I keep circling back to my father when I think about Robert Redford. Not because the two men ever met, but because my father judged actors by whether they could swing a bat, and in his view most of them couldn’t. Gary Cooper’s left-handed impersonation of Lou Gehrig in “The Pride of the Yankees” drove him mad; it was an ungainly thing that no true ballplayer could watch without wincing.

Redford, who died Tuesday at 89, passed the test. His swing in “The Natural” was credible, patterned on Ted Williams but not slavishly imitative, the kind of swing that might belong to a former athlete who remembers what a clean line through the ball feels like. My father hummed his approval. Redford didn’t embarrass the game.

For years the story was repeated that he had played baseball at Van Nuys High School with Don Drysdale, the future Hall of Fame pitcher. Drysdale himself told the tale, recalling Redford as “a pretty good ball player.” It was an anecdote that seemed to fit: Redford was golden, Drysdale was golden, southern California in the early 1950s was golden—why shouldn’t the two have shared the diamond?

But in 2011, the Los Angeles Times dug through yearbooks and interviewed Redford’s classmates: Redford played tennis, not baseball. He and Drysdale were at the school at the same time, but weren’t teammates on the high school team. The story was a legend, and like so many legends about Redford, it was too good to check, until someone finally did.

Yet Drysdale’s memory of Redford as a teammate may not have been false in spirit. They might have played together on sandlots or American Legion teams. Boys found each other through games in those years, and the line between memory and wishful invention is porous. Redford was good enough to earn a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, even if drink and distraction ended that experiment. Whatever the facts, the truth was there in the way he moved. When the camera asked him to be a ballplayer, he looked like one.

That was Redford in essence: a man who didn’t need to make things up. Even his name........

© Arkansas Online