My boyhood love of the Brooklyn Dodgers quickly diminished after the team moved to Los Angeles, but my hatred of the damn Yankees remains as fierce as ever. Here’s hoping for a Dodgers sweep!
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As a boy, in the tiny rural Mississippi community of Bethany, or Brice’s Cross Roads (known almost exclusively as the site of a famous Civil War battle), I discovered baseball. Not the kind I was actually to play in later years on hot, dusty playgrounds and grassy diamonds all across northeast Mississippi, but the kind brought magically down to me by golden voices over radio waves. The kind that fired a 12-year-old’s imagination to transform mere mortals into heroes, demigods even, and transport him beyond a secluded, mundane existence to exciting, far-off events and places.
I listened to Al Helfer on “Mutual’s Game of the Day,” or Harry Caray’s play-by-play description of a St. Louis Cardinals’ game on WELO in nearby Tupelo, or “the Old Scotchman” Gordon McClendon and Lindsey Nelson on Liberty Network, WBIP-Booneville. Those voices became, for me, inseparable from the game itself. At night I found other sites on the dial—clear-channel stations like KDKA Pittsburgh, KMOX St. Louis, WCKY Cincinnati, WJR Detroit, and WBBM Chicago that revved up their power after dark in order to send their signals to all points of the nation. All of them brought other voices and other games of baseball into my lonely, isolated Mississippi nights.
In those pre-expansion days, when major league baseball was played only in the northeast and midwest, the southernmost franchises were St. Louis and Cincinnati. One neighborhood pal, Jim Agnew, a large, rawboned farm boy, was a rabid Cincinnati fan, identifying with their even more muscular first-baseman, Ted Kluszewski. Another acquaintance, a local farmer named Boyd Parham, who had once seen Ted Williams play, rooted for Williams’s Boston Red Sox. But most of the baseball fans I knew were St. Louis Cardinals fans, their loyalty strengthened by nearby Tupelo’s radio station’s being part of the Cardinals’ broadcast network.
Strangely though, and unpredictably, as with all matters of the heart, I early on became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. So far as I could tell, I was the only white person in my community, my school, and quite possibly the entire state of Mississippi who cheered for one of the few major league teams that had African American players on their rosters.
My falling in love with the Dodgers actually had nothing to do, either way, with race. It was about heroics. I still remember the day. Early in that ’51 season, the Cubs led the Dodgers by seven runs until a barrage of home runs by Snider, Campanella, and Hodges turned likely defeat into sudden, glorious Dodger victory. It was love at first hearing.
While race had not been the reason I became a Dodgers’ fan, it quickly became a factor in my remaining one. Reading Dodgers history, I of course encountered the story of Jackie Robinson, and of his courageous and historic pact in 1947 with team-owner Branch Rickey to defy baseball’s color barrier. I also read how their shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, a southern boy like me, had publicly befriended Robinson, demonstrating to both fans and teammates that he was not only willing but even proud to have Robinson on his team. Gil Hodges was also accepting and supportive of his black teammate. By 1951 two other African-American players, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, had joined the Dodgers’ roster. Yet still, of the sixteen major league teams, just six fielded integrated rosters. In both major leagues, the total number of black players was only eleven. The Cardinals would not add their first black player for another three years.
Now, I was a white boy in segregated Mississippi cheering for a northern baseball team, three of whose greatest players were black. I was reminded of this racial divide quite often on the school playground, frequently being scoffed at, and on more than one occasion being called a “n----r lover” by bullying classmates.
I did know one other individual who was also a Dodgers fan—John, the black handyman who worked for Prather Auto Company, the Ford and Standard Oil dealer in Baldwyn, where my father also worked, driving a gas and oil delivery truck. During the summer months I sometimes accompanied Daddy on his deliveries, and between runs I would often visit with the salesmen, mechanics, and other workers in the office or garage. John, the only black employee, washed and waxed cars, pumped gas and fixed flats, cleaned the floors, and emptied the trash. To me he was a prince of a man, a soft-spoken, polite, and gentle soul elevated to royalty in my eyes because he shared my love for the Dodgers. “Jackie got two hits yesterday,” he would say, or “Campy hit a home run,” and we would launch into a replay and analysis of the games while I helped him chamois a car he had just washed. Looking back, I see us as comrades in arms, a white child and a middle-aged, deferential black man, underdogs and confederates conducting guerrilla warfare against a prejudiced and unjust majority. I don’t recall ever being told his last name, but I shall never forget how his face brightened and his voice became more animated when we talked of Jackie, Campy, and Newk.
My love for these ’51 Dodgers was all-consuming. When the radio games ended, I would go outside with an old broom handle and hit “fungoes” with small rocks lifted from the edge of the gravel road that ran past our house. I played imaginary games, pitting my Dodgers against opposing pitchers like Robin Roberts or Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell. Grounders or short pop flies were outs, flies reaching the near fence of the Presbyterian cemetery across the road were singles, rocks landing at designated points inside the cemetery were doubles and triples, those clearing the back fence were home runs. I still recall the batting order for those Dodgers’ games, the real ones and the imaginary ones: Reese, Robinson, Snider, Hodges, Campanella, Furillo, Pafko (or Abrams), Cox, and the starting pitcher—Roe, Newcombe, Erskine, or Branca. How could I ever forget them?
Other times, if none of my friends was around to play catch with me, and if Curtis Tapp, the caretaker of the grounds, was busy elsewhere, I’d unlatch the gate, enter the small battlefield park in the north sector of the crossroads, and practice my pitching skills by throwing a baseball against the granite monument erected to commemorate the battle of June 10, 1864. I was Carl Erskine or Don Newcombe (Preacher Roe was a lefty, so I couldn’t easily imitate him) standing on the mound in Ebbets Field, facing Ralph Kiner or Stan Musial or Alvin Dark with the bases loaded. And in that perfect world spun out of a young boy’s fantasy, my Dodgers never lost.
Actually, the ’51 Dodgers did lose, and every baseball aficionado in the land—the South included—knows the details. They blew a 13½-game lead the last six weeks of the season, finished in a tie for the pennant with a Giants’ team sparked by a rookie centerfielder named Willie Mays, and then lost in the third and final playoff game when Bobby Thomson hit a game-ending, three-run homer off reliever Ralph Branca. That hit came to be called “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” and, still later, would be described by Don DeLillo in his Pafko at the Wall.
I had begged my parents to allow me to stay home from school that day to listen to the game on the radio, and, to my great amazement, they had consented, the only time in all my years of schooling they allowed me to miss school for anything other than illness. Until the last inning, it had been a joyous day, with Newcombe holding the Giants to only one run through eight innings and the Dodgers scoring three runs in the eighth to take a 4-1 lead. But Newcombe faltered in the ninth, giving up three hits, and Dodgers’ manager Charlie Dressen brought in Branca to face Thomson, who promptly hit the second pitch over the left field wall. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Russ Hodges screamed into the radio microphone as Thomson circled the bases in the Polo Grounds. Simultaneously, in Bethany, Mississippi, I cried and cried and cried.
The most famous photograph of the ’51 Dodgers is a full-page color shot that first appeared in Sport magazine and is reprinted in Roger Kahn’s marvelous book, The Boys of Summer. Eight of the players, five of whom are now in the Hall of Fame, are gathered informally near a batting cage in Ebbets Field. Dominating the center are Robinson, Erskine, and Hodges, each casually holding a bat and seemingly engaged in light conversation. Standing slightly behind and to the left of Robinson are Reese and Furillo; to the right of Hodges stand Newcombe, Snider, and Campanella. All of the outside figures appear to be listening to the three central ones, primarily Robinson; Reese and Newcombe are smiling. The photograph exudes strength, confidence, and togetherness. I know the picture well, since the copy I’d razored from Sport was pinned to my bedroom wall throughout my early teens.
Years later, in reading The Boys of Summer, I gained a more realistic understanding of these Dodgers—their human weaknesses and failures as well as their greatness. In a number of cases their lives after baseball proved to be unhappy and even tragic; and even as they forged one of the winningest teams in baseball’s history, their relationships were less harmonious and supportive than a young boy, far removed from Brooklyn and caught up in the innocence of desperate dreaming, could have realized.
My loyalty to the Dodgers, which ultimately proved as evanescent as my childhood, faded after their move to Los Angeles in 1957; and several years later, when I finally made it to Brooklyn, I discovered that Ebbets Field, that storied little ballpark where my heroes had played, had been torn down and replaced with a housing complex. I never saw any of those Brooklyn Dodgers play an actual game; their personalities and exploits came to me only through words (occasionally those of their Mississippi-born play-by-play announcer, Red Barber), and through photographs and film and television images. Yet they remain as real to me as people with whom I interact daily. Some memories can never be completely effaced by harsh reality. And the lessons these Dodgers taught me—about striving for excellence, winning and losing, coping with change, developing and sustaining personal relationships, practicing teamwork, living with limitations, and, most of all, respecting human freedom and dignity—have served me well through the years.
In 1962, to cite but one example, during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, I was a student at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith enrolled there so controversially, the first African American student in the history of the institution. Many people I knew reacted to him—and to similar developments at the time—with anxiety, hysteria, even violence. Yet I was one of those who felt less threatened by the new order emerging. I now know one of the main reasons why. Though a white southern child raised in strict segregation, I had also become, vicariously, a Brooklyn boy. In cheering for the Dodgers, I had learned to root for the underdog (especially an underdog who’d lost, repeatedly, to the “Yankees”), to fight back from disappointment and defeat and try, yet again, for success. I had agonized and empathized with Jackie, felt ecstasy and pain with Newk, celebrated and grieved with Campy, admired and been taught important lessons of tolerance and brotherhood by Pee Wee and Gil. These sports heroes of mine—black and white—I now realize, were my first civil rights heroes as well.
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