|
MAURY ALLEN BY THE BOOK |
 |
|
This is the story of a love
affair that never ended
of TheColumnists.com
This is a lesson of love.
You meet the one you want
to spend a life with, share those joyous moments, travel along
that open road, experience all those adventures, connect as an
eternal entry identified as 1 and 1A.
Sometimes it works out lucky. Friends and family spend a lifetime
admiring your connected style. Sometimes it flops like a dead
fish. As Woody Allen once explained in a film, “Relationships
are like a shark. What we have here is a dead shark.”
There is only one human relationship stronger than a couple’s
connection, only one stronger than all the sharks in the sea,
only one more eternal through all the fun and failure of life.
That is the hold a baseball team has on a baseball fan.
I can’t explain it. You get it or you don’t get it.
It is genetic and it is eternal. It can last a lifetime without
effort. It is as part of the psyche of the fallen as much as
the wonderment of that romantic love that novelists spend careers
describing. Mine started in 1939 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. I
was six years old. It is as strong today as it was 66 years ago.
I said the BROOKLYN Dodgers. Not the Dodgers. Not those imposters
gliding around Los Angeles in Dodger blue.
I waited 50 years to write a book about my team, my favorite
team, my emotional connectors, the World Champion 1955 Brooklyn
Dodgers, my one and only titlists.
In my book "Brooklyn Remembered: The 1955 Days of the
Dodgers" (Sports Publishing L. L. C.) I have finally
written my emotional love letter to the 25 baseball players who
changed my life.
They won, they finally won, they beat the Yankees that year and
for all Brooklyn residents, all Brooklyn fans, all emotionally
bound loyalists, it was nirvana at the Brooklyn Bridge.
Duke Snider, the home hero of those Dodgers and a longtime pal
of mine as a half century baseball writer, was the first member
of that team I approached.
It started with a sad note when he said, “You know I just
looked at the huge blowup picture I have in my garage of the
1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers and I realized only 11 of
us are still alive. Eight are pitchers. I guess they live longer
than the rest of us because they only work once every four or
five days.”
Snider said he was glad that I had written this book capturing
that team of half a century ago and the life and times of the
famed borough of Brooklyn.
“We had so much fun playing baseball then. We were so much
a part of the community,” he said.
They were so much a part of all of us. Neighbors and friends
at the dinner table, in our dens, in our boyhood play rooms without
ever really being there.
My walls were filled with photos of these Brooklyn Dodgers and
my bubble gum collection of cards began and ended with them.
I learned that America was a racist country when Jackie Robinson
showed up in Brooklyn in 1947 and I learned that anti-Semitism
had a strong hold on so many when Sandy Koufax, a kid from Brooklyn,
joined the Dodgers out of the University of Cincinnati (as a
basketball star) as a 19-year-old bonus kid. It was enough for
the other Dodgers that he was only 19, got all that money (a
whopping $14,000) but he also happened to be Jewish.
They had to keep him around that year and he actually won a couple
of games for the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers several years before he
became the standard of pitching excellence.
Don Zimmer was on that team and 57 years after he entered baseball,
he is still upset about the 1955 opener.
“The captain, Pee Wee Reese, was sick the night before we
started and he called me to his room,” Zimmer said. “I
was the backup shortstop and I would play for Pee Wee. We went
over the defenses and I tossed and turned all night in anticipation
of my first big league opening start.”
By game time, Reese recovered and Zimmer sat on the bench all
game. He was hot on that cold Pittsburgh day.
“It was my most frustrating and disappointing day in baseball
at the time,” he said.
Zimmer would later be the Boston manager when Bucky Bleeping
Dent homered for a 1978 Yankee playoff victory over the Red Sox.
Now, that was disappointment.
Carl Erskine was an anchor on that team and represents the dignity
and decorum of old style professionals.
Don Newcombe was a pitching hero, Roger Craig rescued the pitching
staff with a mid-summer call up and Johnny Podres became the
team’s ultimate legendary figure with two World Series wins
over the Yankees.
“Nobody would have cared if it was over the St. Louis Browns,”
witty Podres offered from his upstate New York home. “It
had to be the Yankees, right?”
Sure, we would have cared. But how sweet it was that the Yankees
were finally, finally beaten by my Brooklyn Dodgers.
I happened to be in the Army serving in Japan when all this October
4, 1955 emotion occurred. I could still feel it across the waves.
“Hey, Brooklyn,” shouted my pal from Bismarck, South
Dakota, just before the game I heard on Armed Forces Radio. “The
Dodgers never win the Series.”
Well, they did. They won for me and for all the kids playing
in the streets, cutting out those newspaper pictures, oiling
their gloves for a bleacher visit to Ebbets Field.
Ahh, nobody has ever really been able to explain love. You get
it or you don’t. I loved, love and always will love the
Brooklyn Dodgers, especially the 1955 version of that gift of
the gods.
©2005 by Maury Allen. This column first posted April 11,
2005.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Maury Allen. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|