6.In the team’s early years in Los Angeles Walter O’Malley had hired a Hollywood producer, Mervyn LeRoy, during the team’s push to get a ballpark built. Among other marketing tactics, LeRoy created a scale model of Dodger Stadium that showed the comfort and beauty of the place.
7.Jeane Hoffman, “Celebrities on Hand,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1958.
8.When Koufax and Drysdale ended their holdout and returned to the team for the 1966 season, the film was made without either of the ballplayers.
9.All That Glitters was a satire that presented a world in which women ruled as the “stronger sex” and men were objectified. It starred Eileen Brennan, Chuck McCann, and Linda Gray, who played a transgender character named Linda Murkland, said to be the first such character to appear as a series regular on American television.
10.Charles Maher, “Acting Gets Rise Out of Ex-Dodger,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1977. The show was panned by critics. Time called it “embarrassingly amateurish,” with “flaccid” jokes, flat writing, “mediocre” acting, and “aimless” direction. It was canceled after only thirteen episodes. Parker would land a recurring role on the TV series Police Woman (1975–78) and appear in two TV movies and one feature movie—Cry from the Mountain (1985)—but that would be the bulk of his Hollywood career.
11.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 129, 130.
12.The home opener at Dodger Stadium in 1977 was an afternoon game, which was something of an unusual occurrence in L.A. The last time the Dodgers’ home opener had been an afternoon game was in 1962, the year of the first home opener ever held at the brand-new Dodger Stadium.
13.Dave Distel, “Sparky on Baseball: Think of Loyalty, Fans,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1977; Merry, “Lasorda’s Dodgers Test the Count.”
14.Don Merry, “Cey Cheers His Manager,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1977.
15.Don Merry, “Reggie Smith Turns a Nemesis into a Soft Touch,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1977.
16.Don Merry, “Battery Sparks Dodgers’ 5–0 Victory over Giants,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1977.
17.Don Merry, “Even in Trouble, Dodgers Win,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1977.
18.Anderson’s bitterness came from an honest place. Having grown up in the Los Angeles area, he had been signed by the Dodgers and played in the team’s farm system for nearly five seasons before being traded to Philadelphia at age twenty-four.
19.Don Merry, “Sutton Gives Lasorda an Opening, 5–1,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1977; John Hall, “So Help Me,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1977.
20.Ron Fimrite, “‘God May Be a Football Fan,’” Sports Illustrated, July 12, 1982.
21.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 125.
22.Larry Keith, “In L.A., It’s Up, Up and Away with Cey,” Sports Illustrated, May 16, 1977.
23.Cey’s father owned several service stations in the Tacoma area.
24.Keith, “Away with Cey.”
25.Keith, “Away with Cey.”
26.“Can Dodgers Match Nickname?,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1977. This letter appears to be the first time the nickname appeared in print. Interestingly, the nickname would fade a few years later and get picked up by another team, the New York Giants football teams that won Super Bowls in 1986 and 1990.
27.“Can Dodgers Match Nickname?”
10. A John Wayne Kind of Adventure
Epigraph: Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 318.
1.“Ho, ho, ho” was Lasorda’s response to the attack. John Hall, “The Brawlers,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1977.
2.“Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1977.
3.Don Merry, “Dodgers Explode for 17 Hits and Rout Reds, 10–3,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1977; Ross Newhan, “The Reds Having Second Thoughts,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1977.
4.Merry, “Dodgers Explode.”
5.Bean continued: “It was an honor to play for one of the all-time great baseball field generals . . . So it was with a lump in my throat that I knocked on his office door inside the clubhouse in Pittsburgh after the big trade. ‘Hello, Mr. Lasorda. I’m Billy Bean,’ I declared with all the authority I could muster. Tommy may have achieved the status of a movie star, but he sure didn’t look the part. A white-haired Italian, he was as bow-legged as an old cowboy. . . . ‘How ya doin’ kid?’” Billy Bean, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life in and Out of Major League Baseball (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 110–11.
6.Hall, “The Brawlers.”
7.Don Merry, “Reds Win One, 6–3, and Hope It’s a Start,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1977; Don Merry, “Reds Want to Make It a Math Race,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1977.
8.Don Merry, “Astros Deal Dodgers 4th Loss in a Row,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1977; Don Merry, “Dodgers’ Third Loss in Row No Problem—Lopes,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1977.
9.Disappointed by the portrayal, Wayne wrote a letter to the film’s star, a younger actor named Clint Eastwood. “That isn’t what the West was all about,” Wayne wrote. “That isn’t the American people who settled this country.” Peter Biskind, “Any Which Way He Can,” Premiere, April 1993.
10.Wayne would succumb to illness in 1979, dying of stomach cancer at the UCLA Medical Center on June 11.
11.Patrick Goldstein, foreword to Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Other Perversities: Pop Culture of the 1970s and 1980s, by George Rose (Berkeley CA: Ten Speed Press, 2008), 7; Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 22.
12.Paul Scanlon, “George Lucas: The Wizard of Star Wars,” Rolling Stone, August 1977.
13.Scanlon, “George Lucas”; Michael Kaminski, The Secret History of “Star Wars” (Kingston ON: Legacy Books, 2008), 19. There were also practical reasons for Lucas to seek more general audiences for his film. “When I finished American Graffiti, again I was broke,” Lucas said. “I had got paid twice what I made for THX—$20,000 for Graffiti—but it took me two years to do it. . . . So by the time I was finished, I was out of money again. . . . I said, ‘I’ve got to get another picture going here—just to survive.’ So that’s when I decided that I wanted to do a children’s film.”
14.“I was writing the first Star Wars,” Lucas said, “because it was soon after Nixon’s presidency, and there was a point, right before he was thrown out of office, where he suggested that they change a constitutional amendment so that he could run for a third term. Even when he started getting into trouble, he was saying ‘If the military will back me, I’ll stay in office.’ His idea was: ‘To hell with Congress and potential impeachment. I’ll go directly to the army, and between the army and myself, I’ll continue to be president.’ That is what happens here. An emergency in the Republic leads the Senate to make Palpatine, essentially, ‘dictator for life.’” Kaminski, Secret History of “Star Wars,” 95.
15.Lucas’s film changed drastically between the various draft versions. First there were too many characters, then too few. The plot was too simple, then too complex. Princess Leia’s role grew bigger, then smaller. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, initially one character, became two. The Force got a good side (originally called Ashla) and a bad side (Bogan). A character named Annikin Starkiller became Luke Skywalker. Kenobi began life as an elderly general, became an addled hermit, and then was an elderly general again. A “Kiber Crystal” appeared, then disappeared, and so on.
16.The shooting of Star Wars was as difficult as the writing. Production fell behind schedule due to freak rainstorms (in the Tunisian desert) and malfunctioning equipment. Lucas’s waffling directorial style frustrated the cast and crew. “I had a terrible time; it was very unpleasant,” Lucas said. “I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before.” The project was so demanding that Lucas developed hypertension. When Lucas showed an early cut of the film to his filmmaker friends
—Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, among others—most were not impressed. (Only Spielberg, reportedly, saw the potential of the film.) And there were more complications. By late 1976 hundreds of uncompleted special-effects scenes remained unfinished, a fact that forced a delay in the film’s release. But Lucas never gave up on his film, and, finally, on May 25, 1977, Star Wars opened. Kaminski, Secret History of “Star Wars,” 137–38.
17.“Viewpoint: Letters,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1977.
18.Don Merry, “The Man in Center,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1977.
19.Don Merry, “Expos Have the Last Word, 6–2,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1977.
20.Don Merry, “Lasorda Pep Talk Pays Off, Dodgers Win,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1977.
21.Don Merry, “Home at the Top,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1977.
22.Don Merry, “Buckner Takes Some of His Frustration Out on Dodgers,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1977; Don Merry, “Cubs Beat Dodgers and Franks Tees Off,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1977.
23.“Smith Nearly Goes Up the Wall,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1977.
24.Don Merry, “Suddenly It’s 7½; Lasorda ‘Concerned,’” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1977.
25.“Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1977.
26.Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 343.
27.As Lucas recalled Star Wars’ opening weekend in a later magazine interview: “I was mixing sound [in Hollywood] on foreign versions of the film the day it opened here,” he said. “I had been working so hard that, truthfully, I forgot the film was being released that day. My wife [and I] . . . ran off across the street from the Chinese Theatre—and there was a huge line around the block. I said, ‘What’s that?’ I had forgotten completely, and I really couldn’t believe it. But I had planned a vacation as soon as I finished, and I’m glad I did because I really didn’t want to be around for all the craziness that happened after that.” Kaminski, Secret History of “Star Wars,” 147–48.
28.Lee Grant, “‘Star Wars’ Out of This World,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1977.
29.Roger Ebert, The Great Movies (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 431.
30.Interestingly, this franchising bonanza came about nearly by accident. Initially, few toy companies saw the potential in turning the film’s characters and visual elements into kids’ toys. Only a small concern, Kenner Toys, took a chance at producing Star Wars figures after other toy companies passed on the opportunity. The three-and-three-quarter-inch plastic “action figures” that Kenner produced for Star Wars were not available in markets until well after Christmas 1977, but thanks to clever marketing presale buzz was widespread.
31.Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 316.
32.Don Merry, “Cey’s Streak Ends but Not the Dodgers,’” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1977.
11. Heroes and Villains
1.Widely quoted.
2.Because of the season’s length Updike professed the belief that the intermittent individual heroics of players—the three-RBI game, the hitting streak, the ten-inning shutout, the game-winning grand slam—were of less importance ultimately than players dedicated to craft, “players who . . . care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.” As an example, Updike held up the great Red Sox slugger Ted Williams. John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” New Yorker, October 22, 1960.
3.Widely quoted.
4.Jim Bouton, Ball Four: The Final Pitch (North Egremont MA: Bulldog, 2000), 406.
5.Merry, “Lasorda Pep Talk.”
6.The Dodgers made room on their roster by placing veteran pitcher Al Downing on the disabled list. Downing, who had played with the Dodgers since 1971 and was perhaps best known for giving up Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, was nursing a groin-pull injury at the time. His release on July 21 effectively ended the left-hander’s pitching career. “If the Dodgers didn’t feel I could help them,” the thirty-six-year-old Downing said on hearing the news, “it’s probably better for me I’m gone. . . . I’ve enjoyed my seven years here. It will continue to be my home. But life goes on. You turn the page and start and new chapter.” “Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1977.
7.“Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1977.
8.Asked if Anderson’s move was surprising, considering that the Reds’ manager had often accused Sutton of cheating by doctoring the ball, Sutton said, “Not really. I think he respects me as a pitcher and I respect him as a manager. He has to protect his team. If I were him I’d do the same thing.” “Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1977.
9.Charles Maher, “‘I Wanted to Be Reggie Smith,’” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1977; “Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1977; Maher, “‘I Wanted to Be Reggie Smith.’”
10.UPI, “Dream Game Is a Dream Game for Don Sutton,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1977; “Quotebook,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1977.
11.The team’s overall ERA on July 17, the Sunday before the All-Star Game, was a league-best 3.53, a fact that thus far had been mostly overlooked as fans and media fixated on the Dodgers’ potent lineup.
12.Note that this was before the era of single-inning relief specialists.
13.“Viewpoint: Letters,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1977.
14.Mal Florence, “Hough Takes Some Raps and the Rap,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1977.
15.Garvey’s 4,277,735 vote total was better than the next-highest vote getter, Joe Morgan, by nearly 1 million votes.
16.Jim Murray, “Garvey: Part Village Smithy, Popeye, Gehrig,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1975.
17.Murray, “Garvey: Part Village Smithy.”
18.Sportswriters sometimes called him “Popeye,” and cartoons in the paper always accentuated the feature. “With those arms,” said Sparky Anderson, “he doesn’t even need a bat. He could ‘fist’ the ball off the wall on you.” Murray, “Garvey: Part Village Smithy.”
19.Roy Blount Jr., “Born to Be a Dodger,” Sports Illustrated, April 7, 1975.
20.Garvey and Hamill were actually just a few years apart in age.
21.Cynthia Garvey with Andy Meisler, The Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 171.
22.Rick Reilly, “America’s Sweetheart,” Sports Illustrated, November 8, 1989.
23.Garvey with Meisler, Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey, 136.
24.Jim Murray, “Sour Smell of Success,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1975.
25.Jeff Prugh, “Dodgers Win One and Deny Dissension,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1975.
26.John Hall, “So Help Me,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1977.
12. Dog Days in Dogtown
1.“Environment: The Great Western Drought of 1977,” Time, March 7, 1977. According to the U.S. Geological Society, 1976–77 would end up as the driest two years in California’s recorded history, though scientific records would show that much more severe drought had plagued the region in the distant past. Excerpt from R. W. Paulson et al., comps., “National Water Summary 1988–89—Hydrologic Events and Floods and Droughts: U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 2375” (1989), 59, http://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/impacts/hydrology/state_fd/cawater1.html.
2.Ross Newhan, “In the Other Race, Cey Presses Garvey,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1977.
3.Ross Newhan, “Garvey’s Numbers Game Is ‘Shocking,’” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1977.
4.John Hall, “The Gallery,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1977; Newhan, “Garvey’s Numbers Game.”
5.Newhan, “Garvey’s Numbers Game.”
6.Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 795.
7.Widely quoted.
8.Herman Weiskopf, “Baseball’s Week,” Sports Illustrated, June 19, 1967; “Insiders Say,” The Sporting News, June 20, 1970.
9.Talkin’ Baseball: Baseball Quotes, http://www.baseball-vault.com/baseba
ll-quotes.shtml.
10.“Roller-Coaster to Nowhere,” Time, August 29, 1977.
11.Jimmy Carter, “The President’s Proposed Energy Policy, 18 April 1977,” Vital Speeches of the Day 33, no. 14 (1977): 418–20.
12.The drought would not officially end until the following winter, when a series of monsoon-like storms inundated the region with water.
13. The Right Stuff
1.Ron Kantkowski, “Q+A Steve Yeager,” Las Vegas Sun, April 6, 2006.
2.In 1973 Chuck Yeager had in fact come back in the public limelight, after a period of semiobscurity, for his myriad accomplishments in American aeronautics in the years leading up to the establishment of America’s space program. This was thanks in part to articles that Tom Wolfe wrote on the program back in early 1973, over four issues of Rolling Stone. Titled collectively “Post-orbital Remorse,” the first of four parts began with an examination of the conditions of the astronauts, and of the space program itself, during the launch of the final mission in the country’s moon travel program, Apollo 17.
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