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A BEAR OF A SMOKEY


July 4, 1989
Section: SPORTS
Page: E1


By    Ed Murrieta
Bee Correspondent

There's not a more closely guarded secret in Sacramento than Larry Manuian's age. But don't push him for the information.

"We don't give that out," says Maniuan, founder/manager/designated hitter of the Sacramento Smokeys semiprofessional baseball team.

"I don't get into that. Sheeeesh. I don't give that out. Are you kidding? I might wanna get a date. I might wanna get a loan or something."

Age always has been a sticking point for Maniuan. And though he'll tell you he played pro ball during the FDR and Harry S. Truman administrations, he goes to great lengths to protect his secret, half-seriously threatening bodily harm to anyone who may press him for his date of birth.

"Fifty and over" is all he'll offer. "Over 50. That's the closest. World War II. I spent two years in the combat zone. That gives a little. That's enough right there."

Although rumor has it that he's well past 60, anyone who meets Maniuan or is around him for any length of time can see he's nowhere near ready for a rest home.

Maniuan stands 5-foot-8 1/2 and weighs 215 pounds -- a human fireplug. His chest is as large and formidable as a long-standing oak. His biceps strain at 18 1/2 inches, built up from 20 years of pumping iron, and his fists are like matured hams.

He's quick with a round-faced smile, and just as quick to snarl, his dark and weathered Armenian-American features framed by wild mutton-chop sideburns, his head topped off by long strands of thinning hair flopped from one side to the other.

He speaks in gruff bursts, his words coming out like Howitzer fire. To hear him say it, he's manager of the "Sakamenta" Smokeys.

Told that he may be in better shape than men half his age, Maniuan doesn't want to hear it. He makes frequent references to such aged, successful athletes as Jack LaLanne, Nolan Ryan and the Indian wrestler Gonda, who was a champion into his late 50s.

"Just put I'm past 55," Maniuan snarls. "That's enough for this game. I'm no teenager. I'm no old man. I got a long time to go. I take excellent care of my body."

Maniuan doesn't deny that he's the oldest person to hit a home run over Renfree Field's 325-foot left-field fence, which he did in 1984. Not long after that, he set a record by hitting 19 line drives in 20 pitches from a 90 mph pitching machine at a local batting cage.

"Yeah, I like that," he says. "I'd rather do that than go out and get drunk or take dope. You get the satisfaction of knowing you can do something that no one else your age can do. That is fun.

"But you can't go bragging about those things. And if I go give my age out, people won't believe it."

In any case, it's safe to say Maniuan is playing against ex-pros and top college players young enough to be his sons -- or grandsons.

"If I was his age, hitting the ball and doing all the things he's doing against 20-year-olds and ex-pros, I'd want everyone to know how old I was," says Smokeys first baseman Marty Wright, echoing many of Manuian's players. "He deflates the egos of these college kids.

"When I'm nearing 70 years old, I'll be lucky to play golf," adds Wright, 27, who has played for Maniuan since he was 17. "If I were him, I'd want everyone to know how old I was."

But Maniuan doesn't, though he'll unwittingly tip his hand.

He picks up a tab at a coffee shop, and when the cashier rings him up for a roast beef dinner and a BLT, Maniuan is given -- and accepts -- the senior citizen's discount.

What gives, Larry?

"Where'd they get that s- -t?" Maniuan says. "I don't need a senior citizen's discount. Man, I can't believe that. I can bench press 400 pounds. They'd better not try that again."

With Larry Maniuan, it's hard to separate hyperbole from honest-to-God sincerity. There's no middle ground. But he's very earnest when he talks about baseball, his passion.

He'll tell you how he played Legion ball with Wally Westlake. Served a short stint with the San Francisco Seals under Lefty O'Doul. Played with Ferris Fain, Jake Powell and Ted Norbert.

He played for Knoxville of the Southern Association. He played for a United States Army team. He's played in small towns through the Southern and Western United States, and he's played in prisons.

He's seen good and bad, done good and bad, but he still believes in baseball -- not as a game played by men and boys, but as a game of the soul and spirit.

To Larry Maniuan, baseball is a higher purpose. Why else would a man continue an active role in baseball at an age when most -- probably all -- of his contemporaries, their playing days long passed, are sitting on the porch, bragging about the hanging slider they took deep to left so many years ago?

Maniuan is in his 41st year with the Smokeys, though a biceps injury has restricted his playing time. What keeps him going?

"It's a lot of hard work," he says, leaning back in his chair, sighing. "But the Sacramento Smokeys and baseball are better than dope and murder."

Dope and murder are recurring themes in any conversation with Maniuan. He'll also go on about feminist Nazis, age discrimination, herpes, lesbians, AIDS, steroids . . .

And somehow, it all relates to the Smokeys, must relate to the Smokeys, for the Smokeys are Manuian's life. They have been since he and his late brother, Paul, founded the team in 1949 as Paul Motors (named at first for Paul Manuian's Hudson dealership at 20th and Broadway).

"He loves baseball," former Smokeys player Steve Eakes says. "You know how they say you've got to live, eat and breathe it? He does. Baseball is his life. I'm sure there is more, but I can't put my finger on it. It's all part of his uniqueness."

"This is his whole life," Smokeys announcer/scorekeeper Ken Kitchen says. "He goes out and scrounges money, and he puts on a pretty good brand of baseball.

"It's a one-man show. It's his legacy. It's what he's leaving to Sacramento."

Indeed. While other professional, semiprofessional and minor-league teams have come and gone, the Smokeys have endured, have become Manuian's legacy. The Smokeys have outlasted two incarnations of the Sacramento Solons of the Pacific Coast League. The Smokeys have stayed around while two pro soccer teams have set up and folded, and while semipro football and basketball began and ended here.

The Smokeys almost folded, too. There was a stretch from 1957-63 when the team was shelved for lack of interest. During those years, Maniuan rounded up a team for an occasional barnstorming trip.

But Maniuan being Maniuan, he was able to pull the team back together and has kept the Smokeys going non-stop since 1964, renamed the Sacramento Smokeys, a name he took from his old Knoxville team.

And of all the things he has done, Maniuan is proudest of keeping the Smokeys alive.

"Just when they think they've got the last local team dead, boom, up pops the Smokeys. We're the last ones going," Maniuan says with proud-poppa bravado. "Some of them want to kill the top local sports, step on them like a bug. They hear the Smokeys, and they go, 'Ooooooooooh, are they still around?'

"That's scum that thinks that. They're like bugs. We brush them away."

Most of the teams that have come and gone had investors and were run by people in coats and ties. Maniuan is the antithesis of button-down management. He's gruff and salty and perhaps a bit uncouth. He's acerbic and grating, half full of his own bluster and unwilling to play politics -- "I don't kiss nobody's butt," is how he puts it.

But Larry Maniuan is not out to win the Mr. Congeniality title. He just wants to run a baseball team his way.

"You can see I'm no piano player," Maniuan says. "I'm pretty aggressive and temperamental. What else can I tell you?"

Still, there are those around him who would like to see Maniuan refine his style and command the respect -- and support -- they believe he deserves.

"I would like to see Larry get some more dignified support," Kitchen says. "He needs to dress up his act a little, get more polished. But I don't think he wants it."

"He runs everything out of the back of his trunk," Smokeys first baseman Wright says. "I think he needs to relinquish one of his titles. He'll tell you that he's doing a million-and-nine different things. He may be stretching himself too thin.

"I would like to see him get things a bit more organized, but that would take away from what the Smokeys are all about."

Manuian's one-man-band approach has extended to bankrolling the team out of his own pocket over the years. He's as evasive in money matters as he is about his age, but it's estimated that he spends between $20,000 and $30,000 a year on the Smokeys. Some of the money is raised from program advertising, but most of it comes from the money Maniuan earns from several rental properties.

It's no way to become a rich man, but Maniuan doesn't care.

"To survive like this takes a lot of intestinal fortitude and durability and persistency," Maniuan says. "And I tell you again, it's still a hell of a lot better than dope and murder and people trying to get AIDS and all that.

"If I put in the time in real estate that I put in baseball, I'd be a multimillionaire. Every day of the year, I put four to five hours a day into baseball, except Sundays."

His players say Manuian's devotion to baseball is what attracted them to him and the Smokeys.

"He is devoted to his players," former Smokeys infielder Sam Lovelace says. "And that kind of sets him apart from other people. He lives and dies the Smokeys. I think his dog is even named Smokey."

Lovelace, who played 15 seasons for Maniuan, was ready to walk away from baseball after being released by the Oakland A's in 1971. But he met Maniuan and changed his mind.

"He makes baseball fun," Lovelace says.

Most of Manuian's players were Smokeys before they had their shot or near shot at the pros, and when their pro careers end, they return. His current roster includes nine players with professional experience.

"Mainly it's because of Larry," Butch Metzger, a West Sacramento firefighter and the 1975 National League Rookie of the Year, says of his presence on the team. "When you get away from him and the Smokeys, you miss them."

Everyone has a Larry Maniuan story, and these tales -- sordid, bizarre, sometimes eloquent and always funny -- are the best way to get a fix on the man.

"How do you describe him to someone who doesn't know him? You can't," says Wright, a former sportscaster at KTXL Channel 40 who now works at KCRL Channel 4 in Reno. "To really appreciate Larry Maniuan, you have to play for him and spend some time with him."

But the stories help tell the tale.

* Larry Maniuan as a mean and righteous, take-no-guff kind of guy:

A few years back, Maniuan took the Smokeys to San Quentin to play a team of convicts. The Smokeys had to pass through several security checkpoints, including gates and metal detectors. They dressed in a makeshift locker room. Maniuan forgot his spikes, and not wanting to go through the security checks again, he decided to play in his street shoes -- brownish/purplish platform numbers, known on the street as "pimp shoes."

"The inmates are laughing, calling him a leprechaun," Wright recalled. "He steps out of the batter's box and says, 'I'll take on any three of you murdering suckers right now.'

"We're in the dugout worried, saying, 'Skip, these guys have nothing to lose.' I swear to God, we're panicked. 'Hey, Skip, easy.' "

Maniuan was unfazed. "Easy my a- -," he responded.

* For years, the Smokeys have been playing the Humboldt Crabs, whose field in Arcata features a 20-second pitch clock. If a batter is not in the box within 20 seconds of leaving the on-deck circle, the umpire calls a strike. If the pitcher is not on the mound in 20 seconds, the ump calls a ball.

Maniuan once was standing outside the batter's box warming up when the clock went off and the umpire called a strike. As he stared at the umpire, the clock went off again, and another strike was called. Maniuan then readied himself for the next pitch.

"He got called out on strikes, and he took his bat and banged it on the plate," Lovelace says. "He was walking to the dugout, and all the fans were razzing him. He just held the bat up and snapped it over his knee."

* Larry Maniuan as the old softie he tries not to reveal:

The Smokeys practice at 28th and C streets, a park frequented by transients. Maniuan always has time for them and goes over to talk with them.

A few years ago, Maniuan befriended a mentally retarded man and allowed him to sit in the dugout and go on road trips with the Smokeys. Some of the players didn't like having him around, but Maniuan stuck up for the man.

"He used to embarrass us," Wright says. "Larry would say, 'Hey, what else does he got to do? It means a lot to him.'

"Larry's the epitome of ultra-macho, but I think he's an ultra-softie. He's a good-hearted guy. He's helped out a lot of people, and he doesn't want any credit for it. He's not Mother Teresa, . . . but he seems to find time for guys in the non-mainstream of society."

Maniuan is something of a surrogate father to his players. If someone needs money, Maniuan will help. If they need a job, he'll help them find one or put them to work for him.

Smokeys catcher Clint Brill, baseball coach at Foothill High, remembers Maniuan being there to help after Brill was released by the Atlanta Braves in 1984.

"When I was looking for a job, Larry helped me out," he says. "He's just a real kind guy. The first impression of him is this guy with a low, scratchy voice and all. But once you get to know him, you find he's real kindhearted."

Eakes, who coaches baseball at Highlands High and who played seven seasons with the Smokeys, remembers Maniuan doling out gas money on the yearly road trip to Utah. Veterans would get a little more, but Maniuan didn't want anyone to know.

"He'd always tell guys the exact same thing and say, 'Don't tell anybody,' " Eakes says. "There's a line of guys waiting for money, and he tells everybody don't tell anybody, like it's a big secret."

Maniuan would like you to believe that running the Smokeys is a major hardship, and though he'll complain about how tough it is, it's easy to see that there's nothing he'd rather do.

"Anybody else that does what I do would be in a mental hospital," he says. "There's a lot of work involved. You try to raise a few pennies, book games and practice schedules, going out of town. People ought to try it."

But after 41 seasons of making sure he has enough guys to fill the roster, constantly calling businesses for sponsorships and equipment donations, breaking up bench-clearers and baby-sitting assorted egos, Maniuan has no intention of retiring. Sure, it's been a long, strange trip, but it's been his trip, and he says he'll stick with it "until I'm 105 years old," though he won't tell you how soon that will be.

"What the hell else is there?" he says. "When I find out there's something else I like better, I'll do it. Like I said, I'm good at it, and I like what I do. What the hell else am I gonna do? Go fishing? Chase women and try to get AIDS or something? Or be an alcoholic or take drugs? Baseball's got them beat."

Others have a much simpler view.

"If he ever quits, he'll die, because he lives it so much," Eakes says. "His heart beats for baseball. If it didn't beat for baseball, it would stop beating." 

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