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STAN ISAACS Out of Left Field |
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Isn't the One I Remember |
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His HBO movie nails small details, but gets Maris & Mantle all wrong
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
I'M AFRAID THAT 61*, the new HBO film about Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle's
pursuit in 1961 of Babe Ruth's home run record, is from the Oliver
Stone school of movie making. They have taken real people and
real events and hoked them up with phony dramatics that obscure
reality.
I am probably overreacting to the movie because I covered the
Yankees that season. I liked Maris. I found Mantle much harder
to deal with. The movie's depiction of the two is all wrong because,
for all his occasional surliness, Maris could be approached and
argued out of a cantankerous mood. Mantle was something else:
he could freeze you by looking through you. So it is a bit ridiculous
for the film to show Mantle as the loosey-goosey guy advising
Maris how to deal with the press.
First, let me pass along two incidents which deflate some of
the basic premises of the film. In Detroit one night, when Maris
hit home run No. 56 off the right façade in Tiger Stadium,
right fielder Al Kaline retrieved the ball and threw it toward
the Yankee dugout for Maris to have. Afterward in the locker
room, Detroit reporter Watson Spoelstra asked Maris if that was
a nice thing for Kaline to do.
Because I liked Maris but was all too aware of his tendency to
be blunt, I fervently wished Maris would answer yes. Instead,
he said, "Anybody would have done it." He came off
as an ungracious lout and Spoelstra wrote it that way in his
paper. The next night Detroit fans at the park who obviously
had read Spoelstra's story booed Maris lustily.
The film shows a fan razzing Maris and then throwing a chair
at him, producing a hullabaloo with the Yankees protesting to
the umpires. I am told that Tony Kubek, Maris' teammate, said
this occurred. If it happened, I and others who covered the team,
weren't aware of it, and it certainly didn't inspire the scene
depicted in the movie.
Cut now to a game in Chicago in July, when interest in Maris
and Mantle's pursuit of Ruth's record was heating up. A game
was held up because of rain and there was a long delay. The clubhouses
are off-base to reporters during a rain delay, but word came
up to the press box that Maris had come out on the wire-screened
runway to the dugout and was chatting with fans. This made him
available to the press and several of us scurried down the runway
and chit-chatted with him until play resumed. The man, who myth
has it couldn't handle the press, easily could have avoided the
press at this time. He didn't.
Yet the movie goes for the cliché of having the press
as the enemy. It paints scene after scene of reporters hounding
him. It has one of them, named Artie Green, who director Billy
Crystal himself has likened to the real life Leonard Shecter
of the New York Post, as a bitter, petty guy constantly looking
to harass Maris. This is patently unfair to Shecter, who often
infuriated the Yankees, but was on good terms with Maris that
year.
It also paints a reporter named Milt, who we knew as Milt Gross,
a contentious man angry at the younger reporters, as the nice
guy, fair to Maris. There is even a line which has Milt telling
Artie Green, "You're like a chipmunk looking for nuts."
This is a sly allusion to the fact that the irreverent young
writers of that time were called "chipmunks," a term
of opprobrium to the entrenched, a badge of honor to people like
Shecter and me.
When Mantle was injured and Maris became the main man, he suffered
the mental tension of chasing the record. But there was little
of the contentiousness that is part of the myth of 1961 that
the film plays to. In actuality Maris' problems stemmed mostly
from events of the next season. In the off-season, Maris, prodded
by his brother Rudy, came to the conclusion that he had not made
enough money from his feat. He resented one like Shecter writing
a book about him, for which Shecter got all of $1,000.
Maris came to spring training in 1962 with a multi-dollar-sized
chip on his shoulder. He blew off UPI reporter Oscar Fraley and
columnist Jimmy Cannon. They ripped him, and that escalated controversy
about him. Those of us who had long covered him recognized that
he was a likeable grouch when a relative unknown, but somebody
who didn't know how to be gracious, at least on the surface,
when a celebrity.
The movie is painful when it makes villains of baseball commissioner
Ford Frick and Babe Ruth's widow by having them rooting against
Maris while watching on TV his pursuit of home-run No. 60 in
154 games, the number of games teams played when Ruth set his
record. Frick made an asterisk of himself by declaring an asterisk
should be placed next to Maris' record. This never happened,
but the treatment of Frick here is vintage Oliver Stone stuff.
One of Maris' problems was that if 1,000 people cheered him and
10 people booed him, it would be the boos that would rankle and
stay with him. Maris became embittered with the press and, when
they questioned an injury, Yankee management. He was a fallen
figure in New York before being traded. He groused about the
press ever afterward, though the only two significant honors
he won, Most Valuable Player awards in 1960 and 1961, were voted
him by the press.
At his funeral in Fargo, the temperature was below freezing.
His wife said jocularly on a gushy ESPN tribute to Maris that
making the press stand at the cemetery in the freezing weather
may have been Roger's revenge. As one who stood out there, shivering
in the cold, I sure appreciate that, particularly when I learned
later that Mantle had not come to the cemetery, but had spent
the time back at the motel drinking.
Crystal got the little
baseball details right. The numbers of opposing players are correct
and there is the wonderful touch of the off-center head posture
of Hoyt Wilhelm by the actor (pitcher Tom Candiotti) playing
Wilhelm.
In essence, Crystal, a fervent Yankee rooter, got a little-boy's
chance to memorialize his team and his heroes in this film. I'll
give him that. But I still don't forgive him, a Yankee fan growing
up in Long Beach, Long Island, going on and on for Ken Burns'
baseball documentary about what the loss of the Dodgers meant
to Brooklyn fans. As if he would know.
HBO is showing 61* again today, May 10, 14 and 18.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The illustration is © 2001 by HBO.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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