Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  As Lasorda had been certain it was his destiny to lead the Dodgers to a world championship in his first season at the helm, the wound left by not accomplishing this feat would in time become very clear. And as Reggie Jackson’s fame grew in the aftermath of his Series performance, Lasorda and many of his Dodger players (and Dodger fans) would grow increasingly bitter about the loss. Accordingly, at the start of the winter break one wag wrote to the local paper, expressing a simple sentiment no doubt felt by millions: “To whom it may concern: Damn Yankees!” All winter at home in Fullerton, even as he kept himself busy in preparations for the coming season, Lasorda quietly, internally seethed. The wound remained so raw that in spring training, after a game against the Yankees with little at stake and even less meaning, Lasorda would gloat over the Dodgers’ 7–3 win, telling a reporter that he had waited five months to get these guys. In fact, the seething wound to Lasorda’s ego would apparently never heal. Even in 2010, more than thirty years after the fact, Lasorda used the occasion of a broadcast-booth visit with Reggie Jackson, Tim McCarver, and Joe Buck during a Fox Game-of-the-Week broadcast to attack his old nemesis. When Joe Buck inevitably brought up Jackson’s remarkable feat in the 1977 World Series, Lasorda quickly blurted out: “A blind pig will always find an acorn.” While Jackson attempted to insert some self-deprecating humor into the moment, Lasorda remained unrelenting. If he had had an opportunity to pitch to Jackson, Lasorda said, he would have “put him on his back.”14

  The unsettling fragility of the strong ego was much on the mind of Tom Wolfe in the fall of 1977. In his Rolling Stone “Post-orbital Remorse” articles from several years earlier, he had identified the characteristics that drove the men of America’s space program—their hypercharged egotism, their otherworldly competitiveness, their self-absorbed drive to achieve. Every one of the astronauts, and many involved in the space program, thought the spirit of the time—the driving force of the Right Stuff15—so crucial to the program and to America’s need to achieve that none of them seemed to worry about the negative side effects: the damage to their personal lives, the addictions and mental health issues, their destroyed relationships, and so on. “We were cowboys, and the space program was a cowboy operation. It might have made the whole goddamned thing more open, more honest, more real, more lovable, if you will, and the better for all of us in the long run. But there was nobody who was going to tell that there was a whole side of us that was spelled MANIAC.”16

  Many of the wives of Dodger players may have well understood what the astronauts’ spouses had to contend with: the fallout from an ego that had been lifted to the heights of human achievement, whether it be the rarefied air of outer space or the unlikely playing ground of the World Series. Baseball players are understandably protective of their personal lives, preferring to escape to relative obscurity after a season of intense competition, endless road travel, all-consuming focus on the game. Still, decompression into personal life for ballplayers was likely as difficult as it was for astronauts. In baseball postseason fallout takes many different forms. Fans and players and team management—all suddenly thrust into the emptiness that follows a disappointing end to the season—have little relief but the well-worn clichés: “There’s always next year,” or “We just got a bad break,” or “The team will definitely bounce back from this.” For many Dodgers life might have been just as it was for Steve Garvey, who, after the World Series in 1977, was faced with a return to his home life after many intense months away. “It’s an empty feeling,” said Steve Garvey of the impending off-season. “It’s like writing a book without a climax.”17

  For Cyndy Garvey life after the 1977 World Series seemed somehow irrevocably changed. “The plane ride home to Los Angeles was torture,” she wrote in a tell-all account of her life as a Dodger wife. “Steve and I sat up front, with the coaches. In the back, I could hear the players loosening up, having a few drinks and celebrating how far they’d gotten. They were singing and laughing. Even though they’d lost, even though they’d been unlucky, they knew they were young and healthy and damned good ballplayers.” In the cabin where the Garveys sat, light was dim. The team’s coaches slumped miserably in their seats. Lasorda, who seemed particularly distraught, supposedly sneaked drinks out of a briefcase.18 Garvey did not speak much to his wife on the five-hour flight, breaking his silence only when a reporter stopped by to get a quote. “When we got back to Los Angeles,” Cyndy Garvey wrote, “a small crowd of fans was there to greet us. All the passengers on the plane pulled themselves together and got off. . . . Nobody talked to us. I held on to Steve’s arm and we went home alone.”19 From this moment forward, according to her account, Garvey would grow increasingly distant from his wife, preoccupied with things other than his family. And while Garvey, as a prominent star player on a team that had won the National League Championship, was in high demand—appearing almost around the clock at charity events, banquets, baseball clinics, publicity events—there was also, as Cyndy would discover some years later, no small amount of deceit driving Garvey’s distance from his family.

  Wolfe would describe the range of problems that astronauts had after completing their space missions, even to the point of giving this particular phenomenon a name: postorbital remorse. It wasn’t a clinical diagnosis, as the psychiatrists had departed from the space program early on in its history, but something based on later reports by the astronauts about their struggles. In particular, the early astronauts suffered, once they realized they would never again travel to space, a kind of “holy hell.” Scott Carpenter was the first astronaut to describe postorbital remorse. “The point is it dawned on him,” wrote Wolfe, “that he wasn’t going up again. The adventure was finished. There was no suitable encore to your final space flight. He had spent fifteen years ascending the mighty pyramid of flying and three years staring into the Jaws, training for this one flight, and he made it, and accomplished what he had set out to do—and suddenly he had no future.”20

  In these articles about brave and extraordinary men who faced life after accomplishing something truly remarkable, Wolfe hinted that he identified, however distantly, with their emotions. His collective-astronaut voice, at one point in the story, tried to convey the postorbital struggle by speculating what it might be like if a writer, who had just written a great book, was told by the publishing world that “each writer gets a chance to publish just one book” and after that book the writer had to “step aside forever and let other writers have their shot at it.”21

  This was a telling thought. By late 1977 Wolfe himself had been grounded, as a writer, for several years. After the four-part “Post-orbital Remorse” series hit the newsstands and caused a broad sensation, Wolfe planned to write a grand, comprehensive biographical history of America’s space program. In fact, Wolfe imagined this book well could be his breakthrough work, the one that would attract a vast, new, more mainstream audience that would cement his reputation for the ages. Spurred by this vision Wolfe lined up a publisher and editor and signed a contract. He organized his past notes and categorized them, then drew up plans. But then he hit a snag. Perhaps it was the daunting scope of the subject—fifteen years of very involved history, dozens and dozens of complex interviews, important national cultural ramifications—but for the first time in his career, Wolfe found himself at a loss to write the story.

  Now it was three years later. Wolfe, seeing his city all aflutter from an epic World Series win by the hated New York Yankees and the repulsive Reggie Jackson, and full knowing his epic book on America’s space program was languishing, had a choice to make: either redouble his efforts to finish his master work for the ages or give up the whole idea altogether and start over. Wolfe made his choice. By November he was back in the hunt for the Right Stuff.

  For two other Toms the long winter that followed the Dodgers’ loss in the 1977 World Series also presented crucial moments of decision. By the fall of 1977 Tom Bradley had all but put the racially divisive election of 1977 behind him and begun to fo
cus on issues that would move his city toward the future: his efforts to grow the local economy and prop up local businesses; his burning drive to help the city cope with a growing host of social problems such as entrenched poverty, rising crime, gang violence, and so on; his desire to move Los Angeles into the forefront of a more international, global era; and, related to all of these, his wish for Los Angeles to host the Summer Olympics in 1984. The full reasoning behind Bradley’s desire to bring the Olympics back to Los Angeles was complex. On the one hand, he was convinced that the Games would bring significant benefits, both tangible and symbolic, to his beloved city. But on the other hand, Bradley had other, more personal, reasons to want the Games. Bradley had witnessed the results of the previous Los Angeles Olympics in 1932 when he was an impressionable fourteen-year-old. With his home just within walking distance of the Olympic Village in Baldwin Hills, where the athletes stayed during the Games, Bradley found himself drawn toward the world’s great athletes of the era—especially African American sprinter Eddie Tolan, who earned the nickname “world’s fastest human” for his feats at the 1932 Games. And while he could not afford the eleven-dollar ticket to watch an event at the Coliseum, Bradley caught glimpses of the Games through slats in a fence at the stadium, and he read about the great athletes’ exploits in the daily paper. Later, he climbed the fence of the stadium to watch a favorite track event. “The one-hundred-meter dash turned out to be the most exciting event of the entire Olympics,” Bradley recalled. The memory never left him and may have been a chief inspiration for him to bring the Games back. “It may have been Bradley’s concern for the youth of Los Angeles,” wrote Bradley biographers Gregory Payne and Scott Ratzan, “and his memories of what the Olympics of 1932 had meant to his own impoverished boyhood that made him so determined to bring the Olympic Games to Los Angeles for 1984, despite the possible political consequences to himself.”22

  By November 1977, meanwhile, Tom Fallon had realized something about his struggle to build his business. Sure, things were fine overall. Customers seemed to enjoy coming in to the hardware store, if only to buy a few bolts and share a word with the owners. But with the region around them booming, and new tracts of land being cleared and graded every day for new housing, business could have been even better. What he needed, he thought, was something more, some master plan that could make his enterprise as successful as others around town were becoming. Fallon needed to do something.

  After moving to Alta Loma just prior to becoming a partner with Nelson Hawley, Tom Fallon had gone on a fact-finding tour. He had talked with people, listened to what made them tick, and tried to understand what were their hopes and dreams were. Ultimately, Fallon came to several sharp conclusions. The first was this: the boomtown mentality and the expansive economic drive that ruled Southern California had arrived in the Cucamonga area and were not likely to go away anytime soon. And the second conclusion was this: the key to local boom-time success was one thing, land. That is, he knew that in order to realize for his family a semblance of California-style economic success, he needed to purchase as much land in and around Cucamonga as he could. Despite this realization, however, he wondered in the months after the 1977 World Series exactly how he could pull such a thing off. And this was when everything suddenly changed.

  On November 30, 1977, Cucamonga voted on a referendum along with two adjoining unincorporated Southern Californian communities—Alta Loma, where Tom Fallon owned a home, and Etiwanda, where his grandchildren went to school and played in Little League—on whether to merge as one incorporated city called Rancho Cucamonga. All three bedroom communities, located as they were in the foothills of the Sierra Madre range along the path of old Route 66, had long been separately known for little other than producing wine, being the punch line of a running Mel Blanc–Jack Benny gag, and for some fairly quirky history. For instance, in 1960, before plans were scuttled, a developer sought to build a Bible-land theme park in Cucamonga. Add in a sensational unsolved murder or two from back before the war, and you get the gist of the spirit of the place. By merging into a larger city, Rancho Cucamonga hoped to leave behind its colorful dusty-outpost past and become a place more worthy of serious development.

  For Tom Fallon, the incorporation confirmed that his theory was correct—that there were money and success to be had in owning local land. Fallon also, in the aftermath of the vote, began to hear the rumors: that the city governments of all three communities were increasingly intent on attracting corporate developments to fatten the local tax base and that housing and other developments would be increasingly upscale. Fallon knew, then, that his window of opportunity was shrinking. He had to take action soon. Which was how, in the days and weeks that followed the disappointment over the Dodgers’ loss to the Yankees, Tom Fallon changed the destiny of his business, and of his family.

  Part 2

  1978

  16

  Rediscovering Baseball

  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—made us forget.

  —Roger Angell

  It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

  —A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” Yale Alumni, November 1977

  The ripples that spread out across the country in late 1977 as a result of Reggie Jackson’s World Series heroics swept up many of the hardened purists of the time. That is, the disillusioned masses of baseball fans who had loudly bemoaned the changes to their sport just a year prior suddenly realized, in the winter of 1978, that the ground beneath them had shifted. “The ironic and most remarkable aspect of Reggie Jackson’s feat,” wrote New Yorker writer Roger Angell, “is that for a moment there, on that littered, brilliant field, he—he, of all people—made us forget.”1 Beyond New York, in far-off places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, people were ecstatic about baseball again. Fans young and old forgot their recent complaints about the state of the game. Suddenly, the entire nation was abuzz about the American pastime. ABC TV estimated that a healthy number of fans—between 110 and 120 million of them—had tuned into the World Series in October. In 1977, led by the Dodgers’ record-setting attendance mark of more than 2,955,000 fans,2 the overall attendance for the league reached 38 million, a record for the sport and a rise of 14 percent from the season before. The Dodgerland fans had flocked to Dodger Stadium, but so had baseball fans all across the country come out for their team. A Harris survey conducted after the 1977 season showed that, for the first time in nine years, more adult sports fans in 1977 had followed baseball than football, though this was by only a scant margin (61–60 percent).3 Further, during the off-season advance ticket sales were booming. Twenty-five of the league’s twenty-six teams reported increased preseason sales, and nine clubs, including the Dodgers and Yankees, reported record preseason sales.4

  After the 1977 season, it became obvious that, while baseball’s modern free-agent system still rankled, most fans had all but accepted the changing game as a fait accompli. And why not forget one’s misgivings about free agency? After all, the free agency that so many had feared would bring about the demise of baseball had done the opposite. The game was exciting, its popularity booming. And free agency had played a role in this—making it possible, among other things, for Reggie Jackson’s remarkable, generation-defining achievement to happen. Even the victims of Jackson’s handiwork—the Dodgers and their fans—had to concede that some much-needed excitement had returned to baseball. “Only a few years ago,” wrote a columnist in the Los Angeles Times, “baseball was being subjected to mournful scrutiny by commentators who, having wrung their hands dry, pronounced the game moribund. They mispronounced it rather badly. Baseball has in fact never been more robust.”
5

  A good sign of the thaw in the attitudes of disgruntled and disappointed baseball fans was the return of a time-honored baseball tradition: Yankee hatred. That is, it was clear in the aftermath of the Yankees’ stunning and shattering victory over the Dodgers that the country was split once again along traditional lines. At the end of 1977 you either were ecstatic to see the Yankees on top again or were disgusted by that fact. “Some authors,” wrote Gordon Verrell in The Sporting News, “went so far as to suggest that the World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees was really an exercise matching the ‘good guys’ against the ‘bad guys,’ the result of which obviously says something for black hats and other unsavory types.”6 Across the country people derided the Yankees, self-important owner George Steinbrenner, the even more self-important star Reggie Jackson, and feisty manager Billy Martin. Commenters dismissively ridiculed the Yankees as “the best team that money can buy” and suggested that, for the good of baseball, the team should be dismantled. That the cries were soundly ignored, and the Yankees dug right back into free agency in the off-season to purchase the contracts of free-agent pitchers Andy Messersmith, Rich Gossage, and Rawly Eastwick, did not really matter. The fact was, all the Yankee-centered tumult and disagreement meant one important fact for baseball: the sport mattered again. People cared about baseball.