Dave Parker - Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood

Dave Parker gets his due in Cobra. One of the greatest to ever play the game of baseball. We get to see what made the first Million Dollar Man. He is a giant among men, larger than life.

Chuck D, founding member of Public Enemy

Dave Parker played hard and he lived hard. Cobra brings us on a unique, fantastic journey back to that time of bold, brash, and styling ballplayers. He reveals in relentless detail who he really was and, in so doing, who we all really were.

Dave Winfield

Dave Parkers autobiography takes us back to the time when ballplayers still smoked cigarettes, when stadiums were multiuse mammoth bowls, when AstroTurf wrecked knees with abandon, and when Blacks had their largest presence on the field in the games history. Honest, informative, funny, sad, even at times touching, Parkers book fills a major void about what a great Black ballplayers life was like in the 1970s and 1980s. I highly recommend it.

Gerald Early, professor of English and chair of the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis

Dave Parker made a lasting mark on the imagination of an entire generation of baseball fans, standing out with his unforgettable combination of swagger, style, and skill. Cobra is a memoir thats truly worthy of his legend, filled with Parkers insightful, hilarious, and long-overdue perspectives on the game he played, the era he played it in, and the guys he played it with. Ive been waiting forty years to read this book, and let me tell youit was well worth the wait.

Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass

This is a book that transcends baseball. Dave Parker has finally told his story, and it resonates with the strength and soul that have always made him one of the most compelling, and complicated, figures in baseball history. Cobra is a triumph.

Ricky Cobb (@Super70sSports)

While reading Cobra you will see a portrait of a man with amazing talent, a huge heart, and the will to be great. You will also see a man who seems to have it all but is still searching for peace of mind and love. There are highlights and low moments, excess and loss, brilliance and poor decisions, brotherhood and disagreements, joy and pain.

Preston Wilson, former MLB All-Star outfielder

Dave Parker and Dave Jordan

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2021 by Dave Parker and Dave Jordan

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image is from the interior.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Parker, Dave, 1951 author. | Jordan, Dave (Sportwriter), author.

Title: Cobra: a life of baseball and brotherhood / Dave Parker and Dave Jordan.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020032138

ISBN 9781496218735 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496226594 (epub)

ISBN 9781496226617 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Parker, Dave, 1951 | Baseball playersUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC GV 865. P 37 . A 3 2021 | DDC 796.357092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032138

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Kellye, with all my love

First things first. Thank you very much for taking the time to read about my lifes journey and the tales of all the fellas. It means an awful lot to me that Ive been given this opportunity to finally tell my side of things. For all of you who grew up watching me on television, sitting in the stands, checking my numbers in the box scores every day, or just thinking a whole lot about me, here is my life. I do want to say that this book is an adult story. Id love for you to pass along my lessons to your children and grandkids, but the following chapters cover many mature themes handled in a grown-up fashion with some vivid language. Some names were changed to respect the privacy of those who didnt ask for this exposure. The circumstances and outcomes you are about to experience are all true.

The Pirates clubhouse could be a pretty rough place sometimes. We did things and said things to each other that might be quite frowned upon in todays society. Yall know what Im talking about. That word. There was a time where we said that word repeatedly to one another, Black to white, white to Black, brother to brother, usually in jest or casual conversation. Today, theres no place for it in any conversation. I dont like it, I dont like hearing it, and I definitely dont like saying it. Im not judging others for their behavior, but its no longer personally acceptable to me, so you wont be reading it here. Please understand the context of the times when reading this story.

With all that said, lets get boppin.

Im sorry, Pete.

This is your day, Skip. Pete Rose night in America. The day youve been waiting for since you came back home to Cincinnati. Youre on the verge of breaking the all-time hit record. Youve climbed the Major League mountain, played night after day, through pain and injury, with a drive only a few of us can truly understand. They got no idea what it takes to play 160 games a year for two decadesthey like making snotty, uninformed remarks about compilers, but they dont know. They cant grasp the human wear and tear of near-constant travel, the emotional exhaustion. Those folks cant comprehend what it takes to get here. But I do. Were Queen City brothers from other mothers. Youve been to my high school; weve played on the same football field, the same Knothole Little League. Your relatives grew up in my neighborhood. We both knew the location of every pothole in the Crosley Field parking lot, ate at the same drive-ins as teenagers. I know everything youve ever dreamed of will be fulfilled tonight and my situation today is a terrible distraction. I just feel awful.

I should be standing in my kitchen making breakfast for my kids right now, pouring their apple juice, staring into their waking eyes, awaiting the next life discovery that today will bring for them. I should be driving south on I -75 toward Riverfront Stadium, a ballpark less than twenty minutes from my home, taking on the overflow reporters in the clubhouse this afternoon, those writers looking for an additional angle to the hit record or some second story for their hometown papers. Id be praising your leadership, your work ethic, and your undying love for the game. Instead, Im all alone, throwing on charcoal, pin-striped suit trousers in this hotel room at the Pittsburgh Hilton, on the worst kind of road trip imaginable.

I gotta go to court today, talk about my friends in baseball, my teammates, and how we spent our off-hours. I gotta help the government bring some low-level men to justice. Theres gonna be journalists from every major newspaper, TV networks, reporters yapping about the end of innocence, doing what they can to make this some monumental moment in sports. The other day in the clubhouse, some beat reporter dude was all, Say it aint so, Dave, talking in a fake kid voice, like I was one of the damn Black Sox, trying to get a rise out of me, create a headline.

Im adjusting my tie, wondering if I should just scrap this shit and fly back home, get ready to be with you and play against the Padres. Im only doing this because the smart people I know are telling me that the gun has been placed straight at my head. The defense attorneys gonna try to make me out to be some baseball version of Tony Montana, as if I were the cause of all the ills in the sports war on drugs.