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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Martin was the first to disembark. He descended the ramp, which was swarming with drunk fans, to chants of “We love Billy!” Martin’s stature, never in doubt, was now more exalted than ever. “If our planners and politicians had brass and brains like Billy the Kid, we would be living in Fat City instead of Tap City;” wrote Daily News political columnist William Reel. “Martin for Mayor!” Yankees’ fans couldn’t keep their hands off him. Pushing through the surging crowd, Martin had his pocket ripped from his pants, a chain torn from around his neck, and a shoulder bag looted.

  Reggie poked his head out of the plane and promptly ducked back in. He emerged a few minutes later and pressed on through the swirling masses, spilling a drink on himself as he made his way toward the team bus. By now the fans had spotted the “N.Y. Yankees” lettering above the windshield and had swarmed it as well. The roof of the bus buckled beneath the weight of unsteady bodies.

  63.

  WHEN the Dodgers still played in Flatbush, the Bums provided the color and the Bombers provided the class. These days the two teams had taken the shape of their respective cities: the friendly, easygoing Dodgers and the tired, neurotic Yankees. (The same dichotomy happened to be on display in movie theaters across America in the 1977 Academy Award–winning film Annie Hall.)

  They had last met in the 1963 World Series, a Dodgers’ sweep. Whitey Ford, who pitched the ’63 opener against Sandy Koufax, was now called in at the last minute to throw out the first pitch. He replaced Joe DiMaggio, who had left the stadium in a huff the day before, vowing never to return, after being kept waiting a half hour for his tickets.

  It was a brisk night in New York, the Empire State Building was illuminated in blue and white, and more than 62 percent of the city’s viewing audience had tuned in to ABC, which was debuting new disco-style bubble graphics for the World Series. Few could have been disappointed. The Yanks took the field behind Don Gullett, who insisted that his shoulder was now fine. After a shaky start—two runs on three walks in the first frame—Gullett found his form and yielded just three singles over the rest of the game.

  His counterpart, Don Sutton, a lean right-hander with a dazzling overhand curve, was just as stingy. The Dodgers took a 2–1 lead into the home half of the sixth, when Willie Randolph poled a 2-2 pitch into the seats in left to tie it. The Yanks inched ahead 3-2 in the eighth but left the bases loaded, and the Dodgers knotted it in the ninth.

  Now it became a stalemate. The Yanks got their leadoff man on in the tenth and eleventh, but both times failed to move him into scoring position. In the twelfth, facing the Dodgers’ fifth pitcher of the night, Willie Randolph led off with a double. Munson walked, bringing up Paul Blair, who had replaced Reggie on defense in the ninth. Blair squared to bunt twice, fouling off the first offering and missing the second one altogether. At the stroke of midnight, he punched an 0-2 pitch through the infield to put the game away.

  64.

  GAME two was humbling for the Yankees—Catfish Hunter, pitching on thirty-two days’ rest but still shaky, was torched—and humiliating for the city.

  About an hour before the first pitch, a fire started in Public School 3, an abandoned elementary school a few blocks west of the ballpark. By the time ABC began its broadcast at 8 p.m., orange flames were licking toward the sky. The network cut to its camera in a helicopter hovering above for an aerial view. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” announced Howard Cosell, who later misidentified the building as an apartment complex, “the Bronx is burning.”

  By the late innings the fire had grown to five alarms, and Yankees’ fans were getting restless. Play was stopped repeatedly while stadium police chased fans across the field. Rolls of toilet paper, whiskey bottles, and firecrackers rained down on the field. The residents of the upper deck dumped beer on the owners of the box seats below. A cop was assaulted when he asked several fans to lower a banner that was obstructing the view of those behind them. One fan pulled down his pants and hung from the scoreboard. Another tossed a smoke bomb from the stands that beclouded the outfield in an electric green haze.

  New York’s nationally televised degradation was still not complete. During the final out of the game, a fan pegged Dodgers’ rightfielder Reggie Smith in the head with a hard rubber ball. Smith required immediate medical attention and left town the next day in a neck brace.

  Catfish Hunter, who had been driven out in the third inning of the 6–1 Dodger victory, didn’t blame Martin for giving him the ball. “I’d rather pitch than ride the pine anytime,” he said after the game. Reggie, hitless on the night and three for twenty-two in the postseason, was less supportive when a reporter asked him about it: “How could the son of a bitch have pitched him?”

  The Yankees left for Los Angeles early the next morning. Martin didn’t learn about Reggie’s comment until the afternoon. By then the Yankees were working out in the warm sun at Dodger Stadium. The hot foam rose quickly through Martin’s knotted stomach. “Reggie has enough trouble playing right field,” he told the clutch of reporters. “Why should I pay attention to him? His teammates don’t.” Martin was by no means finished. “He was told in Kansas City, the day of the last playoff game, he would be playing in every game of the World Series, but if he’s going to say things to hurt the ballclub and if he doesn’t hit John [Tommy John, the Dodgers’ game three starter] I may have to think about making a change.”

  It was perfect off-day fodder for the papers. The Post carried the news back to New York under the back-page headline YANKS ARE READY TO EXPLODE—OFF THE FIELD.

  Reggie did hit John—once anyway—and the Yankees took game three, 5-3. The following afternoon they took game four, leaving them one win shy of the World Series. Reggie’s double to right and soaring home run into the left-center seats were overshadowed by the big story, Ron Guidry’s four-hitter.

  Facing elimination in game five, the Dodgers came out swinging. By the sixth they had run the score to 10–0. It was already too late to matter when Reggie singled hard to open the seventh and then, in the eighth, caught Don Sutton’s first pitch and sent it sailing through the smoggy Los Angeles sky. A screen behind the foul pole arrested the ball’s flight, so the distance assigned to his second home run in two days—450 feet—was just a guess.

  The series was to conclude in New York. Even the Dodgers knew it had to be this way. “Otherwise,” said Los Angeles’s first baseman Steve Garvey, packing up his gear for the final road trip of the year, “it would have been like a play without a climax.”

  65.

  IF the 1977 postseason was going to be a microcosm of the regular season—and that was how things were shaping up-there was just one piece missing: the controversial magazine story.

  The new issue of Time, which contained a story headlined NICE GUYS ALWAYS FINISH … ?, greeted the Yankees on their return to New York on the cold, rainy morning of Monday, October 17. In a single page of text the magazine had Steinbrenner saying that several Yankees had pleaded with him to fire Martin; Martin saying that if Steinbrenner fired him, he’d never live it down with the fans (“a little Dago like me fixed his ass”); and Reggie saying he would refuse to play another year for Martin.

  To most of America and all New York none of this came as any surprise. By now everyone just wanted to see how this bizarre drama would end.

  The following morning, October 18, the skies had cleared but the cool air lingered in New York through the early part of the day.

  Reggie had breakfast with his agent, Matt Merola, and then lounged around his apartment with Ray Negron. He called Ralph Destino to make plans for later. Destino was going to drive his son and Reggie’s father and sister home from the ballpark. Then, as was their custom, they’d meet up at McMullen’s.

  By dusk the temperature in New York had climbed into the midfifties. The home team went out for batting practice. A couple of Dodgers were sitting on ball bags in front of the third base dugout. Several more stood on the dugout steps.

  Yankees’ third base coach Dic
k Howser pitched to the last few of his men, a group that included Reggie Jackson. As he stepped in to take his cuts at around 6:40 p.m., a crowd gathered behind the cage. Reggie smashed three balls into the third tier and a fourth off the back wall of the right field bleachers, some five hundred feet from the plate. No one recalls exactly how many Reggie hit out during batting practice that evening—or rather the estimates vary widely—but everyone remembers it as an unprecedented performance. “Every ball flew like it was shot out of a cannon,” says Roger Director, an editor at Sport magazine who was on the field at the time. “It was an electrifying thing. People were completely buzzed and amazed.”

  Fran Healy was shagging flies in left-center during the show. Healy, who swears that Reggie hit every pregame pitch out of the park, couldn’t help remembering the old baseball saw that a good BP was a bad omen: “I thought to myself, ‘Boy, is he gonna have a horseshit game.’”

  66.

  There isn’t anything to say or at least it’s beyond me. Reggie Jackson. Three million dollars to get him here. He has often said he doesn’t want to come back here. I don’t believe it for one second. I never have.

  CBS RADIO’S WINN ELLIOT, DURING THE EIGHTH INNING OF THE STATION’S BROADCAST OF GAME SIX OF THE 1977 WORLD SERIES

  IN the days that followed, some said it had to end like this, but watching Reggie Jackson’s game six performance now, it seems like an odd conclusion to this long season of tension and torment, not anticlimactic, but somehow unbaseball-like. There is none of the subtle jockeying, the foul tips and worked counts that usually accompany memorable at bats. Reggie simply strides to the plate three consecutive times against three different pitchers and, before the commentators can even properly set the scene, strokes the first pitch he sees into the seats. One gets the sense that if this had been the first half of a twin bill—and Martin hadn’t sat him in the second—he would have hit three more, not because he was so much better than everyone else but because something had been lit inside him. For this one night the all-too-human Reggie Jackson glowed with superhuman greatness.

  He first appeared on center stage in the second inning, a black turtleneck under his double knits, the top button of his uniform unfastened as usual, with the Yankees trailing 2–0. Reggie had gone zero for four with a pair of strikeouts against Burt Hooton in game two, but the balance of power had already shifted. Hooton didn’t throw him anything near the strike zone.

  At the start of the fourth, the Yanks now down 3–2, Reggie knelt on one knee in the on deck circle and watched Thurman Munson rap a single to left. Expecting something hard and inside, Reggie took his usual spot in the box and then moved off the plate about six inches, glancing back to make sure the Dodgers’ catcher hadn’t noticed. Reggie tapped his bat lightly on the plate and turned his gaze to the mound. Sure enough, Hooton came inside with a fastball, and Reggie smoked it—a low liner, no more than fifteen feet off the ground. Unsure of the ball’s fate, Reggie broke hard out of the box before it landed in the first row of the right field bleachers. He circled the bases briskly, his upper body bent forward, slowing to a trot about ten feet from home. As he bounded down the dugout steps, Martin—“the beleaguered little pepperpot,” as Cosell referred to him on ABC—gave him an adoring pat on the cheek.

  The next inning three men were scheduled to hit before Reggie, but he pulled his thirty-five-inch bat from the rack anyway as Elias Sosa, the right-handed fastballer who had relieved Hooton, finished his warm-up pitches. Three batters later, with two out and one on, Reggie came to the plate. He mashed down his helmet and turned on Sosa’s first pitch, a fastball down and in, sending it screaming over the wall in right.

  It was another line drive, so Reggie again sprinted out of the box and started motoring around the bases. Between first and second, he picked at his form-fitting uniform, pulling it away from his swelling chest, as the baying—“Reg-gie, Reg-gie, Reg-gie”—washed over the park. The ABC cameras found him moments later at the first base end of the dugout, the second button of his uniform now undone. In case anyone at home had lost count, he held up a pair of fingers, mouthing the word two.

  In the home half of the eighth, a standing ovation greeted Reggie as he walked toward the plate. The din continued as he smoothed the dirt in the batter’s box with his spikes. Then, for a split second, after Reggie reached down for Charlie Hough’s diving knuckleball, a good pitch, the crowd fell silent—“choking on its own disbelief,” as The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell would write. This time Reggie knew. He stood and watched as the ball sailed toward dead center, touching down about halfway up the stadium’s blacked-out bleachers, some 475 feet from where it had collided with his bat. As Reggie glided around first, Dodgers’ first baseman Steve Garvey applauded softly into his glove.

  Reggie’s last home run put the Yankees on top 8–3. The Yankees’ first World Series in fifteen years was almost won, and the Bronx ballyard was ready to explode. The stadium had quadrupled its security for that night’s game. More than one hundred cops in riot helmets now took their positions in foul territory, crouching on the field side of the wall along the first and third base lines. On the other side of the wall, officers were swinging their nightsticks above their heads to keep fans back. The public-address announcements began: “Ladies and gentlemen, no one is to go on the field at the end of the game.”

  On his way out to his position for the final three outs, Reggie—his pinstriped shirt now buttoned only halfway up—doffed his cap and blew kisses to the crowd. It was a long half inning. Torrez was weary, but he wanted to finish it, and Martin didn’t see any harm in letting him. The outs came slowly, but they came. The bleacher creatures were now sitting along the top of the outfield fence, their legs dangling over the wall in fair territory. Firecrackers and cherry bombs were exploding on the field.

  With two down in the top of the ninth, Reggie called a timeout and started running toward the dugout. ABC’s Keith Jackson narrated: “Reggie Jackson is leaving the field, and I don’t blame him. The home fans are chasing their most valuable player off the field.”

  But Reggie was pointing at his head: He just wanted a batting helmet! It took a couple of minutes to find one—the equipment had already been moved into the clubhouse to keep it away from marauding fans—but Reggie eventually trotted back out for the final out, a little popup that Torrez handled himself.

  In an instant, thousands of fevered fans were pouring onto the field. They came from every section of the stands, charging across the tables in the press box on their way down. The extra police and their five mounted horses were no match for this mass of swarming, shaggy-haired humanity. Reggie took off his helmet and glasses and started weaving in and out of the crowd, the fullback looking for daylight. Without his specs, he had poor depth perception; he was genuinely frightened. Gaining speed now, he sent a parka-plump, blue-jeaned fan sprawling with a shoulder block and disappeared into the dugout.

  67.

  ONLY Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in a single World Series game (twice, in fact), but never in consecutive at bats, let alone on three pitches.

  A feat like this, after a summer like this, lent itself to many different interpretations. To defenders of baseball’s emerging era, it was proof that free agency had reenergized the game by raising the stakes for its performers and the expectations for its fans. To baseball nostalgists, it was a vindication of content over form, a victory of on-the-field drama over off-the-field melodrama. “We live in an unprivate time, and the roar of personality and celebrity has almost drowned out the cheering in the stands,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker. “The ironic and most remarkable aspect of Reggie Jackson’s feat is that for a moment there, on that littered, brilliant field, he—he, of all people—almost made us forget this.”

  The tabloids wove Reggie’s three mighty blows into their narrative of the city’s struggle for survival. “Who dares to call New York a lost cause?” a pumped-up Post editorialized.

  After antagonizing Reggie
earlier in the season, the Amsterdam News now canonized him, comparing his game six feat to Joe Louis’s knockout of Max Schmeling and Jackie Robinson’s first major-league home run. “Black residents of New York City reacted with a special jubilation and sense of triumph to the sensational performance by Reggie Jackson,” the paper reported on its October 22 front page. “Much of the feeling appeared to be based on the widespread feeling among Blacks interviewed by The Amsterdam News that the white-dominated media and whites in the crowds, as well as the Yankees’ white manager Billy Martin, had been especially hard on Jackson because he was Black, arrogant, and spoke his mind.”

  As for Reggie, he didn’t see why he should be limited to one interpretation. In the dozens of interviews he gave in the ensuing weeks, his game six performance became a triumph of the Lord (“God allowed me to do that”), a humanitarian gesture (“I’ll tell you what I was thinking … I did this for all of us. Take it. Enjoy it. And let’s do it again”), and, naturally, an emphatic telegram from the once-embattled superstar to his enemies, real and imagined: “Those home runs delivered a simple message: Let me up now—I’m no longer gonna be held down.”

  After the game most of the Yankees headed to a team party at the Sheraton in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.

  A few hours before the first pitch, Martin had been given a thirty-five-thousand-dollar bonus, a Lincoln Continental, and the assurance that he’d have his job in 1978. Now he’d won his first World Series as a manager. But he still couldn’t enjoy himself. He was exhausted, and the party was too crowded. Martin flung his scotch to the floor and repaired to a quiet bar nearby.