100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (18 page)

47. The First High Five

As much as George Washington is the father of our country, Glenn Burke is the father of the high five. Which is to say that he was involved, and he gets most of the credit—but it isn't quite that simple.

Here's the cherry tree version of the story: At the end of the 1977 season, when Dusty Baker circled the bases after joining teammates Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, and Ron Cey to form the first quartet of 30-homer hitters in MLB history, the on-deck hitter, Burke, was there to greet him.

“When Baker crossed home plate, the first man to congratulate him was the exuberant rookie center fielder, who had been in the on-deck circle,” Randy Harvey wrote five years later in the
Los Angeles Times
. “Glenn Burke raised his right hand high above his head. Baker did not know what would happen next, but he did the same. They slapped palms. It was the first high five.

“‘You think about the feeling you get when you give the high five,' Burke says. ‘I had that feeling before everybody else did.'”

Burke then went up to bat and homered himself, and according to the story, got a return high five from Baker. In the passing years, Dodgers fans have not only assumed but taken pride in the fact that this timeless form of celebration, the long-running successor to the handshake and the low five, was brought to life on their home field, by one of their own.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says the newspaper editor in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
. It's a time-tested strategy. Except sometimes, people can't help themselves. In 1995,
Village Voice
writer Gersh Kuntzman found footage of the legendary moment and started pointing out some facts. “Our analysis of the videotape of the Baker home run is inconclusive,” Kuntzman wrote. “It does show Burke raising his arms [yes, plural] above his head, but Baker winds up hugging his teammate rather than smacking Burke's upraised palms.”

While granting Burke a place on the evolutionary path of the high five, Kuntzman's research brought him 2,000 miles from Dodger Stadium to Kentucky, where an entirely different origin story for the high five resides. This version starts with the Louisville University basketball team in the fall of 1979.

“One afternoon, I was just sitting there trying to think of something crazy,” Louisville's Darryl Cleveland told Kuntzman. “I met a group of players at center court, held my hand up high and just said, ‘Gimme five up high!' and it worked.”

Though this event went unwitnessed by the public, Kuntzman concluded that the popularity of the Louisville team, which defeated UCLA to win the NCAA title, constitutes the true origin of the high five.

Perhaps Kuntzman was too hasty to take credit from Burke. After all, two years passed between these two invention stories. Even if Burke's high five wasn't fully executed, it almost seems too improbable that it was the last time a Dodger raised his arms in celebration.

At one point, another source claimed to knock both the Dodgers and Louisville out of the inventors' chair. In 2002, students at the University of Virginia staged what they called the first National High Five Day. Compelled to research the true origin story, they came upon former Murray State basketball player Lamont (Mont) Sleets, Jr., who purportedly adopted a gesture based on what members of his father's Vietnam battalion used to greet each other.

“It was the Bobcat division,” Sleets wrote, “but my dad and his friends always called it ‘The Five.' When they'd later reunite at the Sleets household, they continued to extend their right hands up in the air, saying the name of their division. They'd walk in the door, and a three-year-old kid, he doesn't know the difference between all these grown-ups. But they're all sayin' ‘Five' with their hand up like this, so I just start saying to them, ‘Hi, Five!' like it was their name.” This, Sleets says, evolved into the high five that Mont Sleets brought to his high school and college basketball teams in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 2011, however, Jon Mooallem pursued his own research of the history of the high five for
ESPN
The
Magazine
. Contacting the High Five Day organizers, Mooallem learned that the Sleets story was a hoax. So much for that. What was interesting, though, was that in the comments section of the online version of the article, several readers laid claim to having done their own high fives years, even decades, earlier.

Veritable? Apocryphal? Who knows? Maybe the truest story of the high five is that, like the United States, it has many forebears. This much is certain: You can't tell the story of the high five without talking about Glenn Burke, who passed away of AIDS-related illness in 1995. A high-five to his memory.

 

 

 

48. Chief Noc-a-Homa and Joe Morgan

The two leading hitters for the 1982 Dodgers were named Topsy and Turvy. The ping-ponging jolts of that season, even more than in years like 1951 and 1962, left Dodger fans virtually seasick.

Defending their 1981 World Series title with much of that team's core intact, the '82 Dodgers found themselves blindsided by the Atlanta Braves, who had an MLB-record 13 consecutive wins to start the season and held a 7
1/2
-game NL West lead over the fourth-place Dodgers half a month into the season. By the last day of May, Los Angeles closed within three games of the Braves, only to get swept in Atlanta in early June. When the third-place Dodgers returned to Atlanta on July 30, they trailed the Braves by 10
1/2
games in the standings and 8–3 in the sixth inning of the first game of a doubleheader.

In those days, the Braves had a mascot named Chief Noc-a-Homa, who held court from a teepee placed in the outfield stands. In the 21
st
century, he would have struggled against the test of political correctness, but the bigger issue back in the '80s was that when Atlanta was doing well, the Chief's teepee occupied some very saleable seating real estate. With the Braves' red-hot start bringing pennant fever to Atlanta by summertime, owner Ted Turner had the teepee removed so that more seats could be sold.

For those who lived through it, it was an unforgettable decision. Starting by rallying for two runs in the sixth and five in the seventh to beat the Braves 10–9, the Dodgers saw their fortunes shoot upward just as those of the Braves collapsed. Los Angeles won 12 of its next 13 and 17 of 22, while Atlanta lost an astonishing 19 of 21. Within three weeks of Noc-a-Homa's banishment, the Dodgers had gone from a double-digit deficit to a four-game lead.

Responding to the panic of Braves fans who certainly were going to be less likely to buy tickets if the team's collapse continued, Turner reinstated the teepee. Atlanta promptly went on a 13–2 binge and, just like that, the Dodgers were looking up at the Braves in the standings again.

The teams would jockey for position for the remainder of the hold-your-breath season. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants lurked. The descendants of Bobby Thomson's miracle workers were a fourth-place 66–67 on September 1, nine games out of first. But their own 18–4 spurt, capped by a three consecutive one-run victories in Los Angeles, created a logjam in the West with one week to go: the Dodgers at 85–70; the Braves and Giants each at 84–71.

Heading into enemy territory on the final weekend of the season, the Dodgers eliminated the Giants with 4–0 and 15–2 victories Friday and Saturday. But the Dodgers had stumbled earlier in the week, and trailed Atlanta entering the final day by one game. For the second time in three years, the Dodgers would be playing on the final day to extend their regular season into a tiebreaker game.

Fernando Valenzuela would be the starting pitcher, but he was gone for a pinch-hitter in the top of the seventh with the bases loaded in a 2–2 tie, a decision that stood in contrast to manager Tommy Lasorda's do-or-die approach with Valenzuela in his final start the year before during the 1981 World Series. The game was then turned over to two pitchers: Tom Niedenfuer and Terry Forster. If only the Dodgers had had a crystal ball.

Niedenfuer gave up a single and a double, prompting Lasorda to send in Forster with one out in the seventh. Giants pinch-hitter Jim Wohlford struck out, bringing up left-handed hitting second baseman Joe Morgan.

Through the Dodgers' first 161
2/3
games of the season, Forster had not allowed a home run to a left-handed batter. After the game, an inconsolable Forster, who had missed most of the previous three seasons because of two surgeries, told Mike Littwin of the
Los Angeles Times
that he wanted to run and grab the 1–2 slider to Morgan as soon as he let go of it. But Morgan's bat got there first, blasting it over the right-field fence for a three-run homer.

“I live for those kind of moments,” Forster said. “That's what I've worked for. What's the use of working hard when you go out and make a bleeping pitch like that?”

The Dodgers got doubles from Dusty Baker and Ken Landreaux with one out in the eighth to bring the tying run to the plate. But none of the team's remaining five batters—including Steve Garvey and Ron Cey, in what would turn out to be the final at-bats of their historic Dodgers careers—could reach base. Bill Russell grounded out to end the game, thereby handing the division over to Atlanta. Chief Noc-a-Homa would get a seat for the playoffs and, in a coin-toss of a season, the Dodgers had landed on their heads.

 

 

 

49. Coliseum Carnival

Old news became new news in 2008. A stroke of genius 50 years after the team's arrival from Brooklyn inspired the Dodgers to stage an exhibition game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, their original home that fit them like a half-tailored suit.

Back in the '50s, while waiting for Dodger Stadium to be built, Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley had the option of playing in the home of the Pacific Coast League's Los Angeles Angels: a 22,500-seat Wrigley Field, an actual, albeit cozy, venue for baseball. Too cozy, it was decided, for major league baseball. Instead, O'Malley chose the historic but inflexible Coliseum to host the Dodgers for what would turn out to be their first four years.

Baseball stadiums had a history of catering their dimensions to fit the sub-ideal public spaces they were thrust into, but the Coliseum broke new ground in contorting the game. The left-field fence could not extend more than 251 feet from home plate. To mitigate this, a 42-foot tall screen substituted for the fence itself, preventing stubby fly balls from becoming home runs, but not stopping arcing ones. Wally Moon, the player most famous for taking advantage of the screen, slugged .543 with 37 homers in 217 career Coliseum games. The setup prominently altered the game of baseball 77 times a season, not much less significantly than if the Dodgers abruptly decided to turn the sport's hallowed diamond into a pentagon. It left Los Angeles fans with two choices: chagrin that their first taste of baseball was subverted, or gratitude to get any kind of bat-and-ball game at all.

They chose gratitude.

 

 

The first major league game played in Los Angeles was on April 18, 1958, as the Dodgers beat the San Francisco Giants 6–5 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. 78,672 fans were in attendance—the largest Opening Day crowd in major league history.
Photo courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

 

What's unmistakably important about the Dodgers' Coliseum legacy is the fondness that it engendered. Rather than castigate O'Malley, who had become detested by some in Brooklyn for hightailing the Dodgers out of town, Dodgers fans don't seem to have been offended in the slightest that their first taste of major league baseball had a distended configuration—at least no more than they were offended by the team's first Los Angeles season producing a 71–83 seventh-place finish.

The Dodgers, or the fates, rewarded the fans' generosity of spirit with a stunning World Series victory in 1959, a year in which the Coliseum established itself as a record-setting facility. An exhibition tribute to fallen legend Roy Campanella drew a record 93,103 fans. Three World Series games against the White Sox broke 92,000 or more as well.

Yet team attendance that year was 2.1 million, a figure the modern-day Dodgers achieve by August (though in the 21
st
century, the measuring stick is tickets sold rather than tickets used). For all those football-size crowds, the Coliseum could be a barren place, especially during its numerous day games in the summer. The second home game of the 1959 season drew fewer than 15,000. On June 22 and August 2 games against the Phillies, the crowd barely broke 10 grand. A year earlier, a game against the Cubs booked 6,195 fans—the stadium was 6 percent full.

The final regular-season baseball game at the Coliseum was Wednesday, September 20, 1961. Five games behind the Cincinnati Reds with 10 to play, the Dodgers sent 25-year-old Sandy Koufax (17–11, 3.73 ERA) against Barney Schultz of the Cubs. The game went 13 innings and Koufax pitched all of them, allowing two runs on seven hits (Ron Santo hit a two-run homer in the fourth), three walks, and a hit batter, while striking out 15. He threw
205
pitches, yet did not allow a hit from the ninth through the 13th. Moon, appropriately enough, scored the winning run. The attendance was 12,068.

It was entirely possible that Los Angeles could have greeted the idea of tripping down Memory Lane back to the Coliseum in March 2008 with similar lack of commitment, especially when traffic on Memory Lane figured to be backed up for an hour or more. (The Sig Alert, the label defined as an unplanned stoppage of traffic for 30 minutes or more, was born in Los Angeles not long before the Dodgers' arrived.) But the pull of that particular, peculiar Coliseum era was simply too powerful to be ignored. As a one-time-only opportunity, rarer than a World Series game, to see or re-see what it was like to play under such un-pristine circumstances, the Coliseum game allowed Dodgers fans to travel through time, and a record 115,000 people decided to take advantage. It was a true celebration of baseball in Los Angeles.

 

 

Opening Day for L.A.

The Los Angeles Dodgers actually made their official debut in San Francisco, playing their fellow New York expatriates the Giants on April 15, 1958—with 21-year-old Don Drysdale taking an 8–0 drubbing. The team split its next two games, then headed south for its new homecoming.

On April 18, the team paraded in the morning from City Hall to the Coliseum, where 78,672 customers greeted them. Carl Erskine, whose best years were behind him by his own admission, got the start.

“I was kind of surprised [Walter] Alston had selected me to pitch the opener,” Erskine recalled, 50 years later. “But I think he wanted an experienced pitcher. That was a wild day, man. There were 80,000 people coming into this football stadium to see a baseball game, in a new city, playing before a crowd that had sort of heard about us and didn't really know about us. It was a curious crowd.”

Staked to a 5–2 lead by the fifth, Erskine went eight innings, allowing four runs, to get the win. But as far as game details go, Erskine's recollections again harked back to the crowd.

“I remember in the second or third inning I looked over at the Dodgers dugout, and about five or six guys were looking back over the dugout at the movies stars we were seeing. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Lana Turner—you could name about a dozen of them.”