Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

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Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 6

by Jonathan Mahler


  Reggie Jackson’s friends called his father Skippy, short for Skipper, because he’d been a pilot in an all-black military unit. He was a proud man, a tailor and dry cleaner who quoted the Bible frequently and reprimanded his children for using sloppy diction. “His kids would be able to use the language and use it properly,” as Jackson once put it. “He knew it would pay off eventually.”

  Martinez Jackson was by no means a role model. He was a born hustler, with a weakness for gambling and chasing women, whose wife left him when their youngest son, Reginald Martinez, was six. Martinez Jackson supplemented his income by bootlegging illegal corn liquor in their basement. Reggie’s older brother Jim—Slugger, as he was known because of his tendency to get into nghts—helped operate the still and always had a pocketful of large bills to show for it.

  In other ways, though, it was a typical suburban American childhood, circa 1960. Jackson wore khaki pants or dungarees and plain white T-shirts underneath a Cheltenham High School letter jacket—blue and gold, with a big C embroidered on the back. He listened to WIBG, which played plenty of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. He tinkered with his cars, a maroon ‘55 Chevy 327 and a ’49 Ford with a wheezy Olds engine. He hung out at the Jack Frost ice-cream stand with his best friend, George Beck, who was planning to go into the army after graduation. A couple of bars were usually willing to serve them beer, usually Ballantine’s or Schmidt’s; otherwise it was hamburgers at Kenyon’s, the local diner. On a clear night, Jackson and Beck might scramble up the hill behind the church and talk about their futures while taking in the view. (Years later, when Reggie was a star with the Yankees and Beck was a truck driver, Reggie’s aging father would call Beck and ask him to drive him to the ballpark to see his son play. “Beck?” he’d say. “It’s Skippy. I need a wheelman.”)

  “I once had a long talk with Reggie about his childhood, and I asked him what he had gotten out of living in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood,” recalls Newsday’s Steve Jacobson. “He fiddled around with the question for a while and came up with ‘aspirations.’”

  As a black kid in a mostly white neighborhood, Jackson had his run-ins with prejudice. On several occasions Beck, who is white, says Jackson deputized him to pick up and drop off his girlfriend so the girl’s parents wouldn’t know their daughter was dating a black boy. Still, Wyncote, with its burgeoning Jewish population, was a relatively progressive place. Jackson later called it “a neighborhood where race wasn’t an issue.” Moreover, this was a time of racial optimism ; dreams of a marbled America swelled in the baritone of Martin Luther King, Jr. “The hoarded anger of generations, so long starved by despair, was now fed by hope,” as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it. Jackson’s boyhood hero Willie Mays, who rose to national prominence from the slums of black-hating Birmingham, drove the point home.

  Reggie Jackson graduated from Cheltenham High in 1964. It was an infamous year for nearby Philadelphia. Race riots engulfed the city, and a growing antiblack backlash found a convenient outlet in the Phillies’ new third baseman, Richie (“Dick”) Allen. An outspoken black militant with a giant Afro who drank beer before games and smoked in the dugout, Allen was pelted with bottles and batteries and ordered by jeering Philadelphia fans to go back to South Street with “the rest of the monkeys.”

  By then Jackson was en route to Tempe, Arizona. He had been marked for greatness from an early age, though his future was supposed to involve carrying balls rather than swatting them. Not that he hadn’t been a hell of a baseball player in high school—pitching three no-hitters and batting .550 his senior year—it’s just that the athletic scholarship specified football. Of course, as soon as Jackson’s football coach at Arizona State University moved him from halfback to cornerback, a defensive position, his eyes started wandering toward the baseball diamond.

  Rather than ask for a tryout, Jackson told a couple of his buddies on the baseball team how good he’d been in high school. Then he told them a few more times. Eventually they grew tired of hearing it and bet Jackson that he couldn’t make the team. A few days later, after football practice, he jogged over to the Sun Devils’ diamond. He took off his helmet and shoulder pads, grabbed a bat, and dug into the batter’s box. He missed the first pitch by a yard. His small, mostly uninterested audience laughed. Then the fireworks began: a series of towering blasts over the fifty-foot palm trees beyond the fence in right field.

  Jackson joined the freshman baseball team and struck out nearly every time up. His extraordinary athletic ability was never in doubt, though. All the student athletes at ASU had to take a developmental activities class, which involved a series of physical fitness tests—jumping, running, chin-ups, etc. Jackson finished first in his class; among his more impressive feats was throwing a basketball sixty yards. “That’s when I realized that this guy was some kind of physical stud,” says Jeff Pentland, who lived across the hall from Jackson in college and went on to become a major-league hitting coach.

  During Jackson’s sophomore year, his only season of varsity ball at ASU, he broke the school’s single-season home run record with fifteen. It doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was unheard of, largely because most colleges, including Arizona State, considered baseball a low priority and bought cheap, lightweight bats. He also became the first collegian to hit a ball out of Phoenix Municipal Stadium.

  Jackson was still raw, unschooled, virtually unable to recognize an off-speed pitch; Gary Gentry, who went on to pitch for the New York Mets, remembered striking out a callow Reggie Jackson on three straight sliders. But even with the Wiffle bats that the athletic department provided, when Jackson redirected a fastball, it would sail across the Arizona blue sky as though he’d hit it off a tee. “Nobody that I ever coached hit the ball harder, including Sammy [Sosa], Barry [Bonds], and Gary [Sheffield],” says Pentland. “And that’s giving those other guys as much respect as I can.”

  In the outfield, Jackson misjudged loads of fly balls, but he got great jumps and had a tremendously strong arm. When one of his teammates who was trying to make the transition from pitcher to outfielder complained about his throws sinking, Jackson told him to come to practice early the next day for some pointers. Jackson showed up late. He rode onto the field on his bicycle, wearing wing tips, khakis, and a madras shirt. He took one practice toss and then told his teammate to watch. Jackson proceeded to launch a ball from the fence in right field to home plate on a clothesline.

  There would be time for fine-tuning later. Reggie Jackson was the second player chosen in the 1966 draft. He might well have gone first, his coach at ASU informed him, had the New York Mets not been put off by a line in his scouting report that said he had a white girlfriend. Instead, the Mets took a catcher named Steve Chilcott, who injured his shoulder and never made it off the farm, leaving Jackson to Charlie Finley, the owner of the Kansas City—soon to be Oakland—A’s..

  Jackson’s tenure in the minor leagues was destined to be brief: a cup of coffee in Lewiston, Idaho, where he batted .300 and hit a memorable dinger that broke a window in the little house across the street from the ballpark, then on to Modesto, California, where he made his first fashion statement, Ban-Lon shirts and alpaca sweaters. Jackson’s teammates in Modesto had heard all the hype about their new bonus baby, but they were nevertheless awed by his prodigious home runs and the thunderbolts he uncorked from the deep recesses of right field. Sure, he misplayed more than his share of balls and struck out way too much, but it was only a matter of time. “You knew that once he learned to discipline himself at the plate and became a better defensive player he was going to make it big,” recalls Rollie Fingers, who came up through the minors with Jackson.

  The following year, 1967, Jackson was bumped up to the A’s AA franchise in Birmingham. It wasn’t quite the same Birmingham that his boyhood hero Willie Mays had known, but it was close. There were no visible signs that the struggle for civil rights had started here, no memorials to the fight against segregation, no statues commemorating it
s heroes. The movement itself had long since moved on—“Bombingham” was considered a lost cause—and the city had settled back into its comfortable bigotry.

  The bus arrived from spring training at Nineteenth Street North, the same Greyhound bus terminal where the Ku Klux Klan had assaulted the Freedom Riders as the local police looked on in May 1961. Reggie and two other black players were given cab fare and sent to the Gaston Motel, which had been bombed four years earlier in a failed attempt to kill the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Jackson spent a couple of weeks sleeping on the couch of the apartment of a couple of his white teammates, Joe Rudi and Dave Duncan. Rudi told Jackson that their landlord had threatened to evict them if “the colored” didn’t leave. Rudi thought they all should move. Jackson said to stay put; he’d find his own place. That place was the Bankhead, a rare apartment/hotel that rented to blacks, with a rare coffee shop that served them. The other towns in the Southern League weren’t much better. When the team bus stopped for lunch, Jackson’s teammates frequently had to bring his food out to him. Fans hollered “nigger” and “black boy” at him from the stands.

  Jackson withdrew. “Reggie pretty much kept to himself in Birmingham,” recalls Fingers. “The only time we’d ever really see him was on road trips.” Between the lines, however, the fledgling slugger blossomed. In 413 at bats with Birmingham, he hit .293, with seventeen home runs and seventeen stolen bases. One of those home runs was memorialized with an X painted more than halfway up the light tower in right field at old Rickwood Field. No one, not even Mays, who had played here for the Negro League’s Black Barons, had ever hit one there before. With success came swagger. Jackson started cracking wise when he returned to the dugout after his at bats. He led the Birmingham A’s to the Dixie World Series, was voted the Southern League Player of the Year, and was called up to the big leagues for the tail end of ’67.

  When the A’s opened the following season, in a game that had been postponed for twenty-four hours because of the rioting in the wake of the assassination of Dr. King, Reggie Jackson was the starting right fielder. He went on to lead the American League in two categories that year: strikeouts (171) and errors (14). He also hit twenty-nine home runs, including one that he one-handed off the field foul pole in Oakland while his sprained right wrist was wrapped in a bandage. He worked every day with A’s hitting coach Joe DiMaggio, who focused on getting Jackson to make better contact. He also convinced Reggie, who was still using those toothpicks he’d hit with at ASU, to move to a much heavier piece of wood. “Reggie is still green as grass,” DiMaggio told one sportswriter. “We’ve just got to bring his talents to the surface. They’re all there, no question.”

  Anyone who failed to take note of this twenty-two-year-old slugger in ‘68 could hardly miss him in ’69, when he exploded like a pack of Roman candles, slamming thirty-seven home runs before the All-Star break. He landed his first fan club, Reggie’s Regiment, and his first Sports Illustrated cover. Jackson cooled down considerably in the second half, once pitchers stopped throwing him fastballs and defenses started playing him three infielders on the right side, but he still finished his second full major-league season with forty-seven home runs.

  Jackson’s sophomore swoon arrived a year late. The trouble started with an off-season salary row with Finley. Jackson asked for sixty thousand dollars; Finley offered forty-five thousand. Ten days before the 1970 season started, they finally settled on forty-seven thousand—a thousand for each dinger—plus a four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment in downtown Oakland.

  Jackson struggled, and Finley ordered him moved down in the lineup. When that didn’t help, Finley had him platooned and eventually benched. At one point he even threatened to send Jackson back down to the minors. When he did play, Jackson inevitably got frustrated and lost his temper, flinging his helmet, kicking the water cooler, emptying out the bat rack. After one strikeout he slammed his bat into the ground, snapping it in two.

  It didn’t help that he and his wife, his college sweetheart, had separated at the start of the season, after less than a year of marriage. When Jackson threatened one local newspaperman, a few of his teammates told the writer not to take it too seriously: “You know how fucked up he is this season.” Fucked up enough to give his owner the finger when he crossed the plate after a grand slam, his first major-league grand slam, in September. Jackson ended the season at a dismal .237. The diminished number of at bats did not prevent him from leading the American League in strikeouts for the third straight year, with 135.

  A pair of eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness—whoever heard of a home run hitter wearing glasses?—and a season of winter ball in Puerto Rico made all the difference. At the center of an emerging A’s dynasty, Jackson returned to form in ’71, lifting his average to .277, with thirty-two home runs. But his most memorable drive of the year didn’t count toward his season totals.

  Measuring home runs is an inexact science; the flight of the ball is always interrupted before it can come to a natural stop. So six hundred feet is only the estimated length of the one Jackson hit in the ’71 All-Star Game in Detroit. The ball would have sailed right out of the ballpark if it hadn’t crashed into an electronic transformer on top of the roof in right-center, making the titanic blast only more dramatic; it looked as if sparks were actually going to fly. Even some of the old-time writers who had watched Babe Ruth couldn’t remember seeing anything like it. A1 Kaline, who had been with the Tigers for nineteen years, called it “the hardest hit ball I’ve ever seen in my life, here or anywhere else.” Asked later where the ball, which bounced back onto the field, had landed, Jackson cracked, “Around first base.”

  The A’s captured their division in 1971. In the off-season Reggie went into therapy. (This was the period, as Jackson later reflected, during which he came to realize that R-E-G-G-I-E did not spell J-E-S-U-S.) The following year—and in ‘72 and ’73 as well—the A’s won the World Series. Reggie Jackson became a superstar. His teammates called him Buck or Buck Tater—a modification of long potato, a Negro League term for a home run—or just plain Reggie.

  Part of baseball’s allure had always been the unintimidating appearance of its professional practitioners. “[T]he man in the stands could be forgiven if he felt that only the inexplicable accident of skill kept him from the field itself,” Roger Angell wrote in the days before steroids and rigorous off-season weight lifting regimes. Reggie Jackson was the exception that proved the rule. He was a remarkable physical specimen at a shade north of six feet, 207 pounds. He had a blacksmith’s biceps—seventeen inches around, the same size as Sonny Liston’s. His comic book superhero’s thighs (twenty-seven inches around), got him down the line in a hurry but were so overdeveloped that he was constantly pulling hamstrings.

  Reggie loved the whole ritual of hitting. He’d mash his helmet over his Afro, adjust his glasses, and shift around his upper body to make sure that his shirt wasn’t pulling too tight. He’d dig his feet into the dirt calmly but purposefully—first the back, then the front-making sure there were no stones beneath his spikes. Then he’d take a slow-motion practice swing, stretching his arms out as he eased the barrel through the strike zone, lingering for an extra second at the end, the tip of his bat pointing menacingly at the opposing pitcher. Most hitters free their mind of all distractions when they step up to the dish; Reggie became hypersensitized. He was acutely aware of the bias of the crowd, of the way his uniform clung to his body, of the feel of the lumber in his hands.

  He was a guess hitter. Rather than zone—drawing an imaginary zone and hitting anything inside it—he would look for a particular kind of pitch (usually a fastball) and drop the head of the bat on the ball. When it was at the top of his shoes, he’d go down and lift it up. The ball appeared to be stuck to his bat for an instant, as though he were shoveling dirt. “I wasn’t sure the first time I saw him,” Ted Williams said in 1970. “The second time I was amazed. He is the most natural hitter I have ever seen.” Most power h
itters need to be taught to shorten their strokes in order to increase their bat speeds. Reggie had a long swing and remarkably quick hands. He was a natural at cat-and-mouse mind games too, intentionally flailing at a pitch early in a game to set himself up to see the same pitch again in the late innings, when more was at stake.

  When you look at hundreds of images of Reggie at the plate, two start to recur. In one, the snapshot of the home run swing, his shirt is stretched tight across his chest, his bat is slung over his shoulder, and his chin is tilted up slightly to allow his eyes to follow the flight of the ball into the seats. In the other, the strikeout swing, Reggie is clutching his bat—“the dues collector,” he called it—in front of his torso like a tent pole, his legs twisting around each other as if he were trying to screw himself into the ground.

  “There’s nothing I like better than hitting a ball hard—clean and hard,” Reggie said in his early years. “The feel and sound of it … it’s just beautiful.” The only thing as satisfying as delivering a good line drive, he might have added, was delivering a good line. His father had warned him: Remember, you’re colored. So too had Dick Allen, who gave the young slugger some hard-earned wisdom—to speak with his bat, not his mouth. But Reggie adhered to a different motto: If you don’t blow your own horn, there won’t be any music. “When you take over a pitch and line it somewhere, it’s like you’ve thought of something and put it with beautiful clarity,” Jackson told a writer for Sports Illustrated, finishing the riff with a line that couldn’t have made SI’s headline writer’s job any easier: “Everyone is helpless and in awe.”

  During batting practice, Reggie routinely flouted the rule prohibiting players from fraternizing with members of the opposing team. Rapping with the league’s other home run hitters was worth the fifty-dollar fine. In his 1981 book Mr. October, Maury Allen recounts a typical exchange, this one between Reggie and the Red Sox’s George Scott, who tied Reggie for the American League home run title in ’75 with thirty-six:

 

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