The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  But this game also introduced an ugly tone to the season. When the Indians scored the go-ahead run in the ninth on a disputed play after which Mayo was thrown out of the game by the plate umpire, a rain of garbage began to fall from the upper deck in right. Beer cans and bottles, a corkscrew, fruit, someone’s spectacles. Detroit had a reputation for such barrages. The most famous occurred during the seventh game of the 1934 World Series, when fans in left field bombarded Joe Medwick after he had spiked Detroit third baseman Marv Owen. Judge Landis, who was in attendance, ordered Medwick removed so that the game, which had become a rout for the Cardinals, could conclude. But there had been less publicized incidents over the years. Among them was a near-riot during a Yankees game in 1960 when someone threw the back of a grandstand chair at Roger Maris, and members of the New York bull pen had to flee to the dugout to escape the onslaught.

  The upper-deck overhang in right was one of Tiger Stadium’s most famous features. It was, in fact, copied by the Texas Rangers when they built their new ballpark in the ’90s. It gave fans a great view of the action but also brought them, quite literally, over the head of the right fielder. When displeased, those seated there did not hesitate to let fly.

  Two weeks later, the situation got even worse. Big crowds had now become the norm. Even a Wednesday night game against Boston brought more than 30,000 into the stadium. It was a balmy June evening. Many fans arrived with picnic baskets and liquid refreshment, and they were in a festive mood. But that mood started to sour in the seventh when Ken Harrelson hit a three-run homer and put Boston ahead, 5-4· Harrelson trotted out to right field after his blast and was met with boos and curses. By the ninth, with the Tigers out of the game, the garbage followed. Harrelson tried to ignore it and assumed his fielding position. Suddenly he leaped forward violently and an instant later a cherry bomb exploded a few feet behind him. It had hit him in the back just before going off. Then another one exploded above his head. He started to trot off the field, but the umpires tried to convince him to stay. Harrelson refused, finally stationing himself right behind the second baseman. An instant later the game ended.

  Most fans booed the instigators. Although club officials indicated that such behavior was increasingly becoming common around the league, it seemed to happen most often in Detroit. Campbell announced that all bags subsequently would be subject to a search by stadium guards and that no beer could be brought into the ballpark from the outside. A few malcontents remained convinced that this all was just a massive conspiracy engineered by the ball club and calculated to force them to buy beer at stadium prices.

  In the spring of 1968, however, the entire planet seemed to be thrashing in a spasm of violence that left historians grasping helplessly for comparisons. Less than a week after the Tigers left Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, just hours after winning California’s presidential primary. For the second time in two months, major league baseball was asked to cancel or delay games because of a funeral. Hours before littering the field with garbage on June 7, Detroit fans had stood in silent tribute to the slain national leader. The Tigers switched the following game to night so as not to conflict with the funeral. Although June 9 was declared a national day of mourning, baseball played a full schedule. Besides, it was Bat Day in Detroit. Cancellation was out of the question, and the season’s largest crowd so far, a throng of 52,938, filled Tiger Stadium, day of mourning or not.

  The country’s colleges were in turmoil. Student demonstrators invaded the office of Columbia University’s president in April, took hostages, ransacked papers, and paralyzed one of the nation’s top educational institutions for two weeks. No sooner had this been resolved than French leftists seized control of the Sorbonne, put up barricades in the streets of Paris, and prepared to battle the city’s police. Bombs were thrown in the streets of the Latin Quarter, and hundreds of thousands of militant workers joined the students in a general strike. America was still reeling from the Tet offensive of January, which seemed to prove that the country’s Vietnam policy was a failure. Antiwar demonstrations increased, and activists promised massive protests during the summer’s Democratic nominating convention in Chicago. President Johnson had already announced that he would not seek reelection, forced from office by rising opposition to the war.

  Against this backdrop, the throwing of a few cherry bombs seemed like pretty tame stuff.

  Nonetheless, Detroit had become a symbol of the times. As more details of the previous summer’s riot became known, the city seemed to draw farther apart. The Detroit Free Press investigated every one of the forty-three riot deaths and concluded that most of them had resulted from a lack of restraint and discipline by police and National Guardsmen. Even though it was not publishing, the paper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Moreover, several young black men, held by Detroit police in the Algiers Motel on Woodward in the early hours of the riot, had apparently been executed.

  Entire neighborhoods in the city had changed from predominantly white to all-black in a few months as residents rushed for the sanctuary of the suburbs. Black leaders denounced the police department as “an occupying army.” Only at the ballpark was Detroit able to come together on anything resembling common ground.

  CHAPTER 14 The Healer

  Willie Horton excused himself, jumping up from his chair in response to a call from another part of the house. He was gone for about five minutes. “My grandfather,” he explained upon his return. “He has a room downstairs.”

  Several minutes later another call took him away again. “That was Dominique, my granddaughter,” he said.

  Five generations of family live under Willie’s roof. He couldn’t he happier. It’s a big roof. Horton lives in a fine old house in one of Detroit’s most prestigious neighborhoods, Sherwood Forest. There is plenty of room for everyone.

  He sells machinery, and his employer, who is a big baseball fan, prepared a special packet outlining Horton’s accomplishments and career. Not that anyone in Detroit really would need it. Horton is a special man in the city, a symbol of the best that Detroit would like itself to be. “I believe that the 1968 Tigers were put here by God to heal this city,” he says, and he is utterly sincere. If anyone could have been named the designated healer, it was Horton.

  Hardly a player in the history of the Tigers was not booed in Detroit. Kaline heard it, and so did Hank Greenberg. McLain and Lolich knew what it sounded like, and Cash knew only too well. But not Horton. He was the kid who came off the streets, an almost mythic figure, a natural who never fell from grace. Instinctively, reflexively the crowds knew that Willie Horton was one of them. And for all the years he played in Detroit, they loved him for it.

  How odd that long after his retirement his name should be confused with that of a vicious killer and rapist, a paroled criminal who became a divisive political and racial issue during the presidential election of 1988.

  “That did bother me,” says Willie. “I think Johnny Carson or somebody called me up, and we talked about it on the air and I think we got that all cleared up. But you don’t like to see that happen to your good name.”

  He came out of Northwestern High, maybe the toughest of all the city’s schools in the early ’60s. Most of the 1967 rioters lived in that neighborhood. The principal of an adjacent Detroit school, also noted for its hard characters, once described it this way: “At my place, if a kid wears a nice leather coat to school, they’ll break in to his locker to get it. At Northwestern, they’ll rip it right off his back.” But just a few blocks away from Northwestern were the studios of Motown Records, which was starting up just as Horton was graduating. There were both hope and despair in those streets.

  “We’ve all got a part to play in life as individuals,” he says. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, that’s it. You’ve got to find what you love and do it well. I wish maybe it could have worked out that I work with kids a bit more than I do. Children need heroes today. That’s
the big need. I had a job with the Police Athletic League in Detroit, setting up baseball teams all over the city and getting them equipment. They just don’t play ball anymore in the city the way I used to when I was growing up, and that’s a shame. They let the grass grow up on all those diamonds, and the backstops are falling down. It hurts me to see that. Baseball can help these kids. But, you know, a new mayor got elected here, and I lost that job. 1 knew the new mayor, Dennis Archer, very well. But he told me that it was a political thing and there wasn’t anything he could do. I didn’t care about myself. It was the kids.

  “When I was growing up my hero was Rocky Colavito. I loved to go out there and watch him hit home runs. When I joined the Tigers I went over and shook his hand. He smiled at me and told me that when I came up to stay, he’d be traded. I couldn’t believe it. Trade the Rock? No way. But that’s just what happened. They traded my hero to make room for me. Sometimes that happens in life.

  “It’s funny how people are. When I coached with the Yankees, we had to meet almost every day with George Steinbrenner. I know what his reputation is, but he was always very nice to me. I think he’s just a lonely man. I think that’s why he acts the way he does sometimes, to draw people to him some way.”

  As it was for so many of the younger Tigers, 1968 was a break-out year for Horton. He would never again equal the thirty-six homers he hit then, and only twice in his career would he stay healthy enough to play in more games. In the Year of the Pitcher, Horton was a most dangerous character. He was fourth in the league in hitting and RBIs, second in homers and total bases. He combined power and average better than anyone else in the American League.

  Horton lost his parents in an auto accident on a snow-covered highway just months before his first full season with the Tigers. His dad, Clint, loved baseball and transmitted that love to his son. When Willie joined the Tigers, he wanted to get his father box seats for a game with Baltimore. Clint Horton wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that he watch Willie play from his usual seat in the faraway center-field bleachers. He cheered silently until Willie tagged one off Robin Roberts in the late innings for a home run. Then Clint couldn’t hold it in anymore. He leaped to his feet yelling: “That’s my boy down there. That’s my boy, Willie.” The spectator beside him was unimpressed. “If that’s your boy down there,” he asked, “what are you doin’ up here?”

  The family had little money, but Clint ran a tight house. He was a disciplinarian, knowing what baseball could do for his son. Willie loved boxing as much as baseball as a teenager. He sneaked across the river to Windsor, Ontario, and fought in some amateur bouts under an assumed name. Unfortunately, the fights were picked up on Canadian television, and when Clint tuned in and saw his son with the gloves on, he went through the roof. That ended Willie’s pugilistic career, but whenever there was a fight on the field during his years with Detroit, everyone first looked around to see where Willie was and stayed far away from him.

  If Detroit loved Willie, he was always a man looking for family to love. For several years after the death of his parents, Charlie Dressen and Jim Campbell were his father figures. “I talked to Jim practically every day for many years,” he says. “If you had a problem you could always go to him. He knew about things. He could separate being my friend from being my boss, the person from the executive. I knew he would always treat me fair when we negotiated a contract. But he made sure that [Federal Appeals Court Judge] Damon Keith was looking out for my interests.

  “I started holding barbecues at the Holiday Inn during spring training for the team. I guess it became a regular thing. A way to draw us closer together. That bunch in ’68, though, we were close-knit. You saw two Tigers, and you saw all of them. Always talking baseball. What do you do in this situation? How do you react on the field? I loved talking about the game with Kaline. I looked at him like Abraham Lincoln. It was an incentive just to come up to his level of expertise.

  “I still hear talk about my throw in the World Series, the one that got Lou Brock at the plate in the fifth game. They say that turned the series around. But that just came out of talking about the game, preparing yourself for what could happen. We’d been told that Brock had got himself into bad habits on the bases. Outfielders had just given up trying to make a play on him because he was so fast getting from second to home. So a lot of times he wasn’t watching his coach at third, and the on-deck hitter wasn’t coming out to give him the sign to slide or stand up. He almost never slid. We saw these things. It didn’t happen by accident. When I threw that ball, I knew we had a shot at him. My job was to hit Coyote [Don Wert] right on the nose and for Freehan to make the call on whether to let it go through or not. It was all in the preparation.

  “I see players today taking everything so lightly. Making those one-handed catches. What’s that? That’s an emergency catch. What can you do with the ball after you catch it one-handed? You respect every pitcher you face. Whatever he has he’s going to throw his best to you. You’ve got to anticipate that. I don’t believe there’s anybody talking to these young players about these things the way we used to do it.”

  In the months after the riots, Horton came under tremendous pressure from members of the black community to become a racial spokesman. It wasn’t in his nature to be a militant. He didn’t feel that he should be representing anyone. His advisor, Judge Keith, tried to shield him from a lot of that. But Horton felt a responsibility that he couldn’t quite define to play a spokesman’s role. He was aware that people looked to him as a symbol, but he didn’t know what kind of a symbol, or what he was supposed to do about it beyond playing ball. In 1969, the pressure was so high that he walked off the team for several days to pull his emotions together. But in the years between, he has grown into a man very much at peace with himself, a grandfather eleven times over, the patriarch of a good house.

  “Everything I have in life, I got from baseball,” he says. “I always felt if I didn’t stay focused, didn’t get the most mileage out of my ability, that I was cheating on myself. And I’ve been repaid many times over. You know, little children five and six years old come up to me, and they know about Willie Horton. That’s priceless. But I think it’s because of what we gave to this community back then. Those were special times.”

  CHAPTER 15 Reason to Believe

  There are certain cities in which sports enthusiasts learn early in life to distrust happiness. New Yorkers expect to win, and when they don’t they demand loudly to know why not. Los Angeles is a place where the sense of anticipation also runs high ... and if things don’t work out, hey, it’ll be sunny again tomorrow. Detroit knows no such assurance. It is a city that goes through life feeling that just as things seem to be going well, a safe is probably about to fall on you from a great height. As George Will once wrote memorably about another team, “Being a Cubs fan proves that man was not put on this earth for pleasure.” Tigers fans also come to understand that suffering profits the soul and that behind every strip of cheery wallpaper there is an awfully big glob of paste.

  The last pennant for Detroit had marched home from the war with Hank Greenberg in 1945. But there was a chalky taste to the triumph. The World Series played that October with the Cubs has been described, perhaps unfairly, as the worst in history. Wartime players still dominated the rosters of both teams. They made errors, they fell down, they pitched poorly. The war was over, and America was eager to return to good times. But the series was a reminder of the deprivations that the country had just come through and wanted to put far behind it as quickly as possible. Both winners and losers were ridiculed.

  There was a tradition in Detroit, however, about the only other world champions in the city’s history, the 1935 Tigers. Because of its industrial base, Detroit was savaged worse than any other American city by the Great Depression. The great factories ran with skeleton crews. No one had money to buy the cars they made. The city was devastated, inhabited by an army of the unemployed. Into this picture of despair came a baseball team. Its infie
ld was called the Battalion of Death—Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer, Billy Rogell, and Marv Owen. It was powered by the G-Men—Greenberg, Gehringer, and Goose Goslin. It was led by Black Mike Cochrane, a swashbuckling catcher who refused to countenance defeat and drove his team to consecutive pennants. These men taught a defeated city how to hope again. They brought solace to people who had lost almost everything. And they were loved more than any group of athletes in Detroit’s long sports history. Over the years they turned into mythic figures, the paradigm of what ballplayers should be. For an entire generation of men and women, there would be no manager like Cochrane, no slugger like Greenberg, no infielder like Gehringer, no pitcher like Schoolboy Rowe. After Cochrane’s death in 1962, the street that ran behind the left-field line at Tiger Stadium was renamed in his honor. When Gehringer and Greenberg passed away, the city’s newspapers carried front-page eulogies, and aging children wept silently to themselves. Even the champion Lions and Red Wings teams of the 1950s could not rival them in public affection—because they had saved a city.

  As the 1968 season wore into summer and the first anniversary of the riots, it seemed as if the same sense of wonder was building around this baseball team. There was no danger of another racial upheaval. The city was too exhausted for that. But tiny segments of shattered community were slowly crystallizing around the Tigers. Their struggles and defiant last-gasp comebacks seemed to reflect the reborn hopes of the city in which they played.