by Tim Wendel
“He asked if I’d give him ten days to let him try and turn me into a pitcher,” Lolich said. “All I was then was a thrower really. I’d stand out there and throw it as hard as I could.”
After a week or so, Lolich caught on to what Staley was trying to teach him. How it was better to be a sinker-ball pitcher, with control, than a kid trying to throw one hundred miles per hour on every pitch. The new goal was to keep the ball low, often away from the hitter, consistently hitting the outside corner. “Gerry Staley changed my whole life,” Lolich said. “It’s as simple as that.”
In 1968, few outside of the ballclub realized how complete a pitcher Lolich could be. Instead it was more fun to focus on the lefty’s idiosyncrasies. On days he pitched, Lolich often drove one of his five Kawasaki motorcycles to the ballpark. The high speed and wind in his face helped him unwind, he said. Besides, his home didn’t have air-conditioning, so a motorcycle ride allowed him to cool off. Often after the game, Lolich and his wife, Joyce, loaded the Kawasaki onto a trailer and rode the forty miles back home together. All in all, it seemed a curious hobby considering that as a two-year-old Lolich had in fact driven his tricycle off the curb outside the family home in Portland and plowed it right into a parked motorcycle. The rig fell atop him, pinning Lolich to the ground. After his mother couldn’t free him, a passerby helped roll the motorcycle away. Lolich was left with a broken collarbone. While the right arm was in a sling, he began to throw left-handed. After he healed, Lolich returned to doing almost everything else right-handed again—eating, writing, batting—but with a ball in his hand he was forever a southpaw. And he often loved to carry on like one.
“Sometimes when I lean too far to the left on the mound,” he said, “I find myself thinking sideways.”
The Detroit press considered him a good quote, yet on a deep pitching staff and a colorful team Lolich was sometimes overlooked.
“Denny McLain was Denny McLain,” McAuliffe explained. “Larger than life and well-spoken. Everybody got a daily report of what was on his mind and what he was doing. But we knew Mickey was as important to our ballclub that season as anybody. He had led the league with six shutouts in ’67. We knew weren’t going anywhere without him.”
That’s why McAuliffe and others were reassured when the first pitches from Lolich in Lakeland that spring of 1968 had plenty of zip, with the great sinking movement he was known for. Even though the portly left-hander was often a slow starter, dating back to his days in the minor leagues, this time Lolich appeared ready. “We smiled when we saw how well he was throwing that spring,” McAuliffe said. “A lot of us believed that it was finally going to be our time.”
When ballclubs report to spring training in today’s world, one of the major topics of conversation is invariably the recent Super Bowl. The sports seasons overlap to such a degree now that the big game is sometimes played only weeks before pitchers and catchers report. Of course, nothing stands taller on the sports landscape than the Super Bowl, one of today’s cultural icons. It’s a game now watched as much for the commercials as for the teams that play in it.
Yet in 1968, football was still going through plenty of growing pains. The year before, Super Bowl I had been played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, where there were 30,000 empty seats. “Nobody cared,” Green Bay Packers receiver Max McGee later told HBO.
As part of the merger agreement between the National Football League and its upstart rival, the American Football League, Commissioner Pete Rozelle had only a month to put the event together. The stitch marks sure showed. NFL and AFL owners mixed about as well as oil and water at a pregame cocktail party, with their wives on a verge of a catfight.
When Kansas City Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt called the event the Super Bowl (after a popular toy at the time) instead of its official name, the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, the nickname stuck. When CBS, which carried the NFL games, and NBC, which had the AFL contests, each claimed first dibs to the inaugural Super Bowl, Rozelle let both of them broadcast it. Back then a sixty-second commercial for Super Bowl I cost $85,000. (Four decades later, that price tag would balloon to $2.5 million for thirty seconds of airtime.)
Super Bowl I proved to be competitive for almost two quarters. After halftime, Vince Lombardi’s Packers took control and trounced the Kansas City Chiefs, 35–10. No network footage of Super Bowl I exists today. Legend has it that the game, at the network level, was taped over for a soap opera. During that era tape units were as big as refrigerators, and one of the few who owned such a rig was Playboy’s Hugh Hefner. But even though Hefner said he’s been “hooked on football” since his college days at the University of Illinois, he didn’t bother to tape the early Super Bowls.
The outcome of Super Bowl II, held early in 1968, was remarkably similar—once again demonstrating that Green Bay was the best team in the land. This time the contest was played at Miami’s Orange Bowl, and the Packers opened up an early 13–0 lead. Their AFL opponent, the Oakland Raiders, did trim the lead to 13–7. But in the second half Green Bay took a 26–7 lead and cornerback Herb Adderley sealed the victory with a sixty-yard interception return.
The game drew the first $3 million gate in football history and marked the last time Lombardi would coach the Packers. During his nine-year reign in Green Bay, the legendary coach won six division championships, five NFL championships, and two Super Bowls. Despite the record gate, however, serious questions remained about the Super Bowl’s long-term success in 1968. Sports commentator Haywood Hale Broun dubbed the event “too predictable to be memorable.” Especially when most experts and even fans considered the AFL inferior to the more established NFL.
Through it all, Rozelle was determined to turn his championship into the world’s biggest sports event. “He consciously positioned it as bigger, grander, more concentrated event than baseball’s World Series,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation.
But to do so, Rozelle knew he needed a few breaks to come his way. Most notably he needed the AFL teams to show a lot more spunk, to be more competitive in the Super Bowl itself. After Lombardi’s teams handily defeated the AFL teams in the first two championships, serious discussion began about employing tournament bracketing and play-in games. This could result in two teams from the older league, the NFL, playing in the Super Bowl. Early in 1968, many wondered if the AFL, despite its high-powered offenses led by such quarterbacks as the Oakland Raiders’ Daryle Lamonica and the New York Jets’ Joe Namath could compete against the more established league.
In the spring of ’68, the St. Louis Cardinals were favored to repeat as National League champions and return to the World Series. Over in the junior circuit, the Detroit Tigers were determined not to be caught short again in the bullpen as they invited twenty-five pitchers to camp. As the weeks went by and that total was whittled down to the ten-man pitching staff expected to travel north for the regular season, rookie Jon Warden noticed that manager Mayo Smith often informed the next player to be released or sent down to the minors during batting practice. The Tigers’ skipper walked around the outfield, a fungo bat in hand. Acting nonchalant, Smith would sidle up alongside the next poor soul and give him the bad news. That’s when Warden decided to stay as far away as he could from the manager.
When Warden survived the first round of cuts, a week or so into camp, he moved into the main clubhouse, alongside such stars as Lolich, McAuliffe, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, and Norm Cash. He fought the temptation to ask them for their autographs. Instead he kept his mouth shut, to the point that he became known as the quiet kid.
“Warden, we couldn’t get you to say a thing in ’68,” Kaline told the pitcher decades later. “Now we can’t get you to shut up.”
In 1968, players came to camp to actually work themselves into shape. Playing professional ball wasn’t a year-round job and most players couldn’t afford to work out at a local club or at home. Many needed a second job to make ends meet. That was especially
true for a newcomer like Warden, who helped unload produce trucks at the local supermarket back home in Ohio. In the 1960s, ballplayers had only a short period of time to get up to game-speed and perform, and if they didn’t they were often sent packing.
On March 31, Warden got his chance—and he made the most of it. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, the defending World Series champions, the rookie was brought into a tie game in the ninth inning. Warden proceeded to shut down the Cards for four innings—the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. He struck out six and walked just one.
That evening Warden ran into Wally Moses, one of the Tigers’ coaches, in the Holiday Inn lobby at Lakeland. “You didn’t hear it from me,” Moses told the rookie, “ but you just made the ballclub today.”
Warden ran up to his room and called his mother collect. At first she didn’t realize what he was trying to tell her: that her son had leaped past Triple-A and the lower rungs of the minor leagues and would open the’68 season with the big-league club. But soon enough the two of them were laughing and crying, yelling and screaming over the phone.
“That’s the greatest feeling that a twenty-one-year-old pitcher could ever have,” Warden said. “That I was heading north with a ballclub that had only lost the pennant the year before by a single game in the final game of the season. Everybody in baseball knew they were the favorites to win it all in the American League. That they were that good and somehow I was now a part of it all.”
A few days later, the Detroit team bus pulled up to the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, the site of old Tiger Stadium. It was Monday, April 8, 1968—a mild spring evening in the Motor City. Despite the pleasant weather, the city streets were already deserted by six o’clock at night—a scene that Warden found disappointing, even a bit disturbing.
After pitching for Class A Rocky Mount in the Carolina League, following the Tigers’ pennant chase from afar, Warden had made the most of his opportunities during spring training. Always a hard-thrower, he had gained some control, even the ability to pitch out of jams on occasion. Yet making the big-league club had come as such a surprise he still needed to buy a blazer or suit jacket for road trips and team functions.
The regular season had been delayed due to Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. The funeral for the civil rights leader was scheduled for the next day, April 9, with the season to begin a day later, at home against the Boston Red Sox. The ballclub had stayed in Florida through the weekend, with Warden praying that the coaches didn’t change their minds about him making the team. But somehow here he was, along with Daryl Patterson, another rookie, standing outside the regal, old-style ballpark, ready for the season to start.
Gear shuttled from the bus into the ballpark, and Warden and Patterson were able to catch a glimpse of the emerald-green grass and the distinctive two-story pavilion that rose behind home plate. Tiger Stadium wasn’t considered a pitcher’s ballpark but on that late afternoon the two rookies couldn’t have cared less. While the design of Tiger Stadium remained as iconic as any in the land, the ballpark sported plenty of obstructed seats, thanks to a plethora of support columns, and the bleacher seats were uncomfortable and often a distance from the action. “Watching a game in Detroit is a graduate course in capturing the magic of the old-time ballparks,” Time magazine said decades later. “Unlike the ivy-clad perfection of Wrigley Field or the self-congratulatory ugliness of Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium represents the last remaining link with baseball before it became too self-conscious.”
Too soon, the gathering broke up. Cars driven by family or friends pulled up to take the veteran players and team officials home. Soon enough the two rookies, two white guys from the sticks, were the only ones left standing at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. That’s when Warden and Patterson realized that in the hubbub, they had been totally forgotten. Perhaps an easy thing to have happen, what with the disruption accompanying the news of King’s shooting, the pending funeral, and the season opener being pushed back. Nobody had thought to reserve a room for them or make sure they were taken care of.
“We had fallen through the cracks,” Warden recalled. “It wasn’t like these days when I could call anybody up on my cell phone. That night still remains one of the eeriest sights I’ve ever seen. There was simply nobody around in this big city. Simply nobody. Detroit, the place where I was so determined to pitch, had become a ghost town.”
With hanging bags slung over a shoulder, a suitcase in the other hand, the pair began to walk down the street until a police cruiser pulled alongside. The officer asked who they were. When Warden and Patterson replied that they were with the Tigers, the baseball team, the cop didn’t recognize their names, even though he said he was a lifelong fan. “Of course, he wouldn’t have heard of us,” Warden said. “We were about the only new guys on a really experienced club. Household names? Well, we weren’t exactly that.”
The officer told them that Detroit was under curfew, with nobody allowed on the streets after dusk.
After some discussion, the officer dropped them off at the Leland Hotel, a twenty-two-story Beaux Arts building on Bagley Street, a few blocks from the stadium. There the rookies took an efficiency apartment for the night that eventually became their home for the rest of season.
That evening Warden recalled the stories that Willie Horton and the other African Americans on the team had told him during spring training. How last year had broken their hearts on almost every level. Not only had they lost the pennant to the Red Sox on the final day of the season; as they played on, the city literally went up in flames around them.
The summer before, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had ordered the Eighty-Second Airborne to Detroit after the rioting became so bad that the Michigan National Guard couldn’t contain it. During the long hot summer of 1967, just about anything attempted by authority had struck the wrong chord. Tensions had finally come to a head in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, when the police raided an illegal bar, also called a “blind pig,” where a celebration for two black servicemen returning home from Vietnam was underway. When Detroit’s finest, mostly white, began to load everybody into a paddy wagon, an angry mob, predominately black, had formed on the street outside. Outnumbered, the police retreated and rioting soon spread throughout the city.
Now, less than nine months later, it occurred to Warden as he gazed down the city ’s deserted streets that the quiet could well just be the calm before the storm. One could imagine that the cinders from the previous summer’s fires were in fact still smoldering, merely waiting for the right spark to set them off. By now he knew the stories. How the afternoon after the police raid on the blind pig, the Tigers had taken the field for a doubleheader against the New York Yankees. After losing the first game that evening Mickey Lolich had reported to active duty with his Guard unit. Meanwhile, Horton, who had lived near the site of the police raid, hurried to that section of town still in his game jersey. There he climbed atop a car and spoke to the crowd, trying to calm them down. But it was no good. It took five days to restore order in Detroit, and when it was over, forty-three were dead, 7,200 had been arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings had burned, many to the ground.
Of course, that was last season, and one could say it was time to turn the page. Yet as Warden studied the city that was to be his new home, silent and dark now, cleared by curfew, he thought about what he had heard about King’s assassination, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was inevitable, that Detroit was set to erupt all over again.
In sports, events can often solidify or dissolve in a heartbeat. Nobody knew that better in 1968 than Bill Russell. In fact, he explained that his philosophy of coaching was based as much upon moments—and what those moments would ultimately determine—as it was his play on the court. “All that is required to choreograph the action is the ball,” he wrote in his autobiography, “just throw it out there and the moves will gather around the ball wherever it goes.
“This is true of many major sports: the ball p
rovokes the art all by itself. A baseball player like Willie Mays can stand all night out in some deserted pasture called center field, but if nothing is hit near him, he doesn’t really deserve watching. Once there’s a fly to center field, however, the picture changes instantly. He runs in that pigeon-toed sprint, all concentration, with a hundred thousand eyes in the stadium glued to every step. Those eyes belong to people whose entire days are improved by the sight of what Willie does when he gets to the ball. What a catch!”
After rallying to defeat the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference Finals, Russell’s Boston Celtics faced a faster, more elusive opponent in the 1968 National Basketball Association finals. Instead of a dominating center like Philadelphia’s Wilt Chamberlain, the Lakers alternated Mel Counts and Darrall Imhoff in the low post. Los Angeles’ main weapons were guard Jerry West and forward Elgin Baylor, with quality guards Archie Clark, Freddie Crawford, and Gail Goodrich.
The championship series opened on April 21, 1968, less than three weeks after King’s assassination. The teams split the first two games in Boston, with the Celtics taking the upper hand with a 127–119 victory in Game Three in Los Angeles. That’s when West began to take things over. He scored thirty-eight points, with Baylor chipping in with thirty, as the Lakers squared the Series at two games apiece.
“If we can rebound, we can win,” West said. “ We’re little, but we match up well against Boston. We’re quick and we shoot well, and that can be enough in a seven-game series.”
Through it all, Russell emphasized the little things with his teammates, the hustle plays that can turn the tide. Time and again he delivered them himself. Few realize what a well-rounded athlete Russell was in his prime. Track and field, not hoops, had been his first love at the University of San Francisco. Team members there received a spiffy buttoned sweater with S.F. stitched across the front. Funny what will motivate a guy at times, isn’t it? To secure such duds, Russell high-jumped six feet, seven inches. For meets, he wore the sweater, track suit, silk scarf, and sunglasses.