I resolved to see how far my kids could go.On the decade-long odyssey that followed, I learned that not only baseball-crazy boys harbored knuckleball dreams.
Two wealthy business moguls did too.Their intersecting lives are one of the strange but true stories in my new book, "School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch."THE CRAIG CARTON SHOW–UNFILTERED, UNAPOLOGETIC AND UNMISSABLE.
DOWNLOAD HIS DAILY PODCAST NOW!Min Hur on the mound gearing up for a knuckleball (Credit: Rockand Boulders/Drew Wohl)Brooklyn real estate investor Howard Rich, a free-market guy who founded Americans for Limited Government, had Mets season tickets six rows behind home plate — the ideal place to watch Dickey’s knuckleball baffle hitters in 2012."If the knuckleball’s so hard to hit," Rich ’ s wife Andrea asked one game, "why does only one pitcher throw it in the major leagues?"Great question, Rich thought.This was a market failure.
He’d fix it by opening a school — the International Knuckleball Academy (IKA).He hired two minor league knucklers, Chris Nowlin and Zach Staniewicz to run it.On the other side of the globe, a 36-year-old South Korean who made a fortune in video games had never given up on his boyhood dream of playing pro baseball."I thought if I could master the knuckleball," Min Hur told me, "I might still have a chance."Hur converted the roof of his Seoul office building into a personal training facility, with a retractable dome and cutting-edge pitch tracking technology.
He’d also reached out to the greatest knuckleballer of all, Phil Niekro."Phil invited me to his home in Atlanta and over a month taught me everything from the grip to the philosophy behind the pitch.He became my great mentor."Hur worked with another knuckleball legend, Charlie Hough, too."He could take the spin off the ball pretty darn well," Hough recalled.In 2013, Hur hired a well-connected agent who got him tryouts with the Rangers, Mariners, and Diamondbacks.
The...