by Tim Wendel
Back in Detroit, the celebration began precisely at 4:06 p.m., moments after Freehan caught Tim McCarver’s foul popup. Once again the populace crowded the Motor City’s streets downtown and near Tiger Stadium, but this time nothing went up in smoke. “It was a great exuberant crowd,” Detroit police commissioner told the Sporting News. “There were some opportunists, but no real looters.”
People waded into the Kennedy Square pool downtown, several holding aloft beer bottles. Telephone books and IBM cards were shredded into confetti and thrown out the windows of the city’s tallest buildings. The ticker tape rained down on the revelers below and many fans gathered up the celebratory fodder and tossed it again up into the air. While Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanaugh ordered fire and civil defense to be on alert, they weren’t needed as more than 150,000 peacefully crowded the downtown sector. West of town, 35,000 fans swarmed the landing field at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport—so many of them in fact that the Tigers’ charter from St. Louis couldn’t land there. Thirteen departing flights and thirty-five other arrivals were delayed, and the ballclub’s flight was diverted to nearby Willow Run Airport, where an estimated 1,500 more fans cheered the team’s arrival.
“I was going home,” Tigers reserve infielder Dick Tracewski said after the charter landed. “But I’m glad the baggage wasn’t going to be taken to Tiger Stadium until tomorrow because I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
A week or so after the Fall Classic concluded an old lady approached Gibson at the airport in St. Louis. The pitcher assumed she was going to ask for an autograph, perhaps congratulate him on another fine season, even his World Series record. Instead she stunned him by asking if he still spoke to Curt Flood.
“Lady, how can you ask that?” he replied.
In Detroit, senior baseball writer Joe Falls perhaps best summed up what the championship meant to his audience: “My town, as you know, had the worst riot in our nation’s history in the summer of 1967, and it left scars which may never fully heal,” he wrote. “And so, as 1968 dawned and we all started thinking ahead to the hot summer nights in Detroit, the mood of our city was taut. It was apprehensive.... But then something started happening in the middle of 1968. You could pull up to a light at the corner of Clairmount and 12th, which was the hub of last year’s riot, and the guy in the next car would have his radio turned up: ‘ . . . McLain looks in for the sign, he’s set—here’s the pitch’ . . . . It was a year when an entire community, an entire city, was caught up in a wild, wonderful frenzy.”
FINAL SCORE: TIGERS 4, CARDINALS 1
Detroit wins the ’68 World Series, four games to three.
PART VII
“Never the Same Again”
Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle. Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.
—MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Unable to pitch winterball, ordered to stay home and rest his arm for next season by the Cleveland Indians, Luis Tiant did watch television, first the World Series and then the Olympics. He saw Mickey Lolich jump into Bill Freehan’s arms after the final out in Game Seven, daydreaming of what it would be like to play in the World Series one day.
On October 14, 1968, Tiant’s daughter, Isabel, turned one year old. The family planned a party for that evening at their home in Mexico City, and Tiant spent the afternoon watching the men’s one-hundred meter Olympic trials with a friend. In a few days, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos would raise black-gloved fists to the heavens, a demonstration that the New York Times’s columnist Robert Lipsyte would call “the mildest, most civil demonstration of the year,” and one that would reverberate throughout sports for years to come.
Soon, however, Tiant’s TV viewing was interrupted by his sister-in-law lugging a battered suitcase into the family living room.
“Hey,” she asked, “do you remember this?”
Tiant glanced at the old valise and shook his head.
“You sure?” Tiant’s sister-in-law Concepcion said.
Irritated by the interruption, Tiant got out of his chair and went over to better inspect the suitcase. That’s when he saw his mother standing in the front hallway. After seven years apart, Senora Tiant had finally been allowed by the Castro government to leave Cuba and visit her only child.
Tiant took his mother in his arms—tears running down his cheeks. “Why are you crying?” she chided him. “I’m the one who should cry.”
Years later Tiant said, “Everyone remembers different things from that year, ’68. In the end, that’s the time I’ll never forget.”
Only a few miles away from that joyful reunion, Jim Ryun prepared to run the most difficult race of his life. Just about everyone recognized Ryun once he reached Mexico City. After all, he was the favorite in the 1,500 meters. But the American miler had run only one real race at altitude—the final Olympic trial at Lake Tahoe, California—before arriving at the Games. He had worked hard in training, but would it be enough?
Such doubts only grew after Australian Ron Clarke’s collapse in the 10,000 meters. A bronze medalist in the same event in 1964, Clarke set seventeen world records during his storied career. Yet in the thin air of Mexico City, he never had a chance.
Six runners in the 10,000 meters’ thirty-six field dropped out that day, one after only two laps. Three others fell unconscious as the race soon whittled itself down to a small group, most of them from higher elevations, including Naftali Temu from Kenya and Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia. Clarke did his best to hang with the leaders. But the math didn’t add up. As Richard Hoffer later explained in Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, high altitude can destroy the best of athletes. “Runners at shorter distances burn up ready glycogen and can repay the debt later at their leisure,” he wrote. “Long-distance racers must use oxygen from the air they’re breathing during the race to break down sugar, financing the debt as they go.”
Clarke became the first favorite who couldn’t pay the debt that Mexico City’s altitude required. Even though the winning time in the 10,000 meters was 29:27.4, the slowest time for a winner in the event since 1948, the Aussie veteran keeled over at the line, finishing a distant sixth. Afterward he underwent electrocardiograms and eventually it was determined that his heart suffered permanent damage in the race. For the rest of his life, he took daily medication for a heart murmur.
“I did not win the Olympic gold medal,” Clarke told Sports Illustrated in 1973, “and that has given rise to the idiotic idea that I was not good in real competition. My only contention, and I’m leaning over backward to be fair, is that because of the altitude at Mexico City I had no chance against the Africans, and therefore the critics’ point that I was incapable of winning remains unproved. Personally, I have no doubt at all that I was the best 10,000-meter runner in the world in 1968. At sea level, I would have won easily.”
For the record, Kenya’s Temu won the 10,000-meter gold, with his countryman Kip Keino in contention until he suffered stomach cramps. Temu’s gold was the first ever for Kenya, which seems remarkable considering the running legacy the nation now enjoys. “This feels like Africa,” Temu said of the conditions in Mexico City. “ We will be at home here.”
Meanwhile, that meant trouble for Ryun, who was scheduled to go against Keino and the Kenyans in track’s showcase event, the men’s 1,500 meters. He was entering the contest as a favorite, but so had Clarke heading into the 10,000 meters.
The night before the 1,500 meters, Kenyan officials told Ben Jipcho to go out hard from the opening gun. Keino, who had taken a bronze medal in the 5,000 meters, would trail him and later charge to the finish. The fast pace from the outset, they proposed, would take care of Ryun. The Kenyans’ plan almost didn’t have a chance to work, however, as their team bus got waylaid in traffic leading to the Olympic stad
ium. Both Keino and Jipcho were forced to jog nearly three miles and barely made the event. (“They had to warm up before the race anyway,” said a team official.) Yet when the gun went off, Jipcho moved out in a fast 56-second first lap, hoping to lure Ryun to come with him.
“So what do you do when you have never gone faster than a 61-second opening pace per 400 and your competition goes out in 56?” asked Dr. Jack Daniels, the U.S. team’s expert about altitude training. “Do you go with them not knowing if everyone will die together or let him go hoping he will come back?”
Ryun correctly determined that Keino, not Jipcho, was the guy to beat. So he hung back. It also crossed Ryun’s mind that “I’ve never tried this at altitude and I better be careful so I don’t completely die.”
In the second lap, Keino began to pull away from Ryun and the American was forced to let him go. By the third lap, the field had split into two groups. Keino led the first pack, with Ryun leading the other. By that point, any chance of gold had disappeared for Ryun.
By the bell lap the American was forty meters behind the Kenyan as he gamely continued to fight his way from tenth place up to second. In the end, though, he finished a long ways behind Keino. The race can still be found on YouTube and by the final stretch the Kenyan champion is the only runner in the frame. “That much ground was simply impossible to recover,” Richard Hoffer wrote, “and the greatest miler of his day finished in second, a full twenty meters behind Keino. It was the largest margin of victory, or rather defeat, ever.”
While Keino and Jipcho took a victory lap, a fatigued Ryun told a bystander, “God, it hurts.” Afterward Jipcho apologized to the American for the team tactics by the Kenyans. Ryun told him it was the Olympics and not to feel guilty about anything. Even though Ryun’s silver-medal finish was vilified back home, U.S. distance runners and coaches came away with valuable lessons about how to compete at altitude. Despite the conditions, all three U.S. entrants in the 1,500 meters—Ryun, Tom Von Ruden, and Marty Liquori—reached the final.
In the end, Roone Arledge’s gamble paid off. Thanks to Ryun’s heroic race, Bob Beamon’s stunning record leap in the long jump, Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s fist-raised protest atop the podium after the two-hundred meters, the Olympics became must-see television and remain so to this day.
Closer to home, following the Tigers’ World Series victory, Denny McLain and Bob Gibson were each named both the Cy Young winners and Most Valuable Players for their respective leagues. New York Yankees pitcher Stan Bahnsen was selected as the top rookie in the American League, with Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench edging out New York Mets pitcher Jerry Koosman for the honor in the National League.
Tigers manager Mayo Smith was named manager of the year, with Detroit general manager Jim Campbell selected as baseball’s top executive.
The fourth game of the World Series, the one played in a downpour in Detroit, became the highest-rated sports event in television history at the time. The Nielsen Television Index indicated that more than 78.5 million people tuned in that afternoon. World Series games continued to outpace other sporting events, including Super Bowl II and the NFL championship, holding an overall seven-to-three edge in the TV’s top ten. “From the rankings, it is easy to conclude that the World Series is still America’s No. 1 sports event,” baseball commissioner William Eckert said in a statement.
Just a Hail Mary pass off Interstate 295 in southern New Jersey, stands a two-story, space-age-style office building that serves as the home of NFL Films. Even though baseball was atop the sports heap as the ’68 World Series began, the soothsayers in the sports industry recognized that a sea change was coming. That’s why I’m here, in the far corner of the NFL Films library, hard by the stacks that bolster every Sports Illustrated ever printed, staring at a Trinitron television rigged up to a DVC Pro Slow Motion tape machine. The idea is if we can conjure up time, slow it down frame by frame, perhaps we can glimpse the moments where baseball slips into second place and football becomes king.
Certainly there were hints of such a reversal back in 1968. The year began with O. J. Simpson, then the top running back for Southern Cal, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But while other sporting events—such as the Super Bowl, select boxing matches, and some Olympiads—occasionally managed to escape baseball’s shadow to draw plenty of media coverage and public attention of their own, one could argue such upheavals in the sporting landscape were temporary at best, distractions before things returned to baseball. With its dog days building up to the Fall Classic followed by the renewed countdown to spring training, the national pastime still set the tone and the calendar for sports in America. By’68, though—as with so much else—the stage was set for change. Of all things, it would take a miscue in television scheduling for the powers that be in football, especially those in the upstart American Football League, to realize how swiftly the winds of change were shifting, and just how popular the new kid on the block had become.
After cueing up on the Trinitron, I watch the final minutes of a regular-season game held on November 17, 1968, between the New York Jets and the host Oakland Raiders. Both teams have gunslingers at quarterback—Joe Namath for the Jets and Daryle Lamonica for the Raiders. Although each team boasted quality personnel on both sides of the ball, it was still widely regarded that the best teams resided in the more established National Football League, where they had been playing since the early 1940s when George Halas’s “Monsters of the Midway” in Chicago first made headlines. Of course, that thinking had been further solidified by Vince Lombardi’s Green Packers, which had won the first two Super Bowls handily over AFL teams (the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders).
Yet after Lombardi stepped down as coach the champion Packers fell to a 6–7–1 record in ’68, and despite such household names as Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke, they didn’t come close to defending their division. Instead, the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts were NFL’s top teams that season, and they were regarded as the best in any league.
Studying the film of the Jets-Raiders game, channeling my inner Ron Jaworski, I realize it doesn’t take a genius to be impressed by what’s flashing by on the screen. Of course, I’m watching the game for reasons that go beyond any ability I may have to grade the top running backs on these teams (Matt Snell and Charlie Smith) or be enthralled by how both quarterbacks can throw the long ball with regularity. For this was the infamous “Heidi Game,” a contest that not only rewrote how sports was broadcast in this country, but reassured followers of the rival AFL that they had plenty of company and rabid fans.
With sixty-five seconds left, the Jets held a 32–29 lead. Both squads were considered among the best in the ten-team AFL, entering the game with 7–2 records. Even though the game was still close, NBC ended the broadcast early in the Eastern and Central time zones. The network schedule called for a made-for-TV movie, Heidi, to start at 7 p.m. sharp. As soon as the switch was made, calls began to pour into the NBC switchboard. Network executives tried to reach broadcast operations, telling them to keep the game on, but those calls didn’t go through until the game was well over. And what a game it was. The Raiders stormed back in the final minutes, scoring two touchdowns, to win 43–32. The programming switch was so abrupt that announcers Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis didn’t know. In fact, Gowdy’s call of the winning touchdown (“Lamonica to Charlie Smith . . . Smith is heading . . . and he scores. What a game!”) remains old-school classic.
For the record, the Raiders went ahead on that pass from Lamonica to Smith, and then salted the game away by recovering the ensuing kickoff in the end zone when the Jets fumbled.
While the action on the field was great, the reaction off the field was even better. When Jets’ coach Weeb Ewbank, still fuming about what happened, reached the visiting locker room he was told he had a phone call. It was his wife, eager to congratulate him on the victory. She, and a lot of other fans, thought the Jets had won because they were ahead when NBC cut away.
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�� Win?” Ewbank replied. “Hell, we got beat.”
With that he slammed down the receiver.
John Madden, who went on to greater fame as a broadcaster and product pitchman, was the Raiders’ coach that day. “We knew we won the game,” he said, “but people across the country thought the Jets had won and we had lost.”
New York quarterback Joe Namath had the best line about the fiasco: “I didn’t get a chance to see it, but I heard it was great.”
Back in New York, the switchboard at NBC shut down due to the large volume of calls. Like it or not, America was watching Heidi, starring Jennifer Edwards, the stepdaughter of Julie Andrews, in the title role, along with Maximillian Schell, Jean Simmons, and Michael Redgrave.
Unbelievably, NFL Films also has Heidi available to researchers. So after seeing the end of the game, I figured it’s only fitting that I check out what so many TV viewers were forced to endure. The made-for-TV movie opens in Frankfurt, at the turn of the last century, with a horse-drawn carriage pulling up in front of a stately mansion. The going is slow, slow, slow, with plenty of German accents.
“Don’t make me stay here,” Heidi says, and most football fans would wholeheartedly agree. They wanted to be back at the game, listening to Gowdy and DeRogatis.
Unable to find a home in Frankfurt, Heidi is sent off to the Swiss Alps to live with her hermitlike grandfather. “There was a considerable amount of plot information in the first reel,” director Delbert Mann explained. “If you’d come into the show in progress you wouldn’t know what was going on.”
Due to its exclusive contract with sponsor Timex, the movie was required to begin at 7 p.m. sharp. And that’s what Dick Cline, the network’s broadcast operations supervisor, made sure happened. Too late, network president Julian Goodman got through to Cline, telling him to put the game back on the air. By then the game was over and the video link to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum already cut.