In 1968, Sports Helped Temper a Year of Rage and Upheaval

Great article in the N.Y. Times by my friend Tim Wendel, whose new book “Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever” comes out next month. Enjoy!

Pub. date: Feb. 18, 2012

By TIM WENDEL

Culture wars. Political discord. A divisive presidential campaign.

One of the reassuring aspects of history is we can often find an era, even a year, when the times were as bad or even worse than they are now.

One such year was 1968. In April, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed. By late August, emotions boiled over on the streets of Chicago, where thousands protested what was unfolding at the Democratic National Convention. Through it all, the presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon, Hubert H. Humphrey and George C. Wallace slung the mud, and the electorate was often left disillusioned and angry.

“A year of great convulsion and heartbreak, 1968 was the closest we’ve come to a national nervous breakdown since the Civil War,” said Hampton Sides, the author of “Hellhound on His Trail,” which described the events of King’s assassination.

The traumatic year of 1968 has been analyzed and written about from all sorts of angles — political, cultural, even musical. For this was the period between the Summer of Love and Woodstock. A time when even the best band in the world, the Beatles, was shaken to its core.
But what has often been overlooked in that crucible of years was the pivotal role sports played.
In ’68, Detroit was in dire straits. Swaths of the city had burned the summer before as it experienced one of the deadliest riots in American history. Tigers outfielder Willie Horton, who had grown up in the Detroit projects, went into the streets and pleaded with his fellow citizens to stop the burning and looting, to no avail. Meanwhile, his teammate Mickey Lolich went from the pitcher’s mound to patrolling downtown Detroit as a member of the National Guard. When the ’68 baseball season was delayed by King’s funeral, the Tigers players and athletes nationwide discovered that more eyes were upon them than they had realized.
“We quickly learned that if we could pull together as a team — that meant everybody, blacks and whites — perhaps we could set an example for the rest of city,” Horton said. “There was a lot more riding on that ’68 season for us, for the city, than just wins and losses.”

In St. Louis, blacks, whites and Latinos came together to once again be the best team in the National League. Here was a ballclub that reveled in its racial diversity. A rainbow coalition well before the Rev. Jesse Jackson ever coined the phrase.


How athletes responded to the upheaval in 1968 was often human and something fans could find solace in. The Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, for example, was saddened by King’s death. He and his teammate Curt Flood greatly admired King. Perhaps as a result, Gibson did not start that season well. But when Kennedy was gunned down after winning the California primary, Gibson responded by pitching his first shutout and went on to put up a season for the ages: 13 shutouts, 28 complete games and a 1.12 earned run average. He found a way to channel his rage into superior efforts. His 17 strikeouts in Game 1 of the ’68 World Series stand as one of the most iconic performances of that season and perhaps any other period in sports. Gibson unleashed his pitches like a man on fire, battling to set right the world around him.

In comparison, Horton decided he had to rearrange his life so he was never far from home. That would seem an impossible task for a ballplayer who spends so much time on the road. But Horton, almost in a methodical fashion, made friends in every other American League city. Close enough friends that he could stop by and have dinner at their homes if he felt the need.

“That’s one way I kept going,” he said. “You had to find something when everything was falling apart around you.”

When I began “Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever,” I knew I would write about two of the greatest teams in the Tigers and the Cardinals. What I did not expect to discover were athletes who were struggling like so many others in the country to find a way to move forward, to somehow come together.

Such stories were not restricted to baseball. By sitting with teammates of color at the Jets’ training table, Joe Namath helped guide them toward a Super Bowl championship that season. The Mexico City Olympics are best remembered for the raised fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. But those Summer Games should also be relived for the silver medal an ill-prepared Jim Ryun captured in the 1,500 meters at altitude. In basketball, the player-coach Bill Russell rallied the aging Boston Celtics past Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers, then Jerry West and the Los Angeles Lakers for another championship.

“If anything, this was the biggest year in all of U.S. history,” said Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that sports was right in the middle of the metaphoric pot of a roiling culture.”

One can argue that times are different now. The money in sports is so much more plentiful, and many athletes probably have a greater sense of entitlement. Yet every now and then, we are reminded that sports can transcend even the worst of times. From the newfound magic of Jeremy Lin to the improbable championship run of the Giants to one of the best World Series showdowns in recent memory, we gain a glimpse at the way sports can not only thrill us, but heal us, too.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/sports/in-1968-sports-helped-to-temper-a-year-of-rage-and-upheaval.html?_r=4