Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (16 page)

When King was assassinated in Memphis, Flood joined with a St. Louis calendar company to paint a commemorative portrait of King. How much help Flood received in the project remains up for debate, but the portrait went from a small project to being reproduced as eight-by-ten color productions that were handed out at an Atlanta benefit concert in King’s honor.

“I’m a child of the Sixties, a man of the Sixties,” Flood told Ken Burns decades later for the documentary
Baseball
. “During that period of time, this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Men, good men, were dying for America and for the Constitution.

“In the southern part of the United States, we were marching for civil rights, and Dr. King had been assassinated and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium is truly hypocrisy.”

Despite being on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
, winning two World Series championships with the Cardinals and five Gold Gloves, Flood was unsatisfied. He wanted to be the game’s next Jackie Robinson, to make an impact not only on the field, but on the game itself. He felt he should be doing something more.

Meanwhile, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, new Packers’ coach Phil Bengtson was not only hoping to follow in the footsteps of another sports legend, but also finding the task especially difficult with that legend still hovering in the background. Of course, the big shoes Bengtson was attempting to fill belonged to Vince Lombardi, as big a name as there was in pro football at the time. As the Packers opened training camp that August, launching their campaign for a third consecutive Super Bowl championship, many would have been at a loss to name a tougher act to follow. In addition, Lombardi had remained with Green Bay as the team’s general manager, and the promotion of Bengtson seemed to have as much to do with loyalty and maintaining the party line as it did with ability.

A native of Rousseau, Minnesota, Bengtson had played tackle for Bernie Bierman’s teams at the University of Minnesota, earning All-American honors. The quarterback on that team was Bud Wilkinson, who would become another coaching legend at the University of Oklahoma. After his playing days were over, Bengtson coached at Stanford for twelve seasons before moving up to the professional ranks with the San Francisco 49ers. He was fired after the 1958 season and joined Lombardi’s staff beginning in 1959.

As defensive coordinator, he was the only coach to stay the entire nine years of Lombardi’s tenure in Green Bay. The Packers’ defense, with Ray Nitschke, Willie Wood, and Herb Adderley, was a force and a key reason that Green Bay won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls.

At first blush, Bengtson appeared a logical choice to be the next Packers’ coach. Certainly he was somebody who worked hand in glove with Lombardi and knew the organization, top to bottom. Yet beginning in training camp, the players and press noticed a huge difference in approach. While Lombardi had been volatile, willing to get in anybody’s grill, Bengtson was low key. Perhaps too much so.

“The players at first expressed relief about the new regime,” wrote David Maraniss in
When Pride Still Mattered
. “Bengtson was tall, calm, gentle, laconic, the opposite of Lombardi. Hawg Hanner, his defensive assistant, had advised him to run the players to the point of exhaustion during the first week, reminding them that the Lombardi tradition still lived, but Bengtson politely declined, saying he had to establish his own style. Where Lombardi conducted his practices with metronomic discipline, Bengtson was easily distracted and might pass the whole day dragging on his Camels and discussing the intricacies of a zone defense.”

Players grumbled that Bengtson spoke only in a monotone and seemed more interested in how they lined up for the national anthem before a game than what happened once the ball was snapped. It didn’t help the new coach that Lombardi remained such a dominating presence and iconic figure. On August 7, 1968, the city of Green Bay staged “A Salute to Vince Lombardi.” Highland Avenue outside the Packers’ stadium was renamed for the Hall of Fame coach. “I just want you to know that I’m not dead,” Lombardi said in the dedication.

Of course, Lombardi’s stepping down also resulted in implications stretching far beyond Green Bay. With Lombardi out of the coaching ranks, many believed a door had been opened for the rival American Football League. The upstarts had been crushed in the first two Super Bowls by Lombardi’s Packers. Heading into the new season the consensus was they once again would be a decided underdog, but nonetheless an opportunity for recognition, perhaps even for victory, was now there.

The question was, who would take the AFL to the next level? Who could topple the established NFL in the Super Bowl?

Heading into the summer of ’68, the Democratic Convention, set to be held in Chicago, still needed a home. The city’s McCormick Place had burned down the year before, but Mayor Richard Daley was adamant that the show would go on. So he moved to have the event held at the Amphitheater, down near the old Union Stockyards, a lousy place for an occasion that was already ripe with disappointment and anger.

Still, if Daley and the old guard were determined to have the party in Chicago, then Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and the other leaders of the New Left were just as determined to crash it. Kennedy and McCarthy supporters soon realized that the Chicago convention would be a continuation, even an affirmation of the Johnson presidency. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t on the ballot, but his number two, Hubert Humphrey, had been the front-runner for the nomination since Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel in June.

Inside the convention hall and back at the delegates’ hotels, former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was rumored to be possible VP choice. “If Hollywood movie stars can sit in the California statehouse and the United States Senate, what bar exists to the election of a good football coach?” the
Milwaukee Sentinel
’s editorial page asked.

The paper went on to say that Lombardi’s speeches, which he was now giving across the country, were “a cut above some pronouncements made in the halls of government.”

In his biography about the Packers’ coach, David Maraniss detailed how Richard Nixon first considered Lombardi as his running mate. That infatuation lasted until the Republican candidate learned that Lombardi had been a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy. In fact, when Lombardi stepped down as coach in Green Bay, Kennedy had sent him a cable reading, “Vince, now would you come and be my coach?”

In Chicago, where the Democrats gathered, talk about Lombardi continued. Miles McMillin of the
Capital Times
in Madison, Wisconsin, just down the road from Green Bay, maintained that Lombardi’s name came up in discussions of vice presidential short lists. In the end, though, nothing came of such speculation, and soon enough it was overshadowed by much larger issues.

Although Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders had told their followers to stay away from Chicago, enough advocates from all sides made the trek to the shores of Lake Michigan to set off a cultural explosion. All summer long, a strong undercurrent of anger had been steadily building, igniting in the aftermath of King’s assassination and again following Kennedy’s, all the while gathering greater and greater force. Such emotion could be seen in the baseball ballparks, notably Tiger Stadium in Detroit. There fans were allowed to bring their own booze to the game as long as they concealed it in brown bags. Empty bottles and firecrackers were often deployed to protest umpires’ calls or poor play by the home squad.

In a mid-June contest at Tiger Stadium, Boston outfielder Ken Harrelson was nearly hit in the back by a cherry bomb. A plea over the public address system for “good sportsmanship” only led to additional objects being thrown, including another explosive that went off over Harrelson’s head. With that the outfielder threw down his glove and began walking in from right field. He’d had enough.

“I’d hit a couple home runs and the second one had put us ahead, so when I go to take up my position again in right field, I hear this strange sound going on around me. It was like, ‘Zip, Zip,’ and I saw that they were throwing ball bearings, about the size of a quarter at me,” Harrelson recalled. “Then a cherry bomb goes off over my head. It wasn’t that close, maybe ten to fifteen feet away, but I’m getting unnerved about all of this.

“I came in and start to discuss the situation with the umpires. Our manager, Dick Williams, came out and there’s talk about forfeiting the game. But then somebody tells me, ‘If it’s a forfeit, you lose those two home runs and five RBI you have.’ That’s when I went and got a helmet and decided to ride it out.”

With the Tigers trailing, 8–5, in the bottom of the ninth Harrelson hung around, but just barely. He positioned himself twenty feet or so behind Boston second baseman Mike Andrews—as far away as he could from the mob in right field.

“No wonder they have trouble in this town,” Harrelson said after the game. “It’s people like that, just a few jerks, who give a city a bad name.”

Years later, Harrelson said of that night: “Now I wasn’t privy to what happened later, but I do know that Mr. Yawkey, our owner, and Mr. Fetzer, the Tigers’ owner, talked on the phone. And the next night I went out there, the upper deck in right field had been cleared out. They had done that to keep me and the other guys safe.”

Unfortunately, the Harrelson incident was far from the exception that season.

“Has the whole world gone crazy?” asked Bill Rohr, a relief pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, after so much debris rained down from the second deck in Detroit that he was unable to warm up. “In the stands there were a couple of guys standing together, slugging . . . really hitting each other. There were a couple of people beating up an old man. It is nuts.”

Mickey Lolich added, “A guy doesn’t need (military) basic training. Just play the outfield in Detroit.”

Such flashpoints were possible omens—precursors to what was to happen later that summer in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was scheduled to begin. City officials there, in an effort to discourage demonstrations, refused to issue permits for any marches or overnight stays in the parks. No matter that the Boy Scouts routinely camped in Lincoln Park, an impressive swath of urban openness that hugged the west shore of Lake Michigan. The hippies and Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies and anybody else in town to protest the political powers were required to vacate the park by 11 p.m. Chicago’s finest were charged with enforcing the curfew, and for consecutive nights they aggressively did so, while television cameras rolled in the background. During the day the youthful protesters and city police could actually be seen playing catch, but inevitably each night by 11 p.m.—in time to be featured on the late evening news—the violence escalated to fever pitch yet again. Police clubbed many of those in their way. Cars with Eugene McCarthy bumper stickers had their tires slashed. Across the country the public was transfixed as more than 16 million tuned in on television.

The Tigers were supposed to be in Chicago, too. But all the rooms in the city were booked due to the convention, so the first game of their series with the White Sox was switched to Milwaukee. In hindsight, it would be a fortunate substitution. Other ballclubs weren’t as lucky.

By August 28, demonstrations made their way closer to downtown Chicago. Plans were made to march on the Amphitheatre, where Hubert Humphrey was about to accept the nomination and the party was expected to take a position of supporting the ongoing war in Vietnam. The protesters gathered in Grant Park, a smaller venue opposite the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many delegates were staying. Protesters listened to the convention’s proceedings on transistor radios, and when the prowar plank passed many decided to march.

“After everything that had happened this year,” Mark Kurlansky wrote in
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
, “after Tet, Johnson’s resignation, McCarthy’s campaign, Martin Luther King’s death, Bobby Kennedy’s campaign and death, and four months of futile Paris peace talks—after all that, both parties were to have pro-war stances.”

That’s when Chicago law enforcement, which now numbered more than twenty-five thousand, moved in, again with billy clubs swinging.

Most of the time sport exists in a different orbit from the real news of the day. Even sports writers like to kid that they work in the “toy department”—fortunate to be caught up in less serious matters. But in ’68, time after time, those lines became blurred.

That evening in Chicago, Larry Dierker, a young pitcher with the Houston Astros, checked into the Conrad Hilton with the ballclub. He was pitching well in 1968, with one of his victories coming against Bob Gibson, a triumph he would always treasure. In September, he would turn twenty-two, and after spending the winter pitching in the Dominican Republic, Dierker was thrilled to be part of a big-league rotation. He was holding his own, feeling good about himself. Despite his age it was actually his fourth full year in the major leagues, but nothing he had experienced up to that point had prepared him for what was about to unfold before him.

“We flew into Chicago while those riots were going on,” he recalled decades later. “When the team bus came to the Conrad Hilton, we couldn’t pull up in front of the hotel. Instead we had to enter through the back entrance—through the kitchen to get into the lobby.

“When we got into the lobby, you could smell the smoke and tear gas. It wasn’t like our eyes were watering or anything, but you could tell it was an unusual scene. You could hear the sirens and you could hear the bullhorns. Once we got up to our room, our room was facing the park. That was back when you could still open windows in a hotel. We ordered up some beer and sandwiches and opened the windows. We sat out there and watched what was going on down below.”