The plan is to talk to Bill (Spaceman) Lee about his movie, the one featuring him playing baseball in his late 50s in Cuba. The film is called Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey and it was made by two guys, Brett Rapkin and Josh Dixon, who had to borrow money from tourists to finish their project.
The movie will make its Toronto premiere Friday night with the Spaceman in attendance at the Bloor Cinema. So talking to Lee about the film is where our interview begins.
But staying on one subject with a mind as beautiful and busy as Lee's is no easy task. Better you should herd rabbits.
In the span of almost 30 minutes, Lee touches every base, from his failed bid for the U.S. presidency to Al Gore and global warming to his passion for visionary Buckminster Fuller to his plan to help build a rehabilitation clinic in the Canadian Rockies for brain-injured skiers.
"We've approached the B.C. government [with] Bode Miller and the Crazy Canucks," Lee begins in a telephone call that finds him in Northern California. "We've talked to Dave Irwin and Billy Johnson [former World Cup racers who suffered head injuries]. I want to do it in Canada. I want to live the rest of my life there."
Lee is 60 now, but you'd never know it to hear him talk. The man who rattled baseball's establishment, who is convinced he was blackballed from the major leagues because of his untamed nature, is never at a loss for flights of fancy, such as the time he pitched for a men's team from Carstairs, Alta.
"We had four Americans, a bookie, a cop and a gynecologist," Lee said. "The whole team would have been a sitcom. One night, we were watching the 1999 World Series on TV, and when it was over, the show Cops came on. They got a guy with a miner's helmet on talking softly about how they were sneaking up to this bar [for a bust], and the place was called Teddy's Bar in Boston. It was the bookie's bar.
"It's not often a guy gets to see his bar being raided on TV."
But back to the film, Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey.
When Lee was released in 1982 for staging a one-day walkout after the Montreal Expos released second baseman Rodney Scott, it marked the end of his big-league career. Even before that, Lee was branded a pot-sprinkling, Maoist-spouting, health food-eating, Warren Zevon-singing, Greenpeace advocate who did yoga and spoke of the dangers of overpopulation.
This was considered poor form.
But while baseball didn't want Lee, he still loved the game and travelled the world in search of batters to whiff. His pursuit took him to parts of the former Soviet Union, China and South America, until he opted for Cuba, where the game is played in its poorest, purest sense — no steroids, egos or millionaire players with bad attitudes.
When Rapkin and Dixon approached Lee about filming his exploits in Fidel Castro's backyard, Lee agreed and slipped into Cuba without any immigration hassles. He just wanted to play baseball; the movie crew came along for the ride.
"This is completely about baseball and not completely about baseball," said Rapkin, who was born in 1978, Lee's final season with the Boston Red Sox. "Everyone wants something to get them through the day. Everyone needs to have a passion for something the way Bill has a passion for baseball. It's his North Star."
Away from the diamond, there is much that guides Lee's spirit. In 1998, he ran for the presidency of the United States as a member of the Rhinoceros Party. Asked whether he would have made a good president, Lee replied: "We never would have gotten into Iraq or Iran. We would have gotten the troops to haul icebergs to places that needed water. We would have saved the Sahara, just put more humidity in the air. Everything would have been different if either myself or a woman had been elected president."
Lee added that while former vice-president Al Gore is being hailed for drawing attention to global warming, the Spaceman was saying the same thing back in 1975.
"[Sportswriter] Dick Schapp said I was ahead of my peers," Lee said. "But then a prophet in his own time is not well-respected."
Speaking of prophets, Lee has a soft spot for Fuller, the architect and inventor who coined the phrase spaceship earth and created the geodesic dome. In fact, if Lee could have dinner with any number of historical guests, he would have Fuller at the head of the table, presiding over such luminaries as Tecumseh, Gandhi and "that guy from the prairies who lived with the Eskimos for three years. I love to talk about diet."
And Victor Conte, the man at the heart of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative drug scandal.
"If a guy came to you and said, 'I can help your DNA regenerate your body parts' — you're going to say no?" Lee asked. "In the 1970s, people did speed and greenies so they could party and play hard the next day. Everybody wants to live longer."
Lee? He'll take another trip to the mound, and one more around the globe.
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