- Contributed by Trevor Rowse.

Sports’ trivia question.
Which pitcher was named as the most under-rated sportsman of all time by Sports’ Illustrated, but was ranked in that magazine’s list of the greatest top ten US pitchers? 

Clue One: He brought a team to New Zealand in 1984. It was rated, by the same magazine, as the 8th greatest US sports’ team of the 20th century.
Clue Two: He pitched 238 perfect games, where not one batter reached first base, sometimes reaching a top speed of over 100 miles per hour.
Clue Three: Only 184 people turned up to see this team in Auckland.
Clue Four: In 1967 he faced a line-up of six of the top US baseball hitters and struck them out in a row. They were some of the 141,516 batters he struck out in his career.
Clue Five: His team rivalled the Harlem Globetrotters as it travelled around the US and much of the rest of the world.
Clue Six: He was a softballer who earned, in his heyday, as much as any other ball player in the USA. 

Answer: Eddie Feigner, the King of the four-man fastpitch team called The King and His Court. But, with Eddie, it was more than a game. As well as regulation stuff, he included pitching from behind his back, from his knees, between his legs, from second base and while blindfolded, as he did in Auckland and on the Tonight Show, when he knocked a cigar out of Johnny Carson’s mouth, pitching with his eyed covered.
When I interviewed him in 1984 he was the ultimate showman, knowing what the public wanted for their buck. 
The showcase was the four men, all expert players, who could get the runs while he stifled the ever-eager batters, keen to show that they had the answer to the “old man out there on the pitching plate”.
And he was 58 years old at that time, dressed in a showy star-spangled red, white and blue outfit to show his US affiliation. People remembered the uniform as much as his prowess at making people swing at pitches which moved away from them with prodigious curves, or dropped out of sight. Often they stood still, watching the ball move away, and then back, in and down. 

He played for 60 years, sharing his knowledge with other pitchers and leaving a legacy, while the fastpitch game he loved shrunk as the “sissy game” (as he called it) of slowpitch evolved. 

When I was talking to him, pitchers arrived in his hotel room to pay homage. Mark Smith, the Canadian who pitched here for a controversially short time, was there to pay homage. In that spell Feigner showed him some of his secrets.
“I taught Mark a change-up, without either of us getting out of our chairs,” said Feigner said. “He knew what I was telling him. 

“New Zealand now is like the US of the 1950s and 60s. Fastpitch is the king. The pitching and fielding is high class, but no one has taught you all how to hit. I hope to pass a few things on in clinics.” 

His team bamboozled and entertained all over the world, wherever the game was played by men, and sometimes where it was not, such as Australia, where he was bound the next day. 

“We can alter the Aussies too,” said Feigner, “if we tell them that softball is a he-man game and that it is respectable.
“People stay with what they are used to, but cricketers make softball hitters because they can hit the low pitches.
“I leaned to bowl cricket so that I could relate to people in the West Indies, Pakistan and India, but I’m not all that great.” 

He picked his playing companions from those who batted best against him.
“They are all thrilled to be asked,” he said. 

My final question was: Will there ever be another Eddie Feigner?
“I don’t think so,” was the reply. “First, it takes a lot of talent and showmanship, but it also needs a knowledge of the old days, the old style of pitching. 

“Four-man ball is different – how else could you win against nine men?”
How else? 

Eddie Feigner died this week, aged 81, still able to get up from a wheelchair to throw a pitch or two. He was a very sick man at the end, but he was remembered by a fine tribute by Douglas Martin, in the New York Times (13 February 2007), which is the basis for much of this article. 

But the memory is still of the showman, in red, white and blue, still doing the top show for the few who bothered to turn up at Coca-Cola Park, all those years ago. Like Kevin Herlihy, with pizzazz.