The Dodgers returned to Los Angeles for an eight-game home stand beginning Tuesday, August 10. Koufax won his 20th game of the season, which spurred talk about the possibility of 30 wins. No one had reached that mark since the Cardinals’ Dizzy Dean in 1934, three decades prior. But Koufax had 12 remaining starts, and it seemed possible the way he was pitching. Roseboro thought he might make it; he expected Sandy to win every start. “He was the best I ever saw,” Johnny wrote simply. “I think what set Sandy apart from all the other pitchers was his ability in his prime to throw his stuff so hard and with such accuracy.” The upbeat mood of Angelenos, whose team had been in first place for 99 days, took an abrupt turn the following night.
Around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Lee Minikus, a white California highway patrolman, clocked a gray Buick doing 55 in a 35-miles-per-hour zone on Avalon Boulevard. Minikus gave chase on his motorcycle and pulled over the Buick near 116th Street in the midst of the Watts neighborhood. The driver, Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black man, and his stepbrother, Ronald Frye, 22, had been drinking screwdrivers that afternoon. Officer Minikus smelled alcohol on their breath. He asked Marquette to perform a field sobriety test. Marquette complied but was unable to walk a straight line. The patrolman informed the driver that he was under arrest for operating a motor vehicle under the influence.
The traffic stop had attracted a small crowd of 25–30 people, drawn to the flashing lights on a hot, lazy evening. Marquette had entertained them by joking with Minikus, who had bantered back. Their repartee had been polite, jovial. The crowd had laughed. Marquette’s mother, Rena Frye, changed that.
Barely 5 feet tall, she pushed through the crowd, which was growing steadily. She had been cooking rabbit in her apartment a block away when someone told her that the police had arrested her son. Rena lit into Marquette about his drinking. Her anger ignited his and recast the situation. The white Officer Minikus and his two white colleagues who had answered his routine call for backup suddenly became symbols of a century of oppression, and the moment reminded Marquette and the other African Americans in the Watts neighborhood of past incidents when white cops confronted black citizens. “Those motherfucking cops ain’t going to take me to jail,” Marquette screamed, and he flattened himself against a building along the sidewalk. When Minikus stepped toward him, Marquette shouted, “Don’t touch me, you white motherfucker,” and swung at him.
It got ugly. Officer Minikus and one of his colleagues reached for Marquette to handcuff him. He ducked away. The crowd snarled. The third officer called for reinforcements. The struggle to subdue Marquette on the sidewalk persisted. The skirmish attracted more onlookers. The call for backup summoned more than two dozen squad cars. One of the white highway patrolmen struck Marquette with his baton and split the skin above his eye. Blood spilled onto the young black man’s face That riled the crowd. The law had wounded one of their own, and those who witnessed it abandoned respect for the law.
A 20-year-old woman spat on a highway patrolman. Another officer grabbed her, his arm around her neck. The crowd moved in, ready to lynch the white men. The cops raised their batons. The crowd threw rocks. They smashed windows of passing cars. They grabbed white passengers from cars caught in the snarl and beat them. They chanted to the law, “Get out, Whitey!” One cop cussed, “Nigger.” They beat him. The Watts riot had begun.
It raged for six days. Looters emptied stores. Mobs burned buildings. Hospital workers scurried to treat the wounded. The city morgue tallied the dead. The governor called in the National Guard. That week, Watts resembled the streets of Santo Domingo.
The LAPD arrested Dodgers outfielder Willie Crawford, who lived near Watts, on suspicion that he was involved in the riots. Because he was black. Police Chief William Parker, who valued morality and respect for the law and whom Time declared “the most respected law enforcement officer in the United States after J. Edgar Hoover,” explained with a poor choice of words that the riots started when “one person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” Others were more sympathetic to “the Negro’s unbridled rage” that sparked “fires of hatred and frustration.” Some even took pride in the “bloody outburst.” President Johnson denounced the violence as a setback for civil rights. “A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face,” Johnson said. “They are both lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America.” Yet for those who felt impotent under decades of oppression, violence seemed the only recourse. “The only way we can get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot,” one black man in Los Angeles said. “As long as we lie down we are going to get kicked.”
The players at Dodger Stadium could see the smoke 10 miles away where angry African Americans chanted, “Burn, baby, burn.” Team management announced that fans who feared coming to the ballpark could exchange tickets for a September game. The stadium scoreboard listed highway exits closed by the rioting. The day the city imposed martial law, August 14, Koufax won his 21st game, but the violence had almost rendered baseball irrelevant to Roseboro, a black man living in south-central Los Angeles. When he picked up the newspaper, he skipped the sports section for the first time in his life and read the latest reports of the violence, which pained him. “It’s bad for my race,” he said. On the field he had to remind himself that his job mattered. “I’d wake up in the morning and say to myself, ‘Why are they playing games?’”
His drive home from the ballpark took him past the fires and fighting and shook him. The rage and violence that had collected and exploded here was unlike anything he could have imagined in Ashland 30 years earlier. The riots laid bare to him the bitter truths of racism that he had missed in his youth. He was dismayed that the anger and frustration had erupted into such destruction to property and life.
One night that week, word spread of a protest march that would pass in front of the Roseboro house on its way to a nearby park. Worried what might happen along the way, Johnny gathered the guns he had collected over the years and sat guard by his front door, prepared to protect his family and his property. It turned out that he didn’t have to fire a shot—the march never happened—but the conflict tormented him. Wasn’t there something he could do to help the people of Watts? They had shot the comedian Dick Gregory when he tried to intervene. They had scorned Martin Luther King Jr.’s attempt to pacify rioters. But Roseboro was a Dodger, a professional ballplayer. Maybe he could reach folks on a different level.
When one of Jeri’s cousins, who worked with youth in a local community center, called to ask Johnny if there might be a way to get kids away from the violence, he responded immediately. While helicopters zipped over Watts and television stations showed scenes of the fires, Johnny coordinated buses to take boys and girls out of the danger zone and bring them to Dodger Stadium, where he bought their tickets. It was the little he could do to provide the children some temporary relief.
But Rosey knew he couldn’t squelch the hatred and the violence. By the time the Dodgers headed north to San Francisco for a four-game series with the Giants, the riots had caused $40 million in property damage, claimed 34 lives, and left another 1,032 people injured. The wounds cut even deeper.
Despite Johnny’s misgivings, the game went on. But the players, like America itself, had shed some of their innocence. Try as they might to stay focused on baseball, they could not ignore their humanity. “I suggest that the temper of the country has risen in the last few years because of broken dreams and broken promises, because of frustration,” New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey observed in Sport magazine. “I also suggest that ballplayers—no matter how sheltered—are affected by the temper of our times, whether they know it or not.” He concluded that the national pastime reflected the violence in society.
Indeed, beyond the brushbacks and taunts traded by Marichal and
Drysdale, several other violent incidents had already marked that season. A month earlier, Philadelphia teammates Frank Thomas and Richie Allen had argued so vigorously that Thomas smacked Allen on the shoulder with his bat. In May Roberto Peña of the Cubs had gone after Dodgers pitcher Bob Miller after being hit by a pitch, and Roseboro had forcefully come between them. That same month, even the gentleman Sandy Koufax had struck Lou Brock in the ribs with a fastball. No one seemed safe in the summer of fury.
Juan continued to worry about his family in the Dominican. He wrote to them, but two weeks passed between his posting a letter and receiving a response. “It was a long wait,” he said. His teammates, the Alou brothers, suffered the same worry. “We just wanted the season to be over so we could go home and see our loved ones,” Juan said.
Amazingly, despite his fragile emotional state, Juan continued to dominate on the mound. On the eve of the Giants’ four-game series with the first-place Dodgers, he blanked the Mets 5–0 on three singles, marking his ninth shutout of the season. He improved to 19–9 with a league-leading 1.73 ERA. Koufax had won two more games than Marichal, but Juan had five more games left to play, which meant at least one more start than his rival, and his significantly stingier ERA and nine shutouts seemed to give Juan an edge in the Cy Young competition. If Marichal could keep up this pace and his Giants could edge the Dodgers, he stood an excellent chance to win his first Cy Young Award.
But the situation at home had skinned his nerves raw. In August he barked at the official scorer at Candlestick over a decision that didn’t go his way. The Saturday before his ninth shutout, he had lost his ninth game to the Phillies by giving up three runs in the eighth inning. He turned his temper against home plate umpire Lee Weyer in an argument over the strike zone. Weyer did not eject Marichal but did write him up. Juan’s teammates obviously noted his condition. “I really don’t think Juan should have been playing at all,” Willie Mays later told the New York Times. “He was pretty strung out, full of fear and anger, and holding it inside.”
So when the Dodgers traveled to San Francisco for another series between the bitter rivals, it wasn’t simply two teams contending for the pennant.
CHAPTER SIX
Bloody Sunday
Thursday afternoon, August 19, 1965, Juan Marichal walked across the outfield grass toward the entrance of the Giants clubhouse at Candlestick Park after his team had finished taking batting practice. The Dodgers players had started coming out for their turn. Juan spotted John Roseboro near the right field bullpen. “Hi, Johnny,” he said.
“Hi, Juan.”
The two men knew each other from five years on opposite sides of the Dodgers-Giants rivalry. They had also been teammates for two games as National League All-Stars in 1962. Johnny had caught Juan for two innings in the second game, when Juan had thrown two wild pitches. They did not share the connection that Juan did with fellow Latin players or Johnny did with fellow African-American opponents like Willie Mays. They paused for a moment to exchange pleasantries more perfunctory than personal. That day’s competition would supersede any sympathy from their connection.
The Dodgers had arrived in San Francisco with the slimmest of leads over the Giants, their 70–51 record a .579 winning percentage, placing them slightly ahead of the Giants’ .578. With only six weeks remaining in the season, the two teams were engaged in the National League’s tightest pennant race to date, with the Milwaukee Braves and Cincinnati Reds also in contention. The team occupying first place had changed four times in the previous week. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia also figured into the race. The four-game series at Candlestick gave both the Dodgers and the Giants the chance to secure their position and push the other out of contention. Time reported on the pennant struggle that week: “The tension was terrific—especially in San Francisco.”
Nearly 36,000 fans, some of them Dodgers faithful who had driven up the coast for the confrontation, came out to the ballpark by the bay for Thursday’s game. Roseboro doubled in the seventh to drive in a run and tie the game 3–3. The Dodgers added two more runs in the next inning, but Giants catcher Tom Haller smashed a two-out, two-run homer off Don Drysdale (making an unusual relief appearance) in the bottom of the ninth to send the game into extra innings. Dodgers leftfielder Lou Johnson homered in the top of the 15th, and Roseboro singled to drive in an insurance run. After Ron Perranoski shut down the Giants in the bottom half, the Dodgers had increased their lead over the Giants in the standings to a game and a half.
Before the first pitch Friday night, Maury Wills spied that the San Francisco groundskeepers had spread dirt mixed with peat moss near home plate to soften the surface—and slow him down. He grabbed a board and scraped away as much of it as he could. He pointed out the spot to the umpires. “I don’t believe this should be allowed,” he said.
He worked his revenge on the Giants when he led off the fifth inning. He showed bunt. Haller, behind the plate for the Giants, leaned forward, ready to pounce on the ball. Wills yanked back his bat and nipped Haller’s mitt. Interference, the home plate ump ruled and sent Wills to first. The Giants protested: “How can that be interference? Wills tried to do that. It wasn’t Haller’s fault.” But the call stood.
The Giants didn’t like it. They led 4–1, thanks in part to Mays’s two-run homer in the third, but wanted to even the score in subterfuge. Matty Alou led off their half of the fifth. He squared to bunt, then pulled back like Wills had, trying to flick Roseboro’s mitt. His teammates thought he succeeded and so did some reporters, though home plate ump Al Forman let it go. The distraction caused Johnny to miss the catch. The ball struck him in the chest like a punch. “Weasel bastard,” he growled. “If somebody hurts me, I’m going to get one of you guys.”
The Giants in the dugout jumped on Roseboro. Marichal, Matty’s best friend, yelled from the steps, “Why do you get mad? Haller doesn’t get mad.”
Johnny glared at Juan. “You sonofabitch, if you have something to say, come out here and say it to my face!”
Juan stayed where he was next to manager Herman Franks and glared back.
“If he doesn’t shut his big mouth, he’ll get a ball right behind his ear,” Johnny told Alou, who relayed the message to his friend.
Jim Ray Hart added a solo homer that put the final score at 5–1 and brought the Giants back to within a half game of their rivals. Roseboro, 0-for-4 on the night, remained sore afterward. On his way to the team bus, he came upon the Giants’ Orlando Cepeda in the parking lot. “Tell Marichal that if he has the guts to tangle with me, fine,” Johnny said. “But if not, he should quit wolfin’ at me from behind the manager’s back.”
In Saturday’s matchup, with more than 42,000 on hand, Roseboro got some satisfaction in the top of the seventh. With one out, one on, and his team trailing 2–3, Johnny homered to put the Dodgers up 4–3. Mays tied the game with a solo homer in the eighth. The game continued with playoff intensity into the 11th when Wes Parker hit a two-out, two-run shot over the right field fence that put the Dodgers up for good 6–4 and again increased their lead to one and a half games.
The series climaxed on Sunday with the rare marquee matchup: Juan Marichal versus Sandy Koufax. Fans slept outside the stadium in a line for tickets. When Candlestick opened its gates, 42,807 poured through the turnstiles, the largest crowd of the season. More than a million more tuned in to the Channel 11 television broadcast back in Los Angeles. The game promised something to remember.
Danger portended. On the Dodgers’ bus ride back to the hotel Saturday night, Johnny had remained on edge. The stress of the series, following the previous week’s riots in Watts, had spiked his natural competitive spirit. Talking with Lou Johnson and Jim Gilliam about facing the Giants’ ace the next day, Johnny said Marichal better watch himself “because I won’t take any guff from him.”
Sunday afternoon, Juan ran to the mound, the way he always did. He dusted his hand with the rosin bag once, flopped
it behind the rubber, tossed his warm-up pitches, and was ready. His arm felt good, even in the relatively cool bay air, near 70 degrees under a high sky. The wind swirled a paper wrapper behind home plate. The stadium throbbed with anticipation. The Dodgers had never beaten Marichal at his home park; he had defeated them 10 straight times at Candlestick. Two years earlier, in their only previous showdown in San Francisco, Marichal had defeated Koufax.
The drama began with Juan’s first pitch. Maury Wills beat out a bunt down the third baseline. Like most pitchers, Marichal hated the base-hit bunt more than a home run. The long ball was simply a power swing the batter gambled on correctly; the bunt taunted the pitcher, like spitting on his shoes. Juan did not tolerate anyone showing him up, especially on his first pitch. Wills had laid down the gauntlet for the day.
Juan retired the next two Dodgers, but cleanup hitter Ron Fairly stroked a double to score Wills. That steamed Juan. He got the next batter but returned to the dugout already down 1–0.
Koufax struck out the Giants’ side.
Juan ran back to the mound to start the second inning. After recording the first out, he gave up a double to first baseman Wes Parker. That brought up Johnny Roseboro. He had already contributed to the series with a double, a homer, and four RBI. He was pleased to be showing more confidence at the plate in light of his recent slump. The catcher promptly singled to drive in Parker and increase the Dodgers’ lead to 2–0. Marichal chafed. Eight batters, and he had already allowed more runs than he had averaged giving up over nine innings the entire season. He fanned Koufax to face the top of the order again, Wills.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 11