THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (84 page)

Namath, however, symbolized the modern
athlete. The Super Bowl was formed by his
persona
and became
the event that it is in large measure because of his performance
with the 1968 Jets. Hollywood impresario Robert Evans did fabulous
commercials for the NFL, emphasizing the Namath mystique in order
to capture a modern, late 1990s audience. Namath was eventually
elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The
general consensus on his career has always been that, had he not
injured himself at Alabama in 1964, he may well have become the
best quarterback in the game’s history.

The Jets, however, never approached their
1968 level of success. In the 1980s, defensive linemen Mark
Gastineau and Joe Klecko returned a level of sexiness to the team.
Their on-field prancing after tackling quarterbacks led to the
appellation “New York Sack Exchange,” but their ultimate inability
to be truly great stars on teams that failed to go all the way made
them slightly comical. A reality show featuring Gastineau’s ex-wife
and daughter had the effect of turning him into a parody of sorts;
not unlike the near-great Jose Canseco, better known for steroid
injections, “beefcake” poses and ex-wives posing nude.

Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers dominated
pro football in the 1980s and 1990s. Montana won four Super Bowls
and his successor, Steve Young won one. Coach Bill Walsh was there
for three of them. His successor, George Seifert took the second
two. It was a dynasty that, considering its length and breadth,
supercedes even the Vince Lombardi Packers of the 1960s. Defensive
back Ronnie Lott established himself as the best ever to play his
position, While the Jets struggled, Bill Parcells turned the New
York Giants into one of pro football’s great teams. Led by
linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who revolutionized the position, New
York captured titles in 1986 and 1990, the second one coming on the
heels of a defensive-stoppage of Montana’s 49ers.

The Dallas Cowboys, under coach Barry
Switzer, were led by quarterback Troy Aikman, running back Emmitt
Smith and wide receiver Michael Irvin. They captured Super Bowls
after the 1992 and 1993 seasons. In the 2000s, coach Bill Belichick
led the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl victories behind
the quarterbacking of Tom Brady. Brady in many ways was the
anti-Namath. He was clean-cut, every bit the sex symbol that Namath
had been, but not flaunting about it.

The New York Knickerbockers looked to be a
one-year wonder, replaced by teams without true superstars in the
1970s, with the exception of Walt Frazier. Willis Reed’s injury
debilitated him and he never achieved real all-time greatness. In
1971 Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and the Milwaukee
Bucks dominated the NBA. In 1972, the Los Angeles Lakers won 33
straight games under new coach Bill Sharman. Jerry West and Wilt
Chamberlain got revenge on the Knicks for 1970 by destroying them
in a five-game NBA Finals blowout. In 1973, the Lakers and Knicks
met again.

New York had survived an insane seven-game
Eastern Play-Off with the 68-win Boston Celtics of John Havlicek.
They were a determined underdog against Los Angeles. Walt Frazier
earned his way into the Hall of Fame by engineering a hard-fought
upset over the defending NBA champions. It turned out to be Knicks’
“last hurrah.” They have never won another World Championship.

When New York and Los Angeles slipped in the
late 1970s, the NBA lost much of its popularity. Drugs and racial
problems reared their ugly heads. In 1979, Larry Bird of Indiana
State and Magic Johnson of Michigan State played in a memorable
Final Four. It pre-cursored the NBA’s comeback in the next decade,
when Johnson’s Lakers won five titles to three for Bird’s
Celtics.

Michael Jordan carried basketball to new
heights with the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty of the1990s, followed by a
three-year title run by the Los Angeles Lakers from 2000-02.
Ex-Knickerbockers journeyman Phil Jackson coached both Chicago and
L.A., going down in history as the most successful pro coach of all
time. Center Shaquille O’Neal and point man Kobe Bryant led the
Lakers on the court.

****

The 1980s did not produce one single great
baseball dynasty. The Detroit Tigers, the Kansas City Royals, and
especially the “Bash Brothers” Oakland A’s of Jose Canseco, Mark
McGwire, Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, and Rickey Henderson
threatened to become a dominant team for the ages, but like the
1969-71 Baltimore Orioles, one only one of three World Series.

However, in the 1980s and then the 1990s,
cable television expanded baseball’s popularity. ESPN, Fox Sports,
SportsCenter
,
Baseball Tonight
, a host of marvelous
new stadiums, and expanding offense turned baseball into a
mega-sport. Contending teams routinely sold out every game on their
schedule, an utterly unheard-of, undreamt-of conception in 1969,
yet by the 2000s the Yankees and other teams were drawing 4 million
fans a year.

The Atlanta Braves dominated National League
play with their great pitching staff of Greg Maddux, John Smoltz
and Tom Glavine in the 1990s. The rivalry between the Boston Red
Sox and Yankees became the most exciting in all of sports. In 2003,
the Yankees beat Boston on a home run by Aaron Boone in the
12
^th
inning of the deciding play-off game at Yankee
Stadium. The next season, Boston trailed New York, three games to
none. It was over. Led by heroic pitcher Curt Schilling, the Bosox
became the only team ever to come back from a 3-0 deficit to win
the series, 4-3. They captured their first World Championship since
Babe Ruth in 1918, a four-game sweep of St. Louis in the Fall
Classic.

Mark McGwire of the Cardinals broke Roger
Maris’s single-season home run record with 70 in 1998, beating out
Chicago’s Sammy Sosa. San Francisco’s Barry Bonds broke McGwire’s
record with 73 in 2001, re-capturing America’s imagination in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11. In 2007 he broke Hank Aaron’s all-time
mark of 755 (Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record of 714 in 1974). It
turned out McGwire, Sosa and Bonds were all juiced to the gills on
steroids. This and other like news only strengthens the notion that
the 1969 Mets represented a last vestige of innocence in
sports.

Whatever happened to . . .?

“I just hope the man upstairs will let me
in.”

- Leo Durocher on his mortality

The Chicago Cubs were a shell-shocked crew
in 1970, but a talented one. They could go one of several
directions. They could re-group, determined to make up for the lost
1969 campaign, or they could spiral into another direction. To the
extent that they went in either direction, and this of course being
the Chicago Cubs, they went for the second option. Chicago managed
to lose 10 games in a row at one point during the summer. With
struggling Pittsburgh and New York unable to break away, they were
still in the race well into September, but ultimately folded again
to finish in second at 84-78.

Then came the “Joe Pepitone era”; strange,
garish uniform designs, and general mediocrity. In 1984, Chicago
gained “revenge” for the 1969 season by winning the National League
East with a 96-65 record under manager Jim Frey over the New York
Mets (90-72). In the best-of-five play-offs, they took a commanding
2-0 lead behind ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe over an uninspiring San
Diego Padres club. Then San Diego came back to tie it at two games
each. In the fifth game, leading 3-0 behind Sutcliffe into the
sixth, everything fell apart.

In the bottom of the seventh, Leon Durham
allowed an easy grounder to skip below his glove. Three straight
hits followed and Steve Garvey’s Padres captured the game, 6-3 to
win the series. It was certainly at this point if not before that
Chicagoans began to address the possibility of some kind of “Cubs
curse.” Theories about the billy goat in 1945 and other phenomena
circulated.

In 2003, this concept was given further fuel
when the Cubs blew a late lead to the Florida Marlins in the
National League Championship Series at Wrigley Field. Pitcher Mark
Prior was cruising along when an easy pop foul was prevented from
being caught by Chicago left fielder Moises Alou because a fan
stuck his glove out at the last second. Prior subsequently fell
apart. Next-day starter Kerry Wood, previously invulnerable, was
also knocked about, and the Cubs blew their last, best shot at the
World Series. Further bad luck followed: Prior and Wood, a
potential pitching combination worthy of mention with
Seaver-Koosman, Palmer-McNally, and Koufax-Drysdale, both suffered
injuries that appear to have destroyed any further hint of
greatness.

Leo Durocher managed the Chicago Cubs
through 92 games of the 1972 season. His great stars – Ron Santo,
Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Billy Williams, Randy Hundley, and
particularly Ernie Banks – started to get old on him. Pittsburgh
became the dominant team in the East Division from 1970 to 1972. He
never understood Ken Holtzman, who was traded for Rick Monday in a
bad, bad trade for Chicago. Billy Hands never fully developed.
Durocher did not grasp the nuances of the new game; a strong
bullpen, platooning, and the modern psychology. He was old
school.

In 1973, the Houston Astros hired him. In
the first half of that season he had a talented club playing strong
baseball, but they folded down the stretch and that was it for Leo.
Durocher finished 2,008-1,709 in 24 years as a manager. He won
pennants at Brooklyn in 1941, New York in 1951 and 1954; a sole
World Series with the ’54 Giants. He was a winner, not a whiner,
but not honorable.

Leo faded into a life of golf, drinks and
stories with Frank Sinatra, telling tall tales to anybody who would
listen about his prowess with women, umpires and Willie Mays. To
him, the 1969 Cubs were a baseball version of the
Wehrmacht
,
who in Adolf Hitler’s warped mind let him down. Leo was not a guy
to take the blame, either.

He lobbied for the Hall of Fame, but never
got there in his lifetime. Three years after passing away, he was
inducted in 1994. He lobbied through the media to Christ, too,
giving a self-justifying interview in which he seemed to explain
the merits of why, when all was said and done, he deserved
salvation.

“I just hope the man upstairs will let me
in,” he concluded. Chances are worse men than Leo have walked
through the pearly gates, so hope remains eternal.

One can look at great pitchers throughout
baseball history, and it is not difficult to conclude that, say,
Tom Seaver, Jim Palmer and Steve Carlton, just to name a few
contemporaries, were better than Ferguson Jenkins. Maybe they were,
but in truth, it was by a pretty slim margin.

For some reason Jenkins does not get his
due. It is too easy to blame race. Bob Gibson is black and probably
ranked a little higher than his numbers merit. Mainly, it is
because Jenkins never pitched in a World Series; had a couple of
his best years in the relative wasteland of Texas; and got arrested
for cocaine possession.

Where Seaver dominated, Gibson was
overwhelming, Palmer was elegant, and Carlton’s talent was dazzling
to the eye, Jenkins was a Chicago-style blue-collar workhorse who
pitched fast, fast, fast. He just pumped ‘em in there and a couple
hours later had won, 3-1 with seven strikeouts. Four days later he
repeated the trick.

The Ontario native won 20 for the third
straight year in 1969. He extended that streak to a very impressive
six and seven out of eight, going 25-12 for Texas in 1974. Jenkins
pitched a lot of innings with a lot of complete games, did not
maintain microscopic earned run averages, and usually lost more
than 10 games a year. He could be hit, but come back for his next
start none the worse for wear. He finished 16 shy of 300 wins, with
a 3.34 lifetime ERA. He beat out Seaver for the 1971 Cy Young award
even though his ERA was a full 1.01 higher than Seaver’s insane
1.76. Ferguson was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1991.

Kenny Holtzman finished 17-13 with a 3.59
earned run average in 1969, then duplicated that at 17-11 with a
3.38 ERA in 1970, the year he threw a no-hit game. In 1971 he had
an off year, going 9-15 with a 4.48 ERA, but he threw
another
no-hitter, against Cincinnati. He wore out his welcome with Leo
and was traded to Oakland. It was either the worst place in
baseball for him or the best. The A’s fought, scrapped and clawed.
Racial epithets were routinely thrown around their clubhouse. Guys
were getting in fights all the time, usually because one starting
pitcher might steal a reliever’s girlfriend, or some such thing.
Holtzman was immediately saddled with the nickname “Jew.” In
Oakland, it was their way of saying, “We love you, man.” He was not
their only Jewish player, either. First baseman Mike Epstein looked
like a Mossad enforcer. They called him “Super Jew.”

It was the best place for Kenny.

The A’s had won the division in 1971 but
were smoked by Baltimore, three straight in the play-offs. Holtzman
was the missing piece in their puzzle. In 1972 he was 19-11 with a
2.51 earned run average. He won 21 games in 1973 with a 2.97 ERA,
and was the epitome of a clutch, ace performer in countless, huge,
we-really-need-you-today-Kenny post-season games for the three-time
World Champion, five-time division champion “Swingin’ A’s.”

Charlie O. Finley broke up one of the greatest
dynasties in history and it did not bode well for Holtzman.
According to Sparky Lyle’s
The Bronx Zoo
, when he pitched
for Billy Martin with the Yankees, Martin was a legitimate
anti-Semite who undoubtedly did not like him. Martin was eventually
fired in Oakland when he observed that the A’s ownership and front
office had “too many Jews.” Holtzman just faded from the game when
the time was right and went into business, which he always planned
to do.