—George Lucas
May turned to June in 1977, and all across the Southern Californian basin attention turned to summer pursuits. For many people around Southern California—particularly school-age boys—this meant focusing on the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club, whose cast of heroic young players loomed as large as comic-book heroes. All over the city, boys in backyards, in their driveways, and at suburban parks imitated the batting strokes, fielding stances, and pitching deliveries of their favorite Dodgers, passed Topps cards back and forth, and bugged their families to take them to Dodger Stadium. All of which explains why the buzz around the Los Angeles ball club was growing as the season wore on. By June 1, after just twenty home games, Dodger Stadium had drawn 767,306 fans. This total, best in the league, projected out to a full-season attendance of more than 3.1 million—a total that would shatter the Major Leagues’ single-season single-team attendance record. To many across L.A. in 1977, the Dodgers had simply become the hot summer ticket.
On May 26 the Dodgers took a ten-inning game from the Houston Astros, expanding their lead in the West by a comfortable twelve and a half games over the Reds, who had lost in San Francisco. Despite the Dodgers’ runaway lead, the Reds themselves seemed unalarmed, perhaps even cocky, as they prepared themselves to fly into Los Angeles to take on the Dodgers for three head-to-head games starting on May 27. Before the series Sparky Anderson, perhaps seeking to employ every possible weapon in the looming battle, acknowledged that this Dodger team was a good one before quickly qualifying his assessment. “Well, it’s not going to be enough,” said the Reds’ manager. “I want to see how Lasorda reacts when it turns. We’ve won with soundness, not somebody losing their coconut. We’re solid people. We acted like pros, looked like pros, and did our job. The Dodgers are going to look back some day and realize in the long run this is a better way.”1 The fun is in the chase,” Reds second baseman Joe Morgan added. “And I have never had more fun than catching the Dodgers the past two years.” Reds catcher Johnny Bench concurred: “We’ll get it together and when we do we’ll win it again.”2
The Dodgers responded to the Reds’ cavalier dismissals on the field. In the opener, in front of a sold-out crowd of 53,055 at Dodger Stadium, the lineup socked seventeen hits in a 10–3 victory. After the game the Reds were chagrined. “It was embarrassing . . . humiliating,” Joe Morgan said bitterly. “I felt right then and there we had reached rock bottom. We couldn’t be pushed down any further. We only had one way to go.” Sparky Anderson seemed bemused and alarmed. “We can’t expect help from any other team,” he said. “We’ve got 16 games left with the Dodgers. We’ve go to win at least 12 of them or.” Anderson completed his thought by blowing a kiss, as if saying good-bye to a chance at a third straight world championship. Even Cincinnati’s rank-and-file players seemed torn in two by what had happened. “We’re not really worried,” said pitcher Pat Zachry, who was only in his second year with the Reds. “I mean, we’re worried. But not really. . . . Oh I guess we’re worried.”3
Lasorda, though he knew better, could not help but swagger a bit after the game. The Dodgers’ thirteen-and-a-half-game lead in the Western Division was the largest first-place lead the team had had since its move from Brooklyn. “If I were in their position,” said Lasorda, “I’d be worried. If you’re in trouble, isn’t it natural to be worried?”4 The swagger was understandable. Like any gunfighter in the midst of a long showdown, it took a good amount of ego for Lasorda to do his job. And while there’s no record that Lasorda knew John Wayne, a local boy from the suburbs east of Los Angeles who was a noted Dodger fan—having once praised Sandy Koufax on his 1973 spoken-word album, America, Why I Love Her—it’s certain that Lasorda knew of John Wayne (what American didn’t?). So it made sense that the Dodgers’ manager was beginning to resemble one of Wayne’s interchangeably iconic movie characters, such as Rooster Cogburn, John Chisum, or Hondo Lane. (Years later, in fact, a future Dodger named Billy Bean would compare Lasorda to the gunslinging movie star when describing his first meeting with his new manager in 1989. “Tommy Lasorda is the baseball equivalent of John Wayne,” said Bean. “He wasn’t just a manager; he was a legend.”)5
Unfortunately for the gunslinging Dodgers, the final two games of the series against the Reds dealt the local team a sharp setback. On May 28, the day that one sportswriter noted was the twentieth anniversary of the day the National League approved the move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles,6 the Reds beat the Dodgers, 6–3, on twelve hits, including two home runs by George Foster and one by Ken Griffey. Sutton took the disappointing loss, giving up all of the Reds’ home runs (and all six runs) before being sent to the showers after just three innings. Afterward Lasorda refused to make a big issue of the game, or of Sutton’s ineffectiveness: “I’m not concerned,” he said. “Even Cy Young got knocked out twice in a row the year he won 36 games. So now three guys have been knocked out twice in a row . . . Cy Young, Sutton and, yeah, Lasorda.” The next day, on May 29, the Reds erupted for eight runs off four home runs, including a Johnny Bench grand slam and the fourth homer by George Foster in the three games at Dodger Stadium. While Dodger pitcher Rick Rhoden, who was looking to become the Majors’ first eight-game winner, lasted longer than Sutton the day before, going into the sixth inning before getting knocked out, the result was the same. It was a loss. After the game the Dodgers still held an eleven-and-a-half-game lead over the Reds, but this was the first series loss by the Dodgers all season, so Lasorda was understandably disappointed. “This was a tougher loss,” he said before changing the subject.7
There was no time to staunch the bleeding, however, as the Dodgers boarded a plane to Houston immediately after the loss for a Monday-night game at the Astrodome. Against the young, hard-throwing right-hander Joaquin Andujar, the Dodgers promptly lost their third straight game, 5–3. It was the second straight time the Dodgers had lost to the second-year pitcher. On the next night, May 31, the Dodgers lost to the Astros again, 5–2, getting shut down by the team’s ace J. R. Richard and outhit by a couple of former Dodgers—catcher Joe Ferguson, who hit his ninth home run, and outfielder Willie Crawford, who had two hits and an RBI and scored a run. It was the Dodgers’ fourth straight loss—the first such losing streak of the season—and that, coupled with a Reds winning streak, cut the team’s lead in the West to just nine and a half games.
Dodger reaction to these losses varied. Don Sutton blamed them on a change in the team’s emotional makeup, although he didn’t seem much concerned about it. “We just seem to be less enthusiastic recently,” he said. “The season is a series of peaks and valleys. The idea is to take advantage of your peaks and keep your valleys as shallow as possible. There is no team in history that ever had all peaks and I didn’t expect we would be the first.” Second baseman Dave Lopes, meanwhile, thought the losses were the ironic result of having played so well for the first part of the year. “Give those other teams credit,” he said. “They’ve been playing good ball against us. In fact, from here on out every team is going to be up for the Dodgers, ready to beat the (bleep) out of us. We’ve been getting a lot of publicity all season long and I don’t think some of the other teams like it.”8
John Wayne would have well understood Lopes’s assessment, having many times played the role of a hero fighting against the odds, surrounded by enemies on all sides, outgunned and overmatched and in dire straits. Born Marion Morrison, Wayne was raised in modest circumstances in Glendale, California, by a pharmacist and his wife. After losing a football scholarship at the University of Southern California because of an injury, Morrison went to work for a local film studio, and, in time, he began to appear in bit parts. Now called John Wayne, he landed his first starring role in 1930 at age twenty-three, in the flop The Big Trail. He went on to star in nearly 150 films over the next forty-five years, often reflecting a kind of wry, self-aware swagger that was completely in tune with America’s self-image at the time.
In 1976, in his last role in The Shootist, Wayne played
a dying gunslinger hoping to live his last days in peace even though he has become a mark for old enemies seeking vengeance. The film is set in 1901 in Carson City and plays up the fact that, at the time, the trappings of the Old West were dying out. In 1976 Wayne was in fact struggling—both with the state of Hollywood, which seemed to be fading into something far less appealing, and with his own mortality. In 1973 Wayne had observed a new generation of young Hollywood stars and filmmakers create the iconoclastic western High Plains Drifter, in which inhabitants of a dusty Old West mining town are depicted as craven and murderous.9 By 1976, at the time he made The Shootist, Wayne was old and tired, a survivor of a late-1960s battle with lung cancer, and it showed in the film. The script even somewhat reflected Wayne’s disillusion. “You told me I was strong as an ox,” his character, John Bernard Books, says after being told he has a terminal disease. “Well, even an ox dies,” replies the doctor.10
Whatever the source of his concern, Wayne certainly had a point—the culture was changing, eschewing age-old traditions as the nation’s largest generational cohort came of age and inevitably forced their values on the established culture. And Hollywood was not immune to the change. “Los Angeles was full of tumult,” writes entertainment writer and film critic Patrick Goldstein of the time. “There was a raw, infectious energy in the air, inspired by a sense that the cultural world was shifting under our feet.” Driving the changes in Hollywood, as Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin pointed out in 1969, was a major shift of power in the Hollywood studios—from an “Old Hollywood” approach that was suddenly failing to attract an audience to a daring new approach seeking to connect with the interests and ideals of younger (that is, baby boomer) moviegoers. Film critic Paul Schrader suggested that, in the years between 1969 and 1971, “the industry imploded, the door was wide open and you could just waltz in and have these meetings and propose whatever. There was nothing that was too outrageous.”11 In 1967 two movies—Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate—one violent and sensational, the other sexually provocative and emotionally raw, rocked the industry by attracting surprisingly large audiences. Other similarly innovative and edgy film projects followed over the next few years. And before anyone realized it, there was a new movement in filmmaking—dubbed “New Hollywood” in the press—led by a new generation of directors, producers, auteurs, screenwriters, and young stars whose values developed out of the counterculture of the second half of the 1960s.
The New Hollywood approach to moviemaking yielded some of the most artistically brilliant and original Hollywood movies ever—The Fox (1967), Point Blank (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Paper Moon (1973), Chinatown (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), and the like. But even considering the social commentary and artistic accomplishment of these films, by the second half of the decade audiences were, like John Wayne, just a little fed up with all this heavy, heady, disheartening stuff. As early as 1971 moviemakers were wondering how to deal with the divisions of the times. During the production of George Lucas’s first film, the bleak, dystopian THX 1138 (1971), his filmmaking mentor and friend Francis Ford Coppola challenged him to write a script that would appeal to mainstream audiences. The result, American Graffiti (1973), was a surprise hit for Lucas, noted for its crowd-pleasing nostalgia. The results inspired Lucas. “When I got done with Graffiti,” he said, “I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had—they don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. . . . What would happen if there had never been John Wayne movies and Errol Flynn movies and all that stuff that we got to see all the time. I mean, you could go into a theater, sit down and watch an incredible adventure.”12
For his next film, then, Lucas decided he wanted to continue entertaining the audiences in the way that Hollywood used to do. “I thought: we all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world,” Lucas said. “We also know, as every movie made in the last ten years points out, how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive.” When asked what his next project would be, Lucas was blunt. “I’m working on a western movie set in outer space,” he replied, referring to the idea that would eventually become a film called Star Wars. When the interviewer looked uneasy, Lucas laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Ten year old boys will love it.”13
Although Lucas was certain in 1973 that he had an idea that would work for Hollywood, the execution of his idea took time to develop. He was never a particularly facile writer, and in this case his sources of inspiration—Joseph Campbell’s books on mythology, the great westerns of the heyday of Hollywood, the presidency of Richard Nixon,14 the American involvement in Vietnam—did not easily translate to a script, especially for a populist, entertaining adventure story. Lucas worked on the treatment and script for Star Wars for three years, struggling to get the tone and plot just right.15 He rewrote his Star Wars script three times in succession, submitting each draft to his contacts at the studios and getting rejected each time. Through it all Lucas’s health suffered. He grew isolated from friends and family. Finally, in early 1976 the fourth draft of Lucas’s nascent space swashbuckler finally seemed to have the right story elements in place. Even then Lucas worked with two script doctors, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, to turn the fourth Star Wars script into a final preproduction script. Then, despite his hard work, most of Hollywood’s studios at the time—Warner Brothers, MGM, United Artists, and Universal—took a pass on Star Wars. The project was saved at the last minute only when a studio on the verge of bankruptcy, Twentieth Century Fox, decided to take a gamble on it.16
After many trials Star Wars, George Lucas’s old-fashioned tale of romance, adventure, swashbuckling swordplay, princesses in distress, and cloaked villains—all set in space—finally made it to movie houses in late May. Meanwhile, out in the bright daylight, the Dodgers were suddenly becoming reacquainted with the feel of the earth beneath their feet. Their easy streak of domination over the rest of the National League came to an abrupt end, and, just as Sparky Anderson had predicted, the reality of the long season settled over the team.
As if responding to a silent cue, over the next few weeks a growing number of fans wrote in to complain: about Lasorda’s use of his bullpen, his deployment of outmanned young bench player Ed Goodson—a rare left-handed batter on the Dodgers—in key game pinch-hitting situations, and his directing of Steve Garvey to swing more for the fences (which they claimed was threatening his usual dependability at the plate). “I hate to throw cold water on the fine start of the Blew Wrecking Crew,” wrote one fan to the sports page in early June, “but the holiday weekend had all the earmarks of those late May days of the last couple of years when Ye Olde June Swoone has cursed our local heroes. . . . It might be a repeat of 1975 and 1976.”17
If the season had been a John Wayne movie, or even a newfangled outer-space throwback to the western adventures of the past, it was at this point in the story that, from out over the horizon, a cocky hired gun would appear to deal with the town’s enemies. A chief candidate for this role was a player that the Dodgers thought, when they obtained him before the season began, would bring plenty of firepower to their lineup: Rick Monday. And indeed, the outwardly genial, six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound outfielder, who had become immediately popular on the team, was a deeply competitive gunslinger. “My one goal,” said Monday before the season had begun, “is to have Sparky (Cincinnati manager Anderson) watch the World Series on television and to see Dodger blue on his set.”18 Yet in the early part of the season Monday had barely factored in the Dodgers’ attack. In the first regular-season game, on April 7, Monday went hitless. By the end of the month he was batting only .253 and had just 3 HRs and 10 RBIs, at best a middle-of-the-road sort of performance—especially compared to teammates like Cey (9 HRs, 29 RBIs, .403 average), Garvey (6 HRs, 22 RBIs), and Smith (16 RBIs, .344 a
verage).
The pressure on Monday to produce mounted as the season continued. On the first day of May, in the fifth inning of a game at home against the Expos, Monday overswung at a pitch by the Expos’ Steve Rogers and topped a dribbler down the first base line. As he took off Monday’s spikes caught in a divot, and he went down hard to one knee as Rogers forced him at first. As he kneeled just off the plate, gingerly testing his knee, the Expos’ caustic manager, Dick Williams, began chattering at the veteran. “Fuck your leg and get the fucking hell out of there” is what Lasorda reported Williams said (though diplomatic Expos catcher Gary Carter said that Williams was yelling that he should forget Monday and keep the pitcher warm), and the embattled Monday was in no mood to hear it. He moved toward the Expos’ bench, gesturing and barking back at the team’s manager before being restrained by Lasorda and home plate umpire Dutch Rennert. Williams, incensed, led his team out onto the field for a confrontation, and the Dodgers rushed out as well. Although no punches were thrown and the conflict calmed, Monday was still steamed about the incident after the game. “I respect Williams as a manager,” Monday said. “He knows baseball . . . but personally I dislike the man. He and I will settle this later. At some point in time I will be there and he won’t have 25 guys in front of him.”19
Despite the swagger, however, the biggest setback to Monday in 1977 was still to come.
With the team struggling to stave off its hungry rivals, before a game on June 1 against the Astros Tom Lasorda stepped in front of his players behind closed clubhouse doors at the Death Star–like Astrodome. It was an unusual moment for the emotional Dodger manager. Although Tom Lasorda was widely known for his motivational skills, he was not known for his subtlety. But the manager was struggling with mixed emotions. A day earlier, on May 31, during a tight game against the Astros, Lasorda had watched as one of his key players went down. While racing for a sinking line drive off the bat of Julio Gonzalez in the seventh inning, the score tied at 2–2 and two runners on (with one out), Monday’s foot got caught in a seam of the Astrodome’s artificial turf, and he took a tumble. He stayed in the game, a 5–2 loss, but afterward his back stiffened. The next day, scratched from the lineup, Monday watched from the trainer’s room in the visitors’ clubhouse of the Astrodome as Lasorda tried to inspire his players with just a few choice words. What Lasorda exactly said at the closed-door meeting was not recorded, but he did later explain he was trying to light a little fire under the team. “I reminded them of their capabilities,” Lasorda said, “and reminded them how they got to where they are today, on top of the mountain. I told them they didn’t get there by accident.”20 Whatever was said, it worked. After Lasorda’s speech, the Dodgers ended their longest losing streak of the season so far by beating the Astros, 6–2.
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