THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (7 page)

Other athletes have been smart. Moe Berg was
an OSS spy. Bill Bradley was a Rhodes Scholar. Wilt Chamberlain was
an intellect. But few if any were the complete package as was
Seaver; a combination of looks, education, uprightness and
unmatched athletic greatness.

Charles Seaver, Tom’s father, played
football and basketball at Stanford University. He was also one of
the finest golfers in the world at one time. In 1932 he competed
for the United States in the prestigious Walker Cup, an amateur
trophy named for the family of two Presidents: George W. Bush and
his father, George Herbert
Walker
Bush. Famed radio
broadcaster Ted Husing announced that Seaver defeated his British
opponent, Eric Fiddian, thus securing for the U.S. their seventh
Walker Cup title.

After winning the Walker Cup, Charles
returned to Stanford and defeated a golf teammate named Lawson
Little. When courting his wife, their dates more often than not
were putting contests for nickels and dimes. After graduation came
marriage, membership in the aptly named Sunnyside Country Club in
Fresno, California and a rising executive career with the Bonner
Packing Company.

This was the central California of John
Steinbeck’s novels, but Charles Seaver was a successful businessman
who protected his young family from the Great Depression. Fresno
and environs were “America’s fruit basket” or “salad bowl,”
providing grapes, figs, peaches, oranges, and vegetables to fruit
stands and grocery stores.

Fresno is a town that gets very hot in the
summer and is subject to strange “tule fogs” in the winter. Despite
being in California, it a place with a passion for sports that more
resembles Texas or Oklahoma. Charles raised a family in idyllic
California suburbia. The family backyard included cherry, orange
and fig trees. The streets were safe for the kids to ride bikes and
get into mischief. The little league fields were well kept,
supported by an enthusiastic community. He kept up his golf game,
winning the Fresno city tournament six times. Weekends were spent
at the country club. Charles and his wife watched their four
children splash in the pool, play golf and whack tennis balls.

The kids included Charles Jr., who took to
golf like his old man. Next was Katie, a swimmer in the manner of
her aunt, who had surfed Hawaii’s wild rides. Carol was also a
swimmer.

“There was good clean competition in our
home, and you earned what you got,” said Charles. “The only thing
provided for you was emotional security.”

George Thomas was the youngest. The Battle
of the Bulge was about to get underway when he was born in the late
fall of 1944. Victory in Europe came less than six month later; the
conquering of Japan a few months after that. He would grow up in a
post-war Baby Boomer environment that has been mythologized by such
books as David Halberstam’s
The Fifties
: California
barbecuing, drinks on the patio, socializing with neighbors, the
kids’ fast friends. Capitalism had not just survived, it had
thrived. The Great Depression, the New Deal; done, dead. These were
the Eisenhower years and this was the middle class, the American
Dream. But in this West Coast version of the Kennedys, being
youngest meant fighting for everything you got.

“When you are the fourth child in a family,
you probably have to be a little tougher to survive,” his mother
told friends.

“His dad was Tom’s idol,” Charles Jr. said.
“Our father was a perfectionist and he taught his boys to be the
same way.”

For reasons that have never really been
explained, he went by his middle name from an early age. Tom played
in the back yard with imaginary friends, one of whom was his alter
ego, “George.” He took to baseball over and above all other
activities. The game was coming into its own as a televised sport.
Tom imitated the players, sliding into “home,” declaring himself
“safe,” arguing with the “umpire.”

Eventually he was allowed to leave the house
on his own, to venture into a street past sprinklers watering
lawns. The music of the era was Pat Boone, not Nirvana. It was the
age of innocence, the last vestiges of a by-gone era before drugs,
the anti-war protests of the 1960s, pornography, and the
bone-chilling fear of child molestation.

Tom made fast friends with a neighbor boy
named Russ Scheidt. They played baseball together. In 1953, with
the Korean War coming to an end, eight-year old Tom Seaver showed
up for little league try-outs. The coach, a high school teacher
named Hal Bicknell, noticed that he was the smallest boy and told
him he needed to be at least nine. He ran home bawling into the
arms of his mother, but resolved to come back the next year. When
the time finally came, he made the North Rotary team of the Fresno
Spartan League.

Tom was immediately installed as a pitcher,
the most important position on the field. One day an adult rooting
for the opposing team shouted a stream of insults at young Tom, who
cried but kept on pitching.

“He had this tremendous desire to succeed,
to win,” recalled Bicknell. He “didn’t complain, didn’t quit, just
poured it right in there.”

Charles Sr. went to the games but was never
a “little league parent,” pushing his kids to be something they did
not want to be. He encouraged his son as he did all his children,
but always stressed education above everything else. Charles was a
perfectionist and instilled that in young Tom, but the desire
extended beyond baseball to all things he endeavored in.

Tom achieved the pinnacle of his little
league world, batting .543 and throwing a perfect game. Getting
back to that level of perfection would drive his pitching career
well into the big leagues. Tom’s mother read him a children’s book
called
The Little Engine That Could
.

“The lesson got through to me,” he said. “I
grew to share my mother’s optimism, her feeling that everything
would work out, that any goal could be achieved.”

For some reason he could not master golf as
he did baseball. Angry and frustrated, his mother told him she
would not play with him as long as he threw his clubs after bad
shots, but he did follow Charles Sr. on the course, learning the
art of quiet concentration.

“I’ve got the ability of self-control and
discipline on the mound, and I certainly got that from my dad,” he
said.

Fresno in the 1950s and 1960s may well have
been the sports capital of America. It was a competitive
environment, producing young kids who went on to great success on
the diamond. Jim Maloney came out of Fresno to become one of the
hardest-throwing strikeout pitchers in baseball, the ace of the
Cincinnati Reds. Dick Ellsworth was another hard-throwing chucker
who went to the Mets. The 1959 Fresno State Bulldogs made it to the
College World Series.

The town did not merely produce baseball
stars. Tom Flores was a quarterback hero who would star for the
Oakland Raiders, later leading them to two Super Bowl titles as
their coach. Daryle Lamonica followed Flores. After Notre Dame he
became a two-time American Football League Most Valuable Player,
quarterbacking the Raiders into the 1968 Super Bowl.

Little league ends at age 12. When the boys
turn 13, they move on to Babe Ruth League play, which means making
the enormous leap from small-field dimensions to a regular diamond;
pitcher’s mound 60 feet, six inches from home plate, the bases 90
feet apart. It is the end of many a “career.” It almost was the end
for Tom Seaver.

He had a friend named Dick Selma. He and
Selma were rivals throughout little league, competing for star
status, their teams for supremacy. It was an even rivalry until
junior high school. Selma continued to grow. As he entered Fresno
High School he was reaching six feet in height with a muscular
build. Tom was still 5-6 and 140 pounds as a high school sophomore.
On top of all else, Tom was by virtue of being born in November
younger than most of his classmates, some of whom were born in
January and therefore were almost a year older at a time when that
year means everything in a kid’s development.

“He was the runt of our crowd,” Selma
recalled.

Selma made the Fresno High varsity as a
sophomore, a singular honor that separates a young man from the
pack. Tom barely made the junior varsity. While Selma impressed the
local prep media and professional scouts, Seaver remained a JV. To
still be a JV in one’s junior year, as he was, invariably means
that one lacks the skills to go beyond high school if indeed he
makes the varsity in his last try as a senior. Tom did not throw
hard, but he was smart. He learned how to set up hitters, to change
speeds, developing a curve and even a knuckler.

“Tom was a hell of a pitcher, as contrasted
to a thrower, even when he was on the JVs,” Selma recalled when he
got to the big leagues. “He knew how to set up hitters, and him
just in high school, I’m still learning now.”

High school sports success often dictates
one’s place in the social hierarchy. Being a career JV was a
comedown after little league stardom, but Tom had much more going
for him. Despite his lack of size, he was a good-looking kid with
an outgoing personality. Tom had easygoing charm and the gift of
repartee. He was popular with teachers, with teammates, but most
importantly with pretty girls. Above all other things, this is the
prized attribute that determines a high school boys’ place in the
pecking order. He was a good student who decided he wanted to
become a dentist.

“He was a real happy-go-lucky guy,” Selma
said. “He had a lot of friends and he always dated all the
good-looking girls.”

In his senior year, Tom went out for
basketball, mainly to stay in shape for baseball. He was determined
that he would make the most of what looked to be his last year of
athletic competition. He was a 5-10, 165-pound guard whose natural
athleticism shone through. Surprisingly, he made the all-city
team.

The scouts were out in force, but not to see
him. Selma was on everybody’s radar and would eventually sign with
the expansion New York Mets for $20,000. Tom did manage to make it
into the starting rotation. Still lacking any heat, he was
effective enough throwing off-speed pitches with control to win six
games against five losses and a place on the all-city baseball
team, “mostly because there wasn’t anyone else to choose,” he
recalled. “When the professional scouts came around, looking over
the local talent, some of the other kids got good offers. I didn’t
even get a conversation; not one scout approached me.”

It was the beginning of the magical “summer
of ’62,” the year depicted by filmmaker George Lucas, who grew up
in nearby Modesto and would attend the University of Southern
California with Seaver. The world Lucas showed in
American
Graffiti
was the only one Tom Seaver knew. It was a unique
central California culture of cars and girls. Tom Seaver’s Fresno
was not quite
The Beach Boys’
Southland surf magic, nor the
brewing, dangerous mix of angry protest, harmful drugs and
unprotected sex that would have such ultimately devastating
consequences in the Bay Area.

Songwriter Stephen Stills wrote a famous
line: “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly
clear.” Indeed, in California something
was
happening there.
It had been going on there for decades. Tom Seaver would come to
symbolize what it was.

California’s political
ethos
can be
traced back to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln promoted the building
of the Trans-continental railroad. He received his greatest
financial backing from the railroad companies. A look at the map
leaves one pondering why the line was built over the difficult
terrain of the Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges, to San Francisco,
instead of the relatively flat lands of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, the
Southern California desert, and on into Los Angeles. The reason is
that had it been built over the “Southern route,” slaves would have
built it. Lincoln could not condone that.

When the Civil War ended a large migration
to California occurred. Northerners from Boston and New York who
supported the Union tended to favor San Francisco. Former
Confederates favored Los Angeles. Later, when the Rose Bowl became
popular, Midwesterners flocked to the warm lands of Southern
California. As a result, the north took on a more liberal, secular
nature. The south became more conservative and Christian.

However, inter-mixing within California
created a general mindset popular statewide. It became a
progressive place, a trendsetter, a place of new ideas. In the
north, a strong civil rights movement developed. Orange County and
environs remained Right-wing, but on matters of race its white,
Christian citizenry developed a sense of moderation unlike their
Southern brethren, who thought like them on most other matters such
as anti-Communism and small government.

Two Southern California political figures
embodied this way of thinking. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan
ascended to the White House in large measure on the strength of
Southern support. Together, they husbanded the South “into the
Union,” so to speak, by making palatable to the South the
conservative-yet-racially-moderate views of Orange County and
California in general.

So it was that in the 1950s and 1960s, a
young white boy growing up in an affluent California suburb would
feel free to choose as his sports hero a black man without thinking
twice about it; with no repercussions from disapproving friends and
family. When Tom Seaver was a young boy in Fresno, California, the
Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. There were no Pacific
Coast League teams near him. As a fan, he was a “free agent.” He
was not pre-disposed to root for white stars like Mickey Mantle of
the Yankees or Ted Williams of the Red Sox. Willie Mays of the
Giants and Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers, teams whose fan bases he
lived in, were not yet in the Golden State. He chose Henry Aaron,
the smooth-swinging outfielder of the Milwaukee Braves who at that
time was an emerging superstar.