by Tim Wendel
“Track is really psychic,” Russell once told Sports Illustrated. “There wasn’t a guy I jumped against I couldn’t beat if I had the chance to talk with him before beforehand.”
Teammate and fellow Hall of Famer John Havlicek remembered Russell as “a fantastic athlete. He could have been a decathlon champion. He could broad-jump twenty-four feet. He did the hurdles in 13.4 (seconds). I’ve seen him in plays on a basketball court when he not only blocks a shot but controls the ball and feeds it to his forwards and then he’s at the other end of the court trailing the fast break and if there’s a rebound, he’s ready for it. He just might be the fastest man on the Celtics.”
Against the up-tempo Lakers, Russell had the opportunity to exhibit his athleticism. Several times in that final series, Los Angeles’ Archie Clark stole the ball, with a wide open path to the basket, only to have Russell catch him from behind. “Each time Russell caught him and blocked the shot,” Havlicek said. “Think of that. Think of being on the other team. There’s got to be a funny feeling, going for the basket when Russell’s around.”
The NBA Finals soon became a battle of the all-stars: the Celtics’ Russell and Havlicek against the Lakers’ West and Baylor. In Game Five, despite playing on a badly twisted ankle, West scored thirty-five points, rallying Los Angeles from an eighteen-point deficit. The Lakers were down by four with less than a minute to play when West stole the ball and found Baylor for a layup. Then Los Angeles garnered another steal, the ball moving to West, who scored to send the game into overtime. In the extra session, though, Russell turned the tables again, blocking a pivotal shot by Baylor as Boston held on for the 120–117 victory and the series lead.
Heading into Game Six, Russell proved he was as adept when it came to X’s and O’s as any full-time coach. He moved Sam Jones to forward, where he could post up on Goodrich. That forced the Lakers to go with a taller yet slower lineup. The Lakers trailed by twenty at the half, and Boston held on to capture its tenth championship and its first with Russell as coach.
“He is an unbelievable man,” West said of Russell. “To be frank, we gave them the championship. We gave them the first game, and we gave them the fifth. But I take nothing from them. There is something there, something special. For instance, twice tonight the ball went on the floor and Larry Siegfried dove for it. He didn’t just go for it hard, he dove for it. They’re all that way on the Celtics and you can’t teach it.”
Afterward Russell was asked what he had left to accomplish, as a player and a coach. “ Well, I don’t know,” he replied, “ because I never had a goal. To tell you the truth, it’s been a long time since I tried to prove anything to anybody. I know who I am.”
All in all, the loss to Boston left West bitterly disappointed. “It got to the point where Jerry hated anything (Celtic) green,” Bill Sharman later said. “Jerry told me, ‘I couldn’t even wear a green sport coat or a green shirt for a lot of years.’ Green really rubbed him the wrong way.”
Soon after the series concluded, Lakers’ owner Jack Kent Cooke received a phone call from 76ers’ owner Irving Kosloff. Would Cooke be interested in trading for Wilt Chamberlain? Cooke jumped at the chance, signing the big man to a five-year deal at $250,000 a year. In exchange for Chamberlain, the 76ers received Darrall Imhoff, Archie Clark, and Jerry Chambers. Overnight, Cooke’s team transformed itself from a small, run-and-gun outfit to a squad with a powerful frontcourt of Baylor and Chamberlain, with West heading up the backcourt. With that the NBA became defined as East versus West, the Boston Celtics versus the Los Angeles Lakers, Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain.
“Don’t be shy,” says the heavy-set guy sitting behind a long table just inside the door to the luxury suites at Comerica Park. “C’mon, get your own autograph from ‘The Gator.’ Have something to take home and treasure forever.”
Fans file past, heading for some of the most expensive seats in Detroit’s new downtown ballpark and many at first don’t give the smiling black man, with a Flair pen in hand, a second glance. But then something clicks and their gait slows and they turn, saying something like, “Gates, is that you?” Or, “Hey, I remember that game.”
And just like that, William James “Gates” Brown has them in the palm of his hand once again. Not bad for a guy who learned to play baseball in prison of all places. Brown was arrested for breaking and entering at the age of eighteen and sentenced to a short stretch in Mansfield (Ohio) State Reformatory. Movie buffs may recognize Mansfield State as the setting for the film The Shawshank Redemption. Brown played on a team there and was visited by Pat Mullin, the Tigers’ top scout. After Brown crushed a long home run with Mullin in attendance, the ballclub signed Brown to a $7,000 contract when he was paroled.
Once Brown was asked by somebody unaware of his background what he took in high school. “I took a little English,” he replied, “a little mathematics, some science, some hubcaps, some wheel covers.”
On this afternoon at Comerica Park, sitting alongside the longtime Tiger favorite can be like hanging with baseball royalty. Diligently Brown signs the black-and-white Xeroxed photographs as fans gather around.
“That home run against the Red Sox in 1968,” one of the newcomers mentions.
Brown nodded his head, holding out the autograph sheet to the guy.
“That set the tone, didn’t it?”
“Did it ever,” the fan answers.
And just like that we’re in Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine, heading for 1968 and a season for the ages. Often people forget that the Tigers’ epic year began with a 7–3 loss to the Red Sox. Earl Wilson, who had tied with the Red Sox’s Jim Lonborg for the most victories in the American League the previous season, started the home opener (an honor that McLain felt he deserved). The attendance was 41,429—less than capacity. Carl Yastrzemski homered in the seventh and ninth innings and after the loss United Press International’s Rich Shook wrote, “Detroit started 1968 the same way it ended 1967—one game behind Boston.”
The following day, McLain got his shot, shutting out Boston for the first five innings. Yet he ran into trouble a frame later when the Red Sox tied the game at 3–3, setting the stage for the first set of improbable heroes of the Tigers’ 1968 season.
After winning fifteen games the year before at Rocky Mount, Jon Warden improbably found himself on the mound at Tiger Stadium when McLain was lifted by manager Mayo Smith. Nearly a half-century later, Warden laughed when he recalled how badly his legs were shaking as he made his major-league debut.
“I kept wondering what I was doing out there,” he said. “And how was I going to get out it? I mean I’m facing the Boston Red Sox. The defending American League champs.”
The rookie proceeded to load the bases in the eighth inning but then escaped the jam without a run scoring. The next inning he fanned none other than Yastrzemski, the previous season’s Triple Crown winner, for his first major-league strikeout.
“Carl Yastrzemski,” Warden remembered. “Can you believe that?”
In the bottom of the ninth, with the score still knotted at three apiece, Brown came to the plate. The Gator had struggled in 1967 with a dislocated wrist and late in the season the ballclub obtained Eddie Mathews, one of the game’s all-time home-run leaders, for pinch-hitting duties. The Tigers had been open to dealing Brown, eager to listen to any offer. Yet as the new season began, Brown was still on the roster.
“By the time ’68 came around, [manager] Mayo Smith and I weren’t the best of buddies, if you catch my drift,” Brown said. “He didn’t think I could do the job by then. He tried to trade my ass during the winter, but there weren’t any takers. He wanted Eddie Mathews to be his prime pinch hitter and looking back on Eddie’s career, who could blame him?
“But I’m not the kind of guy to take that kind of thing lying down. All I needed was a chance and I was going to make the most of it, and that’s exactly what I did. Let’s just say that when ’68 began I was plenty pissed off.”
In that second game of the
season, Smith had already used Mathews as a pinch hitter. So it was left to Brown to do the job in the ninth inning. He indeed made the most of the opportunity by hitting the first pitch he saw for a game-winning home run off the Red Sox’s John Wyatt.
In what would soon become known as the “Year of the Pitcher,” Brown was one of the few batters who excelled. He would have an American League record eighteen pinch-hits, and six of his first ten pinch-hits would be home runs.
“Being a pinch hitter isn’t easy work,” Brown said, between shaking hands at Comerica Park. “You’re sitting on the bench for what seems to be forever and then you’re up there with the game often on the line, often against a guy looking to strike you out just like that. Like he’s got a car waiting for him outside, ready to hit the town. Everything can speed up in a hurry, so as much as you can, you try to slow things down. Slow it down so you can think. And what’s pretty important, at least it was for me, you can’t be afraid to enjoy the moment.”
Sometimes Brown took that approach to extremes. Once he was called on to pinch-hit earlier than anticipated. Brown hurried up to the plate, drove one of the first pitches he saw into the outfield for a hit, and hustled around the bases, sliding head-first into second. As he stood up, the crowd gasped. The front of his jersey was covered with bright colors and pieces of squashed meat. The explanation was that Brown had been eating hot dogs while on the bench. When Smith called for him to pinch-hit, Brown had quickly jammed the snack down the front of his jersey (food in the dugout was against team rules) only to have it burst into a big mess in his slide to safety. “That’s the only time I ever wished I’d struck out,” he said.
While a few fans bring up that incident on this day at Comerica Park, Brown prefers to steer the conversation back to the ’68 team and the camaraderie of that bunch, how everybody looked out for each other. He recalls how manager Mayo Smith once called Brown’s room after the midnight curfew and Gates’s roommate, Willie Horton, answered. Brown wasn’t there and Horton realized that if he told the manager that piece of news his roommate would be fined for sure. So Horton did his best to stall. He walked around the hotel room, trying to decide what to do, before picking up the phone again.
“ Well,” Horton told the manager, “I couldn’t find him in the bedroom, so I looked in the bathroom, and he wasn’t there. And then I looked in the closet, and he wasn’t there. And then, Skip, I found a note. It says Gates just stepped out to the ice machine and he’ll be right back. Don’t worry, Skip, he’ll be right back.”
With that Horton hung up and Brown somehow wasn’t fined.
When things aren’t going well in baseball, players talk about how it’s only a game. The proverbial, “ We play them one at a time.” Still, memorable victories, say a game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth, can ripple throughout a team, perhaps even a community.
“I’ll never forget that first victory in ’68,” said Warden, the winning pitcher that day. “Not only was it huge for me, but it was something big for a lot of people. Soon enough our ballclub was on a roll and people really started coming back out to the ballpark again.
“The city of Detroit was still in the worst way. There was no denying that. But we began to feed off each other. Everybody in town began to rally around the team. Soon those of us in uniform began to feel like we were fighting for something bigger than just another ballgame. That somehow an entire city, the future of Detroit, was at stake, too.”
“ Will you stop Godding up those ballplayers?”
That’s the advice sports editor Stanley Woodward once wired to his columnist Red Smith.
Smith later explained, “I’ve tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I’d rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them as excellent ballplayers, first-rate players.”
Bob Broeg, the legendary sportswriter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had similar concerns late in his career, wondering if David Halberstam and others perhaps made the Cardinals of the mid-1960s out to be “too noble.” Yet throughout sports in 1968 even the most jaded scribes couldn’t turn away from what they were watching. And those in Detroit certainly had the opportunity to take a long vacation from the game. The two local newspapers—the News and the Free Press—went on strike November 18, 1967. The work stoppage would last 267 days—until August 9, 1968. Despite being out of full-time work, Joe Falls, Jerry Green, and George Cantor doggedly continued to follow the team. Like so many, they knew something interesting, perhaps memorable, was going down. The last two would later pen books documenting the season—Year of the Tiger and The Tigers of ’68.
Without a daily newspaper, well before the Internet and ESPN highlights, Detroit fans tuned in to broadcaster Ernie Harwell to keep up with much of the epic season. Born in 1918 in rural Georgia, Harwell suffered from a speech impediment growing up. He took weekly elocution lessons and among the pieces his teacher had him read aloud was a poem called “The House by the Side of the Road.” Years later, it would work into Harwell’s regular play-by-play when he said a batter who struck out had “stood there like the house by the side of the road.”
Harwell began his broadcasting career at the age of twenty-two, as a student at Emory University in Atlanta. During World War II, he called a handful of Crackers’ games while still a Marine and stationed in Atlanta. After the war, he caught the attention of Brooklyn Dodgers’ executive Branch Rickey. Ever the creative thinker, Rickey traded catcher Cliff Dapper to Atlanta for Harwell, perhaps the only broadcaster-player trade in baseball history.
After a season in Brooklyn, Harwell jumped to the crosstown New York Giants. (The Dodgers hired Vin Scully to replace him.) After four seasons with the Giants, Harwell then moved to Baltimore for the Orioles’ inaugural season. By 1960, he was in Detroit, where his Southern voice brought a distinctive flavor to the Tigers’ broadcasts. During home games, he would often say a foul ball had been caught by a fan from Ypsilanti or Muskegon or Traverse City. Of course, Harwell had no idea where the lucky spectator was really from, but his listeners loved such flourishes.
Harwell, perhaps more than many at the time, realized what was at stake in 1968. “In baseball, democracy shines its clearest,” he later wrote. “The only race that matters is the race to the bat. The creed is the rulebook; color merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another.”
PART IV
The Fire Down Below
Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given.
—CITIES OF THE PLAIN, CORMAC MCCARTHY
The only way to truly understand Detroit, then and now, is to drive its streets. With that in mind, Willie Horton has given us a road map to follow. Granted it remained a touch vague in spots. After all, streets can change names over the years. We didn’t exactly get the Rand McNally out, although I wished that we had. Instead Horton rattled off a list of landmarks and must-sees off the top of his head. Easy for him to do as he grew up in the Jeffries neighborhood, the housing project that once dominated the city’s western horizon. The worst riots in 1967 erupted nearby, and Horton will be forever remembered as the ballplayer who tried to make a difference at that time.
Soon enough we were on the road, with me riding shotgun and my friend Tom Stanton behind the wheel. Since we met fifteen years ago at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—both of us on a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship—Tom has written a half-dozen books, including The Final Season, a haunting memoir about the last year in the life of Tiger Stadium.
From Comerica Park, the team’s home since the old ballpark closed in 1999, we passed the refurbished Fox Theatre, where the Chrysler commercial ends with rapper Eminem on stage, and headed up the Midwestern-wide downtown boulevards. We crossed Interstate 75 and angled through the neighborhoods that line the John C. Lodge Freeway. Horton had a paper route in this part of town as a kid. He delivered the Michigan Chronicle, which has been reporting on the African American community since 1
936. The Chronicle was one of the few papers still publishing in ’68, as the News and the Free Press were on strike for much of the season.
“For the most part, fans had to follow us on the radio back then,” pitcher Mickey Lolich remembered. “They’d get together and listen to Ernie Harwell do the play by play.”
We were bound for Twelfth Street and Clairmont, where the worst of the rioting occurred back in 1967, and where Horton had shown up in full uniform. (He’d only changed out of his cleats.) With the fire and smoke billowing up around him, Horton climbed atop a car and pleaded with the mob to stop, to go home, to cease and desist.
“People knew immediately who I was,” he said. “What I remember today is that they were so concerned for me, that I might get hurt. That’s when they told me to go home. It looked like it was a war out there. I’ve never seen stuff like that—burning buildings, looting, smoke everywhere. They said, ‘Willie, you best go home.’”
As we pulled away from the downtown, the cityscape opened up as if we were ready to barrel across the Great Plains, heading way out west. So much open space stands between the neighborhoods now that it can be difficult to comprehend what has happened to the Motor City. Census figures indicate that Detroit’s population plunged 25 percent to approximately 713,000 people in the years 2001 to 2010. That’s the lowest level since Henry Ford did business in 1910. According to the Detroit Free Press, the Motor City lost 238,270 residents during that period, or one every twenty-two minutes.