Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  Jim Fanning, Expo GM at the time, responded munificently. “It is customary to give a no-hit pitcher a new contract or bonus, usually about $1,000,” he said. “But Montreal is an unusual city and this is an unusual team. We are giving him a $2,000 raise.”

  The team was also paying Maury Wills, who had been caught stealing base fifty-two times the year before, more than he ever earned in his halcyon years with Los Angeles or Pittsburgh. “Why,” a reporter asked Sam Bronfman’s then thirty-seven-year-old son Charles, “did you sink more than a million into the team in the first place?”

  “I learned from my father,” he replied, “that citizenship means more than paying taxes or writing cheques for charity.”

  Let’s face it, from owner to batboy, no-hit pitcher to bullpen bum, everybody connected with the Expos was … beautiful.

  Canada, the prescient Bronfman told reporters in Florida, has a national inferiority complex and will gain status by being major league in baseball. “Nothing is so big league as major league baseball. Mr. Average Citizen of Montreal can now feel just as good as Mr. Average Citizen elsewhere.”

  Happily for Montreal, the supreme importance of major league baseball was also undoubted by big John McHale, club president and investor, who was formerly with Milwaukee and Detroit. Soon after joining the Expos, McHale was announced as a favoured candidate for the office of commissioner of baseball. He turned down the post rather than abandon Montreal—our Montreal, his investment—but not without first informing the picayune natives that in the United States the job of baseball commissioner was second in importance only to that of the U.S. president. Of such conviction, surely, were future World Series winners made.

  To come clean, when I first read that one of the most untiring and tiresome of our city councillors, hand-pumping Gerry Snyder, had cajoled a couple of second-generation multimillionaires, Bronfman and Lorne Webster, into staking a major league ball club, enabling them to make their very own mark, I was exceedingly skeptical. After the grandeur that was Expo, Montreal was enduring the inevitable business slump as well as a sobering morning after of whacking bills to be paid, with the upshot that escalating city property tax had become the highest in the country. Furthermore, French Canada was growing increasingly restive, separatists finally knitted into one respectable political party by the formidable René Lévesque. English-speaking Montreal was beginning to feel the chill. While Ontario burgeoned, its investment plans calling for a 14 percent growth rate, all that went boom in the Montreal stock exchange was a separatist bomb, brokers sliding under the desks faster than Maury Wills ever broke for second base.

  If this seemed a dubious climate for an expensive, risky new venture, then cynics, myself numero uno, had not counted on the energy of Gerry Snyder and Mayor Drapeau’s consummate hunger for glory. Or Charles Bronfman’s boyish eagerness and matured money.

  Among the supplicants for an NL franchise in 1968 were Milwaukee, Dallas, San Diego, Buffalo, and Montreal. Milwaukee, with a lawsuit pending against the league, was immediately counted out. Dallas, deserving maybe, would have bitten into the Houston Astros’ TV pie. The Buffalo ballpark, league officials ordained, was unsuitably located, vulnerable to race riots. From the onset, Montreal was the most cherished of all the cities applying for entry into the NL. After all, the city had a proud (and profit-proven) baseball tradition. Until 1960, it was the home of the Montreal Royals.

  An article in the memorable opening-day program of the Expos noted that while the province of Quebec had never been known as a hotbed of major league talent, we had nevertheless produced a few ball players, among them pitchers Claude Raymond and Ron Piché, and that three native sons, Roland Gladu, Jean-Pierre Roy, and Stan Bréard, had once played for another ball club here, the Royals.

  Oh, I remember the Royals—yes indeed—and if they played in a Montreal that was not yet growing and vibrant, pace Warren Giles, it was certainly a place to be cherished.

  Betta Dodd, “the Girl in Cellophane,” was stripping at the Gayety, supported by twenty-three Kuddling Kuties. Cantor Moishe Oysher, the Master Singer of His People, was appearing at His Majesty’s Theatre. The Johnny Holmes Band, playing at Victoria Hall, featured Oscar Peterson; and a sign in the corner cigar and soda warned Ziggy Halprin, Yossel Hoffman, and me that

  LOOSE TALK COSTS LIVES!

  Keep It Under

  Your

  STETSON

  I first became aware of the Royals in 1943.

  MAY U-BOAT SINKINGS

  EXCEED REPLACEMENTS

  KING DECORATES 625

  CANADIANS ON BIRTHDAY

  Many of our older brothers and cousins were serving overseas. Others on the street were delighted to discover they suffered from flat feet or, failing that, arranged to have an eardrum punctured by a specialist in such matters.

  R.A.F. HITS HARD AT

  COLOGNE AND HAMBURG

  2,000 Tons of Bombs

  Rain on Rhine City

  Even in fabled Westmount, where the very rich were rooted, things weren’t the same anymore. H.R., fashion emporium to the privileged, enjoined Westmount to “take another step in further aid of the government’s all-out effort to defeat aggression!”

  HOLT RENFREW ANNOUNCE THAT

  BEGINNING JUNE FIRST NO DELIVERIES OF

  MERCHANDISE WILL BE MADE

  ON WEDNESDAYS

  This forethought will help H.R. to save many gallons of gasoline… and many a tire … for use by the government. Moreover, will it not thrill you to think that the non-delivery of your dress on Wednesday will aid in the delivery of a “block-buster” over the Ruhr… Naples… Berlin… and many other places of enemy entrenchment?

  Nineteen thirty-nine was not only the date we had gone to war, it was also the year the management of the Royals signed the contract with Branch Rickey, making them the Dodgers’ farm team. Before we had even reached the age of puberty, Ziggy, Yossel, and I had learned to love with caution. If after the first death there is no other, an arguable notion, I do remember that each time one of our heroes abandoned us for Ebbets Field, it stung us badly. We hated Mr. Rickey for his voracious appetite. “There has been no mention officially that the Dodgers will be taking Flowers,” Lloyd MacGowan wrote in the Star on a typical day, “but Rickey was in Buffalo to watch the team yesterday. The Dodgers can’t take Flowers without sending down a flinger, but chances are the replacement for the burly lefty will hardly be adequate.”

  The International League, as we knew it in the forties, its vintage years, was Triple A and composed of eight teams: Montreal, Toronto, Syracuse, Jersey City, Newark, Rochester, Baltimore, and Buffalo. Newark was the number-one farm team of the Yankees, and Jersey City filled the same office for the Giants. But organized baseball had actually come to Montreal in 1898, the Royals then fielding a team in the old Eastern League, taking the pennant in their inaugural year. In those days the Royals played in Atwater Park, which could seat twelve thousand. From all accounts it was a fine and intimate stadium, much like Jarry Park. During the twenty-one years the Royals played in Atwater Park, they offered Montreal, as sportswriter Marc Thibault once wrote, “du baseball parfois excitant, plus souvent qu’autrement, assez détestable,” the problem being the troubled management’s need to sell off their most accomplished players for ready cash. Be that as it may, in 1914, long before major league baseball came to Montreal, George Herman Ruth took to the mound in Atwater Park to pitch for the Baltimore Orioles. Two years later the Royals folded, a casualty of the First World War, and another eleven years passed before the team was resuscitated.

  It was 1928 when George Tweedy “Miracle Man” Stallings bought the then defunct Syracuse franchise and built Delormier Downs, a stadium with a capacity of 22,000, at the corner of Ontario and DeLorimier Streets. An overflow crowd of 22,500, among them Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was at the opening game. The Royals won, defeating the fearsome Reading Keystones, 7–4. A year later Stallings died. In 1929, the Royals finished fourth. Two years l
ater, Delormier Downs, like just about everything, was in deep trouble. There were tax arrears and a heavy bank debt to be settled. The original sponsors resigned.

  In the autumn of 1931 a new company was formed by a triumvirate that included a man who had made millions in gas stations, the rambunctious, poker-playing J. Charles-Emile Trudeau, father of the prime minister. Another associate of the newly found club, Frank “Shag” Shaughnessy, cunningly introduced the playoff system in 1933, and two years later became the club’s general manager. In 1935, fielding a team that included Fresco Thompson, Jimmy Ripple, and Del Bissonnette, the Royals won their first pennant since 1898. However, they finished poorly in ’37 and ’38, and the following year Mr. Rickey surfaced, sending in Burleigh Grimes to look after his interests.

  Redemption was at hand.

  Bruno Betzel came in to manage the team in 1944, the year the nefarious Branch Rickey bought the Royals outright, building it into the most profitable club in all of minor league baseball, its fans loyal but understandably resentful of the head office’s appetite, praying that this summer the Dodgers wouldn’t falter in the stretch, reaching down for fresh bats and strong arms, just when we needed them most.

  The Royals finished first in 1945, and in ’46 and ’48 they won both the pennant and the Little World Series. They were to win the pennant again in ’51 and ’52, under Clay Hopper, and the Little World Series in ’53, when they were managed by Walter Alston. If memory serves, the Royals fielded their greatest team in 1948, the summer young Duke Snider played here, going to bat seventy-seven times before he was snatched by Mr. Rickey.

  Sammy Jethro was here in 1949, and two years later, Junior Gilliam was at third as George Shuba hit twenty home runs. In 1952, our star pitcher was southpaw Tommy Lasorda, the self-styled Bob Feller of the International League. Lasorda pitched his last game for the Royals on July 4, 1960, against Rochester, which seemed to be hitting him at will. Reminiscing recently, Lasorda recalled, “I knew I was in trouble when I saw our manager’s foot on the top of the dugout step. If the next guy gets on base, I’m going to be out of there. I turned my back on the hitter and looked up toward the sky. Lord, I said, this is my last game. Get me out of this jam. I make the next pitch and the guy at the plate hits the damnedest line drive you ever saw. Our third baseman, George Risley, gets the tips of his fingers on it but can’t hang on. The ball bloops over his hand and our shortstop, Gerry Snyder, grabs it. He fires it to Harry Shewman at second base, who relays it to Jimmy Korada at first. Triple play.”

  A year later the Royals were dissolved, and in 1971, Delormier Downs was razed to make way for the Pierre Dupuy School.

  On weekday afternoons kids were admitted free into the left-field bleachers, and by the third inning the more intrepid had worked their way down as far as the first-base line. Ziggy, Yossel, and I would sit out there in the sun, cracking peanuts, nudging each other if a ball struck the Miss Sweet Caporal sign hitting the young lady you know where. Another diversion was a porthole in the outfield wall. If a batter hit a ball through it, he was entitled to a two-year supply of Pal Blades.

  Sunday afternoons the Royals usually attracted capacity crowds, but come the Little World Series, fans also lined up on the roof of the adjoining Grover Knit-to-Fit Building, and temporary stands were set up and roped off in centre field. Ziggy, who used to sit out there, liked to boast, “If I get hit on the head, it’s a ground-rule home run.”

  In 1945, the Royals acquired one of ours, their first Jewish player, Kermit Kitman, a William and Mary scholarship boy. Our loyalty to the team redoubled. Kitman was a centre fielder. On opening day, a story in La Presse declared, “Trois des meilleurs porte-couleurs de Montréal depuis l’ouverture de la saison ont été ses joueurs de champ: Gladu, Kitman et Yeager. Kitman a exécuté un catch sensationnel encore hier après-midi sur le long coup de Torres à la 8e manche. On les verra tous trois à l’oeuvre cet après-midi contre le Jersey-City lors du programme double de la ‘Victoire’ au stade de la rue DeLorimier.”

  In his very first at-bat in that opening game against the Skeeters, Kitman belted a homer, something he would not manage again until August. Alas, in the later innings he also got doubled off second. After the game, when he ventured into a barbershop at the corner of St. Catherine and St. Urbain, a man in another chair studied him intently. “Aren’t you Kermit Kitman?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” he allowed, grinning, remembering his homer.

  “You son of a bitch, you got doubled off second. It cost me five hundred bucks.”

  The lineup for that 1945 team, which was to win the pennant, included Eddie Stevens, 1b; Salty Parker, 2b; Stan Bréard, ss; Stan Powalski, 3b; and Al Todd, c. Jean-Pierre Roy, Honest John Gabbard, and Jack Banta were the pitchers, and the others in the outfield were Red Durrett and Roland Gladu. “If I could hit pitchers like Gladu, I wouldn’t be in the needle trade today,” Kitman said.

  He’s an engaging man, a prospering partner in Leslie Fay Originals, Pretty Talk Fashions, and Fancy That. Fifty-four years old when I talked to him in 1978, somewhat chunky, he tried to take in at least one game in every Expo series and still can remember his own box scores as if it were yesterday. In 1946, he recalled, Dodgers with a certain seniority were released from the armed forces: Furillo, Olmo, Snider. Kitman didn’t get to move up, as he had hoped, but was slated for the Royals again. And out there in Daytona, where they trained, a raw young man was seen to knock ball after ball into the wilderness.

  “What can you do besides catch, son?” Leo Durocher asked him.

  “I can play third base,” Gil Hodges said. There was yet another change in the summer of 1946. After scouting the Negro leagues for more than a year, Mr. Rickey brought the first black player into organized baseball. So that spring the Royals could not train in the regular park in Daytona, which was segregated, but had to work out in Kelly Field instead.

  Actually, Jackie Robinson had been signed on October 23, 1945, in the offices of the Royals at Delormier Downs, club president Hector Racine saying, “Robinson is a good ball player and comes highly recommended by the Brooklyn Dodgers. We paid him a good bonus to sign with our club.”

  The bonus was $3,500 and Robinson’s salary was $600 monthly.

  “One afternoon in Daytona,” Kitman told me, “I was leadoff hitter and quickly singled. Robinson came up next, laying down a sacrifice bunt and running to first. Stanky, covering the sack, tagged him hard and jock-high. Robinson went down, taking a fist in the balls. He was mad as hell, you could see that, but Rickey had warned him no fights. After the game, when he was resting, Stanky came over to apologize. He had been testing Robinson’s temper, under orders from Rickey.”

  Kitman, a good glove man, was an inadequate hitter. Brooklyn-born, he never got to play there. Following the 1946 season, he was offered a place on the roster of another team in the Dodger farm system but wisely elected to quit the game instead.

  The 1946 season opened for the Royals on April 18, with a game in Jersey City. The AP dispatch for that day, printed in the Montreal Gazette, ran: “The first man of his race to play in modern organized baseball smashed a three-run homer that carried 333 feet and added three singles to the Royals’ winning 14–1 margin over Jersey City. Just to make it a full day’s work, Robinson stole two bases, scored four times and batted in three runs. He was also charged with an error.”

  Robinson’s.349 average led International League hitters that year. He hit three home runs, batted in sixty-six runs, stole forty bases, scored 113 runs, and fielded.985 at second base. And, furthermore, Montreal adored him, as no other ball player who has been there before or since. No sooner did Robinson reach first base, on a hit or a walk, than the fans roared with joy and hope, our hearts going out to him as he danced up and down the base path, taunting the opposing pitcher with his astonishing speed.

  We won the pennant that year and met the Louisville Colonels, another Dodger farm club, in the Little World Series. The series opened in Louisville, where Robinson
endured a constant run of crude racial insults from the Colonels’ dugout and was held to a mere single in two games. Montreal evened the series at home and returned to Delormier Downs for the seventh and deciding game. “When they won it,” Dick Bacon recently wrote, recalling that game in the two-hundredth-anniversary issue of the Gazette, “Jackie was accorded an emotional sendoff unseen before or since in this city.”

  First they serenaded him in true French-Canadian spirit with “il a gagné ses épaulettes,” and then clamoured for his reappearance on the field.

  When he finally came out for a curtain call, the fans mobbed him. They hugged him, kissed him, cried, cheered, and pulled and tore his uniform while parading him around the infield on their shoulders.

  With tears streaming down his face, Robinson finally begged off in order to shower, dress, and catch a plane to the States. But the riot of joy wasn’t over yet.

  When he emerged from the clubhouse, he had to bull his way through the waiting crowd outside the stadium. The thousands of fans chased him down Ontario Street for several blocks, before he was rescued by a passing motorist and driven to his hotel.

  As one Southern reporter from Louisville, Kentucky, was to write afterwards: “It’s probably the first time a white mob of rioters ever chased a Negro down the streets in love rather than hate.”

  That was a long time ago.