You might not know who Eddie Feigner was, but he was a big name in sports.

"Now, wait," you're thinking. "I'm pretty knowledgable about sports figures and I've never heard of this guy. He couldn't have been all that great!"

He was. And the reason why I know this is that my father told me so. My father was not a big sports buff. Outside of golf, he probably couldn't name ten people who played any professional sport. But he did know about Eddie Feigner.

His knowledge was first-hand.

In the 1960s and 1970s, my father played softball for the Pennsylvania State Police. It was purely for fun and my father pitched for the team. But there was one particular game that my father told me about. That was the day that he played against Eddie Feigner's team.

Mr. Feigner was the star pitcher and namesake for "The King and His Court." And my father pitched against them in a charity game.

Sports Illustrated ranked The King and His Court among the magazine's top 20 favorite teams of the 20th century. They ranked 8th...ahead of the Super Bowl-winning 1985 Chicago Bears and the 1955 World Series-winning Brooklyn Dodgers.

My father's game was far from unique. In his career, Eddie Feigner led the team to more than 11,000 other games where they won nearly 10,000 of them! He threw 141,517 strikeouts (8,698 of them while he was blindfolded), 930 no-hitters, and 238 perfect games. According to their website, they travelled more than 4,000,000 miles covering all 50 United States, 100 countries, and 6 continents to play in front of more than 20,000,000 spectators. Eddie played for 54 years where they would take on full teams of nine or ten players using only a pitcher, catcher, first baseman, and shortstop. Yes, they were good enough to win against full teams while fielding only four players. His four-man team even beat a nine-man baseball team, including a number of major league players, in front of 16,000 people at the Silverdome with the 56-year old Feigner pitching.

Eddie Feigner once had a pitch clocked at 104 mph. In an exhibition game in 1967, he struck out Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Brooks Robinson, Maury Wills, Harmon Killebrew, and Robreto Clemente...yes, that's six baseball Hall of Famers in a TWO-INNING game.

On February 9, 2007, just about one month shy of his 82nd birthday, Eddie Feigner died in Huntsville, Alabama.

He played against some of the greatest baseball players of all-time as well as some cops doing their best to pose as hack softball players. His efforts have raised money for charities around the world. A US Marine, Feigner has also given to Veteran's charities including Honor Flight, which takes WWII veterans to Washington DC to see the WWII Veterans Memorial.

There was a time when entertainers such as The King and His Court toured the US. These people did it for the love of the job and, in Eddie Feigner's case, to give back to the world. I wish I had been fortunate enough to have seen them play ball, but I can say that I was one degree away from playing against the legend.

Learn more about this author, Vince Capece.
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