Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever

by Tim Wendel

  “I don’t think there was an American middle or long-distance runner who was as ready as he should have or could have been for his race in Mexico,” Dr. Jack Daniels later wrote in a paper entitled “Science and the Altitude Factor.” “For a non-acclimatized miler to race a mile at altitude would be similar, from a competitive standpoint, to having him race a sea-level two mile for the first time. It’s a different race.”

  U.S. Track and Field named Daniels as its official altitude consultant the summer before the ’68 Games. Unfortunately, the organization didn’t give him much funding, nor did they bother to really listen to what he had to say. In the months leading up to the Summer Olympics, Daniels joined forces with Dr. Bruno Balke, a German medical doctor and physiologist specializing in altitude training. Balke had been brought to the United States by the Air Force to help develop the space program. At one point, Balke told the U.S. Olympic Committee, “I should not be coming to you asking for funds to do altitude research. You should be coming to me offering it.” Together, he and Daniels determined that two types of acclimatization—physiological and competitive—needed to take place for even elite athletes to excel at the kind of high altitude they were going to be competing at in Mexico City.

  “We should have been having major competitions at altitude for several years prior to the ’68 Olympics,” Daniels said.

  Yet neither Daniels nor Balke could convince U.S. officials to hold a significant number of races at altitude. Instead, it fell to the athletes themselves to help foot the bill for such research and try their best to prepare. Jim Ryun, the face of the U.S. track team, went to work at a supermarket in Alamosa, Colorado, at $1.50 an hour, to help defray training costs. For many, it was inconceivable that the world-record holder in the mile would end up in such a situation. One morning, Ryun and Daniels were having breakfast at local diner in Colorado. A teenage girl and her little brother approached the runner.

  “My brother thinks you look like Jim Ryun,” the girl said.

  “I am,” Ryun replied.

  Shaking her head, she said, “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am,” Ryun said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  With that she led her little brother away by the hand.

  In August, Curt Flood graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, making a leaping catch against the emerald ivy and four-hundred-foot sign at Wrigley Field. The cover line read, “Baseball’s Best Centerfielder.” Left unsaid, but certainly understood by many, was that Flood also played for the best team in baseball. After losing eleven of thirteen games early in the season and falling to fourth place, the Cardinals had responded in dominant fashion, putting together a 54–20 record from Memorial Day into the dog days of August. A ballclub built on pitching and defense with a touch of the unconventional (manager Red Schoendienst won one game by pinch-hitting for MVP Orlando Cepeda), the Cardinals held a fourteen-game lead in the National League as the regular season began to wind down.

  Even though St. Louis and Detroit were markedly different ballclubs with varying clubhouse dynamics, they had a common trait. Both could be brutally honest with each other.

  “Chemistry means you get in my butt if I’m not doing the job,” the Tigers’ Willie Horton explained years later. “Sure we’ll have good times. But you also know we can criticize each other if one of us isn’t doing the job.

  “It’s like having brothers at home. You’ll have fights, but they don’t mean anything. You probably talk more honestly to each other, especially when things are against you, than you would to others. Winning teams have fights in the clubhouse. Because they’re that close. In ’68, we had a lot of scrapping in the clubhouse. But that doesn’t mean tomorrow we’re mad at each other.”

  If hanging around the Cardinals sometimes resembled a fashion shoot for GQ magazine, for the Tigers, on the other hand, it could be like stepping onto the set of Animal House. The joke was that if anybody ever wanted a team picture just find the nearest bar. Most of the Detroit roster would be found there. When Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Mathews first joined the ballclub in 1967, he initially thought they were a bunch of drunks. Over time, though, he realized that Tigers were a well-knit group that looked out for each other, even Denny McLain, and the off-the-field shenanigans played a key role in team chemistry. Perhaps no prank better demonstrated this than the famed “Plane in the Pool” stunt. On a road trip to Anaheim, the ballplayers became enthralled with a full-sized wooden replica of an antique aircraft in the hotel lobby. It had been erected for a convention of aviation hobbyists, who were sharing the same hotel with the team. Some genius got the bright idea to steal the plane, relocate it next to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool, and just like that the game was afoot.

  Several obstacles, however, lay in the Tigers’ path. First, measurements were taken and it was determined that the plane was too big to go through the door leading out to the pool deck. Somehow, in short order, sufficient tools were found to take it apart. But then there was the matter of getting it out of the lobby without being caught.

  The wooden plane was located just around the corner from the front desk. While the night clerk couldn’t see it from his post, any noise would certainly draw his attention. As a solution, reliever John “Ratso” Hiller was sent down to the front desk to chat up the clerk, making sure to talk loud enough so that the rest of the team could get to work. While Hiller’s conversation echoed throughout the lobby, the Tigers quietly took the plane apart and lugged the pieces outside. There they reassembled the plane next to the pool. For most teams that would have been enough. Yet once the Tigers got the plane rebuilt on the pool deck, they couldn’t resist sliding it entirely into water, even though most got wet feet in the process. Despite the fact that the massive model was made of wood, it eventually sank. Afterward, the team reconvened in a room overlooking their handiwork—a pool with a full-sized replica of an antique plane resting beautifully in its deep end. That was certainly one way to have a team-building experience. For many of them, like Mickey Lolich, it “was one of the transcendental moments” of the ’68 season. Deep down, Tigers management must have agreed because Detroit general manager Jim Campbell paid the hotel for damages.

  While the Cardinals didn’t go in for such heavy lifting, they could be just as hard on each other when it came to mental miscues. In the clubhouse, they often played a game called “baseball quiz.” Win or lose, they would start shouting questions like, “Who couldn’t advance the runner in the first?” or “Who forgot to slide into second base?”

  As in their El Birdos’ cheer, names from Ty Cobb to Babe Ruth to Max Patkin were tossed out until the guilty party, somebody wearing a Cardinals uniform, was identified. If anybody was scoring the ballclub’s baseball quiz during the 1968 season, they would have noticed that Curt Flood’s name was rarely brought up for such derision.

  Flood had arrived in St. Louis in a minor trade with the Cincinnati Reds after the 1957 season. He made an immediate impact, allowing the ballclub to move then outfielder Ken Boyer to third base. When Lou Brock came from the Cubs to the Cardinals and became our leadoff hitter, Flood was the perfect guy to bat behind him in the second spot, Tim McCarver said.

  “[Flood] was patient at the plate,” McCarver explained, “which gave Brock the opportunity to use his great speed and steal all those bases. Curt could go deep in the count, hit behind the runner, and steal a base, and he was consistently in the .290 to .300 range. Don Drysdale called him the toughest out in the National League.”

  Among the Cardinals, Flood became the most involved in the national civil rights movement. His hero was Jackie Robinson, and at Robinson’s invitation Flood attended the NAACP’s (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) regional conference in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962. There he had been joined by boxing champions Floyd Patterson and Archie Moore. In his biography of Flood, A Well-Paid Slave, author Brad Snyder noted how Flood did his best to stay involved with the movement despite his baseball schedule.
When Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., Flood was taking the field with the Cardinals in San Francisco. “I should be there instead of here,” Flood later said.

  When King was assassinated in Memphis, Flood joined with a St. Louis calendar company to paint a commemorative portrait of King. How much help Flood received in the project remains up for debate, but the portrait went from a small project to being reproduced as eight-by-ten color productions that were handed out at an Atlanta benefit concert in King’s honor.

  “I’m a child of the Sixties, a man of the Sixties,” Flood told Ken Burns decades later for the documentary Baseball. “During that period of time, this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Men, good men, were dying for America and for the Constitution.

  “In the southern part of the United States, we were marching for civil rights, and Dr. King had been assassinated and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium is truly hypocrisy.”

  Despite being on the cover of Sports Illustrated, winning two World Series championships with the Cardinals and five Gold Gloves, Flood was unsatisfied. He wanted to be the game’s next Jackie Robinson, to make an impact not only on the field, but on the game itself. He felt he should be doing something more.

  Meanwhile, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, new Packers’ coach Phil Bengtson was not only hoping to follow in the footsteps of another sports legend, but also finding the task especially difficult with that legend still hovering in the background. Of course, the big shoes Bengtson was attempting to fill belonged to Vince Lombardi, as big a name as there was in pro football at the time. As the Packers opened training camp that August, launching their campaign for a third consecutive Super Bowl championship, many would have been at a loss to name a tougher act to follow. In addition, Lombardi had remained with Green Bay as the team’s general manager, and the promotion of Bengtson seemed to have as much to do with loyalty and maintaining the party line as it did with ability.

  A native of Rousseau, Minnesota, Bengtson had played tackle for Bernie Bierman’s teams at the University of Minnesota, earning All-American honors. The quarterback on that team was Bud Wilkinson, who would become another coaching legend at the University of Oklahoma. After his playing days were over, Bengtson coached at Stanford for twelve seasons before moving up to the professional ranks with the San Francisco 49ers. He was fired after the 1958 season and joined Lombardi’s staff beginning in 1959.

  As defensive coordinator, he was the only coach to stay the entire nine years of Lombardi’s tenure in Green Bay. The Packers’ defense, with Ray Nitschke, Willie Wood, and Herb Adderley, was a force and a key reason that Green Bay won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls.

  At first blush, Bengtson appeared a logical choice to be the next Packers’ coach. Certainly he was somebody who worked hand in glove with Lombardi and knew the organization, top to bottom. Yet beginning in training camp, the players and press noticed a huge difference in approach. While Lombardi had been volatile, willing to get in anybody’s grill, Bengtson was low key. Perhaps too much so.

  “The players at first expressed relief about the new regime,” wrote David Maraniss in When Pride Still Mattered. “Bengtson was tall, calm, gentle, laconic, the opposite of Lombardi. Hawg Hanner, his defensive assistant, had advised him to run the players to the point of exhaustion during the first week, reminding them that the Lombardi tradition still lived, but Bengtson politely declined, saying he had to establish his own style. Where Lombardi conducted his practices with metronomic discipline, Bengtson was easily distracted and might pass the whole day dragging on his Camels and discussing the intricacies of a zone defense.”

  Players grumbled that Bengtson spoke only in a monotone and seemed more interested in how they lined up for the national anthem before a game than what happened once the ball was snapped. It didn’t help the new coach that Lombardi remained such a dominating presence and iconic figure. On August 7, 1968, the city of Green Bay staged “A Salute to Vince Lombardi.” Highland Avenue outside the Packers’ stadium was renamed for the Hall of Fame coach. “I just want you to know that I’m not dead,” Lombardi said in the dedication.

  Of course, Lombardi’s stepping down also resulted in implications stretching far beyond Green Bay. With Lombardi out of the coaching ranks, many believed a door had been opened for the rival American Football League. The upstarts had been crushed in the first two Super Bowls by Lombardi’s Packers. Heading into the new season the consensus was they once again would be a decided underdog, but nonetheless an opportunity for recognition, perhaps even for victory, was now there.

  The question was, who would take the AFL to the next level? Who could topple the established NFL in the Super Bowl?

  Heading into the summer of ’68, the Democratic Convention, set to be held in Chicago, still needed a home. The city’s McCormick Place had burned down the year before, but Mayor Richard Daley was adamant that the show would go on. So he moved to have the event held at the Amphitheater, down near the old Union Stockyards, a lousy place for an occasion that was already ripe with disappointment and anger.

  Still, if Daley and the old guard were determined to have the party in Chicago, then Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and the other leaders of the New Left were just as determined to crash it. Kennedy and McCarthy supporters soon realized that the Chicago convention would be a continuation, even an affirmation of the Johnson presidency. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t on the ballot, but his number two, Hubert Humphrey, had been the front-runner for the nomination since Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel in June.

  Inside the convention hall and back at the delegates’ hotels, former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was rumored to be possible VP choice. “If Hollywood movie stars can sit in the California statehouse and the United States Senate, what bar exists to the election of a good football coach?” the Milwaukee Sentinel’s editorial page asked.

  The paper went on to say that Lombardi’s speeches, which he was now giving across the country, were “a cut above some pronouncements made in the halls of government.”

  In his biography about the Packers’ coach, David Maraniss detailed how Richard Nixon first considered Lombardi as his running mate. That infatuation lasted until the Republican candidate learned that Lombardi had been a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy. In fact, when Lombardi stepped down as coach in Green Bay, Kennedy had sent him a cable reading, “Vince, now would you come and be my coach?”

  In Chicago, where the Democrats gathered, talk about Lombardi continued. Miles McMillin of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, just down the road from Green Bay, maintained that Lombardi’s name came up in discussions of vice presidential short lists. In the end, though, nothing came of such speculation, and soon enough it was overshadowed by much larger issues.

  Although Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders had told their followers to stay away from Chicago, enough advocates from all sides made the trek to the shores of Lake Michigan to set off a cultural explosion. All summer long, a strong undercurrent of anger had been steadily building, igniting in the aftermath of King’s assassination and again following Kennedy’s, all the while gathering greater and greater force. Such emotion could be seen in the baseball ballparks, notably Tiger Stadium in Detroit. There fans were allowed to bring their own booze to the game as long as they concealed it in brown bags. Empty bottles and firecrackers were often deployed to protest umpires’ calls or poor play by the home squad.

  In a mid-June contest at Tiger Stadium, Boston outfielder Ken Harrelson was nearly hit in the back by a cherry bomb. A plea over the public address system for “good sportsmanship” only led to additional objects being thrown, including another explosive that went off over Harrelson’s head. With that the outfielder threw down his glove and began walking in from right field. He’d had
enough.

  “I’d hit a couple home runs and the second one had put us ahead, so when I go to take up my position again in right field, I hear this strange sound going on around me. It was like, ‘Zip, Zip,’ and I saw that they were throwing ball bearings, about the size of a quarter at me,” Harrelson recalled. “Then a cherry bomb goes off over my head. It wasn’t that close, maybe ten to fifteen feet away, but I’m getting unnerved about all of this.

  “I came in and start to discuss the situation with the umpires. Our manager, Dick Williams, came out and there’s talk about forfeiting the game. But then somebody tells me, ‘If it’s a forfeit, you lose those two home runs and five RBI you have.’ That’s when I went and got a helmet and decided to ride it out.”

  With the Tigers trailing, 8–5, in the bottom of the ninth Harrelson hung around, but just barely. He positioned himself twenty feet or so behind Boston second baseman Mike Andrews—as far away as he could from the mob in right field.

  “No wonder they have trouble in this town,” Harrelson said after the game. “It’s people like that, just a few jerks, who give a city a bad name.”

  Years later, Harrelson said of that night: “Now I wasn’t privy to what happened later, but I do know that Mr. Yawkey, our owner, and Mr. Fetzer, the Tigers’ owner, talked on the phone. And the next night I went out there, the upper deck in right field had been cleared out. They had done that to keep me and the other guys safe.”