After 14 years of disappointment, former Red Sox slugger Jim Rice yesterday savors his selection into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

AP / Steven Senne

In the summer of 1988, I made a pilgrimage to Anderson, S.C., the small sleepy town near Clemson University where Jim Rice grew up.

The point of the visit was to try to figure out the enduring mystery of Jim Rice, the man who had become the least-known superstar ever to play in Boston.

He was in his 14th season at the time, in the twilight of his great career, and in many ways we knew as little about him then as we did when he first had come to the Red Sox in 1975, the year he and fellow rookie Fred Lynn burst across the baseball world like some supernova across the nighttime sky.

All this came rushing back at me yesterday afternoon upon hearing the news that Rice has been named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the culmination of a baseball journey that began in the South Carolina of his childhood, light years from the bright lights of the biggest baseball stadiums in the country.

I thought of the small town in the summer heat, with its main street full of stores whose glory days seemed all in the past.

The Jim Ed Rice Center, an old elementary school that had been turned into a youth center, complete with a large picture of Rice in his Red Sox uniform, the center field bleachers of Fenway Park behind him, his large Afro sticking out from under a red hat.

The woman writing a letter to Rice asking him to stop into the center sometime, that the kids see his picture but they don’t know him.

All of it.

For this is a journey that had its roots in the segregated South, to the point that Rice had gone to a segregated high school near his house until his senior year, until the town redrew the lines of the school district and he was sent to the white school in his senior year, even though his sister remained in the black school.

“They used him,” said Beatrice Thompson. She was a guidance counselor at the black high school and a distant relative of Rice’s. “He knew they only wanted him to play ball for them.”

The move gave him more exposure, though, for even in the late ’60s there were baseball scouts that largely ignored the black high schools in the South. That June he became the Red Sox’ first pick in the ’71 draft.

Four years later he was in Fenway Park, arriving in the middle of Boston’s court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in the city’s public schools. It would turn out to be the worst school-busing crisis in American history, ripping the city apart.

What did Rice think of this?

Did Rice feel the weight of being a young black star in a city immersed in racial hell, playing for a franchise that had been the last in baseball to integrate, a franchise where other young, black players had been unhappy?

Who knew.

He seldom gave interviews, and when he did, they were perfunctory at best, offering little. And as he moved through his career this never changed. If anything, it only got worse, as Rice’s antagonism toward the media became as omnipresent as his growing numbers, as if he had put a moat around himself and the voracious Boston media and no one was going to get across it.

That, too, became part of Rice’s mystique, right there with the stories about his strength and the prodigious numbers that became his calling card. His teammates swore by his work ethic, manager Don Zimmer always lauded him. And it became like there were two Jim Rices — the one his teammates saw, and the one that seemed to publicly move through the seasons to the beat of some private rhythm.

And as the years went by his anger seemed to be closer to the surface, adding to the mystery. There was the sense that he had positioned himself into a place where he didn’t get the attention he no doubt deserved, and now felt a certain bitterness because of it.

In 1985 he admitted that he’d been hurt by all the attention Lynn had received when they both had been rookies in 1975 and Lynn had been the MVP of the league, even though Rice had had similar numbers.

But it wasn’t until the publication of the 2002 book Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, by Howard Bryant, that Rice seemed to speak of things he’d kept bottled up for years.

He spoke about coming up with Lynn, who was supposed to be the Golden Child.

“They didn’t know what to do,” he said in Shut Out . “I wasn’t white. I wasn’t Irish and I wasn’t from Boston. But I knew the rules. I wasn’t going to say or do anything that was going to put what I had in jeopardy.”

So he never did.

Instead he hid behind his numbers.

The numbers that were good enough yesterday to put him into the Hall of Fame.

And he kept everything else inside in some private place, some place the world would never see.

“I got into trouble not giving the media what they wanted,” he said yesterday. “You don’t have to like me. Just give me respect.”

He has it now, of course, his slice of baseball immortality.

And one senses that it didn’t come easily, and that transcends the fact this was his 15th time on the ballot.

For this is about a journey that began back there in the South Carolina of his youth, back there in what essentially was the segregated South, so far away from the stadiums he one day would play in, and the bright lights he would play under. So far away from the Baseball Hall of Fame where Jim Rice’s career with the Red Sox will now live forever.

breynold@projo.com