15 years and played baseball there, but by the time he got out, he was 43. His wife, Rose, played by Viola Davis, reminds him that he was too old at that point to play professional baseball. But Troy refuses to accept that obvious fact.
Troy keeps a baseball bat in the backyard along with a baseball suspended by a rope from a tree. He and Cory smack the ball around from time to time. At one point, Troy says, “Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.” He then takes his bat and swings at that suspended baseball.
He uses baseball as a metaphor for life throughout the movie.
He tells Rose, “You’re born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You’ve got to guard it closely, always looking for the curveball on the inside corner. You can’t afford to let none get past you. You can’t afford a called strike. … I fooled them, Rose. I bunted. When I found you and Cory and got a halfway decent job, I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me, I wasn’t gonna strike out no more.”
This is a very potent movie, and the performances are astounding. Washington and Davis won Tonys when they played these parts in the Broadway play. Davis won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film version.
It’s not a sports movie, but sports are used as a framework and a metaphor for the fences that Troy is trying to break out of. The film is a poignant reminder of the fences that have hedged in African Americans, not only on the baseball field, but in life.
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This column first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on February 5, 2021.
