Biography
William Ashley Sunday was born on November 19, 1862, in a log cabin near Ames, Iowa. His father, a soldier in the Union army, died of illness during the Civil War before Billy was born. His mother was left with little, and she placed Billy and his brother in a soldiers' orphans' home for several years. He grew up poor, tough and quick. He worked at odd jobs as a boy and found that he had a gift for running and for playing baseball.
He was discovered by a team in Marshalltown, Iowa, and in 1883 he joined the Chicago White Stockings, one of the best baseball teams in the country. He was among the fastest runners in the game. He played for Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia over the next eight years. He was also a young man who loved to drink and to spend time in the saloons. He was not interested in religion.
In 1886, one Sunday afternoon in Chicago, he was walking down the street with some teammates when a gospel wagon from the Pacific Garden Mission stopped on the corner. The band played hymns he had heard in his boyhood, and he was moved. He started to attend the mission and soon gave his life to Christ. He said that he came to the end of himself and that the Lord forgave him. He gave up drink and gambling and began to study the Bible. In 1888 he married Helen Thompson, a young woman from a Chicago family, and she was a steady partner in his work for the rest of his life.
He continued to play baseball for a few more years, but he felt a call to full-time Christian work. In 1891 he left the game for a post with the YMCA in Chicago, at a fraction of his ballplayer's salary. He later worked as an assistant to the evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, and in 1896 he began to preach on his own. His first campaign was in a small town in Iowa. Over the next three decades he became the most famous evangelist in America.
His preaching was dramatic and athletic. He ran across the platform, slid as if into home plate, smashed chairs and threw his coat aside. He spoke in the slang of the street and used baseball images. His sermons were blunt, with strong words against sin and against drinking. In the cities where he held campaigns, huge wooden tabernacles were built, holding up to twenty thousand people, and the sawdust floors gave the name of sawdust trail to the walk the converts took to the front. He is estimated to have preached to more than one hundred million people and to have seen several hundred thousand come to the front to give their lives to Christ.
He was a leading voice for Prohibition and was proud of the part he played in winning it. In the First World War he took a strongly patriotic line. Critics found his style crude, and some thought that he used fear to move people. He also had a hard time in his family. Several of his children struggled, and two of his sons were known for trouble. He was a man who had given himself so fully to his work that he could not give enough time at home.
In his last years his health failed and the crowds grew smaller, as the style of revival he stood for went out of fashion. He died on November 6, 1935, of a heart attack, in Chicago. Thousands came to his funeral. His life shows that God can take the roughest of men and make them a messenger of the cross.