Trip to Cuba hit home with Oakland youths
Filmmaker captures how baseball coach provided hope
Berkeley filmmaker Eugene Corr went to Cuba in 2007 mainly to defy President George W. Bush’s tightening the travel embargo to the island. Wandering around Havana, he came upon a scene that inspired the feature documentary that would take eight years to come to fruition.
“I walked onto a ball field, and it was time travel. I went back to Richmond in the ’50s,” says Corr, who’d grown up playing on public fields in the once-booming industrial East Bay city where his father coached and guided kids of all kinds.
“It was the same deal — you had black and white kids playing together. The coaches were hanging out with people. It was a joyous feeling.”
Observing the passion and patience of Cuban coach Nicolas Reyes, Corr decided to tell a
tale of two coaches: this man in Havana — who earned $14 a month from Cuba’s national baseball program — and a coachto-be-found working with inner-city kids back home.
That turned out to be Roscoe Bryant Jr., a solid citizen who’d started a baseball team for youngsters in the West Oakland neighborhood called Ghost Town in ’04 after a 14-yearold boy was gunned down in front of Bryant’s house and died in his arms. He figured nine kids on the diamond meant nine fewer on the perilous streets.
Bryant tells the story in Corr’s “Ghost Town to Havana,” a potent and poetic 2015 film that follows Bryant’s Oakland Royals as they travel to Cuba to play and connect with their Spanish-speaking counterparts — and deal with unexpected events that give the movie even more resonance.
As part of their Barnstorming Tour to recruit, train and inspire men and women to coach and mentor inner-city kids, Bryant, Corr and some big-league ball players will do a Q&A at free public screenings of the film this week and next.
On Tuesday, former Giants center fielder Andrés Torres, representing Junior Giants, will be at San Francisco’s Bayview Opera House with Bryant, Corr and David Jacobson of Positive Coaching Alliance. Former Dodgers and Giants second baseman Nate Oliver will be at the screening Wednesday at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland. Former Giants outfielder Mike Felder will be at Richmond’s East Bay Center for the Performing Arts on May 10.
“Baseball teaches social skills, teamwork, perseverance,” says Bryant, 54, coaching a T-ball scrimmage between two teams of youngsters at East Oakland’s Brookdale Park on a mild April evening.
“If you keep pluggin’ along, there are possibilities that you can succeed. That translates into life.”
A focused, graceful man with a small gold hoop in each ear and an engaging way with kids and their folks, Bryant is a serious volunteer coach who supports his family — which includes a foster son who played on the team that went to Cuba and whose mother later died — as a guard with Bannerman Security. (“We’re kind of the Uber of security,” he says. “We can pick our assignments.”)
He grew up in an African American community in Ohio where “there were always men around — coaches, fathers, pastors.” That wasn’t the case in West Oakland a decade ago.
“At that time, a lot of men were being shipped off to prison, caught in the drug wars, the drug trade, that pipeline to prison. There was an absence of men in our community.
“I’m starting to see that change,” he says, gesturing to the multicultural crowd on hand for the T-ballers of the local Babe Ruth League (uniforms provided in part by the Oakland A’s). “You see a lot of fathers out here, a lot of men.”
Corr, whose credits include writing the narration for Carroll Ballard’s “Never Cry Wolf ” and writing and directing the Oscar-nominated documentary “Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey,” video-connected Bryant and the Afro Cuban coach Reyes. After two years of fundraising and red tape, he brought them and their young players together in Havana in 2010.
The first few days, Corr recalls, the Oakland kids, most of whom had never flown or stayed in a hotel, weren’t happy. They didn’t like the food (goat, the first night), the heat or language barrier.
But then there were “pretty girls, a lot of baseball and a lot of fun. The Cubans are so warm. The kids really opened up, and the camaraderie with the Cubans was genuine.”
Bryant picked up valuable coaching tips watching Reyes, with whom he bonded (the Cuban’s wife had just had a debilitating heart attack, and Bryant was shaken up by the recent breakup of his marriage). The Cubans, he says, had little materially but an abundance of familial love.
“I loved the fact that the family was still intact in Cuba. You didn’t see a lot of single moms or dads,” says Bryant, who had the painful task of telling one of his players before they returned to Oakland that his stepfather had been shot and killed. Two years later, the young man spoke on camera about his feelings and the Cuban experience.
“For those nine kids, going to Cuba changed their lives,” Bryant says. “All are either in college or gainfully employed. The last one lives with me, and he’s definitely on his way to college.”
For Corr, guys like Bryant and Corr’s own mentor — basketball player and coach Eural McKelvey — “are the men who show you where center field is at, who kind of describe the world to you in certain ways when you really need it.”
When Bryant started the Royals 14 years ago, he committed to coaching for 20 years. “That’s about a generation. I think change takes about one good generation,” he says.
Bryant, who’s getting married in July to a woman he met at a screening of the film, has learned from Oakland Babe Ruth League president Louie Butler, who’s been involved for 49 years.
“We’re teaching life lessons through baseball,” says Butler, watching the kids at Brookdale Park. “We’re trying to get them to come up and be productive adults, and keep them from being a statistic.”