TRUE BLUE: The Dramatic History of the Los Angeles Dodgers,
Told by the Men Who Lived It
by Steve Delsohn
·
Paperback: 320 pages
·
Publisher: Harper Perennial (2002)
· ISBN:
0380806150
I am a Dodger fan, though I look at the current roster and
recognize only the names of coaches Manny Mota (a Dodger since 1969) and Davey
Lopes (who joined the team in 1972). My
emotional investment runs to the Walt Alston line-up of my childhood; the Sandy
Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Maury Wills Dodgers of the late ‘50s and early-to-mid
‘60s.
This summer, I have been reading a wide range of California
history, including two books on the Dodgers.
Roger Khan’s delightfully literary, THE BOYS OF SUMMER, focuses mostly
on the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early ‘50s.
Those same players formed the core of the team that I remember coming to
LA in 1958: Duke Snyder, Jim Gillium, Wally Moon, Johnny Roseboro, and Pee Wee
Reese. Delsohn’s TRUE BLUE dips back
into the Brooklyn years only enough to set the stage for that move. Then, year-by-year, he uses interviews to
record the memories of the players and close observers who made up the Dodger
teams until the close of the century.
That pretty much chronicles the baseball years of my
life. I was eight when the Dodgers
arrived in LA. In 1959, I attended my
first professional game, Dodgers vs. Cincinnati, in the Coliseum. For the next decade, I didn’t make it to the
bleachers very often, but I listened to most games on the radio, and checked
box scores every morning in the LA times.
By necessity, a history of fifty years—both on and off the
field—can hit only the high points, and most fans will want to offer their own
list. Yet Delsohn hit all but two of
mine. His quick overview of the
politics behind the new stadium at Chavez Ravine missed the bitterness of the
community that lost their homes. I could
only have been ten, but I remember the standoff between police and a man armed
and barricaded in his home, while the bulldozers stood ready to demolish
it. Throughout my teaching career, I
have gone back to that illustration every time I needed to explain the workings
of eminent domain.
I also would have included Dick Nen. Delsohn recalls the pennant drive in 1963,
clinched when the Dodgers swept a series in Saint Louis. I remember Nen’s homerun in that series, the
only hit he ever had as a Dodger, tying a game they went on to win. Nen came up from the minors late in the
season, and was traded at season’s end to the American League. I remember standing on the playground at
school, listening on a radio. Curiously,
all these years later, I remembered it happening four years earlier, the year
the Dodgers beat the White Sox in the World Series, and my memory had me listening
to it on a different playground. Our
minds play tricks on us, and reading history helps set us straight.
In childhood, these Dodgers were my elders—two and three
times my age—and heroes. It is
interesting now, at age 62, to look back at them as young men, half, or even a
third my age. Koufax conquered the
world, and retired at 30, almost like Alexander the Great.
I must have been about twelve when I stood in line an hour
at a bank opening, to stand in front of Koufax for a few seconds while he
signed his name to a plastic bat and handed it to me. What finally became of that bat, I don’t
know. We were kids. We thrashed it hitting tennis balls in the
street, the closest we ever got to real baseball. A rolled up newspaper was the pitcher’s
mound, and I was Sandy Koufax staring down Mays or McCovey. Never mind that I threw right handed, at a
velocity that barely overcame inertia, and my opponent was a brother three
years my junior. And we were appalled when
Koufax retired.
That 1966 season he’d gone 27-9, with an ERA of 1.73.
Forty-six years later, I can view the
retirement in a very different light. I
have my own bum knee, earned at age 17, while trying to push my body beyond
what it could reasonably do. The team
doctor had warned Koufax before the 1966 season that pushing his arm could
leave him permanently crippled. Delsohn
also suggests the intensely private Koufax had been humiliated during the
previous winter’s salary negotiations.
Stingy Walter O’Malley had belittled Koufax in the press for several
months, before finally raising his annual salary from $90,000 to $125,000.
The book also probes the motivation for
Koufax’s refusal to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series, because it
fell on Yom Kippur. Previously, Koufax
hadn’t displayed enough religious devotion to justify such a decision, but
Delsohn concludes that Koufax took seriously his position as a role model to
thousands of youngsters. That is the
stuff our sports heroes ought to be made of.
The 1972 season started with the first
Major League Players’ Strike, and ended for me in September, when I left for
Europe. It was impossible to catch Vin
Scully’s radio-casts while hitchhiking through foreign lands. Only in December did I learned who won the
Series (Cincinnati). I’d broken my
childhood addiction, cold turkey.
On the other hand, in 1973, marriage
brought me a father-in-law who bought Dodger season tickets. That brought me a very different relationship
with the Dodgers. The Ron Cey, Bill Russell,
Davey Lopes, and Steve Garvey Dodgers were my own age, peers rather than heroes
for daydreams. As Delsohn’s book moved
into the Tommy Lasorda years, I was surprised to still recognize the names of
every player.
That didn’t change until the teams of
the mid 1980s. By then I was overseas
again, this time in the wilds of eastern Colombia, teaching school on a small
Bible translation center. Delsohn
doesn’t mention Karis Mansen, but he should have. Karis became my conduit to the Dodgers. By day, she was a linguist, translator, and
mother-of-three. But in the wee hours of
the morning, she tuned into Armed Forces Radio to catch her Dodger games. Then she would keep me posted. The 1985 season stands out in my memory. Near the All Star break, Karis told me the
team was in fourth, several games below .500.
I figured the season was over, and didn’t ask again until October. A very animated Karis told me the Dodgers had
taken their division, and would be facing Saint Louis in the play-offs. They had, she said, turned it around.
I no longer follow baseball, and beside Mota and Lopes, can
only name two active major leaguers (Diamondback Aaron Hill attended our church
when he was small, and Astro’s manager Brad Mills is a former neighbor).
But that was not the case 50 years ago, and as Delsohn wove
together interviews of players and others near the game, it took me back to a
time when I rarely missed a game on the radio, or a box score in the next
morning’s LA Times. He refreshed
memories and filled in gaps in my knowledge.
He even supplied the missing pieces for some mysteries I’d carried since
elementary school.
These days, I may not often think about baseball. But when I do, I think Dodger Blue.
A previous Dodger post,
The Back of Duke Snyder's Head, is from Feb 28, 2011.
The link on this screen saver is
here
The report today of Duke Snider’s passing brings two small memories to mind, though most of his Hall-of-Fame career (1947-1964) was before my time and on the other side of the continent.
My Time with baseball started in 1959, the Dodgers’ second year out of Brooklyn. My Cub Scout den drove downtown to the Coliseum to watch the Dodgers host Cincinnati. I would have been nine, and I’m not even sure Snider played. I remember Pee Wee Reese, Wally Moon, and Gil Hodges. It was still the core of the team that had come from back east, and Snider was one of its most fabled players, but I hadn’t yet caught the fever. We sat in way-yonder center field seats where Snider would have been the nearest player in front of us, so maybe I spent nine innings staring at the back of his head. However, my two strongest memories are how far from the game we actually were, and how fast the Reds’ Vada Pinson could run from home to first on a single.
I didn’t really become a baseball fan until the Kaufax-Drysdale-Wills teams of the mid-60s. By then, the Dodgers had moved from the Coliseum to their own stadium, and Snider had moved to the Mets, Giants, and retirement. It was then I finally saw the Duke up close.
Off-season, Snider made his home in Fallbrook, California, rooted for the local high school athletic teams, farmed avocados, and attended the Methodist church. My own family had tried weekend avocado ranching near Fallbrook. My cousins attended high school there, and played baseball. They also attended the Methodist church, and I heard frequent mention of Duke Snider.
One Sunday, we made the trip to the Fallbrook church. My mother’s favorite, but long-retired pastor was making a guest appearance. As I took a seat, my cousin pointed at the man in front of me. “That’s Duke Snider,” he whispered. I spent the next hour looking at the back of the great man’s head. Afterwards, Snider got up and left and my mother pulled me up front to show me off to her pastor.
There you have it: a baseball great passes on to the ages and my two strongest memories are of the back of his head. Rest In Peace, Duke.
For another discussion of the Dodgers, go here.
Many people who knew John Wooden much better than I are recounting stories of him today, and I have no original pictures. But I can’t let his passing go completely unmentioned here. Wooden graduated to Heaven yesterday, at 99.
The last time I saw John Wooden was spring of ’72. He came out a side door at Pauley Pavilion, just as I approached, and he gave me a little smile and nod of his head. It was the same door I’d seen Haile Selassie exit from four years earlier, but I’d gotten neither a smile nor a nod on that occasion. Selassie was the reigning emperor of Ethiopia. Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” was the reigning king of college basketball. He’d just won the 8th of his eventual ten NCAA National Championships. At UCLA, his genius was more recognized than any of our Nobel Prize winners. If it had been his nature to be as imperial as Selassie, he had earned the right.
Wooden had given a guest lecture a few weeks earlier in one of my kinesiology classes, but I can’t imagine he still recognized me. I was just one of 35,000 students at UCLA., but more than anything else, Wooden was a teacher. All 35,000 of us were his students, and I got a smile.
I’ve read that after ten national championships he was most proud that his teams ranked highest in number of athletes who actually graduated. I became acquainted with some of those young men, Terry Schofield, Sven Nader, and Keith (later, Jamaal) Wilkes. He recruited athletes of fine character, not just physical prowess. Among his many personal accomplishments, he was proudest of winning the Big Ten Academic Achievement Award (during the year he also led his team to the conference championship) for the highest GPA. He was a remarkable man, a gentleman scholar, and a servant of God, and I was blessed by the little bit he touched my life.
(In poking around on the web, I find this interview with Wooden, in which he quotes a poem written by Sven Nader. Nader lived in our dorm during my sophomore year [as did Wilkes, Bill Walton, and the rest of the freshmen team]. I remember Sven's beautiful singing voice. Seven-footers have a lot of lung capacity.)
The AmGen Tour of California's fifth stage (Visalia to Bakersfield) passed about half a mile from our campus today, so I walked a group of 7th graders over to watch the race. It was about twenty-five minutes each way, with another thirty minutes wait once we got there, for about 20 seconds of bicycles, preceded by three minutes of police cars and followed by three minutes of team vehicles. If someone can recognize or label individual riders, I would appreciate it. I'm told Lance Armstrong is is wearing #2, but I couldn't see any numbers, and he certainly didn't stop to chat. They were about seven miles into a ride that will go about 125 today, and finish on Sunday. After the racers blurred past, my students asked, "Is that all of it?" I tried to tell them ahead of time it would be over pretty fast, but it may be one of those things you have to see to understand.
Now we've seen it.
Many people who knew John Wooden much better than I are recounting stories of him today, and I have no original pictures. But I can’t let his passing go completely unmentioned here. Wooden graduated to Heaven yesterday, at 99.
