Billy Sunday was born in 1862 and soon had a reputation for being quite the character. As I did with the seventeen historical characters in my book, Eternity through the Rearview Mirror, I wondered what he would say if asked him to write his autobiography now that he’s on the other side. When I see him I’ll ask him how I did! I built this from research and from his actual words, which are shown in italics.
Play Ball!
The crack of the bat was music to my ears. Ah, the summer days of baseball. Yes sir, speed was my game. I was fast, daring—crazy! The first person to run the bases in fourteen seconds flat! Ha! And why run when I could somersault between them—which I did often! In seven years as a Center Fielder, I had a career batting average of .248 with 170 runs batted in. The crowds roared for me to steal those bases, and steal ’em I did—246 times.
But I was destined to steal more than bases.
Growing up was not easy. My widowed mother remarried but that husband soon deserted us. So impoverished we were that by the time I was ten Mother had no choice but to leave my brother and me at an orphanage. Needless to say, the immediate future back then didn’t look so good. But I studied hard during those years and by fourteen was on my own. I was pretty good at athletics, too—especially baseball.
I got the call to play ball from the Chicago White Stockings in 1883, and the fans couldn’t get enough of me, it seemed. Turns out that studying paid off; I became the team’s business manager. I was smart when it came to God too, converting to Christianity in 1886. Pretty good for someone with my hapless, penniless background; I’m a graduate from the university of poverty and hard knocks, and I have taken post-graduate courses.
Billy Gets the Call From the BIG Ump
It soon got another call – this time to play for an even bigger team. Jesus might have called us the Jerusalem Sluggers! I happily walked away from a well-paid baseball career and began to preach: salty, straight-talking, and so wound up when I preached you might have thought I had a ball in my hand, ready to let it fly home! Thousands came to hear me – far more than ever saw me at a baseball game.
Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ve butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, listless, footless, and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.
Listen to me now, the Bible will always be full of things you cannot understand, as long as you will not live according to those you can understand.
America needed to be taken down to God’s bathhouse and the hose turned on her. America needed a tidal wave of the old-time religion, and I was just the person to give it to her. And give it to them I did—I stole a million souls from the devil.
Glory Days!
I preached in huge tents, carpeted with sawdust. All across the country people gave their souls to Jesus. Oh those were glory days! The newspapers in Columbus were full of stories: “His work cannot be conservatively and sanely described. It would be like trying to describe a cyclone when you are in the midst of its fury.”
I did get a mite carried away, but there was God’s work to be done! No fancy talk for me, either. I wanted to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring along a dictionary. I got the crowd’s attention all right – with plain talk folks could hear:
- Going to church don’t make anybody a Christian any more than taking a wheelbarrow into a garage makes it a car.
- Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.
- Hell is the highest reward the devil can offer you for being a servant of his.
My homespun preaching made me a lot of money but I was not a big spender; gave much of it to charity. I died at my home in Chicago, November 6, 1935 at 73.
Want to play a pick-up game with me when you get to heaven? Just listen for the loudest-mouth cheering on his team; stealing those bases (we call it borrowing up here). That’d be me, all right. Yes, sir, that’d be me.
*****
God used Billy’s simple faith and trust in him to turn his life into something extraordinary. Readers, what do you think?