Jim Bouton
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Topics
Sports Figures
Inspiring Stories
Motivation Strategies
Your speech was absolutely the highlight of the evening. MANY people gave us great comments. You kept everyone engaged and laughing.
National Paper Trade Association
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About Jim Bouton - Former MLB Player and Inspirational Speaker:
Jim Bouton is the New York Yankee's twenty-game winner, author of Ball Four, Sportscaster, actor, inventor, and businessman. As a major league speaker, Jim's presentation is a highly entertaining combination of anecdotes, insights and inspiration, tailored to his audience.
In 1963 Jim won 21 games for the New York Yankees and made the all-star team. In 1964 he won 18 games and beat the Cardinals twice in the World Series. Truly innovative, during his comeback in 1978 Bouton helped create 'Big League Chew,' shredded bubble gum in a pouch, so ballplayers could look 'right' without getting sick. Big League Chew, introduced in 1980, has replaced chewing tobacco for people across the nation.
Bouton received the highest honor of his career when he was featured in The One Hundred Most Important People in American Sports History, published by Macmillan. This book, which covers 150 years, contains only 21 people from the world of baseball.
Jim's book Ball Four is the funny, controversial, all-time bestseller that revealed baseball players as human beings. Ball Four was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 'Books of the Century.' The latest update, titled Ball Four: The Final Pitch, is now entertaining a new generation. In 1970 Bouton retired from baseball and became a television sportscaster in New York where he helped WABC-TV and then WCBS-TV climb to 1st place in the ratings. During the 1970s he wrote a sequel to Ball Four entitled I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, earned good reviews in a Robert Altman movie The Long Goodbye, and created, wrote and acted in a CBS network TV sitcom based on his book.
In 1997 Bouton wrote his first novel, Strike Zone which is now in paperback. In 2003 Bouton self-published Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark - his first diary since Ball Four.
What Jim Bouton Talks About:
Bouton believes in focusing on the process as a way to achieve goals. He encourages his audience to think like athletes, to get into the fun of the enterprise, the challenge of long odds, the satisfaction in details, the thrill of extraordinary effort, the joy of work. It was his love of a challenge that led to his unprecedented comeback to the major leagues at the age of 39, after an eight year retirement.'The irony,' says Bouton, is that by focusing on the process you reach the goals more often.'
