All you hear about on our team is Steve Garvey, the All-American boy. Well, the best player on this team for the last two years—and we all know it is—is Reggie Smith. As Reggie goes, so goes us. . . . [Yet] Reggie doesn’t go out and publicize himself. He doesn’t smile at the right people or say the right things. He tells the truth, even if it sometimes alienates people. Reggie’s not a facade or a Madison Avenue image. He’s a real person. Reggie and Richie Allen are the two most totally misrepresented people I ever met. They’re wonderful people with wrong reputations.9
The article closed on a strongly positive note—Reggie Smith expressing gratitude that he was in Los Angeles and away from the Boston Red Sox. “I’ve lived in the shadows of some pretty good players,” said Smith. “I’ve had people harp at me about not living up to my potential. Well, I’m finally with a team that’s perfectly suited to me. I no longer feel the pressure. . . . Now, when I step to the plate, I don’t feel I have to do anything. All I have to do is my best.”10 But despite the positive words, the damage had been done.
After the article hit the DC streets a few days passed without any commotion—at least in the Dodger clubhouse. On Friday morning, August 18, a small item appeared in the “Morning Briefing” section of the L.A. Times with the heading “Here’s One That Should Stir Some Emotions in the Dodger Clubhouse.” The blurb then proceeded to repeat, out of context, the several meaty statements that Sutton had made to Boswell. Two days later, in the morning before a Sunday-afternoon game against the Mets, Steve Garvey met his manager for breakfast in a hotel in Manhattan. Holding the paper, Garvey asked Lasorda, “What would you do?” And here is where, according to Lasorda’s biographer, the manager’s mind went to work. On the one hand, he well knew, there was some amount of truth in what Sutton said. On the other hand, it was precisely the wrong place and wrong time—in the midst of a heated pennant race in the middle of a hot August—to say these things. But even more important than all of this, Lasorda wondered, was there a way he could turn this situation to his and his team’s advantage?
“In such situations,” wrote Bill Plaschke of Lasorda’s actions that morning, “it is a manager’s job to put out the fire. But as Lasorda knew, sometimes it was more important to start one.” In watching the character of his clubhouse develop over the seasons he had been with the Major League squad, first as third base coach, then as manager, Lasorda well knew that teammates’ impressions of both Sutton and Garvey had not been good for the team. Garvey had the reputation among his teammates of “being soft.” Known for his reluctance to make the pivot throw from second base, for example, and for avoiding getting riled up on the field (or cutting loose with his teammates after games), Garvey was a mystery in the Dodger clubhouse. Sutton, on the other hand, was, to his teammates, just a sharp-tongued jerk. In this moment, at breakfast with a puzzled Garvey, Lasorda made a quick calculation. “I ain’t going to tell you what to do,” the manager said. “But if it was me, and somebody said those things in the paper about me? The first time I saw him, I would deck him.”11 Then Lasorda put down the paper, got up from the table, and left Garvey behind without looking back.
Versions of what exactly happened a few hours later vary slightly, depending on who is doing the telling. From Garvey’s vantage point the incident went something like this: Infuriated by the quotes, the first baseman walked over to Sutton before the game and told him he thought the comments were inappropriate. “We are a team,” Garvey supposedly said. “If there are any differences they should be kept among ourselves and not expressed in the newspapers. I’ve been knocked before about things I do off the field, and I don’t think those things should be written about in the press. If you have to say something about me, say it to my face.”12 The two shared further words, growing increasingly heated, and when Garvey took one of the pitcher’s remarks as an insult to his wife, he told Sutton he would fight him right there if necessary. In this version of the story Sutton leaped at Garvey, and the two fell to the floor, where they wrestled and clawed at each other as their shocked teammates watched. A separate story strand suggests that one teammate, perhaps Joe Ferguson, yelled, “Let ’em go. Maybe they’ll kill each other.” Another, more neutral, account suggests that Garvey physically picked up Sutton and then threw him into another teammate’s locker. It was this loud crash that caught the attention of Dodger GM Al Campanis and manager Lasorda, who rushed in yelling “What the hell’s going on?” while several Dodgers13 managed to break up the tussle. Both ended up with bruised faces, and Garvey had suffered a noticeably bloodshot eye from where Sutton had poked him.
In Sutton’s account of the incident, meanwhile, which he told to a magazine reporter several years later, the pitcher naturally laid more of the blame on Garvey. After Garvey had asked if he had said those things to Boswell, Sutton implied that a “discussion” followed to iron out “a misunderstanding between two intelligent young men.”14 Garvey, according to Sutton, had an annoying habit of emphasizing his points with finger jabs to the chest, which is what led Sutton to bring Garvey’s wife into the discussion. When Garvey, again, objected to this with another finger jab, Sutton shoved Garvey, which led to the tumble to the floor. (Sutton said nothing about being physically picked up and thrown.)
And finally, Tom Lasorda offered his own interpretation of events in the clubhouse that day. As he told it, Lasorda was standing on the field before the game when a panicked stadium worker approached him to say a fight had broken out in the Dodger clubhouse, and he feared that some equipment had been damaged. “Lasorda just smiled,” wrote Bill Plaschke. The manager’s plan was in motion.
Whatever the true and exact version of events, after the fight, and before the flight back to L.A., Sutton sought out Lasorda and angrily told his manager he wanted to call a press conference to attack Garvey. Lasorda, reportedly, looked at Sutton and flatly suggested what a horrible idea that was. “He’s too big for you,” Lasorda said. “The fans love him.” When Sutton called the press conference anyway four days after the fight, Lasorda and the rest of the team gathered around the TV to see what the wily pitcher would say. Surprisingly, on the whole Sutton was positive and remorseful. “For the last few days,” he said, his eyes moist with tears, “I have thought of nothing else and I’ve tried over and over to figure out why this all had to happen. The only possible reason I can find is that my life isn’t being lived according to what I know, as a human being and a Christian, to be right. If it were, then there would not have been an article in which I would offend any of my teammates.”15
At this, supposedly, Dodger captain Dave Lopes turned to Lasorda and asked, “How did that happen?” To which Lasorda smiled and said he had no idea. “[His] ploy had worked,” Plaschke wrote. “The two players who were most disliked by their teammates had beaten each other into humility. . . . Two problems had been fixed without Lasorda having to lift a finger.”16
After the fight on August 20 the Dodgers were not the same team as before the fight. Lasorda, after interviewing both players, pointedly did not fine either of them, nor did he ask for any apologies. When he addressed the team on the matter, he was direct about what he wanted. “I don’t care if you like each other or not,” Lasorda said, according to an account by Tommy John. “I can’t make you do that. All I’m asking is that this doesn’t carry onto the field. We must play as a team. We’ve got twenty-five guys here. We can’t have thirteen pulling from one end of the rope and twelve from the other. That won’t get us anywhere. We have to pull together.”17
Surprisingly, the team came together after the fight just as Lasorda requested. Neither Garvey nor Sutton carried their feud onto the field, and the rest of the team suddenly seemed to play with the intensity and focus that fans had been watching for all season. “The fight was cathartic in that if finally got the hostility out in the open,” said Tommy John. “We played extremely well after that for the stretch run.” Reggie Smith agreed with John’s assessment. “That [the fight] was when we came together, realize
d how important we were to each other,” Smith explained. “We started playing better. We’re a good blend of ballplayers and that brought it all together with the feeling of, ‘Let’s do it together, as one.’”18
Indeed, the Dodgers won the game that immediately followed the fight, with Garvey providing two hits, an RBI, and a run scored. While the long-nurtured team image—of one big happy family—had been shattered, this may not have been wholly bad. No longer concerned what everyone thought of them, perhaps, the Dodger players shrugged off the notoriety of the so-called Grapple in the Apple and went about their business. For the rest of the month the team went 6-3 against the Phillies and Expos. By the beginning of September the Dodgers had settled in first place (by two games). In the first half of September the team continued winning, going 11-4 in the first two weeks of the month and rushing out to an eight-and-a-half-game lead in the West on September 15. At last, despite the fuss and notoriety, all was right in Dodger country. Finally, Tom Lasorda could stop calling team meetings. Finally, his boys were back where they should have been all season: on the way to the playoffs.
25
Is the Force with Us?
Everything is “awesome.” The Times’ You magazine described a fountain and grunion run as “awesome” sights. Hardly a day passes in which some newspaper or magazine writer does not use “awesome” to describe some slightly above average event. . . . Aren’t we overdoing it a little? Or is it a fear that most of what happens these days is actually pretty mediocre?
—Lynne Bronstein, “Underwhelmed by the World, ‘Awesome,’” letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1977
For anyone paying attention to the news in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978, the times were confusing, frustrating, depressing, and distressing. For eleven- and twelve-year-old boys, however, enjoying watching their favorite team in bunches, or for small businessmen trying to keep their family businesses thriving, or for a by-your-bootstraps mayor of what would soon to be the second largest city in the country, or for sophisticated East Coast writers observing the far West Coast from comfortable New York apartments—for all sorts of people, life in Los Angeles near the end of the 1970s was, if sometimes uncertain and occasionally troubling, pretty pleasant. Times were changing, certainly, but all in all life was pretty good and often, in the parlance of the times, pretty “awesome.”
Awesome was a word that came into increasing use in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978. As a neologism the word had caught on not only among postadolescents and beach-bound teenagers, but also among a wide swath of the hip-conscious mainstream. Awesome, in fact, had recently begun appearing in TV commercials, on television sitcoms, and all across the media. So common, and sudden, was its usage that a concerned citizen wrote into the local paper to complain. “Has anyone beside myself noticed the current rage for the term ‘awesome’?” wrote Lynne Bronstein, a poet and newspaper writer who lived in Sherman Oaks.1 For Tom Fallon’s eldest grandson, who turned twelve years old just before the start of the Dodgers’ 1978 season, awesome just seemed to fit the times. Daily life for this grandson in the late summer of 1978 was pretty awesome, after all. His favorite sports team, the Dodgers, who played his favorite sport, baseball, was back in first place of their division. He and his friends lived and breathed all things Dodgers in those long, awesome summers (of 1977 and 1978), trading baseball cards of their favorite players, pretending to be those players during pickup games of playground baseball, and mooning over the rare neighborhood kid who had managed to score a Dodger player autograph or other relic.
It makes sense, of course, that a twelve-year-old boy might not pay much attention to the national malaise and the raging worry about the growing mediocrity of America. Young boys who love baseball and the other trappings of boyhood are the perfect antidote, after all, to the ever-looming sense that Things Are Always Getting Worse. Old-time baseball fans might have wanted to set this twelve-year-old boy straight by informing him that the Steve Garveys and the Ron Ceys and the Davey Lopes and the Doug Raus of today couldn’t hold a candle to the bright lights of baseball’s past, but for what purpose? The boy would not have changed his mind and become any less of a fan of baseball, of his team, and of his favorite players. If anything, he would have shrugged. From his vantage point the times seemed just fine.
Later in life, when he wondered about it, the boy would learn that this tendency to believe that things were always getting worse was due to a particular cognitive feature of the human brain called the negativity bias. Psychologists have long observed that people tend to recall negative experiences more readily than positive ones, a fact that may have been evolutionarily important as a trait that keeps us out of harm’s way. Of course, though, it also means—as was more than evident throughout the 1970s among baseball fans, taxpayers, and ordinary citizens afflicted with a nationalized sense of “malaise”—that humans tend to be hardwired for a doom-and-gloom outlook.
Still, it was fortunate for Tom Fallon’s grandson that he was Tom Fallon’s grandson, as he was one of those rare cases that proved the rule. Rather than gloom and doom, Fallon was optimistic almost to a fault—ever dreaming of a better life, ever encouraging everyone else to dream. It was this tendency, of course, that bound his grandson, and many others in the family, to Tom Fallon. It was also what led him to devise his latest get-rich plan—one that he was certain would finally get him the financial security he had long wanted for his family.
Beyond the world of Tom Fallon and his grandson, in the second half of 1978 people all over America were increasingly doubtful that things would get better in the foreseeable future. Much of the impetus for this sense of decline in the 1970s was hard economic reality. After the 1973 energy shock sent the country into sharp recession, the economy had been slow to recover. By 1977 a condition known as “stagflation,” a combination of stagnant economic growth coupled with fast-rising inflation, had developed. And while President Carter had taken a number of steps to deal with it, and had given numerous speeches to assuage the concerns, nothing seemed to ease the situation.
Beyond economics another reason for the cynicism of Americans in 1978 was the inevitable social change being driven primarily by generational changeover. Simply put, the emerging adulthood of the baby boom was driving a host of social and cultural revolutions—the rise of feminism and other interest-group movements, the explosion of the suburbs, the mainstreaming of drug use, increasing divorce rates, and other trappings of the so-called culture of narcissism. With all this as a backdrop it’s no wonder that Time would, in the summer of 1979, declare that nobody would call the 1970s “the good old days.”
While Tom Fallon was hardly a qualified economist, if asked he would have said that things were not nearly as bad as everyone seemed to believe.2 Fallon’s Cucamonga Hardware, after all, had grown steadily in recent years. The store had plenty of customers, and the partners were earning a decent living. Still, Fallon wanted more. He wanted to create something truly noteworthy. And this impulse, along with his view of the times, led him to submit a wild new proposal to the partnership.
To understand Fallon’s latest scheme, one would have to understand the exact spirit of Cucamonga—or Rancho Cucamonga as it was now known—at the end of the 1970s. Located on the edge of the wide, contiguous swath of development that spread east from Los Angeles, Cucamonga was still relative terra incognita. The landscape that surrounded the town was, though punctuated by the eucalyptus tree lines planted long ago as windbreak, composed mostly of dusty scrub fields. Even in 1978, after developers had discovered the area, Cucamonga was relatively open, traffic free, and mostly devoid of the polluted skies that plagued much of the rest of Southern California. In the northern part of the town, up against the foothills of the Sierra Madre, there were vast, open rock-quarry pits, yielding the gravel and stone that were being used to pave over the region. In scattered lots here and there were small vineyards and modest lemon and orange groves, presumably owned by the last of California’s small-time f
armers. Although most of these fields would disappear within a few years, in 1977 and 1978 you could still, while walking to the Circle K, cut across small lots of budding grapevines and lush citrus trees. In summer and fall the winds brought tumbleweeds to Cucamonga, which rolled through the town like something out of a movie western. Summer evenings were punctuated, especially in the foothills, by the mournful call of coyotes come to prey on house cats, small dogs, and unsecured garbage bins. Then there were the desert frogs. Thousands of them, crawling out from the fields at night and finding their way into backyard swimming pools.
The openness of the newly renamed Rancho Cucamonga, and all of its dusty, scrubby plots of dirt, was the key to Tom Fallon’s plan. When he first moved to the area in 1974, settling in Alta Loma, Fallon saw the open land and salivated. At the time a local acre was selling for about ten thousand dollars. He knew it for what it was—a dirt-cheap opportunity—and he also saw that builders were increasingly becoming interested in the land. Lacking resources and credit to buy, however, Fallon could do nothing about it. He would have to bide his time. By 1978, with two sons having joined in the Cucamonga Hardware partnership, and another son working in the store hoping to become a partner, business was good. Now, at last, Fallon knew it was time to act. And it was also at this moment that Fallon and his business fell into some good fortune.
What happened was this: On the city block that occupied the corner of Archibald Avenue and Foothill Boulevard in Cucamonga, there existed an array of old low-slung shops and a mishmash of other buildings. In the 1960s the area had gained some underground notoriety for being the stomping grounds of musician Frank Zappa. In his early twenties at the time, Zappa had come to the area to work at Paul Buff’s Pal Recording Studio, which was located on Archibald Avenue directly across the street from Cucamonga Hardware. The location would leave an impression on Zappa, and he would later describe the corner in his autobiography. “Cucamonga was a blotch on a map,” he wrote. “On those four corners we had an Italian restaurant, an Irish pub, a malt shop and a gas station. North, up Archibald, were an electrician’s shop, a hardware store and the recording studio. Across the street was a Holy Roller church, and up the block from that was the grammar school.”3
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