Movie inspiration
How Hollywood icon Ron Shelton turned New Britain’s Steve Dalkowski into Bull Durham’s Nuke LaLoosh
Hollywood writer/director Ron Shelton, a former minor league baseball player, explains how New Britain pitcher Steve Dalkowski, above, became the inspiration for the character Nuke LaLoosh in the classic baseball film “Bull Durham.” Dalkowski died last month due to complications from COVID-19.
Ron Shelton, a minor league infielder long before he turned Hollywood, was shagging flies in the outfield when he and his teammates spotted their manager, Joe Altobelli, talking to a disheveled civilian.
“This guy was hanging out in the corner,” Shelton remembers. “He just looked like a bum, and Joe was talking to him. I remember, we were curious. Joe was from upstate New York. How would he know somebody who looked like a homeless guy with a bottle in his hand behind the bullpen in Bakersfield, Calif., which was a very rough place?
“Joe said, ‘That was Steve Dalkowski,’ and that was the first time I’d ever heard his name.”
This was 1968. The Orioles and the rest of baseball had already given up on Dalkowski, the legendary fireballer from New Britain, and the talent he couldn’t harness. He was a migrant worker during this period, lost to alcoholism, and his life would spiral out of control until his sister, Patty Cain, found him, brought him home to New Britain and settled him in the nursing home where he spent the last 26 years of his life. Though most of his memo
ries were lost to alcohol-related dementia, he appeared to find peace and enjoy the game in his later years. He died last month at 80, due to complications from COVID-19. Shelton, who finally met Dalkowski in 2009, considers Patty her brother’s “angel.”
One would like to imagine Steve Dalkowski is in a better place this spring, young and healthy, given a second chance and firing fastballs with unerring accuracy past lineups filled with Hall of Famers. Back down here, his story will always have a place in baseball, particularly on MLB Network or Turner Classic Movies, and Ron Shelton, 74, whose playing career ended at Triple A in 1971, has much to do with that.
With little in the way of live sports, re-watching movies like Shelton’s “Tin Cup,” “White
Men Can’t Jump,” or “Cobb” has had to help tide us over. And the oft-shown masterpiece among all of Shelton’s sports-themed romantic comedies is 1988’s
“Bull Durham.”
“Joe Altobelli told a story or two,” Shelton says, from his home in California, “and I didn’t know I was going to be a writer, but these things were being filed away in the back of my brain. And then [Dalkowski’s] name came up another time, and another time, and another time. And then he showed up in Stockton after a game, in the clubhouse, looking for Joe to borrow some money. So these stories started to build, and as I moved up in the [Orioles] organization, I started to hear from coaches, like Cal Ripken [Sr.], who had played with him. And these stories started to grow, and these myths started to grow.”
Eventually Shelton learned that Altobelli, as an aging careerminor leaguer, had been Dalkowski’s catcher and tried to help him get his act together. And from the dynamic of this relationship grew Nuke LaLoosh and Crash Davis, the central characters in “Bull Durham.”
“What stuck in my head, all those years later when I became a writer,” Shelton says, “was what a great set-up for a story this is. It’s a work of fiction, but the idea of the veteran is coming to realize his chances of making it to the big leagues are coming to an end and he better find a new dream and he’s asked to mentor a guy who has no idea he actually has the gift that nobody else has and he’s squandering it.”
The Dalkowski stories have been told and re-told, embellished to become folk tales, though there seems to be a nugget of truth in nearly all of them. He didn’t “throw so hard. He ripped a guy’s ear off,” for instance, but he did hit a young batter in the side of the head, cut his ear, knock him out cold and end his career. And the numbers don’t lie: the 12.5 strikeouts and 11.6 walks per nine innings during his career are enough to validate the claim that he could be the fastest, wildest pitcher there ever was.
But the baseball side of it didn’t appeal to Shelton, the filmmaker. It was the human side. He later learned from longtime Bakersfield cops that, although they arrested Dalkowski many times over his barroom brawls, “they actually had an affection for him that I never forgot.” The LaLoosh character, too, is likable, but in different ways.
“Steve’s is unfortunately a very dark tale, but all comedy comes from some painful story,” Shelton says. “Nuke is sort of the sunshine. He’s innocent. He’s an empty vessel to be filled. What was similar was, the guy had the gift, quite literally from the gods that he doesn’t know what to do with, and I met a lot of players like that in the minors, pitchers mostly. I thought that was a fascinating archetype.”
Another pitcher, Greg Arnold, who was also in the Orioles system in the 1960s, has often insisted that he was Shelton’s model for Nuke LaLoosh. Certainly, Shelton used threads from all his minor league experiences to weave “Bull Durham.” “I’ve never said Greg was the model for it. Greg has claimed it,” Shelton says, “but if Greg is fine with that … I would say that if you put Greg and Dalkowski together, you’re on your way to Nuke.”
Once Shelton had created his character and crafted his script, he directed Tim Robbins in bringing Nuke/Dalkowski to life.
“To get Tim to embrace Nuke was the question,” Shelton says, “because Tim couldn’t be more different than Nuke. He was politically active, intellectually combative, all that wonderful stuff. I kept telling Tim, ‘You’ve got to read that comic book that Nuke reads the same way you read Bertolt Brecht. It’s the same earnestness. You have the same commitment to it.’
“Tim liked the script, liked everything and finally all I had to tell him was, ‘Don’t comment on the character, just immerse yourself in the character. Don’t make judgments about Nuke.’ So Tim asked me, ‘What is there to like about Nuke?’ I said, ‘almost everything. He can’t be embarrassed. He doesn’t care what people think. He’s earnest. He’s open. He expresses himself straight forward. He’s guileless. There’s a lot about Nuke we could learn from.”
Shelton hadn’t told anyone about Steve Dalkowski or Joe Altobelli while “Bull Durham” was being filmed in Durham, N.C. So no one knew why he moved the cast and crew an hour away to Wilson to film the memorable scene in which
Kevin Costner, as Crash Davis, breaks into the locked ballpark and turns on the sprinklers to force a rain-out.
“Well, the secret reason,” Shelton says, “was, that’s where Dalkowski — I didn’t tell anybody at the time — supposedly threw a fastball like 20 or 30 feet over the catcher’s head and it went through the mesh. Cal Ripken [Sr.] swore by that. And that mesh was 40 feet back. I said, ‘I’m going to go look.’ We go to shoot this scene, a night scene, and I climb up like a monkey and there was this hole up there. And I imagined, that’s where the ball went through. Who knows? But that’s why we shot that floodingthe-field scene in Wilson, N.C.”
The screen play for “Bull Durham” was nominated for an Academy Award, won numerous other major writing awards in 1988, and the film has grossed more than $50 million. In 2003, it topped Sports Illustrated’s list of best sports movies of all time. Shelton says he may have another sports movie or two left in him.
“I love sports, and I have great respect for athletes,” Shelton says. “I do, but I don’t mythologize it. I don’t like things about baseball to get too lyrical and poetic, because that’s not really what’s going on out there. I never write about ‘the big play.’ You go to ‘SportsCenter’ for ‘the big play.’ The movie-maker has a mandate to tell all the stories we can. I don’t like most sports movies because you know what’s going to happen at the end. It’s kind of based on triumph, which almost never happens in real life, and the hero walks away with everything and that’s certainly not true. How many athletes have happy, contented, fulfilled lives? They’re performers, and failed performers, and their lives are complicated. It’s the stories that are interesting.”