October 1964

by David Halberstam

  He was quiet and reserved, far more introverted than Mantle, with whom he was invariably compared. His had not been an easy childhood; his father had worked for the railroad for small pay and was a hard and unsparing man. Boyhood friends thought Maris’s childhood had never been easy, and there was a time when he had even lived with another family for part of a year. He had none of Mantle’s exuberance, gregariousness, or, for that matter, his mood swings. In the locker room, he was never the show that Mantle was. Mantle, for all his reservations about the press, his moodiness and his modesty, was always aware of his role in baseball history as the star of the Yankees. Even if on occasion he felt burdened by it, he quite liked being on center stage at Yankee Stadium, the heir to the tradition of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, with all the challenge and all the glory implicit in that role. Mantle was, thought Jim Bouton, like a long-running Broadway show all his own—funny and tragic, difficult and engaging, but always well acted. It was a rare performance by a player who always understood the special glory of being the star. If Mantle had any regrets about his role, they were momentary, and in the end the glory far outweighed the burden.

  Maris was completely different. He liked to play baseball, and he was good at it, but he pulled back from the theatrics associated with the game. Most ballplayers, thought Maury Allen, a talented sportswriter who covered Maris in those years and knew him exceptionally well, liked to say that they did not care about getting their names in the papers or their faces on television; but Roger Maris, more than any other player Allen knew, truly felt that way. He liked playing the game, but everything else was extraneous. He disliked dealing with the media—not necessarily the media people themselves but the daily byplay. “I’m not a good talker, get someone else,” he would usually say when reporters tried to grab him for interviews. He was a physical man, not a verbal one: he was skilled in the use of his body, not in the use of words. Social encounters were difficult for him and left him distinctly uncomfortable. In that 1961 season, when he hit his twenty-seventh home run and seemed to be on a record pace, a reporter asked him the big question for the first time: did he think he had a chance to break Ruth’s record. His answer was pure Maris: “How the fuck do I know?”

  Since he was a man who did his job, he understood to some degree that the beat reporters had their jobs to do as well, and he would try to be reasonably accommodating with them. He was better with reporters he knew than with strangers, and he had a reputation with the Yankee beat reporters as being unusually fair, straight, and consistent in his moods. But his answers were always as short as he could make them. He would talk about what pitch he had hit and how he had played a hitter, but he never allowed the writers to get inside his mind or his personality. When they tried to do that, and in 1961 they tried little else, a curtain came down immediately. There was a certain edginess and defensiveness about Maris. He was quick to find and, on occasion, to hold resentments, and even those men who were fond of him were aware that if, for some reason, Maris felt he had been let down, he never forgave it. In his first two years on the Yankees, most of the reporters, especially some of the younger ones, quite liked him. They felt themselves outsiders in the world of the Yankees, and, thanks to his competition with Mickey Mantle, Maris was always going to be cast by the fans and even his teammates as an outsider as well. There was to him, thought the writer Larry Merchant, who quite liked him, a wonderful kind of indigenous American populist sourness, handed down in a family that had never known success or wealth, and where there was an innate conviction that those who had wealth and power always screwed those who did not. Maris reminded Merchant very much of men he had met in the army, constantly griping, constantly irritable, and yet surprisingly tough and good at everything to which they were assigned. In 1961, Whitey Ford had joked that he was going to form a cabinet just like Jack Kennedy’s, except he was going to assign his ballplayers to the cabinet positions. Maris’s job, he noted, was going to be Secretary of Grievances.

  Maris gave his trust slowly and reluctantly. He was much better in one-on-one interviews than he was when a group gathered around his locker, for then he was sure reporters he did not know would quote something out of context, or in some way cause him harm. “Shit-stirrers,” he and some of the other players called such reporters, that is, men who were out to cause trouble by exaggerating some small tension or problem in their articles. What an irony, then, that Roger Maris involuntarily became one of the first modern athletes caught in the glare of the new media society. As the power of television grew in the late fifties and early sixties, those who were propelled forward in sports and other walks of life began to find themselves under a new, relentless scrutiny. In many cases they loved the fame, in some cases they were indifferent to it, and in some cases, such as that of Roger Maris, they truly hated it. In the past, sports had been sports, and while it is true that it was also a form of entertainment, the athletes themselves, with few exceptions, were first and foremost athletes, not entertainers, and by and large that was the way they thought of themselves. They were supposed to go out there, play hard, and win, and if they did, that was enough. But with the coming of television, things began to change: the show was now as important as the event—the athlete was supposed to be not just someone who did his job but someone who was a star as well.

  Maris, a man of old-fashioned values and loyalties, an honorable man who tried to live within his own code, was completely unprepared for this new definition of the athlete. Unfortunately, his assault upon Ruth’s record was probably the first great sustained sports story in the age of modern media. At first print reporters seized on it, which soon whetted an appetite for television coverage, and as television coverage followed the chase with an ever more watchful eye, that inspired even greater print coverage. In addition, it had continuity, something the media loved, and became, day after day, a great running story. As the interest in him grew, he encountered a changing definition of what his fellow Americans wanted to know about him. They did not, it now appeared, care whether or not he had hit an inside curveball or a low fastball; instead, they wanted to know what he thought and what he felt about a vast number of things, including a good many about which he had no thoughts or feelings at all. Millions of Americans wanted to know what Roger Maris was really like, and they wanted to know every day for more than two months. It was a sea change in the nature of media, and it foretold the coming of a media-obsessed society, a society that would culminate almost three decades later when People magazine sold more advertising than its older and more traditional sibling, Time magazine.

  Perhaps even three years earlier, he might have chased Ruth’s record with far less commotion, and he would have been covered under the old rules, the simpler rules of print. But in 1961, Americans were watching live televised press conferences of their president, dazzling performances really, and they watched Alan Shepard, the first astronaut, lift off live from Cape Canaveral. In the next year the networks, responding to better and better technology and a great hunger for news, went from fifteen-minute news shows to half-hour ones. For John Kennedy the coming of television was a great boon, and it had greatly aided his campaign; when Kennedy had debated his opponent, live, on television the year before—the first time that had ever been done—it had greatly enhanced his candidacy. In addition, it made him a star. The American people wanted to know not just about his policies, but about his family, and what he ate, and what he wore, and what he read. Kennedy was perfectly comfortable with this new entertainment-driven definition of politics, certain always that he could use it to his advantage. At about the same time, a brilliant young heavyweight boxer named Cassius Clay understood intuitively that he was as much star and entertainer as boxer, and that he was engaged in theater of a high order. He gloried in his new role and orchestrated the show as no athlete had ever done before him. His weigh-ins became as exciting as some of his fights, and he began to write poems in which he predicted when his opponent would fall.

  What Clay and so
on Joe Namath pursued with zest and brilliance, Roger Maris pulled back from with fear and loathing. He was being pulled before a spotlight he never sought, the likes of which had never been turned on a baseball player before. It permitted others, strangers, to examine him in a way he did not want to be examined. So it was that he faced a terrible dilemma in that fateful season, for every time he hit a home run, and every time he came a little closer to breaking Ruth’s record, he lost just a little more of his most precious commodity, his privacy. As he neared the record, the crowd of reporters grew larger, and the questions became more and more personal. “Do you play around on the road?” a reporter from Time magazine asked. “I’m a married man,” Maris answered. “I’m a married man, too,” said the reporter, “but I play around on the road.” Worse, there were to be heroes and villains in this, as in every great story, and Maris, somewhat to his surprise (for he was only doing what he was paid to do), became a villain. Not everyone, it turned out, wanted Babe Ruth’s record broken, especially older fans. Many younger fans, on the other hand, were quite willing to see it fall, but only if it fell to Mantle, whose team this rightfully was.

  In 1960, Maris had played in the Stadium regularly for the first time, and he had hit 25 home runs in less than half a season; at one point he was slightly ahead of Ruth. For the first time there had been mention of his name in connection with the Ruth record. Even though he injured himself, he had still ended up with 39 home runs in only 136 games and had been the Most Valuable Player in the American League. Mantle had led the league with 40 home runs in 153 games, and 28 more at bats. Maris later told his friend Mike Shannon that the ambition to beat Mantle in 1961 had been a calculated affair. He had been goaded into it, he told Shannon, by the fans. In 1960, they had begun to cheer Mantle and boo him, and he decided quietly to get even by beating Mantle out for the club home-run championship. If they wanted to boo, he would give them something to boo about. He set out to lead the club, an amused Shannon said years later, as much as anything else, out of spite. This was a rare admission by Maris, for again and again, both during and after that season, when the subject of the home-run derby came up and reporters asked about the apparent competition with Mantle, Maris would shrug it off and say that he was just having a good season. In truth, he thought he could do it because of the short right-field porch, which was a target for him far more often than it was for Mantle. So it was that both of them had gone at the home-run title with a vengeance that season. If Mickey was going to hit two, Maris told Shannon, then he was damn well going to hit two as well. As far as he was concerned, it was all about home runs, and his batting average (for he was a .260 to .280 hitter in those days) did not matter. That offended some purists, who favored Mantle, in part, because he was a .300 hitter as well. Theirs was an unspoken competition, for Mantle, proud and every bit as competitive, understood the game from the start. For Maris, it was a year in which everything went right for him on the field. He seemed to be in a groove for most of the season, he saw the ball exceptionally well, and it just seemed to jump off his bat that year. His health was good for the entire season, which was rare for him. Because Mantle was hitting behind him, Maris knew he was likely to see a lot of good pitches, and it became clear early in the season that he had a genuine shot at the Ruth record.

  A great sports team is always a surprisingly delicate mechanism, because it includes all kinds of egocentric, highly motivated people with a common objective: to win. Yet, at the same time, great teams demand enough talented players with similar goals and drives whose egos may very easily clash. On a great team such tensions are resolved because the idea of winning is so powerful. But they remain just beneath a thin veneer of unity, and they often surface when the idea of winning is not so powerful. With the Yankees in 1961, those tensions abounded even though both Mantle and Maris handled their personal rivalry with exceptional maturity. This was Mickey Mantle’s team, and Roger Maris never had any illusions about that. Mantle was a far greater player certainly than Maris, who saw himself quite realistically, and knew his own strengths and limitations better than most of his critics did. The two players were friends, it was true, and for a few months that season they even roomed together, along with Bob Cerv, who was a close friend of Maris’s. But it was, in the words of Julie Isaacson, a cool friendship, one of men who at once liked each other but were not close, and the fierce, unspoken competitiveness hovered always. There was no animosity, though, and no hard words. Later, when sportswriters claimed there was a considerable bitterness between them, they were wrong. The bitterness was between Maris and the fans, and subsequently the Yankee management. Though it should have been the easiest thing in the world to root for both men, that was not what happened. Everyone, it seemed, had to take sides that year, and almost everyone, of course, favored Mantle. Maris was made to feel the interloper, even by the Yankee organization. The problem, as Julie Isaacson later said, was that the wrong guy had broken the record.

  Maris lacked the skill and the desire to win the fans over. His greatest sin, as far as the media contingent covering him was concerned, was that he not only was boring, he liked being boring. Worse, the larger the media contingent grew, the more determined he became to seem, if anything, even more boring than he really was. He was a man absolutely without pretense, and he wore no face save his own. He was not graceful or subtle. He was almost always blunt, sometimes unspeakably so. Late in the assault Al Kaline, the Detroit right fielder, retrieved a ball that Maris hit off Frank Lary for home run number fifty-seven—it had bounced back on the field and Kaline tossed it into the Yankee dugout as a souvenir for Maris. After the game, one of the Detroit writers suggested to Maris that what Kaline had done had been a very nice thing, and Maris, blunt as ever, curiously obtuse about how his words would later appear to readers, said no, it was something that anyone would have done, and that he would have done the same thing for Kaline. To the New York beat writers, that was simply Maris being Maris, but the Detroit writers were offended.

  At the end of the season, when Maris wrote his authorized account of the home-run chase, he chose for his co-author Jim Ogle of the Newark Star Ledger, one of the least known beat reporters, but a true Yankee loyalist. He did this because he liked and trusted Ogle. The result was exactly the kind of book Maris wanted, almost completely devoid of color and humanity; it was written statistically, home run by home run, as if by an accountant. Maris could never summon up the heroic words and images to go with his heroic deeds. Writers described him in desperation as a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy who got along well with his teammates and wanted his team to win. So the reporters would gather around his locker and he would say that he had hit a low inside fastball or a hanging curve, or that he was just doing his job as best he could, or that he liked Mickey and they were good friends, or that he revered Babe Ruth and knew he was not as good a player as Ruth. (When he did that people wrote in complaining, Who was Maris to compare himself with Ruth?)

  As the pressure closed in on him, he became more and more superstitious. Early in the season he had Julie Isaacson drive out to Queens to pick him up, and they went into Manhattan and ate a late breakfast at the Stage Deli, a famed New York Jewish deli in the theater district. Maris, who loved eggs and baloney, forced Big Julie Isaacson to have eggs with chopped-up baloney in it. “Roger, Jewish guys don’t eat baloney and eggs,” Isaacson protested, but Maris insisted that Isaacson eat his eggs in what he claimed was Fargo style. Isaacson, knowing how stubborn Maris could be, surrendered and ate his eggs with baloney. That day Maris hit two home runs. Clearly the eggs and baloney were an omen, and so from then on, they had to go to the Stage every day when the Yanks were home, and they had to have the same table, and the same waitress, and Big Julie had to eat his eggs with baloney.

  As he got closer to the record, the reporters Maris knew and trusted became a minority, greatly outnumbered by others from publications he had never heard of, and who clearly had no interest in baseball. The more he became the story, the
warier he became. The Yankees, completely unprepared for the media circus, gave him no help, offered him no protection, and set no guidelines. They let him, stubborn, suspicious and without guile, hang out there alone, utterly ill prepared for this ordeal; they never gave him a press officer to serve as a buffer between him and the media, or even set certain times when he would deal with the reporters, so that it would not be a constant burden. They did not filter requests, or tell him whom he might trust and whom he might not or which requests were legitimate and which were trivial.

  Under all this pressure, Maris grew more and more irritable. He found that he could go nowhere without a phalanx of journalists. When, late in the season, after he had hit more than fifty home runs, a reporter asked him about the record, he answered, “What record? Am I close to it? I don’t want to talk about it. Do you want me to concede defeat? If you do, I’ll concede, all right?” But he tried all season to be a good teammate. On days when he did nothing, and when Elston Howard or another player won the game for the Yankees, the crowd of reporters would swarm around his locker anyway, and he would try to guide them to Howard’s locker instead. “Talk to Ellie,” he would say. “He won the game for us.” No one, of course, moved toward Howard’s locker. It got worse and worse: Maris’s hair began to fall out because of nerves, and he developed a number of rashes. His wife came to visit him in New York, looked at his hair, and told him he looked like a molting bird near the end of the season. The chase was made more difficult because the commissioner, a former Ruth ghostwriter, Ford Frick, noted that Ruth had set his record in a season of 154 games. Therefore, there should be an asterisk beside Maris’s name, Frick suggested. In effect, that left him with two deadlines: he could break the record within 154 games and enter the record book clean and unsoiled, or he could do it in 162 games and enter the book with an asterisk.