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BUENA VISTA, Va. - You have to pass a sign proclaiming this town the home of the new Phillies manager, this small burg by the Maury River, which eventually connects to the Chesapeake Bay.
It is an hour from Charlottesville, hard in the Shenandoah Valley, a little more than an hour from the West Virginia line. This is the womb from which Charles Fuqua Manuel sprang upon the world, 6-foot-4 of ornery, affable hillbilly. Here, "Fook" - so nicknamed by his pals because of the middle name he shares with the family doctor - began to become the wise and patient teacher of baseball.
At 61, life has used him hard. But when you talk to him, he seems little the worse for wear after a marriage, two children, a divorce, and a tumultuous baseball career chosen over basketball, his first love. Baseball took him to 12 states and two Japanese cities. He was tough enough to play three seasons in the majors with a 2-inch bone spur in his left heel, tough enough to play 2 days after Jerry Reuss shattered his jaw, broke his nose and knocked out six teeth when he hit Manuel with a pitch in a minor league game.
Manuel chuckled at the irony that he is cast as Larry Bowa's cool-headed replacement, considering Manuel says he used to manhandle his minor leaguers and exploded at some point nearly every night.
"I had a terrible bleepin' temper," Manuel says.
With the help of life's pains, and a 6-year immersion in Japanese culture, Manuel has mellowed. He has survived a heart attack, quadruple bypass surgery, a blocked and infected colon, kidney cancer and a life of others mocking his accent, assuming his ignorance.
"People have always talked about my accent," Manuel says. "I've never changed it, never been ashamed of it. That's exactly who I am."
That's why he's still "Boona Vista," through and through and forever. That, and this: He loves the sign, to be sure. But the sign takes second place to his favorite landmark: a replica of the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue.
Says Manuel as he enters the town, "I think that's one of the coolest things about Boona Vista."
Just to the northeast of neighboring Lexington, nestled into the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lies Virginia Military Institute. As a high schooler, Manuel would sling his basketball shoes and a bag with a bologna sandwich over his shoulder and run the 8 miles to VMI barefoot to play pickup basketball all day long.
The Maury River runs along Route 60, which connects the towns; it's the river where, as a boy, Manuel fished with a cane pole. Just to the northeast of Buena Vista, tucked into the side of another mountain, is a clearing where Manuel and his brothers and their friends would spend hours as boys, hitting rocks with sticks.
They built fires there and played basketball into the night, shooting at a hoop nailed to a pole. His friend, Bobby "Flash" Huffman, who now owns a painting business, tells a story of when he and "Fook" went there and "Fook" killed a squirrel from 100 yards with a shotgun.
That's where Manuel prepared for life before high school, where he would become a basketball and baseball star. The baseball field behind Parry McCluer High School has shrunk; only a few hundred can watch games there now; at one time, there was enough seating area to handle 2,000. The rightfield fence used to be 330 feet; now, it's 295. And there is only a field where there once was a playground.
"You could hit a home run if you hit one in the monkey bars," Manuel says.
Lovingly, Melissa Martin, 49, his companion for 10 years and now his fiancee, watches Manuel help a photographer set up a shot of him posing at the field. It is a nippy and wet January day. Manuel wears a dress shirt and slacks, but when the woman with the camera suggests building a platform to improve the shot, Manuel gives no thought to ruining his clothes. He picks up an old tire with each hand and lugs them to the proper site; then, in shiny shoes, he stands on them. And Martin's eyes shine.
"People tend to judge him or classify him because he's Southern," Martin says. "He's just very comfortable with who he is."
Says Phillies slugger Jim Thome, whom Manuel mentored since Thome was drafted in 1989: "He's the definition of, 'What you see is what you get.' "
What you get differs little from what you got when he lived in Buena Vista.
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