56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (17 page)

Toots Shor could feel that good and giddy surge, his eyes and cheeks aglow. He had bet $100,000 on Conn. Toots shifted comfortably in his seat, anticipating, and joined the growl of the crowd. He held a drink in his right hand. “C’mon Billy, finish the crumb-bum!” This was the biggest bet that Toots had ever made in his life. It was much, much more money than he could afford to lose.

DiMaggio sat beside Toots, soaked in. He loved the big-time fights, the hugeness and the heat of it, the absence of ambiguity. Two men each with the same simple and straightforward assignment: to beat the other. DiMaggio was a Joe Louis man, and had been since before the summer of 1937 when he went to Pompton Lakes, N.J., and dropped in on Louis, then barely two months into his heavyweight champion reign and training to fight Welshman Tommy Farr. Louis had stopped what he was doing that afternoon, put away his jump rope, and he and DiMaggio had spent better than two hours together, talking baseball mostly. Louis was a Tigers fan from Detroit but after that day he said he would always be rooting for DiMaggio too.

“I hope you win your bout against Farr,” DiMaggio said in farewell. DiMaggio, Louis later told the press, had “class, plenty of class.” If he were a ballplayer, Louis said, he’d want to be a ballplayer like Joe DiMaggio.

The promoters had expected 40,000 at the Polo Grounds for Louis’s fight against Conn, but by the time DiMaggio walked into the noisy stadium in his double-breasted suit many more than that had already arrived. People were crammed back into the $2.50 seats, or settling in closer up at $11.50, or right near the ropes in the most coveted and costly spots, the seats that DiMaggio’s friend and ticket broker George Solotaire preferred to traffic in: $25 a pop. The ring was set up in the middle of the ball field where the New York Giants played and hot bright lights were strung above it. A half moon hung in the black sky. When the last receipts were counted, 54,487 people had made their way inside.

Louis was guaranteed 40% of the purse, Conn 20%. But in truth it was the impish challenger as much as the beloved champion who caused the excitement. At last Louis, even favored as he was in this his 18th title defense, faced a serious test; Conn had won 19 fights in a row, the last four by knockout. He could not be thought of as just another entry in the bum of the month club. And he was handsome as a movie star. The betting commissioners on 49th Street said there had not been this much wagering on a fight since the second Louis–Max Schmeling match in 1938.

You still couldn’t think of Louis without Schmeling coming to mind. His defeat of Louis in 1936 drew praise and the predictable, poisonous propaganda from Adolf Hitler himself:
See? No black man could beat a German fighter
. And then, two years later, again in sold-out Yankee Stadium, Louis had responded with a pure and beautiful vengeance, burying Schmeling with three knockdowns in Round 1, a victory for every black man, a victory for all of America. A victory for everyone, everywhere. After one particular punch Schmeling had yelped audibly in pain.

Now Schmeling was in the news again, engaged in a more serious fight as one of the first German paratroopers who a few weeks before had landed in Crete through a buzz of gunfire. The subsequent rumors of Schmeling’s death that made it into U.S. newspapers had been exaggerated; he was ill and in a hospital in Athens.

Under the hot lights in the Polo Grounds, Louis staggered and held on. He somehow ducked beneath another wild Conn left, then avoided another and another as the 12th round ticked down. Flashbulbs popped. Both boxers wore dark purple trunks. There were some women in the crowd and even a few children, allowed out late. DiMaggio, the walls of sound around him, sat rapt, his long day and the Yankees 3–2 loss to the White Sox for the moment forgotten.

After breakfast that morning, the sunlight fair upon the terrace, he had left the apartment earlier than he usually did. Peanuts had driven DiMaggio over the bridge to a hospital in Jersey City. He had agreed to visit a kid over there. The boy was 12 years old and named James Licata, and he told DiMaggio that he was a ballplayer too, on the sandlots. But now, after the accident had taken three fingers off his right hand, he wondered if he would ever play again. DiMaggio sat with him for awhile in the hospital room and when he left he gave the boy an autographed baseball and tickets to a game.

Later at the Stadium the White Sox had walked DiMaggio intentionally in the first inning of the game, the correct thing to do with one out and runners on second and third. When DiMaggio came up in the fifth, 0 for 1 after grounding into a double play, short to second to first, he again hit one Appling’s way, a knuckling bloop of a ball that bounded onto the infield dirt and sent the shortstop to the edge of his long range to smother it with his glove. Appling didn’t even try to throw to first. With DiMaggio churning down the line and smelling a hit, there was no reason to. “The guy runs as fast as he needs to run to get there,” Bill Dickey sometimes said. Earle Combs gave DiMaggio a pat on the rump when he got back to the first base bag; players slapped hands in the Yankee dugout.

If DiMaggio had had a little luck to keep his streak going the past two days, he wasn’t about to give a hit back. Especially not the way he was stinging the ball now, punishing pitches high and low, on every part of the plate. Getting on base with an infield single, or because of a bad hop, seemed only fair considering all the rotten luck balls—like that smoker that Taft Wright had caught against the wall. DiMaggio felt as if he could hit anything. Once, a year or two earlier when DiMaggio had been in a very good stretch at the plate, he had asked Gomez in their room, “Do you think that a guy could hit .500 in this league.” Gomez chuckled loudly—
Yeh, and McCarthy might come to work in a tutu
—but DiMaggio wasn’t joking.

Gomez was at the Conn fight too, and so was McCarthy somewhere. The manager felt partial to Conn, and not, he said with a grin, just because he was Irish. For many people Conn had the underdog’s charm. “Louis has been a great champion, but it’s time for someone else to begin getting the gravy,” McCarthy said.

Louis made it through the 12th and even after the bell the crowd scarcely quieted. The outcome of the match, the changing of the belt, felt inevitable. When the 13th round began all Conn had to do was to jab a little and dodge, stay away from Louis, just as the men in his corner were telling him to. Three rounds of staying upright and the heavyweight title would be his. But Conn instead brought the fight straight to the champ, wanting a knockout and believing, after the way he had just shaken Louis, that he had the power to get one. For Billy Conn this was a matter of pride. He stood in there and traded punch after punch with Louis. The 13th round was like a brawl. Conn was full of energy and completely unbowed; Louis, the great champion, fought back. DiMaggio could not take his eyes off what was happening.

And then in the final stages of the round Louis delivered: suddenly, precisely and brutally. He hit Conn with a hard right to the jaw. He caught him once on the ear. Conn grew unsteady on his feet and his body angled forward into Louis. That quickly, the fight had changed. Now it was Louis who was zeroing in. It was almost like seeing a man rise from the dead. Toots grew suddenly quiet and unusually stiff and the smile ran away from his heavy face. Now Louis connected once and then again, to Conn’s belly and to his chest, and then came the short hard righthand blow that landed on the back of Conn’s skull and sent him to the ground. Louis went to his corner. Conn was unable to get to his feet quickly enough. When he was counted out there were two seconds left in the 13th round and Joe Louis was still the heavyweight champion of the world.

Louis walked past Conn at his stool. “I knew you’d screw it up, you crazy Mick,” said Louis. “The title was yours.” He was saying it with a kind of sympathy and bewilderment; Louis liked Billy Conn. Later Conn, still his endearing self, would say of his failed strategy, “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be thick?”

The fight stayed with DiMaggio, as it did with McCarthy, powerful and rankling; the result did not seem in any way amusing to them. How could anyone be so daft as to do what Conn had done? How could anyone take a certain victory and throw it away? DiMaggio thought too about Louis and how when the match had been the hardest, Louis had been his best. That was a thing that great men, great athletes, did.

But in his apartment that night as he uncuffed his sleeves and slipped off his belt in the yellow light of the hallway outside the bedroom, and as he glanced in at Dorothy, five months pregnant and asleep on her side, something else came into DiMaggio’s mind. When he had entered the Polo Grounds, and first been noticed, the people around him had broken into sustained and exuberant cheers, all 54,486 standing and applauding it seemed. Then there were suddenly police officers surrounding him, helping him move through the crowd, keeping the groping fans away. He had not anticipated this. It had never crossed DiMaggio’s mind that he would inspire such a reaction, or anything beyond the usual and moderate fuss. DiMaggio had at once felt the blood rush to his face and a little flip in his stomach and then the stoniness rise inside him. He wondered if anything were now expected of him. He raised his hands in acknowledgment and the noise of the people in the Polo Grounds grew louder still. It was as if DiMaggio were at Yankee Stadium having just hit a home run to win a game. But all he was doing was walking to his seat, a spectator on a night that belonged to other men.

It was only later, here now in the narrow apartment hall, at about the same time that Louis was being mobbed at his Harlem hotel and that Conn was making off with his sweet colleen, that the realizations came to DiMaggio. That in these times, doing what he was doing at the ballpark, he was a man on the minds of others, and that for a charged-up crowd at a boxing match, the joy of the moment was plain: Joe DiMaggio, with his 31-game hitting streak, was among them.

O
ver the decades, as DiMaggio’s streak has gone
unbroken and unassailed, some fidgety historians have sought to explain away, or at least to bring into more natural order, an accomplishment so phenomenally singular that the eminent evolutionary biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould called it “the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.” How could anyone unfurl a hitting streak that extends so extravagantly past all others?

There is, however, meager grist for the skeptics, and scant rationale to insert the “Yeah, but. . .” that often attaches itself to monumental statistical achievement. And so it is that the flukishness and the minor ambiguity of the base hit that DiMaggio got in Game 30 of the streak—that bad-hop ground ball to Luke Appling that Dan Daniel fretted over before officially ruling it a single—has been occasionally brought into question. Did DiMaggio really deserve a hit in that game? Or should Appling have been given an error and the streak potentially stopped? One relatively recent and nicely synthesized version of the argument that Appling may have committed an error appeared in the October, 2007, issue of the Canadian magazine,
The Walrus
, and was written by David Robbeson. The issues raised in that essay were subsequently picked up and debated in various news outlets—the topic earned a spot on ABC news for one—and a few of the baseball wonks I talked with made mention of the piece. People will always gather to watch a building torn down.

The case for an Appling error essentially boils down to two separate but related questions: Did the baseball truly take a bad hop or was it simply, as Robbeson writes, “adjudged bad by Dan Daniel”? More intriguingly: Was Daniel consciously generous in awarding DiMaggio a hit—that is, was the official scorer a willing and crucial conspirator in keeping the streak alive?

To the first point: Let’s look at some of the accounts of the play as written by eyewitnesses other than Daniel that appeared on the evening or morning after the game. The New York
Daily News
called it, “a lucky, bad hop single.”
The New York Times
wrote that “a ground ball that was labeled an easy out in the seventh suddenly took a bad hop [and] hit Luke Appling on the shoulder.” The
New York Post
observed that DiMaggio “kept his hitting streak alive on a grounder that took a bad bounce in front of Appling.” The
Journal American
said that DiMaggio, “led off the seventh with a ground ball that took a bad hop over Appling’s shoulder.” And, the paper added: “If DiMag has a sense of gratitude he will search out the pebble that caused that hop and have it stuffed and mounted.”

Other, independent accounts describe the play in much the same way and at least one observed that the bounce was so sharp and unexpected that the baseball hit Appling in the face.

No one who was at the game and reported on it suggested that the ball took anything but an unusual and difficult-to-handle hop. Is it possible that after the game Daniel—whose piece in the
World-Telegram
said that the ball, “took a bad hop over Luke Appling’s left shoulder”—went around the press area and as his competitors on the Yankees beat banged out their stories on deadline cajoled each one of them to say that there was a bad hop when there was not? Sure, it’s
possible
. But highly implausible.

The more titillating suggestion is that Daniel was biased toward DiMaggio and thus awarded a hit where an objective observer would have determined that the play was an error. Like many reporters at the time Daniel got treated well—“taken care of”—by the Yankees who, in the custom of the day, paid for many of his and other writers’ expenses. He was also on friendly terms with DiMaggio, just as most reporters were with many players. Daniel, though, was not a DiMaggio chum or a night-out-at-Toots’s pal, as was a writer such as Jimmy Cannon (who was not among those who covered the Appling game). It is not at all evident that Daniel was any closer to DiMaggio than he was to other Yankee players or even, say, to Earle Combs the Yankees first base coach whose record DiMaggio was chasing. Yet the question is: Are those relationships, with the Yankees and with DiMaggio, enough to suspect Daniel of some complicity?