THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (4 page)

But the most indelible minds-eye image is of
the green grass of Shea Stadium, the pretty-blue pinstriped
uniforms of the Mets, that awesome “NY” insignia on the cap which,
despite being a rip-off of both the Yankees
and
the Giants,
nevertheless had a uniqueness all its own. Then there were those
wonderful gray Baltimore road flannels, the black-and-orange
ensembles and their own great symbol, the bird image on black
cap.

But it was Shea Stadium that seemed to be a
character in and of itself. A new stadium is finally going up in
Flushing Meadows, but for years, decades really, Shea was thought
of as a dump. In 1969, however, it was a baseball palace. Outside
of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Busch Stadium in St. Louis,
perhaps the wondrous Houston Astrodome – plus a few others - in
1969 most baseball stadiums were decrepit and old.

A series of “cookie-cutter” monstrosities in
Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and elsewhere would be built.
All would need to be torn down to make way for real baseball parks.
Over time, stadiums in Baltimore, Cleveland, Seattle and other
cities would be done right, and in comparison Shea Stadium would
not hold it own.

But Yankee Stadium was seven years from its
renovation. With the Bronx becoming a gangland killing field, the
Yankees a shell of their old selves, and the Stadium itself more
than half empty, the “House That Ruth Built” did not have the 1969
imprimatur of Shea Stadium. Just four years old, Shea provided
modern amenities in what was, by New York standards, a suburban
atmosphere. It was easily accessible by freeway from the white
enclaves of Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County. Its
Queens location was thought then to be a safe alternative for a
generation of “Archie Bunkers” who had escaped the meaner streets
of Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was the anti-dote to crowded,
crime-riddled Brooklyn, which the Dodgers fled because their fans
had mostly departed.

But what struck my young mind as most
unusual were the Shea fans. Go to a library, or check your old
baseball book collections, and look at one of those coffee table
histories of the World Series. Look at photos of fans in the stands
at: Yankee Stadium, 1962; Dodger Stadium, 1966; and Busch Stadium,
1968. It is startling and says much about why the 1960s were
considered the time of greatest social upheaval in American
history.

Yankee Stadium, 1962: men, all dressed in
black suits, many wearing hats, smoking pipes, some in dark
sunglasses that made them look like Sam Giancana. Very few women,
but the ones seen are in mink stoles, sunglasses, bouffon hair-dos.
Bored expressions all, little enthusiasm. These are not the regular
season patrons, but rather the “fat cats” with money and
connections to Series tickets unavailable to the average Joe.

Dodger Stadium, 1966: men in white,
short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, sunglasses giving them the
look of vice cops, many wearing visors on a hot day. More women
than at Yankee Stadium, print dresses, sunglasses.

Busch Stadium, 1968: a black-and-white
ensemble (most photos are not in color), the fans looking robotic
in their sameness.

Shea Stadium, 1969: for the first time, the
fans have
character
. A true ensemble. Far more women and a
fair rendering of black people, almost non-existent in previous
years. Enthusiasm, colorful, lots of placards exhorting their
heroes. The fans do not all look like stockbrokers. This scene
portends the extraordinary changes in fan behavior seen in the next
decade, when the fans became wild, unruly, charging the field in
post-game celebrations.

Then there was my uncanny predictive
ability. Youth is a time of unbounded enthusiasm and surety. The
odds do not matter nearly as much as what your heart tells you is
true. Less than a year earlier, I had watched my favorite pro
football team, the Oakland Raiders, take the lead with mere minutes
left on the clock on a blustery December afternoon at Shea Stadium.
Then Joe Willie Namath led the New York Jets on a clutch drive,
resulting in the winning touchdown, giving the Jets the American
Football League title. From there it was on to Miami and a Super
Bowl III match with the 13-1 Baltimore Colts, who went through the
NFL Play-Offs liked Patton’s Army in the early spring of 1945.

Baltimore was an 18-point favorite. Every
prediction from all possible sources agreed with the assessment
that it would not be a game, but rather a coronation for the Colts.
Every prediction, that is, except from Namath himself, who claimed
that his pre-game ritual was to go to bed with “a blonde and a
bottle of Johnnie Walker Red” and “guaranteed” a New York win. In
my young mind, the Jets could not lose. I was utterly positive they
would win. When they did I was the least-surprised person in the
country, except for Namath I guess.

The Mets faced the exact same kind of odds
against another Baltimore opponent, the 109-win Orioles. This was
the juggernaut of juggernauts. They were an even better baseball
powerhouse than the Colts had been a football powerhouse.

I
knew
the Mets would win. There was
no doubt in my mind. The exactness of youth replaced reason or bet
hedging, equivocations. When they did, I was again completely
unsurprised.

Then came the aftermath, and this was where
it got really crazy for me. If I was obsessed before, I was now
possessed
by an overwhelming desire to read, to know,
anything I could get my hands on concerning the New York Mets, Tom
Seaver, and the 1969 baseball season.

First there was the record,
The Amazin’
Mets 1969
. This was a jazzy vinyl re-enactment of the season,
with the recordings of Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson re-creating
all those incredible moments that I had not heard because I did not
have access to Mets’ broadcasts via radio or TV in those pre-cable,
pre-Internet, pre-Syrius radio, pre-podcast days. I listened to
that thing over and over again.

Then there were those back issues of
Sports Illustrated
and
The Sporting News
. I read and
re-read them, committing it all to memory. In the spring of 1970 I
found something that changed my life forever.
The Sporting
News
Official Baseball Guide - 1970
was a complete
re-cap of the 1969 season. Every single detail of the year –
scores, chronology, post-season, stats, trades, attendance,
everything – was found within its pages. I
memorized
it. Not
just the stories, the team summaries and World Series highlights; I
mean the minutiae, the statistical leaders, all of it. That
dog-eared little paperback became the Holy Grail. It was an altar I
worshipped at. It was a “baseball Bible.” I became the world’s
leading baseball expert on the Year of Our Lord 1969.

Then Tom Seaver wrote a book called
The
Perfect Game
, which got into his mind inning-by-inning as he
beat Baltimore in game four at Shea Stadium. Later, Jim Bouton’s
Ball Four
was released. That was not a book about the Mets,
but I must have read it, in whole or in part, 40 times over the
years. I memorized it, too. Bouton went into great detail about his
years playing in New York, so the result of reading
Ball
Four
increased my acute knowledge of all things having to do
with the Big Apple, even though it would be a decade before I ever
visited the place.

I read these books, magazines and
publications for years after the 1969 season. I would just pick one
of them up, flip to a page, and read on. Frankly, it was unhealthy
to be so into any one thing like that, but in looking back I can be
thankful I was addicted to this, not drugs or alcohol. My parents,
my mother in particular, were concerned at my single-mindedness of
interest. She took me to the opera and plays to widen my horizons,
but always my mind wandered back to Tom Seaver and the Mets.

Strangely somehow, my baseball obsession had
an osmosis effect in that love of baseball and baseball history
became love of history, period. In reading
The Glory of Their
Times
,
Baseball Joe
and everything else associated with
the game, I came to learn about America and the world. If Christy
Mathewson and a lot of big leaguers were serving in the Army during
World War I, I came to know about World War I. If Ted Williams
missed several years flying for the Marines during World War II and
Korea, I came to learn about World War II and Korea. If there was a
controversy over Tom Seaver’s proposed public endorsement of a
so-called “Vietnam Moratorium” in 1969, I came to learn about
Vietnam. From there, it all expanded until I came to be a true
historian and culturalist.

So, this book is not just about Tom Seaver
and the Mets. It is about 1969. It was an
amazin’
year not
just because of the Mets, but rather it is a touchstone of American
culture, a tipping point in world history; the end of much, the
beginning of much more.

STEVEN R. TRAVERS

(415) 455-5971

[email protected]

“Joe, Joe, you never heard such
cheering.”

“Yes, I have.”

- Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s cold
reply after she returned from Korea.

The rarest of the breed is the true New York
Sports Icon. One of the greatest of this breed was “born” at 9:55
P.M. Eastern Standard Time at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows,
Queens, New York City on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord
1969. This was not the moment of his Christian birth, but rather
the moment of his ascension into that most esteemed place in
American society. His new “birth” in fact placed him in tricky
territory not necessarily Christian in nature in that he now became
a source of pagan idolatry, the kind that tests man’s ability to
withstand the sins of pride of vanity.

****

Outside of a very few historical figures,
the short list of which includes such names as George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln,
Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin
Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton,
John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong
and Ronald Reagan; the true New York Sports Icon is the next-most
exclusive in this great nation, and therefore probably the
world.

Marilyn Monroe, an iconic figure of the
first order, learned about the exclusive nature of this club when
she returned from a USO tour of Korea in the early 1950s.
Love-starved GIs baptized her in lust and adoration. Upon returning
home she announced to then-husband Joe DiMaggio, “Joe, Joe, you
never heard such cheering.”

DiMaggio was a cold fish, utterly
self-absorbed, amoral in the manner of the Italian Mafiosi he hung
out with despite press coverage that he did not. Writers said he
was the clean Italian-American hero who changed the
gumba
image of a generation of first and second-generation immigrants
from the Old Country.

DiMaggio was more like Don Vito Corleone,
Marlon Brando’s character in
The Godfather
, who had a strict
moral code about sex and drugs that did not extend to the mortal
sin of murder. Okay, DiMaggio was not known to condone killing even
if some of his social companions did. However, he viewed the sexpot
Marilyn with a jaundiced eye, particularly when a blast of wind
from a New City fire grate blew her dress to her head, revealing to
the preying eyes of public spectators, paparazzi, cast, crew, and
eventually the world via the magic of movie, her panties in what
was at that time considered
de facto
pornography.

Marilyn’s breathless exhortation of Army
lust aimed her way in Korea no doubt elicited in Joe D. disturbing
images of his wife in various stages of carnal betrayal of their
wedding vows. Several thousand horny young men in close proximity
to his sex symbol bride, no doubt blowing kisses implicit with the
“promise” of forbidden pleasures, brought out his nasty side.
DiMaggio’s nasty side was both biting and regularly evident.

Now she was telling him had had “never heard
such cheering.”

“Yes, I have,” DiMaggio replied.

Aside from probably being the beginning of
the end for the famed DiMaggio-Monroe marriage, it was a lesson in
true hero worship for Marilyn. Movie stars, rock stars, maybe a few
models or even people who are “famous for being famous” often get
the wrong idea about their own celebrityhood. They mistake the
fawning love and fan obsession for them with heroism. Perhaps they
have moments in which the cheers are louder, the spotlight
brighter, than the attention paid to a General George Patton after
running roughshod over the Nazi
Wehrmacht
, a Presidential
motorcade when the polls are in his favor, or an astronaut after
defying death and touching the Heavens.

But the actor, the rock god, the sex symbol
is a tabloid spectacle, a public relations creation, a performer on
cue. At any given time they may believe the hype, but true iconic
status is reserved for the very rarest among them, and often death
– like masters of art throughout history - must precede the full
impact of their fame. Some who may have achieved this level of
idolatry include Rudolph Valentino, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary
Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Clark
Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Stewart,
Peter O’Toole, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Paul
Newman, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino,
Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John
Huston, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford
Coppola, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,
Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Lennon, Paul
McCartney, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Steven Tyler,
and David Lee Roth.