Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  With one big exception: Gibson had regressed in 1983. While his peers had made their breakthrough, the team’s anticipated superstar, the man Sparky once said had “a chance to be the next Mickey Mantle,” struggled.

  Leg injuries had played a part, limiting him to more appearances as a designated hitter than as the right fielder. But it was more, much more than that. He seemed to be at war with himself. The man who could have been a first-round draft choice as a football player, who could run like a wide receiver and hit home runs that seemed to come down in another dimension, appeared unsure of his own abilities, baffled by the expectations that had been placed upon him.

  He had played in more games than any of his previous three seasons, but he looked tentative as a hitter, unsure and overmatched by most left-handers and even average right-handers.

  His name was just as apt to turn up in the gossip columns of the Detroit papers as on the sports page. He and his buddy, pitcher Dave Rozema, were living large, bigger than life. They had plenty of money, good looks, and instant recognition wherever they went. They were a couple of kids who had grown up in Michigan and everybody loved them.

  But when the Tigers needed the lift that might have put them over the top in ’83, Gibson was missing. There was the suspicion that he might never match the hype. That he had been rushed too soon into a pressure-filled role. That his experience as a college player at Michigan State University and in the minor leagues had been far too brief.

  The verdict was: not ready. Maybe never ready.

  Gibson knew it, too. Whatever else he was, the man was not dumb. Abrasive, cocky, and loud, oh yes. But you’d also have to write down smart to complete the sketch. And when 1983 ended, he knew that it was on his shoulders as never before.

  Telling only a few close associates, he slipped out of town and headed for the West Coast. The simple goal was to remake his mind and regain the confidence that had somehow slipped away. His destination was Seattle, and what happened there would redefine who Gibson was.

  But something else had happened in 1983, too, something that had shaken this entire franchise to its core. On the eve of the World Series opener, the Detroit Tigers had been sold.

  John Fetzer, sole owner of the team for 22 years, decided at the age of 81 that he’d had enough. Taking the advice of his most trusted aide, team president Jim Campbell, he had sold the ballclub to Tom Monaghan, a little-known pizza baron from Ann Arbor.

  Even the most casual fan knew that this, somehow, had changed things. No one could have guessed how profound those changes would be.

  After a disappointing second-place finish in 1983, Lance Parrish (left), Larry Herndon, and the 1984 Tigers were focused on winning it all from day one.

  3. Changes in Attitude

  Fetzer insisted he hadn’t even known himself that he was ready to sell his ballclub. “It’s painful for me even to think about that,” he told Monaghan when the two men met for the first time the previous April. “This team has been my life.”

  But the longer that meeting between the two self-made business tycoons lasted, the more Fetzer thought he saw something in the younger man. He saw John Fetzer.

  Same Midwestern upbringing. Solid religious values. Building a business empire after starting out on a shoestring. An unshakable belief in positive thinking as the path to achieving the highest degree of self-actualization. Being all that you can be, as the ads for the army put it.

  More than that, Monaghan unquestionably loved baseball. In fact, dreams of the game had sustained him during an impoverished, hard-knock boyhood spent in a Catholic orphanage and as a farm worker.

  His father had died when Monaghan was four, and his mother, with no means to support her two sons, placed them in an institution in Jackson, Michigan. A sympathetic nun, Sister Mary Berarda, had nurtured the boy’s dreams. She didn’t laugh when he told her that his wish was to play shortstop for the Tigers someday. Instead, she told him earnestly that dreams can come true if you worked at them and never gave up. The lesson took.

  Even 40 years later, however, Monaghan shuddered while recalling what happened when Sister Mary left the orphanage. “The next six years,” he said, “was like being in prison. No one wanted to talk to me about baseball.”

  When he was permitted to leave and work on foster care farms, Monaghan seemed to have embarked on an aimless existence. He barely managed to get through high school. He was kicked out of a seminary for the sort of horseplay that didn’t suit a candidate for the priesthood.

  He joined the marines instead, and that experience contributed some structure to his life. But when he got out of the service in 1960 he was broke. Monaghan was 22 years old and still didn’t know what he wanted to be. Except for one thing: he wanted to be rich.

  Fetzer’s path had not been quite as hard. He had grown up in small-town Indiana, in a family of modest means. But by the age of 13, his future course had been set. An uncle who was a railroad dispatcher got the young man a job as a telegraph operator.

  One of his duties was to post the baseball scores that came over the wire. For some reason, it was Ty Cobb’s Tigers and their unsuccessful run for a pennant in 1915 that fired his imagination, and Fetzer became an ardent fan of the team.

  But his fascination lay in the field of communications, especially the new science of wireless telegraphy. The idea of voices crackling through the night from distant places, cities where he had never been, was an irresistible lure. Fetzer knew his life was meant to be spent in radio.

  He dropped out of Purdue University after a year when he was offered a job as manager of a new station in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He bought the station eventually and, realizing that opportunities for growth in such a small town were limited, he moved it to Kalamazoo in 1931. With the Depression worsening, it was hardly the most auspicious time to begin such an enterprise.

  “It was a terrible, heartrending experience,” Fetzer recalled later. “Everybody was either out of work and nearly broke or hanging on to every cent in their pockets. Not many people were interested in buying an ad on some newfangled novelty.”

  But he managed, somehow, to hang on, and in time the little station in Kalamazoo had grown to nine stations in two states. He was among the first to embrace television, served on the executive board of the National Association of Broadcasters, and gained an understanding of the financial workings of his industry that few others possessed.

  In 1956, while Monaghan was scraping through high school in Ann Arbor, Fetzer joined a consortium of 11 investors to buy the Detroit Tigers from the Briggs family. Fetzer loved to tell how he stole the team from right under the nose of Bill Veeck.

  The colorful Veeck, as was his wont, spoke openly to the press about the deal. One of the facts he let slip was the size of the loan approved by a Detroit bank. Fetzer calculated the amount of cash Veeck would have to put up to get the loan, added it all up, and immediately raised the sealed bid that his group was planning to submit.

  The bid beat Veeck’s by some $300,000, and for a grand total of $5.5 million—about the annual salary for a midlevel star today—the Fetzer group had bought itself a baseball team.

  The experience reinforced something Fetzer already knew: when it comes to business, you better keep your mouth shut.

  The unwieldy 11-man ownership was an unworkable arrangement. Within five years Fetzer had bought out the rest of his partners and owned the Tigers by himself.

  He ran the team guided by a set of firm convictions. First, a major league ballclub was a civic stewardship, a trust. Second, his team would be run on principles of strict financial responsibility. Third, he would hire men he respected and then stay out of the way and let them run the ballclub.

  “Anyone who owns this franchise should not hold this team for a grandiose plaything or for gratifying an ego,” he said. “I bought the club for just one reason—
love of the game.”

  In his Kalamazoo office, alongside all the broadcasting awards he had won, Fetzer kept a battered fielder’s glove, the one he had used as a kid. But he rarely appeared in the Tiger clubhouse. He preferred to watch games from a private box that hung from the second deck of Tiger Stadium, behind first base. Its front was made of reflecting glass that prevented others from seeing inside.

  For all these reasons, he was regarded as a rather remote and, if truth be known, unlovable figure. But he was devastated when the Tigers were beaten on the last day of the 1967 season. After the game he retired to his private office at the ballpark, sat alone, and wept.

  When the team won the pennant the following year he appeared in the clubhouse in a suit and tie and was promptly picked up and deposited in the whirlpool. He was absolutely delighted.

  But that was a rare breach in the wall, and when the economics of baseball changed, when free agency and million-dollar contracts came in, he became an increasingly unpopular figure in Detroit—because he refused to compromise his principles.

  The team would build from within. It would not join in the free agent madness. It would win the old-fashioned way, by out-thinking the next guy, not by outspending him. And that, sports fans, was that.

  Meanwhile, Monaghan had come up with a terrific idea. He had grown up in Ann Arbor and spent a lot of time in nearby Ypsilanti. Both were college towns and he could not help but notice that students were drawn to inexpensive food. Like pizza.

  There were lots of pizza joints in both places. But what if he could provide something that none of the others were supplying? A service. A system. What if he could deliver his pizzas hot right to the kids’ dorms and houses?

  Others had tried it, but the results were lukewarm, soggy messes. College kids did have some culinary standards. Not many and not high, but some.

  Monaghan began experimenting with two innovations. Portable car ovens, to keep the pizza hot en route, and insulated corrugated boxes. The combination worked and he found that he was able to deliver his product more efficiently than any competitor.

  He started out with a hole-in-the-wall joint called Dominick’s in Ypsilanti, financed with $900 that he and his brother were able to scrape together. After a quick course on how to make a pizza from the previous owner, the keys were turned over, and Monaghan was in business. He decided to change the name slightly, to Domino’s, but didn’t have the wherewithal to change the sign on the front door.

  The results were instantaneous. He almost went broke and had to buy his brother out to stay in business. But like Fetzer at the brink of failure, Monaghan kept at it, and within a year he had enough capital to open a second place in Ann Arbor. Then a third in another college town, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

  By the end of the sixties he was rapidly expanding, from 12 outlets to 44 in little more than a year. Then he discovered his business plan had been a bit too aggressive. His cash flow slowed to a trickle, he couldn’t pay his suppliers, and in 1970 he lost control of Domino’s.

  In the museum he later set up at his Ann Arbor corporate headquarters, he displayed a copy of the sad little note he had written to his creditors, apologizing for sneaking out the back door when they came to be paid. The collapse of his company shook Monaghan to his core. He was back at square one, without a pot to pizza in.

  But he still had two major assets: faith in himself and faith in his big idea. Within a year he had managed to convince his creditors to return the company to him. He told them that only he had the ability to make the system work. From that time on, he never looked back. He learned to conserve his resources, to expand only when conditions were ripe for expansion. Within 10 years, he had more than 400 Domino’s franchises in operation.

  It was this tale of resilience, of learning from catastrophe, that impressed Fetzer more than anything else. Here was another man who had looked failure full in the eye and triumphed. And learned. Just as John Fetzer had.

  By 1983, Monaghan was one of the wealthiest men in Michigan. His company’s annual revenues were $129 million. But outside of Ann Arbor he was still not very well known. Only one story about him had appeared in the Detroit papers before that year, an admiring magazine profile. To the general public, the man behind Domino’s remained an anonymity.

  Late in March, Monaghan decided to fulfill one of his boyhood dreams and visit the Tigers’ spring training base in Lakeland, Florida. He was introduced to the team president, Jim Campbell, who could be gruff where strangers, even wealthy strangers, were concerned. But Campbell almost choked when Monaghan brightly inquired if the Tigers were for sale, and, if they were, would he be considered as a possible buyer.

  Who was this guy, this cheeky mogul, grinning at him from behind wire-rimmed glasses like a hyped-up chipmunk? Campbell called someone whose opinion he trusted—Bo Schembechler was a Domino’s franchisee. In fact, with sly humor (because the coach of the University of Michigan football team is always the most hated man in town), Monaghan had sold him one of the stores in Columbus, Ohio. Schembechler also sat on the Domino’s board of directors.

  Despite being an Ohio State graduate, Campbell was on good terms with the Michigan football coach. Bo told him that Monaghan was just as he seemed, an enthusiastic guy who loved sports and had enough money to pretty much do what he wanted to do. “He gets what he wants,” Schembechler told him.

  Fetzer had given no indication that he was ready to sell, but Campbell thought he’d give his boss a heads-up anyhow. The owner was planning to visit Lakeland in the next few days and agreed to a meeting with Monaghan. It lasted two cordial hours, but ended with Fetzer gently informing him that his team was not for sale. “If I ever get ready, I’ll give you a call,” he told Monaghan.

  But he didn’t want a hint, a whisper of this meeting to leak out. It never happened. They weren’t even to be seen together. If he read anywhere that the discussion had taken place, Monaghan would be cut out of any future sale. Then Fetzer went off to sit in the owner’s box, while Monaghan took a seat in the stands.

  Fetzer knew from his experience with Bill Veeck that, in business, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

  Monaghan agreed. He was encouraged and thought that “the vibes had been getting better and better” between the two men at their meeting. He also was a man who knew how to keep his lips zipped.

  The call came in June. Fetzer wanted another meeting. He needed to sound Monaghan out about baseball, tradition, and where he thought the Tigers stood in the bigger picture.

  In 1983, the Tigers stood very tall. They were regarded as a model franchise, and Fetzer was among the handful of owners who ran the game. The reason was simple: he had unlocked the vault.

  Fetzer understood broadcasting finance like no other man in baseball, and he knew that the networks were underpaying to televise the games. He showed the other owners how to maximize revenue for broadcast rights, the big honey pot that pro football was cashing in on. For that, he was an object of deep respect, almost veneration.

  But while some of the owners used these funds to go on wild free agent spending sprees—like George Steinbrenner in New York—Fetzer husbanded his resources and plowed it back into the minor leagues and the superstructure of the franchise. Because that was the way to win; you built from within. If the fans didn’t understand that . . . well, in the end they would respect the decision. Because it was, in Fetzer’s mind, in the public’s interest to do things that way.

  “If you go against the public interest,” he had said, “woe be to baseball.”

  There was one thing that bothered him, though. Tiger Stadium. As early as 1977 he had called the ballpark “a noose around our necks, an intolerably bad situation.” The biggest single item in the Tigers’ budget was structural steel for support of the second deck in right field, which had been added to the stadium in 1938 and presented ongoing maintenance problems.


  Something would have to be done about that, and he wanted to make sure that Monaghan, for all his expressed love for Tigers tradition, comprehended that fact.

  The meeting went well, and another one was called for August. Fetzer was getting close, very close to an agreement. All that remained was the price.

  Monaghan had made up his mind that whatever Fetzer asked, he would pay. It turned out to be $53 million, the largest amount ever paid for a franchise in any sport up to that time. Monaghan didn’t blink. Although he asked his attorneys and accountants to go over the deal, he trusted Fetzer’s sense of fairness.

  The final details were ironed out in a secret meeting at a Holiday Inn in Battle Creek on October 4. Monaghan drove away from the hotel so excited that “I was almost sick to my stomach.”

  Sister Berarda had been right all those years ago. Who would have believed it? He had never given up on the dream and now it had come true beyond anything he ever imagined. The Tigers, the team of his childhood, were going to be his.

  The nun who had so enriched his childhood lived just long enough to see those hopes fulfilled. She died a few months after the purchase was completed.

  At the press conference announcing the sale, Monaghan was asked if there was anyone in the world he would trade places with now.

  “Yes,” he responded in all seriousness. “I would trade places with Alan Trammell.”

  Almost a year to the day before Alan Trammell (left) and Aurelio Lopez celebrated their Series win, the club was sold to Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan.

  4. Darrell’s Dilemma

  Time was running out. He knew it, and it was eating him up.

  Darrell Evans had one more move left. At the age of 36, with one of his best seasons just sealed in the books, he was a free agent.

  Parts of eight seasons with Atlanta, and eight more in San Francisco. Never with a winner. Not unless you wanted to count those 12 games with the ’69 Braves. Evans didn’t. He was just a kid then, riding the bench.