Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (11 page)

The regular season had been delayed due to Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. The funeral for the civil rights leader was scheduled for the next day, April 9, with the season to begin a day later, at home against the Boston Red Sox. The ballclub had stayed in Florida through the weekend, with Warden praying that the coaches didn’t change their minds about him making the team. But somehow here he was, along with Daryl Patterson, another rookie, standing outside the regal, old-style ballpark, ready for the season to start.

Gear shuttled from the bus into the ballpark, and Warden and Patterson were able to catch a glimpse of the emerald-green grass and the distinctive two-story pavilion that rose behind home plate. Tiger Stadium wasn’t considered a pitcher’s ballpark but on that late afternoon the two rookies couldn’t have cared less. While the design of Tiger Stadium remained as iconic as any in the land, the ballpark sported plenty of obstructed seats, thanks to a plethora of support columns, and the bleacher seats were uncomfortable and often a distance from the action. “Watching a game in Detroit is a graduate course in capturing the magic of the old-time ballparks,”
Time
magazine said decades later. “Unlike the ivy-clad perfection of Wrigley Field or the self-congratulatory ugliness of Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium represents the last remaining link with baseball before it became too self-conscious.”

Too soon, the gathering broke up. Cars driven by family or friends pulled up to take the veteran players and team officials home. Soon enough the two rookies, two white guys from the sticks, were the only ones left standing at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. That’s when Warden and Patterson realized that in the hubbub, they had been totally forgotten. Perhaps an easy thing to have happen, what with the disruption accompanying the news of King’s shooting, the pending funeral, and the season opener being pushed back. Nobody had thought to reserve a room for them or make sure they were taken care of.

“We had fallen through the cracks,” Warden recalled. “It wasn’t like these days when I could call anybody up on my cell phone. That night still remains one of the eeriest sights I’ve ever seen. There was simply nobody around in this big city. Simply nobody. Detroit, the place where I was so determined to pitch, had become a ghost town.”

With hanging bags slung over a shoulder, a suitcase in the other hand, the pair began to walk down the street until a police cruiser pulled alongside. The officer asked who they were. When Warden and Patterson replied that they were with the Tigers, the baseball team, the cop didn’t recognize their names, even though he said he was a lifelong fan. “Of course, he wouldn’t have heard of us,” Warden said. “We were about the only new guys on a really experienced club. Household names? Well, we weren’t exactly that.”

The officer told them that Detroit was under curfew, with nobody allowed on the streets after dusk.

After some discussion, the officer dropped them off at the Leland Hotel, a twenty-two-story Beaux Arts building on Bagley Street, a few blocks from the stadium. There the rookies took an efficiency apartment for the night that eventually became their home for the rest of season.

That evening Warden recalled the stories that Willie Horton and the other African Americans on the team had told him during spring training. How last year had broken their hearts on almost every level. Not only had they lost the pennant to the Red Sox on the final day of the season; as they played on, the city literally went up in flames around them.

The summer before, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had ordered the Eighty-Second Airborne to Detroit after the rioting became so bad that the Michigan National Guard couldn’t contain it. During the long hot summer of 1967, just about anything attempted by authority had struck the wrong chord. Tensions had finally come to a head in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, when the police raided an illegal bar, also called a “blind pig,” where a celebration for two black servicemen returning home from Vietnam was underway. When Detroit’s finest, mostly white, began to load everybody into a paddy wagon, an angry mob, predominately black, had formed on the street outside. Outnumbered, the police retreated and rioting soon spread throughout the city.

Now, less than nine months later, it occurred to Warden as he gazed down the city ’s deserted streets that the quiet could well just be the calm before the storm. One could imagine that the cinders from the previous summer’s fires were in fact still smoldering, merely waiting for the right spark to set them off. By now he knew the stories. How the afternoon after the police raid on the blind pig, the Tigers had taken the field for a doubleheader against the New York Yankees. After losing the first game that evening Mickey Lolich had reported to active duty with his Guard unit. Meanwhile, Horton, who had lived near the site of the police raid, hurried to that section of town still in his game jersey. There he climbed atop a car and spoke to the crowd, trying to calm them down. But it was no good. It took five days to restore order in Detroit, and when it was over, forty-three were dead, 7,200 had been arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings had burned, many to the ground.

Of course, that was last season, and one could say it was time to turn the page. Yet as Warden studied the city that was to be his new home, silent and dark now, cleared by curfew, he thought about what he had heard about King’s assassination, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was inevitable, that Detroit was set to erupt all over again.

In sports, events can often solidify or dissolve in a heartbeat. Nobody knew that better in 1968 than Bill Russell. In fact, he explained that his philosophy of coaching was based as much upon moments—and what those moments would ultimately determine—as it was his play on the court. “All that is required to choreograph the action is the ball,” he wrote in his autobiography, “just throw it out there and the moves will gather around the ball wherever it goes.

“This is true of many major sports: the ball provokes the art all by itself. A baseball player like Willie Mays can stand all night out in some deserted pasture called center field, but if nothing is hit near him, he doesn’t really deserve watching. Once there’s a fly to center field, however, the picture changes instantly. He runs in that pigeon-toed sprint, all concentration, with a hundred thousand eyes in the stadium glued to every step. Those eyes belong to people whose entire days are improved by the sight of what Willie does when he gets to the ball. What a catch!”

After rallying to defeat the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference Finals, Russell’s Boston Celtics faced a faster, more elusive opponent in the 1968 National Basketball Association finals. Instead of a dominating center like Philadelphia’s Wilt Chamberlain, the Lakers alternated Mel Counts and Darrall Imhoff in the low post. Los Angeles’ main weapons were guard Jerry West and forward Elgin Baylor, with quality guards Archie Clark, Freddie Crawford, and Gail Goodrich.

The championship series opened on April 21, 1968, less than three weeks after King’s assassination. The teams split the first two games in Boston, with the Celtics taking the upper hand with a 127–119 victory in Game Three in Los Angeles. That’s when West began to take things over. He scored thirty-eight points, with Baylor chipping in with thirty, as the Lakers squared the Series at two games apiece.

“If we can rebound, we can win,” West said. “ We’re little, but we match up well against Boston. We’re quick and we shoot well, and that can be enough in a seven-game series.”

Through it all, Russell emphasized the little things with his teammates, the hustle plays that can turn the tide. Time and again he delivered them himself. Few realize what a well-rounded athlete Russell was in his prime. Track and field, not hoops, had been his first love at the University of San Francisco. Team members there received a spiffy buttoned sweater with S.F. stitched across the front. Funny what will motivate a guy at times, isn’t it? To secure such duds, Russell high-jumped six feet, seven inches. For meets, he wore the sweater, track suit, silk scarf, and sunglasses.

“Track is really psychic,” Russell once told
Sports Illustrated
. “There wasn’t a guy I jumped against I couldn’t beat if I had the chance to talk with him before beforehand.”

Teammate and fellow Hall of Famer John Havlicek remembered Russell as “a fantastic athlete. He could have been a decathlon champion. He could broad-jump twenty-four feet. He did the hurdles in 13.4 (seconds). I’ve seen him in plays on a basketball court when he not only blocks a shot but controls the ball and feeds it to his forwards and then he’s at the other end of the court trailing the fast break and if there’s a rebound, he’s ready for it. He just might be the fastest man on the Celtics.”

Against the up-tempo Lakers, Russell had the opportunity to exhibit his athleticism. Several times in that final series, Los Angeles’ Archie Clark stole the ball, with a wide open path to the basket, only to have Russell catch him from behind. “Each time Russell caught him and blocked the shot,” Havlicek said. “Think of that. Think of being on the other team. There’s got to be a funny feeling, going for the basket when Russell’s around.”

The NBA Finals soon became a battle of the all-stars: the Celtics’ Russell and Havlicek against the Lakers’ West and Baylor. In Game Five, despite playing on a badly twisted ankle, West scored thirty-five points, rallying Los Angeles from an eighteen-point deficit. The Lakers were down by four with less than a minute to play when West stole the ball and found Baylor for a layup. Then Los Angeles garnered another steal, the ball moving to West, who scored to send the game into overtime. In the extra session, though, Russell turned the tables again, blocking a pivotal shot by Baylor as Boston held on for the 120–117 victory and the series lead.

Heading into Game Six, Russell proved he was as adept when it came to X’s and O’s as any full-time coach. He moved Sam Jones to forward, where he could post up on Goodrich. That forced the Lakers to go with a taller yet slower lineup. The Lakers trailed by twenty at the half, and Boston held on to capture its tenth championship and its first with Russell as coach.

“He is an unbelievable man,” West said of Russell. “To be frank, we gave them the championship. We gave them the first game, and we gave them the fifth. But I take nothing from them. There is something there, something special. For instance, twice tonight the ball went on the floor and Larry Siegfried dove for it. He didn’t just go for it hard, he dove for it. They’re all that way on the Celtics and you can’t teach it.”

Afterward Russell was asked what he had left to accomplish, as a player and a coach. “ Well, I don’t know,” he replied, “ because I never had a goal. To tell you the truth, it’s been a long time since I tried to prove anything to anybody. I know who I am.”

All in all, the loss to Boston left West bitterly disappointed. “It got to the point where Jerry hated anything (Celtic) green,” Bill Sharman later said. “Jerry told me, ‘I couldn’t even wear a green sport coat or a green shirt for a lot of years.’ Green really rubbed him the wrong way.”

Soon after the series concluded, Lakers’ owner Jack Kent Cooke received a phone call from 76ers’ owner Irving Kosloff. Would Cooke be interested in trading for Wilt Chamberlain? Cooke jumped at the chance, signing the big man to a five-year deal at $250,000 a year. In exchange for Chamberlain, the 76ers received Darrall Imhoff, Archie Clark, and Jerry Chambers. Overnight, Cooke’s team transformed itself from a small, run-and-gun outfit to a squad with a powerful frontcourt of Baylor and Chamberlain, with West heading up the backcourt. With that the NBA became defined as East versus West, the Boston Celtics versus the Los Angeles Lakers, Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain.

“Don’t be shy,” says the heavy-set guy sitting behind a long table just inside the door to the luxury suites at Comerica Park. “C’mon, get your own autograph from ‘The Gator.’ Have something to take home and treasure forever.”

Fans file past, heading for some of the most expensive seats in Detroit’s new downtown ballpark and many at first don’t give the smiling black man, with a Flair pen in hand, a second glance. But then something clicks and their gait slows and they turn, saying something like, “Gates, is that you?” Or, “Hey, I remember that game.”

And just like that, William James “Gates” Brown has them in the palm of his hand once again. Not bad for a guy who learned to play baseball in prison of all places. Brown was arrested for breaking and entering at the age of eighteen and sentenced to a short stretch in Mansfield (Ohio) State Reformatory. Movie buffs may recognize Mansfield State as the setting for the film
The Shawshank Redemption
. Brown played on a team there and was visited by Pat Mullin, the Tigers’ top scout. After Brown crushed a long home run with Mullin in attendance, the ballclub signed Brown to a $7,000 contract when he was paroled.

Once Brown was asked by somebody unaware of his background what he took in high school. “I took a little English,” he replied, “a little mathematics, some science, some hubcaps, some wheel covers.”

On this afternoon at Comerica Park, sitting alongside the longtime Tiger favorite can be like hanging with baseball royalty. Diligently Brown signs the black-and-white Xeroxed photographs as fans gather around.

“That home run against the Red Sox in 1968,” one of the newcomers mentions.

Brown nodded his head, holding out the autograph sheet to the guy.

“That set the tone, didn’t it?”

“Did it ever,” the fan answers.

And just like that we’re in Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine, heading for 1968 and a season for the ages. Often people forget that the Tigers’ epic year began with a 7–3 loss to the Red Sox. Earl Wilson, who had tied with the Red Sox’s Jim Lonborg for the most victories in the American League the previous season, started the home opener (an honor that McLain felt he deserved). The attendance was 41,429—less than capacity. Carl Yastrzemski homered in the seventh and ninth innings and after the loss United Press International’s Rich Shook wrote, “Detroit started 1968 the same way it ended 1967—one game behind Boston.”