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| MEMORIES OF SUMMER |
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David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Roger Kahn, author of Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art and Writing about It a Game.
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Roger Kahn, author of "Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art and Writing about It a Game."
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DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: Roger, this is the third book you’ve written that waxes rhapsodic about baseball in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Why were those years so golden?
ROGER KAHN, Author, "Memories of Summer": I think--with each book I think about it a little more.
These were not xerox copies, and I think now what made the years so golden first was the coming of the black player to organized baseball. I think you can really say the coming of blacks, Jackie Robinson, with Larry Doby in the American League, Willie Mays with the Giants, there was a capacity, a potential there to have the game destroyed because their appearance made the racists so furious that they were going to strike; they were going to--it’s necessary to destroy the game. And if one of these great players had not succeeded, it could have been absolute chaos. But of course, they did succeed, and they’re in the Hall of Fame.
DAVID GERGEN: So they invigorated the game in many ways.
ROGER KAHN: Invigorated the game, and made the game better, and the teams hired the blacks.
You didn’t have to be a great scout to go into the Negro American League or Negro National League and say, "I think that kid in centerfield might do." And his name is Willie Mays. It wasn’t too tough to look at Roy Campanella and say, "This fella can catch." So the teams that could shed their prejudice got these great players. And what teams were those? Well, first, there were the Dodgers and Branch Rickey. And second there were the Giants. And suddenly the Giants and the Dodgers were the most powerful teams in New York. And this is getting to your point about vigor, and they would have this fratricidal battle, Brooklyn and New York.
DAVID GERGEN: In the National League.
ROGER KAHN: In the National League, 154 games, more bean balls than you could imagine, ferocious game, and then the winner of this war of attrition would then play the all-white Yankees. A summary of the Yankees then was, how can you root for the New York Yankees? It’s like rooting for the U.S. Steel.
DAVID GERGEN:
And the Yankees won their share but Brooklyn finally broke through.
ROGER KAHN: Finally, but the Yankees beat Brooklyn in ‘47; they beat Brooklyn in ‘49; they beat Brooklyn in ‘52. They beat the Giants in ‘51. They rolled on. And if you were a bad-writing sportswriter, you would say, the Lordly Yankees, or the Yankee Juggernaut, and without even knowing what Juggernaut met.
DAVID GERGEN: Right. But if you are a kid from Brooklyn, as you were, the year ‘55 was pretty important.
ROGER KAHN: It was pretty darned important, and it was the only time in the history of humanity from the Jurassic Age until today when a Brooklyn team won a World Series. And unless we get a second coming in Flatbush, it will be the only time till the very end of time a Brooklyn team wins. Yeah, it was pretty exciting. I remember a little story, if I can tell you, David.
DAVID GERGEN: Sure.
ROGER KAHN:
We all, unfortunately, we all smoked a lot of those days, you know, and Peewee Reese, the Dodger captain and shortstop, the captain from Kentucky, after a while I found myself in kind of an elegant pub, and there were cigarette butts around our ankles, and we were drinking, I guess it was Chablis. And--
DAVID GERGEN: Somehow I think not, but go ahead.
ROGER KAHN: And Peewee had said all of the years he lost--in ‘41 and so forth--he said, you don’t just lose; you begin to say, what kind of a person am I really, and he talked about that, and I said, well, now it was two out in the game where you had the chance to finally--finally, you could win. Will you tell me what you are thinking? And Peewee said, oh, yeah, I was thinking I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me, and this was like a huge epiphany. I said to myself, well, that’s the way I play baseball, but this is Peewee Reese, and I said, I know what you mean, and Peewee said, I’ll bet you do."
DAVID GERGEN: This season, of course, marks the 50th anniversary of the integration of baseball, Jackie Robinson coming to the Dodgers branch, Rickey bringing him there. You got to know Jackie Robinson really well. Tell us about him.
ROGER KAHN: Well, David, one reason I got to know him very well was that I admired him so much before I met him. And, after all, what was Jack asking, to move into a white neighborhood?
No. To send his kids to a white school? No. To join a golf club and play with whites? Heavens no! He was asking for the right to make a living playing end field in the major leagues, if he was good enough, and Jack’s phrase on that to me several times was, my demand was modest enough. Well, of course, I rooted for him passionately, and when I got to cover the team and some of the writers said, well, you know, he’s hard to like, and, look, I thought he was a great man before I met him, and I think that showed, so we became close.
DAVID GERGEN: Who was the greatest ball player you’ve seen?
ROGER KAHN: The greatest baseball player?
DAVID GERGEN: Yes. The greatest baseball player.
ROGER KAHN: Willie Howard Mays of Fairfield, Alabama. Jack may be the most exciting; to me, at any rate, Stan Musial the best hitter; to me, at any rate, Sandy Koufax the best pitcher, but the greatest total player--run, hit, field, throw, steal--and the most joyous player was young Willie Mays. And I’ve never seen anybody whose love for playing baseball exploded from the ballpark, and everybody felt it. And actually it was true, David, when the Giants got done with a tough game, Willie would go up to the apartment he had in Harlem and what did he do, he would play stick ball with the children. And I’d say this, if I was choosing up a stick ball team, I would pick Willie first.
DAVID GERGEN: You have this marvelous picture in your book from that ‘54 game against the Indians, the catch. Tell us about that.
ROGER KAHN: I was standing there with Bob Kramer of "Sports Illustrated," and I thought ball game, ball game, nobody’s going to get this.
DAVID GERGEN: Because a long drive.
ROGER KAHN: Huge drive by Vic Wertz, 470, monstrous line drive.
Willie ran the ball down and made this throw, and I think that’s why the Giants won that World Series because if you’re playing against Zeus, which Willie looked like, it’s pretty hard to beat him. And now when I went through the book, when I went through "Memories of Summer" to sit with Willie in Atherton, California, in Willie’s den, and Willie said I want to tell you about that catch, and Willie is a subtle man, and he said, look, about this catch, from the minute it left the bat, I knew I could catch it. And I said, I didn’t know you could. Willie said, It didn’t matter what you thought. I knew I could, but I knew Larry Doby, good runner--now it also is Larry’s 50th anniversary integrating the American League--was on second, it was a tie game, 8th inning, two to two, on a fly that long, Doby could score after the fly, and Willie said, I’ve done that myself more than once. So his focus, he says, as he was going out, he would catch the ball, was, how am I going to throw it? I’ve got to have my momentum going in the throw if I stop--and he did a little motion with his feet stopped--I just get my arm in it, that won’t work. So he planned to catch it right here, do a 360, so he would get his full momentum into his throw. He made this incredible catch.
DAVID GERGEN: Over his head.
ROGER KAHN: Over his head.
DAVID GERGEN: Over the shoulder.
ROGER KAHN: Right here. Did a 360 while running toward a fence, a concrete wall, loosed the throw. The throw was 330 feet. That’s a football field in an end zone, a throw of a Howitzer, and fell down. And he said to me, and the next day the newspapers wrote "Willie Mays made that throw on instinct." What he means, David, is, and he means to this day, is that the press, the media tend to say blacks are natural athletes and only whites know how to think.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah. It’s really interesting. What was the finest moment in baseball that you can remember?
ROGER KAHN:
To me it was in the early Jackie Robinson days in 1947 when the Cardinals were talking about striking, when the Dodgers were thrown out of a hotel in Philadelphia, not the South, and this terrible anti-black feeling was building and building, and finally the Dodgers went to Cincinnati. Peewee Reese grew up in Louisville. They grew up segregated because Louisville was segregated. He went in the Navy. The Navy was a segregated service. And there--of course, we feel in Cincinnati these cries of "hate," "jungle bunny," "snowflake," and much worse--came and came and came--Peewee was at shortstop, Jackie was at first base. Peewee called "time," walked over to Jackie Robinson, put his arm around Robinson and stood there, white man with his arm around the lone black man, and glared those bigots into silence. And my vote is the greatest moment in the history of American sports.
DAVID GERGEN: Well, with Peewee Reese now suffering from lung cancer, that’s a wonderful note on which to close. Roger Kahn, thank you very much.
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