Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  After learning that the referendum had passed by a two to one margin and that Bryant was spinning the victory as a mandate to take her campaign national, thousands of gay New Yorkers amassed in front of the old Stonewall Inn for an impromptu demonstration. A few hours later the crowd migrated to Abzug’s West Village brownstone. It was now a few hours before dawn, and she was awakened by the rhythmic chanting: “Bel-LAH! Bel-LAH! Bel-LAH!” Her long-suffering husband, Martin, groggily told her she was hearing voices in her head. (No doubt, if Abzug had been hearing voices in her head, that’s exactly what they would have been saying.) But Abzug was sure the voices were coming from outside. She rose out of bed, pulled on her bathrobe and slippers, and stepped out onto her stoop to find hundreds of gay men assembled in front of her Bank Street house. Abzug told them that the struggle for civil rights was a long one and reminded them to vote for her in September.

  Abzug was New York’s feminist earth mother. For the 1977 mayoral race, she decided to update her famous 1970 congressional campaign slogan, “This woman’s place is in the House,” with “Maybe it’s time for me to return to the traditional role of women—and that is to clean up the mess they made!”

  There were two ways to explain New York’s ongoing fiscal crisis. According to one, the banks were the villains. Rather than stand by the city as it grappled with the loss of manufacturing jobs, they had panicked and abruptly dumped all their New York City bonds on an unsuspecting market. Under the other explanation, the labor unions were the bad guys. They had strong-armed City Hall into concession after concession until the public sector payroll was finally so bloated that it broke New York’s financial back.

  Most New Yorkers figured there was enough blame for both parties to share. Not Bella. “Everybody makes the unions the scapegoat, but it was the banks who accelerated the fiscal crisis!” she bellowed. Her first priority as mayor, Abzug vowed, would be to give all out-of-work civil servants their jobs back. At a small gathering in front of Engine Company 269, a red-brick firehouse in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, that had been shuttered because of budget cuts, the candidate promised to reopen this and every other closed engine company in New York. “Right on, Bella!” one local shouted. “Right on, baby!” she yelled back.

  No one did protests better than Bella. At a “Disarm” rally in the Columbia quad, she whipped the young crowd into a frenzy, blaming the violence plaguing New York’s streets on America’s militaristic culture: “A society that sanctioned the horrors of Vietnam, the unbridled growth of the Pentagon, and the CIA’s involvement in the violent overthrow of the governments in Chile and Guatemala should not be surprised when so many Americans turn to individual violence and crime at home.” At a red-lining protest in front of the Greater New York Savings Bank in South Brooklyn, she accused the banks of “destroying neighborhoods” by refusing mortgages to local homeowners and businesses. In the depths of Queens, she demanded that New York State revoke the licenses of real estate brokers who engaged in blockbusting, the use of racial scare tactics to provoke panic selling among white homeowners. In the executive dining room of CUNY’s Graduate Center, she railed against the “traumatic contraction” of the hallowed institution, which had lost thirty-eight thousand students and a thousand faculty members over the past year, and cited the “moral imperative” to provide free higher education to the poor and disadvantaged.

  Nothing got Abzug hotter than Westway, the city’s plan to rebuild the West Side Highway south of Forty-second Street. The blueprints called for burying the highway in a concrete tube beneath the surface of the Hudson, then extending the deck above out into the river to make room for parks and office and apartment buildings. Westway won high marks from architecture critics like the Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable, who described it as “a chance to reclaim the mutilated waterfront and West Side,” and the business community was convinced Westway would promote development in a flagging lower Manhattan. Even setting such practical considerations aside, the symbolic implications were hard to ignore: To many New Yorkers, the very fact that the city was again daring to reach seemed worthy of celebration. Best of all, Westway would be free. The new road would be within the interstate highway system, meaning that the federal government would pick up 90 percent of the tab. The state would pay the rest.

  But Westway also made a logical next front for the community warriors who’d spent the better part of the 1960s beating back large-scale development projects they feared would wreak havoc on the city’s neighborhoods. To them, Westway flew directly in the face of New York’s organically messy essence. It was a big patch that would never become part of the larger fabric of the city. Naysayers needed only point to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial 1974 biography of Robert Moses, to underscore just how destructive overzealous city planners could be.

  The plan’s critics had no trouble persuading Abzug to side with them. She sponsored a clever piece of legislation that would enable cities to swap federal funds earmarked for interstate highways for mass transit money. Instead of getting $1 billion from Washington to build an interstate highway, New York City could opt for $550 million to rehabilitate its subway system, a needy case if ever there were one. Framed as a choice between automobiles and subways, between lining the pockets of real estate developers and improving the lives of workaday New Yorkers, Westway became a perfect foil for Abzug, who saw her beloved city as an overgrown village, a place where the power belonged to the people, not to the men with green eyeshades and pocket protectors who had the nerve to talk about the “greater good.”

  Still, Westway lurched forward, winning the final go-ahead from Washington in early 1977. “Mayor Beame and the real estate speculators who support this project are willing to sacrifice the needs of 89% of New Yorkers who use mass transit to benefit the highway lobbyists,” Abzug said one drizzly early summer night at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the mostly liberal Upper West Side. The crowd rose from its red-cushioned benches to applaud her, much as it had earlier in the evening, when she’d made her dramatic entrance, striding up the church’s center aisle, arms pumping, hands thrust out in front of her body. “This is exactly the kind of planning for special interests which has brought our city so many times to the verge of bankruptcy!”

  As much as they adored Abzug on the liberal Upper West Side, they loved her even more at Camp Tamiment, a pine-spiced summer resort some ninety miles southwest of the city in the Poconos. A group of trade unionists and socialists had planted stakes here in the 1920s, and it had quickly become a favorite summer retreat for New York’s working class, who came in droves to sleep in rustic cabins, swim in a shimmering lake, and soak up lectures on totalitarianism. It was a requisite campaign stop for every New York City mayoral candidate.

  In late June 1977 Abzug told the crowd at Tamiment that she knew exactly what had gone wrong in New York, this once-proud paradigm of New Deal plenty. It was a case of diminished expectations. “Almost every day we can read editorials in our leading newspapers telling us not to expect much from Washington and not to expect much from City Hall,” she said, the beads of perspiration glistening on her red temples. “The people with this outlook say we will continue to lose jobs and population. They say let’s encourage the poor to get out of town and let’s tear down their neighborhoods. Let’s continue to attack the unions because we have to drive down wages … They say let’s get rid of free tuition and the municipal hospital system, shut down child care centers, senior centers, libraries and fire stations. They say let’s fire teachers, guidance counselors and security guards, and let’s get rid of rent control. Let’s slash subway and bus service and crush more people into the trains, and maybe we’ll even make them pay more for that memorable experience. That’s not my vision and I know it’s not yours. You have invested too much of yourselves, too much sweat, time and thought into our city to settle for a spiral of further cutbacks and reduced services that will only hasten the decline of New York.”

  Abzug, pure product of
old New York that she was, clung stubbornly to her utopianism, convinced that if she shook her broken snow globe hard enough, she could make the flakes fall again.

  19.

  ON June 17, 1977, a warm, foggy Friday night at Fenway, Catfish Hunter had the worst outing of the worst season of his career.

  Like Reggie Jackson, Hunter, the Yankees’ brown-haired, blue-eyed, barrel-chested ace, had started on Charlie Finley’s plantation. When Finley signed him in 1964, there wasn’t a scout in the country who hadn’t heard of this eighteen-year-old kid named Jimmy Hunter. They descended in droves on Hertford, North Carolina (population: twenty-two hundred), a little tobacco town on the banks of the Perquimans River, but Finley outdid them all, pulling up to the Hunter family farm in a long black limousine. Jimmy’s sunbonnet-topped momma was hoeing weeds; her husband was rearranging the bacon in the smokehouse. Over a dinner of hog jowls and black-eyed peas, they talked business. Finley left a few hours later with a pair of smoked hams and a new right-hander.

  All Jimmy Hunter needed was a nickname. Finley settled quickly on Catfish. He’d tell the press that Hunter had been missing one night and that his folks found him down by the stream with one catfish lying beside him and another on his pole. Hunter himself didn’t see what was wrong with “Jim,” but he wasn’t going to argue with the guy who was about to write him a check for seventy-five thousand dollars. First things first: Finley wanted the buckshot—the result of a rabbit-hunting accident—removed from Hunter’s right foot. He spent the ‘64 season on the disabled list and joined the A’s partway through ’65, having never pitched an inning in the minor leagues.

  On a good day, Hunter’s fastball topped out in the mid-eighties, and to the untrained eye his slider looked a lot like his curve, but a childhood spent throwing rocks, corncobs, and clods of dirt through a small hole in the family’s barn door had served him well. He estimated that he could put the ball within three inches of his catcher’s target 90 percent of the time; others figured his margin of error closer to one or two inches. The key to his control was his repetitive motion. “If you go out to the mound after he’s pitched a game you’ll see three marks: one where he stands when he’s on the rubber, one where his left foot lands, one where his right foot lands,” his former teammate Doc Medich told J. Anthony Lukas for a 1975 New York Times Magazine profile. “Most players leave the mound all scratched up like a plowed cornfield.”

  Hunter was arrogant on the mound and humble off it and didn’t want the distinction blurred. (After pitching a perfect game for the A’s in ’68, he wouldn’t allow his teammates to hoist him up on their shoulders.) He had the relaxed, almost sedated temperament of a Carolina farm boy and an easy, appetite-whetting delivery to match. In the wake of one particularly humiliating defeat at Hunter’s hands, Milwaukee Brewers’ manager Dave Bristol slammed shut the clubhouse door and lit into his team for the better part of an hour: “You guys call yourselves hitters? If you can’t hit that puffball pitcher, you can’t hit anybody!”

  Hunter became available to the highest bidder in ’75, after Finley had violated the terms of his best pitcher’s contract by refusing to make certain agreed-upon deferred payments. The timing of the Great Catfish Auction, as the free marketeers on The Wall Street Journal’ s editorial page approvingly tagged it, could not have been better. Hunter was fresh off a twenty-five-win season, the fourth year in a row in which he’d won at least twenty-one games. The Yankees promptly signed him to a five-year, $2.9 million deal. He was the highest-paid player in baseball, but the numbers are a bit deceptive. Deferred income and insurance payments accounted for $2 million of the total; $36,000 was specifically earmarked for scholarships for his children, $6,000 for a new Buick. The contract stipulated that Hunter pay for the license plates himself. Still, it was six times what he’d earned playing for Finley.

  True to form, Hunter won twenty-three games for the Yankees in ‘75, but in ’76 his right shoulder began bothering him. Martin added a fifth starter to give him an extra day of rest. Not one to miss a turn—he already felt guilty enough about getting paid so much to work forty days a year—Hunter pitched through the pain, soaking his right arm in a big tub of ice after each start. “If I can still throw where I want to and get hitters out, if it hurts and I can still do it, that’s not pitching with pain,” he told one reporter, “that’s pleasure.” He went 17-15 on the year and hoped that a quiet winter on the farm in Hertford would restore him to health.

  It didn’t. Hunter struggled in spring training in ’77, his fastball hovering in the low seventies. A cortisone shot managed to right him in time for a strong opening day performance, but since then he’d been floundering. His aching body compelled unconscious adjustments to his near-perfect form. Martin’s strict policy about discussing injuries with the press notwithstanding, the word was out that Catfish Hunter was not well. Concerned fans were even mailing him cures. One suggested that cranberry juice might help dissolve the calcium deposits in his arm. Hunter, who was missing as many starts as he was making, was desperate enough to start drinking a quart a day.

  Hunter made his June 17 start at Fenway, but he didn’t survive the first inning. The Red Sox binge began with a leadoff home run off the bat of Rick Burleson, an overachieving line drive that settled softly into the net atop the Green Monster. Hunter sucked some juice from his tobacco-packed cheek and went to 3-2 against Fred Lynn. Lynn fouled Hunter’s sixth pitch straight back. The seventh he deposited in the right field bullpen.

  Hunter dug back into his hole at the right-hand corner of the rubber and retired the next two hitters. Then Carlton Fisk sent a fastball over the Monster and onto Lansdowne Street. Martin came out to the mound to make sure everything was okay. The Yankees’ skipper had scarcely returned to the dugout when George Scott went deep, tying the major-league record for most home runs in an inning.

  Four hits and four runs over two-thirds of an inning. Martin came back out to the mound and this time asked for the ball. Hunter walked off the field briskly, slung his warmup jacket over his shoulder, and clattered down the cement runway toward the locker room. He was finished, but for the Yankees the weekend had just begun.

  20.

  THE fog cleared overnight. Saturday was sunny, hot, and humid. noon the narrow streets surrounding Boston’s cozy bally-ard were choked with people as the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees. Along Yawkey Way a brass band played and sausages sizzled. Fenway drew its biggest crowd in more than twenty years, and twenty-five million more were tuned to watch the first-place Red Sox play the second-place Yankees on NBC’s Game of the Week.

  The Yankees scored two in the top half of the first. The Sox answered with Carl Yastrzemski’s three-run blast into the center field seats, then piled on three more in the fourth. The Yankees scratched out another two runs, closing the gap to 7–4 before they took the field in the bottom half of the sixth, with starter Mike Torrez still on the mound.

  Boston’s Fred Lynn singled to open the inning, bringing Jim Rice to the plate. Torrez came up and in, and Rice, checking his swing, looped the pitch down the line into shallow right field. Rice slowed down as he rounded first. Reggie, who was playing the power hitter deep, moved in tentatively. Rice, seeing Reggie’s hesitation, started for second. By the time Reggie’s throw arrived at the bag, Rice had slid safely into second. Reggie put his hands on his hips in disgust. Martin ambled out to the mound to lift Torrez.

  As reliever Sparky Lyle jogged in to spell Torrez, Yankee broadcaster Frank Messer filled the void with the usual patter: “The Boston Red Sox are leading 7–4, and Sparky Lyle will be coming in. Sparky is tied for the American League in saves with thirteen. Before the game, Billy was saying …”

  “Uh-oh,” interrupted Messer’s longtime broadcast partner, Phil Rizzuto. “I’m sorry, Frank, but I think Billy’s calling Paul Blair to replace Jackson, and Jackson doesn’t know it yet. We’re liable to see a little display of temper here … It’s Reggie’s own fault really. On that ball he did not
hustle.”

  Rizzuto quickly searched his memory. In his long career in baseball, he could recall only one other occasion when a manager made a defensive substitution in the middle of an inning: Casey Stengel sending Cliff Mapes in for Joe DiMaggio. DiMag refused to leave the field.

  “Oh, look at Billy!” Rizzuto intoned. “Is he hot!”

  The Fenway crowd caught sight of Blair trotting across the field and let out a roar. Reggie, who was chatting with Fran Healy, his arms draped casually over the green fence of the bullpen, was practically the only guy in the ballpark with no idea what was going on. Healy told Reggie to turn around. Reggie glanced over his shoulder and saw Blair coming toward him. Reggie pointed at himself—You mean me?—in disbelief. Blair nodded.

  “What the hell is going on?” Reggie asked.

  Blair shrugged. “You’ve got to ask Billy that.”

  The NBC cameras followed Reggie off the field and into the dugout. Initially, he looked more puzzled than angry bounding down the dugout steps with his hands spread, palm side up, in an expression of utter confusion.

  Martin was waiting for him, neck cords bulging, knees bent, arms dangling impatiently at his side. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing out there?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what the fuck I’m talking about. You want to show me up by loafing on me. Fine. Then I’m going to show your ass up. Anyone who doesn’t hustle doesn’t play for me.”

  Now the fury was building inside Reggie too. He took off his glasses, set them down on top of his glove, and started moving toward Martin.