April 17

By MICHAEL K. BOHN

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

They came by the thousands. Mostly men, with their overcoats buttoned and hats pulled tight against the cold wind. They formed a river of black and brown and gray wool that surged toward an immense structure on 161st in the Bronx. The river’s tributaries flowed from nearby subway stops, across the Macombs Dam Bridge from Manhattan and out of the 8,500 automobiles that clogged every avenue. All of them, all of the 100,000 people, came because they wanted a seat at the stadium, the coliseum of baseball. Although many looked forward to the game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, the brand new Yankee Stadium was the attraction that day, one ninety years ago this week.

The stadium gates opened at noon on Wednesday, April 18, 1923. The swells had it easy and headed for the 15,000 reserved seats and boxes. Everyone else stood in long lines at the ticket kiosks for one of the 50,000 unreserved seats in the grandstand and bleachers.

The Boston players left the Hotel Ansonia in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and took cabs to the game. But vehicles and pedestrians clogged the Manhattan approaches to the stadium, so the players walked across the Macombs Dam Bridge, carrying their equipment and uniforms. The police provided an escort for the Yankees, especially Babe Ruth, who lived in the Ansonia, as he drove in his Pierce-Arrow to the stadium.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of Major League Baseball and the living consequence of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, rode the Lexington and Jerome Avenue subway to the station next to the stadium. Landis finally found a police escort and safety inside the stadium after battling the crowd.

The club staff closed the gates at 2:10 p.m. and later announced that a crowd of 74,217 had paid to get in. The police reported that they had turned away 25,000.

A New York Times reporter looked with amazement at the vast skyscraper structure. “The sweep of the big stand strikes the eye most forcibly,” he wrote that night. “It throws its arms out to each side, the grandstand ending away over where the bleachers begin.”

Yankee Stadium boasted baseball’s first three-level grandstand, one that extended well past the foul lines into left and right field. The bleachers completed the arc around the outfield. A distinctive frieze hung from the top rim of the grandstand’s upper level, a decorative touch that would forever identify Yankee Stadium. A 400-yard running track encircled the field, a feature of the multi-sport stadium. A giant flagpole arose from deep centerfield in front of the 490-foot part of fence. Pity the poor centerfielder who ran into it, but hooray for the player who hit a ball that far.

A young John Durant, who later would become a widely read sportswriter, sat in the bleachers that day and later described the spectacle: “It was the biggest one-day show baseball had ever staged.”

As the Yankees took the field for warm-ups, 28-year-old Babe Ruth also marveled at the stadium, “Some ball yard.”

BUILDING THE STADIUM

The Yankees began their baseball life in 1903 as the Baltimore Orioles, a two-year-old, charter franchise in the American League. New Yorkers Frank Farrell, a big-time gambler, and Big Bill Devery, a former police chief with a shadowy reputation, bought the club for $18,000 and moved it to New York.

The owners quickly built a 16,000-seat ballpark for their team in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. The National League New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds, just a dozen blocks south.

The press began calling facility Hilltop Park because of elevated site above the Harlem River, which led to the team’s early nickname, the Highlanders. The team finished second in the AL in 1904 and 1906, but generally labored in the middle of the pack for years.

The Giants played at Hilltop for three months after an April 1911 fire at the Polo Grounds. The Giants returned the favor in 1913 when the Highlanders moved in as co-tenants at the Polo Grounds. Coincident with the move, the team formally changed its name to Yankees, a nickname that the press had been using for a few years.

Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Colonel Tillinghast Huston bought the Yankees in January 1915 for $450,000. Ruppert was a prominent brewer and Tammany Hall politician who had served four terms in the U.S. Congress. His colonelcy was an honorary National Guard title, but Huston earned his in wartime army service as an engineer. “We got an orphan ball club,” Ruppert told the press years later, “without a home of its own, without players of outstanding ability, without prestige.”

That all changed in 1920. Ruppert and Huston bought Babe Ruth’s contract from Red Sox owner Harry Frazee for $100,000 and a $300,000 loan to Frazee secured by the deed to Fenway Park. Ruth hit 54 home runs that season, an extraordinary feat for those times and a singular, sport-changing milestone.

The Babe’s batting also changed how New York baseball fans viewed the Yankees. The 1920 team demolished single-season, major-league attendance record by attracting 1,289,422 fans, far in excess of the Giants draw. Giants owner Charles Stoneham and his manager, John McGraw, decided it was time for the Yankees to leave the Polo Grounds. “If we kick them out,” McGraw said, according to author Michael Gershman, “they won’t be able to find another location on Manhattan Island. They’ll have to move to the Bronx or Long Island. The fan will forget about them, and they’ll be through.”

Ironically, the Yankees and the Giants met in the 1921 and 1922 World Series. The field-sharing agreement guaranteed a home-team Series win each year, and the Giants prevailed both times.

Ruppert and Huston shopped for a place to build a new stadium throughout Manhattan. But McGraw was right, and the colonels settled on a spot in the Bronx across the river from the Polo Grounds. They bought 10 acres from the estate of William Waldorf Astor for $675,000 in February 1921. City politics, likely instigated by McGraw and Stoneham, held up the start of construction until May 1922, a scant 11 months before the 1923 season’s first home game – April 18.

To design the stadium, the owners commissioned Osborn Engineering Company in Cleveland, which had built the Polo Grounds, Boston’s Fenway Park, Chicago’s Comiskey Park, and other major league facilities. The initial concept had grandstands that completely encircled the field, thus requiring an airplane if people wanted to see the field from outside. Budget constraints and the need for adequate sunshine for the grass eventually led to bleachers in the outfield. Ruppert decided to orient the diamond so the late afternoon sun would get in the leftfielder’s eyes. That and the short right field porch, built to accommodate the team’s left-handed hitting right fielder, led to one version of an old saying, “a house built for Ruth.”

An army of construction workers, marshaled by general contractor White Construction Company, labored nonstop on the project through the winter. In early April, the New York Times tabulated the materials used in the huge stadium. For example, crews installed 2,500 tons of structural steel, two million board feet of lumber, 30,000 cubic yards of concrete and 116,000 square feet of sod. The stadium boasted 16 restrooms, a total eight each for men and women, a ratio ahead of the times.

Ruppert and Huston spent a total $2.5 million for the land, construction, fees and miscellaneous costs. That was an inflation-adjusted $31.2 million in 2009, the year the new Yankee Stadium opened. The new park, which cost $1.5 billion, must have more bathrooms.

CEREMONIES

At 3:00 p.m., 30 minutes before the scheduled first pitch, the players and the Seventh Regiment Band assembled near the Yankees third-base dugout – a location switched in 1946. Also gathered there were the dignitaries, led by New York governor Al Smith and his wife Catherine. Maj. Gen. Robert Bullard, the commander of the Army’s Department of the East, and Maj. Gen. F.W. Sladen, superintendent of West Point, joined them, as well as other military and police officials, and colonels Ruppert and Huston. Once together, the celebrities walked to the centerfield flagpole.

John Philip Sousa, the March King, formed up the 75-piece band and began marching toward the centerfield flagpole. The two teams followed behind the musicians.

With everyone arrayed about the flagpole, the band struck up the Star Spangled Banner. A member of each team hauled up the American flag and Yankees 1922 AL pennant, with both flags billowing at the top on the anthem’s last note. The huge crowd roared with approval, and dignitaries returned to their box seats.

The players gathered around home plate. The Yankees wore their pinstriped white uniforms, with gray cardigan sweaters to ward off the cold. The Red Sox had on their road grays, which also had pinstripes. Splashes of bright red, though, were everywhere on the Boston players – their cap bills, undershirt sleeves, stirrup stockings and sweaters.

Governor Smith and Yankees catcher Wally Schang readied themselves for the ceremonial first pitch. Standing in his front row box, Smith doffed his bowler and then snapped a decent throw right to Schang. This was quite a departure from the norm – dignitaries, both then and more recently, have traditionally bounced one in the dirt. It was time to play ball.

THE GAME

The Yankees took the field, with Bob Shawkey, a 20-game winner in 1922, on the mound. Umpire Tommy Connolly, the senior official on the AL staff, worked the plate. The Boston shortstop, Chick Fewster, stepped in as the stadium’s first batter.

Shawkey set down the Sox in order, and Boston followed suit in the bottom of the first. Ruth, batting third, flied out to left. That didn’t sit well with either him or the crowd, considering his poor year the previous season and his woeful 2-17 performance at the plate in the 1922 World Series.

Things picked up in the bottom of the third. With two out, Joe Dugan singled in Shawkey for the Yankees first run in the new park. With Dugan and Whitey Witt on first and third, Ruth came to the plate.

Boston pitcher Howard Ehmke offered Babe nothing but off-speed stuff. On a 2-2 count, the Sox pitcher served up another slow curve. By then, Ruth had it timed and sent a frozen rope into the right-field seats.

The fans rose to their feet as one and gave Babe the biggest cheer in baseball history. The esteemed sportswriter Grantland Rice drew upon his famously purple prose to describe the blow: “On a low line it sailed, like a silver flame through the gray, bleak April shadows, and into the right-field bleachers. The sky above began to rock and the ground below began to shiver from the racket that arose.”

Durant later described Ruth’s home run trot: “Rounding third, he took off his cap and, holding it at arm’s length, waved it to the crowd all the way home. No shy tip of the cap from the Babe!”

The Yankees went on to win 4-0, an exclamation mark at the end of the day’s spectacle.

A question arose a few weeks later about the club’s reported gate total of 74,217. Reporters calculated that the stadium only had a little over 62,000 seats and questioned Ed Barrow, the Yankees business manager. He admitted to adding SRO figures to get into the 70,000 range. Whether the crowd totaled 62,000 or 74,000, the gate broke the single game attendance record by at least 20,000. By comparison, the Brooklyn Dodgers opened the same day at Ebbets Field in front of 14,000. Each of other three AL games drew about 20,000 fans, so the Yankee Stadium crowd equaled their collective total.

LEGACY

The Yankees opened their new stadium 2009 and then demolished the “house that Ruth built.” Baseball purists seem to favor the old park, though. “It was the perfect ballpark,” author Curt Smith told me last month, “because anything could happen here – and usually did. The foul lines were short enough for popgun home runs. The power alleys were so vast that doubles and especially triples – to many, the game’s most exciting plays – were an everyday rite.” Smith, whose latest book is “Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV,” liked the whole package: “The frieze, the triple tiers, the grass mowed on such awesome acreage. It became The Stadium – then and, in memory, now.”

Yankee Stadium came along during the Golden Age of American sports, the Roaring Twenties, an era that transformed games into entertainment. The park not only hosted the most successful team in baseball history but also many touchstones in the country’s sports culture.

Two baseball examples stand out: The 1939 farewell speech by a dying Lou Gehrig, the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” as he said of himself; and Ruth’s poignant goodbye in June 1948, captured by photographer Nat Fein.

Football broadened the stadium’s appeal. It became part of the Army-Notre Dame rivalry, including Knute Rockne’s “win one for the Gipper” game in 1928, and the 1958 Colts-Giants game transformed the NFL. And then boxing – Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and the others. It was quite a run.

By MICHAEL K. BOHN
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Mention the words “designated hitter” in a room full of baseball fans, and the reactions will be split. Younger folks will shrug and say, “Yeah, what’s your point?” The older crowd will make spitting sounds and use words like “purity” and “mistake.” My friend Gene Laporta, the manager of the local hardware store, speaks for the designated hitter haters: “The DH takes a lot of strategy out of the game. Besides, if a pitcher plunks a hitter, he should have to step in the box and take his lumps as well.”

Forty years ago this week, the American League began a three-year test of sending a “regular” player to the plate to bat for the pitcher. Unlike a traditional pinch hitter who replaced the pitcher in the lineup, at least until his team took the field again, the designated hitter would return to the bench and wait until he went to bat for the pitcher again.

On April 6, 1973, the Red Sox hosted the Yankees in an Opening Day game at Fenway Park.

The Boston fans packed the park on a cold day with the temperature in the 40s, but things started badly for them. Red Sox ace Luis Tiant’s corkscrew, back-to-the-batter windup let him down in the top of the first. He gave up a two-out double to Matty Alou and switched to his stretch delivery, one highlighted by an annoying series of hesitant drops and twitches of his glove. Those distractions didn’t help much, as he walked Bobby Murcer and Graig Nettles to load the bases.

At 1:53 p.m., New York’s Ron Blomberg became Major League Baseball’s first designated hitter when he took ball one. Hundreds of camera shutters clicked in unison. The sprinkling of Yankees fans present must have hoped that Blomberg would hit his way into the record books.

Alas, Tiant’s wildness continued, and he walked Blomberg on four pitches, and the Yankees went up 1-0.Tiant laughed last, though likely with his back to the batter, when he got the win in a Red Sox rout, 15-5. Blomberg, in his other at-bats that day, singled, flied to left, and lined out.

Three other players had a realistic chance that day to be the first DH. Boston’s Orlando Cepeda had a shot, but Blomberg, batting sixth in the long top of the first, edged him out. Two other DHs in an Eastern time-zone game in Baltimore were in the running – the Orioles’ Terry Crowley and Milwaukee’s Ollie Brown – but the clock designated Blomberg that day. The DHs in the two West Coast games, Royals-Angels and Twins-Athletics, didn’t have a chance.

THE RULE CHANGE

The idea of sending a substitute hitter to the plate when a team was in a pinch has been around baseball for a while. John Montgomery Ward became the first pinch hitter when he batted for a Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher on June 16, 1892. A few years later, Connie Mack proposed allowing a player not already in the lineup to bat regularly for the pitcher. The Hall of Fame manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, however, failed to interest many others in the concept.

National League president John Heydler broached the DH idea again in 1928. NL owners approved the proposal, but the junior circuit rejected it. Since both leagues then had to agree on major rule changes, the DH idea went back to the bench.

The baseball hierarchy resurrected the DH concept after the “Year of the Pitcher” in 1968. Legendary hurlers – Denny McLain, Bob Gibson, and Don Drysdale, to name but three – smoked the big leagues that year. As a result, each league’s overall batting average was the lowest in the 20th century – .243 in the NL and .230 in the AL.

The MLB rules people snapped into action and quickly sent help to the hitters. Among other changes, they lowered the pitcher’s mound from 15 to 10 inches and shrunk the strike zone back to the 1950 limits.

The Playing Rules Committee also proposed using designated pinch-hitters in spring training games and in four minor leagues during the season. The Triple-A International League’s approach was the simplest and essentially the same as the AL’s procedure today. The NL chose not to participate, and the minor league experiment lasted only one year.

During the 1969 International League season, the DHs hit .261 collectively, up from the pitchers’ average of .160 the year before. Home run production rose similarly, 24 to 108. The games were six minutes shorter.

The overall AL batting average in 1971, despite the more hitter-friendly rule changes, had risen only to .247. Influential people lamented the offensive drought, and lagging attendance in AL parks confirmed the fans’ reaction. The colorful Charlie O. Finley, the Oakland Athletics owner, captured the mood with this widely quoted view: “The average fan comes to the park to see action, home runs. I can’t think of anything more boring than to see a pitcher come up, when the average pitcher can’t hit my grandmother. Let’s have a permanent pinch-hitter for the pitcher.”

AL owners voted unanimously in December 1972 to support a rule change allowing a designated hitter. The Rules Committee, with representatives from each league, disapproved the change by a 5-3 vote, with one abstention. Cleveland Indians general manager Gabe Paul bemoaned the decision. “The game has got to be offensive. The stadiums and the pitchers are getting bigger. Maybe we even ought to juice up the ball.”

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn showed his disappointment when he called owners from both leagues to a special meeting in Chicago on January 11, 1973. He pointed to the overall AL batting average of .239 during the strike-shortened 1972 season, only nine points up from the 1968 low point. Kuhn urged the owners to reconsider the DH rule proposal.

With seven yeas required for passage, the AL voted 8-4 to try out the DH for three years. The proposal failed in the NL, 6-4 with two abstentions, the Phillies and the Pirates. According to Jack O’Connell in a 2008 Baseball Digest article, Philadelphia’s Bill Giles abstained because he couldn’t reach Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter, who was on a fishing trip. Pittsburgh’s owner John Galbraith had told his representative at the meeting to vote with the Phillies. For want of a cellphone, NL passed on the designated hitter.

Unlike in 1929, both leagues did not have to approve the new rule, so the AL pressed forward with the DH on its own. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley assessed the split in February 1973. “As of the moment, only the American League will use the artificial stimulation of the designated hitter, while the National League remains aloof in it arrogant self-sufficiency.” The DH rule became permanent in the 1976 season.

The DH had an impact on offense. The overall AL batting average in 1976 had risen to .266, up from .247 five years before. In the NL during the same period, the collective average rose only from .252 to .255. In overall league attendance, the AL drew 11.87 million in 1971, and 14.66 million in 1976. On the other hand, NL totals fell during the same period from 17.32 million to 16.66 million. From 1977 until 1992, the AL had 14 teams, the NL, only12; comparisons thus became more complicated during that period. However, in 1995, when the NL had 14 teams, both leagues drew 25 million fans.

Of course, as in all things baseball, everyone has opinions, especially in sports bars. Among insider baseball experts, many lament the DH. Baseball writer Tim Wendel, author of “High Heat,” “Summer of ’68″ and other baseball books, is an exception.

“I may pride myself on being a baseball purist, but I’ve warmed up to the designated hitter,” Tim told me recently. “I know, where did I go wrong?” Wendel bases his opinion on the benefits the DH opportunity has provided to great, but aging or hurting players. “This rule, no matter how problematic, kept guys like Edgar Martinez, Chili Davis, David Ortiz and certainly Paul Molitor in the game longer, and that’s good enough for me.”

BLOMBERG

Yankees manager Ralph Houk talked to the media the day before the Hall of Fame collected Blomberg’s bat. He said that his choice for the DH that season would depend on the park and the pitcher. For the opener, he had the right-hand hitting Felipe Alou playing first because of his hot hitting during spring training. Houk inserted the left-handed hitting Blomberg in the lineup as the DH against right-hander Tiant. “I don’t intend to do this all year against right-handed pitching,” Houk told the media. “I expect Blomberg to play a lot of first base.”

Houk, though, had another consideration – Blomberg’s leg. “I had a hamstring problem on Opening Day,” Blomberg told me last month. “So the skipper made me the DH and I walked into the record book.” Blomberg also recalled that he was a bit confused after the first inning ended. “I stood there on the field and waited for someone to throw me my glove. I had forgotten that I wasn’t playing first. Finally, Ellie Howard, the first base coach, told me to go to the dugout.”

Blomberg, an Atlanta native, was a four-sport letterman at Druid Hills School. He has said that he turned down more than 100 college scholarship offers and entered the 1967 amateur baseball draft. The Yankees picked him first overall. After a stint in the minors, he came up to the big show for a cup of coffee late in the 1969 season. He played Triple-A ball in 1970, and in 64 games with the Yankees in 1971, hit .322. New York City welcomed the Jewish Blomberg, who styled himself as the “Yiddish Yankee.”

After Blomberg opened the 1973 season as the DH in Boston, he went on to a good year, batting .329 while both playing first base and designating. By 1975, injuries had slowed him, with his batting average falling to .255. He missed the 1976 season with a knee injury, and played his final year with the White Sox in 1978.

“It’s been a great ride,” Blomberg said, “and great to have been part of a new era in baseball.”

DH TRIVIA

Minnesota’s Tony Oliva hit the first home run by a designated hitter in the 1973 Opening Day game in Oakland. Boston’s Cepeda won the inaugural Outstanding Designated Hitter Award for the 1973 season, hitting .289, with 20 HR and 86 RBI. MLB changed the name of the award in 2004 to the Edgar Martinez Award in honor of the Seattle DH who won it five times during the period 1995-2001. Martinez won the batting title as a DH in 1995, hitting .356. He had won the 1992 title, while playing 103 games at third, and DHing in 28.

Kansas City’s Hal McRae won the first RBI title as a DH in 1982 with 133. Boston’s David Ortiz was the first DH to win a home run crown in 2006 with 54 dingers. Ortiz won the Martinez Award five straight times, 2003-07 and again in 2011.

Here’s an oxymoron stumper for your next sports bar trivia contest. What designated hitter has won a Gold Glove? . . . . Rafael Palmeiro of the Texas Rangers in 1999. He played only 28 games at first, but with great skill, while DHing in 128 games. A bit of obvious controversy surrounded Palmeiro’s selection, a result of voting by managers and coaches.

A number of aging players, as Tim Wendel noted, have enjoyed productive seasons in their golden years. The best example is Hall of Famer Al Kaline, who played his final year, 1974, as a DH. Kaline gained his 3,000th hit late that season while sitting between at-bats.

Cepeda, who had a great career at first base with the Giants, Cardinals and Braves, suffered knee problems late in his career. But in 1973, Boston made him the first player to be signed specifically as a DH. Cepeda joined the Hall of Fame in 1999.

The Times’ Arthur Daley wrote about a few woeful glove men who might have extended their careers as a DH. Among them were Babe Herman, Showboat Fisher, Dale Alexander, Deke Bonura and Smead “Smudge” Jolley, who hit .357 for the White Sox in 1932. Jolley once made three errors on the same batted ball – through his legs, through his legs again after it bounced off the fence and on his throw to the dugout.

By Michael K. Bohn

March 4, 2013

It was an odd sight, using a Cadillac as a cutting horse.  John Harding, the driver, pointed at a cow and calf about fifty yards away as we drove across the dry and scruffy pasture.

“Bohn, get out and sit on the fender,” he instructed as he slowed to a stop.  “When I get along side that calf, jump off and grab it.”  As a green city kid helping out on Harding’s spread south of Lubbock in 1966, I didn’t know enough to argue.  I swung a leg over the double headlights and stuck my fingers in the grille to hold on.  John stepped on the gas.

The cow had seen enough of Harding’s Sedan Deville to stay fairly calm as we approached.  As he slowed near the calf, I played bulldogger and slid off running.  In a couple steps, I wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck and the two of us came to a tangled stop.  Harding pulled up, lowered the front passenger window, and yelled, “Get in the back seat with the calf!”

I pushed and pulled the bawling critter into the car—it was all legs and hair and slobber.  I sorta sat there and hugged the terrified animal.  John drove back to the pens as if he had nothing more than two rowdy teenagers in the back seat.

I was in graduate school at Tech in 1966, working on a masters in government and paying some of the bills as a teaching assistant.  Harding was on the Tech economics faculty and provided welcome adult advice to my fraternity.  He also farmed sorghum and cotton, and ran a cow and calf operation on land that he leased from his wife Lorene’s family in Lynn County near Tahoka.  His was a shoestring enterprise in a cowboy boot business, with only one full-time hand, a one-armed man named Q.T.  With several other fraternity members, I provided free labor on the weekends.  The work was intriguing and I thought it might be something to pursue fulltime.

The closest I’d come to a working horse before my cowboy adventure was running behind the Red Raider at Texas Tech football games.  I’m the third cheerleader from the left.

By February 1967, I had finished my course work and needed only to wrap up my thesis.  I had started to think of my future, at least that part beyond my student draft deferment, which ran through the end of year.  I talked with Harding about how a young man, whose family had no land, might succeed in the farm and ranch business.  “I’m not sure,” he said in his distinctive, dry tone.  But he did offer a chance to measure my naive interests against reality.  “I’ll pay you $200 a month, and you can live with Lorene and me.  You can help Q.T.”  Thus began my youthful flirtation with farming and ranching.

While my family had lived on an avocado farm in Orange County, California, when my father’s oil business took him away from Houston for ten years, I knew little about row crops and cattle.  Harding first put me to work mending fence, and stretching barb wire was simple compared to battling the rattlesnakes.  I graduated to horseback chores, and Harding lent me an old saddle and bridle.  He pointed to an ornery, proud-cut gelding and said, “Be careful with him.  He thinks he’s still a stallion.

Q.T. handled most of the farming.  John believed that the man’s mother called him a “cutie” when he was young, and it stuck.  He lost his left arm to a grain auger, a painful and messy affair.  Although illiterate, he was a hard worker and could hook up a disc harrow to the tractor with one hand and go to work.  His handicap never bothered him when he and his friends went coyote hunting at night.  They’d have a few beers, drive a pickup through the pasture, and look for coyotes to freeze in the headlights.

One morning, I drove by the old bracero shack that was Q.T.’s home.  He walked out the door with his ring finger stuck in a bullet hole in his gut.  “Mr. Mike,” he struggled to say, “my girlfriend done shot me.”

“Why did she shoot you?” I asked, as we got in my car.

“I’se cheatin’ on her.”  I drove him to a Lubbock hospital and he was back at work the next week.

One evening while Lorene was frying steaks in butter, I talked with Harding about how I might find a real job on a ranch.  Through his myriad Tech connections, he arranged for me to interview at the Four Sixes Ranch in Guthrie.  I was mostly all hat and no horse then, and made a greenhorn error while riding around the ranch in a pickup with two Four Sixes cowboys.  I had a wad of Red Man in my cheek and got stuck in the middle seat.  No place to spit.

The manager offered me a job riding fence at $300 a month, plus a bunk in a line camp.  I quickly realized there were limits to my dreams of cowboying on the open range.  I drove back to Lubbock, needing another plan.

After a second counseling session with Harding, I drove out to Lubbock Feedlot on the east side of town and asked for a job.  John’s theory was that my inexperience wouldn’t keep me from learning the feedlot business.

I purposely didn’t tell the manager that I’d been to college, much less grad school.  I hired on at $2.00 an hour and my first job was to ride pens looking for sick cattle.  Every morning, I caught a mount in the horse pens and joined several other guys riding through 40,000 head of cattle.  It was a prairie pas de deux—opening a gate on horseback, wheeling through, and then closing the gate—over and over.  As the winter settled in, the concrete areas became icy traps for the riders, especially when a steer bolted off the dirt paths.  Although I had no mishaps, my inexperience on horseback became clear to the boss.  He reassigned me to a crew that processed incoming cattle.  My options seemed be narrowing to cowboying on foot.

Lubbock Feedlot today.

Harding had taught me the rudiments of working a squeeze chute, as well as dehorning, branding, and castrating bull calves with a pocketknife.  But I soon learned that doing all of that a couple hundred times a day wasn’t that romantic.

Within a few weeks, I had become the gang foreman.  My organizational skills had blossomed amid the disappointments of my horsemanship, and the motley crew of a dozen drunks and transients needed constant leadership.  Plus, I spoke un poco de español.

We treated the incoming cattle with antibiotics and growth-inducing hormones—no organic beef in that outfit—tipped horns for their collective safety, and branded them as a means of keeping the lots together.  We used a ghastly clamping device—a Burdizzo—to bloodlessly castrate young bulls.  Years later, it was a topic that always produced a titter at Washington DC cocktail parties when I reminisced about my brief time in the cattle “bidness.”

My crew also helped sort cattle headed for the Swift packing house next door, counting heads and weighing them.  Long buggy whips and electric prods helped, but on a frigid dawn, it didn’t match the fun that I had at Harding’s ranch.

I also learned another skill—scooping manure with a Bobcat, a small front loader.  We had to periodically clean the pens and transport the stuff to huge piles, where it “cooked.”  Steam rose from the heaps during the winter, adding to a scene drawn from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  At least I was, um, mounted for that chore.

I also helped the veterinarian with sick and ailing cattle.  Respiratory problems were common in the crowded pens, but steers can have kidney stones just like people.  Also, cows suffer calving problems, and my stories about breech births and full-arm examinations never failed to repulse my wife years afterward.  But at least I can make small talk now with a suburban vet when I take my dog in for shots.

Each afternoon, I threw my boots and leggings in the trunk and drove home for a shower.  If I had a date that night, the girl would wrinkle her nose and ask, “What’s that smell?”

After about ten months, my adventure was stalling.  It was Christmastime, 1967, and I was poor, cold, smelly, and discouraged.  By then I had realized that I could never buy a feedlot with the money I earned working in one.  But the clincher came in the mail—my draft notice.  “Greeting:  You are hereby ordered to report for induction . . .”

I’d had my fill of living in the mud by then, so I joined the Navy to stay out of the Army.  I earned a commission in April 1969, and left for Vietnam that summer.  In Saigon, I boarded an old DC-3 prop plane that carried both soldiers and locals to the Mekong Delta and back.  At aircraft’s first scheduled stop, a Vietnamese woman leading a small calf clambered up a loading ramp.  She had trouble with the animal on the metal deck, but I knew what to do.

I grabbed the calf’s lead rope and its tail, and steered it toward the row of nylon sling seats along the fuselage side.  She and I sat down with the calf wedged between us.  She nodded approvingly, but must have wondered where I had learned to sit with calves.

Just after noon on February 26, 1993, a yellow Ford Econoline van and a red Chevrolet Corsica eased down a service ramp to the B2 basement level of the World Trade Center complex in lower Manhattan.  Two men parked the van in a forest of columns, while the Chevy idled nearby.

One of the men in the van gathered four bottles of nitroglycerine and opened the van’s rear door.  He wedged the bottles between boxes containing 1,200-pounds of an explosive mixture of urea and nitric and sulfuric acids.  Among the boxes that crammed the cargo space were three tanks of compressed hydrogen meant to be an explosive booster.  He attached an Atlas Rockmaster blasting cap to each nitro bottle, and each cap had a twenty-foot fuse.  The man lit all four fuses and closed the van’s rear doors.  He had calculated that they had about 12 minutes to get away from the building.

The two men from the van jumped in the Chevy and the driver headed for the up ramp.  Near the ground floor exit, a truck blocked their way.  Shouted Arabic curses, horn-honking and arm-waving used up two or three of their 12 minutes.  The truck driver finally moved his rig out of the way and the three bombers sped into the daylight.

12:18:42 p.m.  “Police Operator Five.  Is this an emergency?”

“Yes, there is an emergency,” said the 911 caller.  “Something just blew up underneath the parking garage tunnel between World Trade Center Tower One and the World Financial Center, across the street.”

Twenty years ago this month, the bomb in the Econoline van killed six people in the WTC basement complex and injured 1,042.  Damages exceeded $500 million.

No official, from a street cop to the president of the United States, knew then that the bombing was the second attack in an ongoing transnational jihad against the United States by radical Islamists.  The campaign’s first incident was a 1990 assassination in Manhattan, and the most destructive acts have been the hijacked airliner attacks on September 11, 2001.  It has been a period that former National Security Council staff members Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have called the Age of Sacred Terror.

Americans also did not know the potential scope of the bombing plot.  But now, looking back on two decades of investigation and prosecution, Paul Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, put the attack in perspective.  He said in a recent interview that the significance of WTC-93 is not in the results, however tragic the six deaths, but rather the intentions of the bomb maker—Ramzi Yousef.  “He wanted to kill thousands and thousands of people, and but for the lack of funds, he might have done it.  What Yousef tried to do in 1993, topple the WTC towers, Osama bin Laden accomplished in 2001.”

v v v

On November 5, 1990, in Manhattan’s Marriott East Side Hotel, an Egyptian named El-Sayyid Nosair shot and killed Rabbi Meir Kahane.  The founder of the extremist Jewish Defense League was speaking at a public event.  Nosair shot two others while attempting to escape, before being wounded himself and arrested.

Before Nosair’s trial started in November 1991, his cousin, Ibrahim el-Gabrowny, traveled to Saudi Arabia and collected $20,000 from a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden to pay for Nosair’s lawyers, including the flamboyant William Kunstler.  Ultimately, the jury acquitted Nosair of homicide, because no one actually saw him pull the trigger, but convicted him of lesser weapons and assault charges.  The judge sentenced him to a prison term of 7 1/2 to 20 1/2 years.

Nosair was part of a group of Muslim men who found each other at the Farouq Mosque on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue.  Collocated with the mosque was the al-Khifa Center, part of the U.S. branch of the Maktab al-Khidmat (Services Bureau) network founded in 1984 by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.  The leading ideologist of the mujahidin resistance against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, Azzam had established the bureau to manage an international network of recruiting centers to attract Muslim men to join the Afghani war.  One of Azzam’s protégés, bin Laden, helped fund the Maktab al-Khidmat.  Although the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989, the talk of jihad—a physical struggle against the enemies of Islam—still permeated the mosque and center.

Another source of jihadist inspiration arrived in New York in July 1990—Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh.”  Abdel-Rahman was the leader of the radical Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya in Egypt, the “Islamist Group.”

Abdel-Rahman, who holds a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence, had issued a series of rulings, or “fatwas,” which were important underpinnings for bin Laden’s plans for jihad.  Abdul-Rahman’s fatwas, according to Benjamin and Simon, also emboldened Nosair’s “cell” to kill Americans.

Soon after Abdel-Rahman’s arrival, men loyal to bin Laden took over the al-Khifa Center, a development that has led a few observers, including reporter and screenwriter Peter Lance, to claim that al Qaeda sleeper cells in America date to 1991.

According to court records and news media reporting, a paid FBI informant, Emad Salem, infiltrated the cell after Kahane’s murder.  By the summer of 1992, Salem reported that the group had raised $8,500 and had begun seeking firearms and explosives.  However, as widely reported, Salem refused to wear a wire or testify in court, which prompted senior FBI officials to drop the often inconsistent source in July 1992.

The cell, now led at this point by Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian in the country on an expired visa, was in over its head on the technical matters of bomb making.  In August 1992, according to Benjamin and Simon, Abdel-Rahman called a phone number in Pakistan—810604.

A few weeks later, on September 1, 1992, two men disembarked at JFK Airport in New York from Pakistan International Airlines flight 703 from Karachi.  One, Ahmad Ajaj, had recently attended the bin Laden-funded Khladen terrorist training camp near Peshawar, Pakistan.  There, according to author Simon Reeve in his book, The New Jackals, Ajaj met his traveling companion, Abdel Basit Mahmud Abdel Karim.

Ajaj, 26, presented a crudely altered Swedish passport at the Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint, and agents quickly detained him.  The INS officials, however, initially missed the bomb-making manuals in Ajaj’s baggage, one of which was marked “al Qaeda” in Arabic.

Karim, a 24-year-old Pakistani with a two-year British degree in electrical engineering, offered an Iraqi passport in the name of Azan Mohammed and quickly asked for asylum.  He gave what he said was his real name—Ramzi Yousef.  Officials let Mr. “Yousef” walk, but ordered him to attend an asylum hearing on December 8.

Yousef hailed a cab and went directly to the Farouq Mosque and al-Khifa Center.  There he connected with Salameh and moved in with him in a Jersey City, N.J. apartment.  Aided by Nidal Ayyad, Yousef began ordering chemicals for the bomb.  They used the money that Salem had reported, and, according to author Steve Coll, an additional $660 sent from Pakistan by Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.  Mohammad, casually called KSM, is the purported al Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 attacks; U.S. authorities captured him in 2003.

On February 23, Salameh rented the Econoline van at a Jersey City Ryder Truck office and made a $400 cash deposit.  On the night before the bombing, Salameh reported that the van had been stolen and gave the police a false license plate number.

v v v

After the WTC bombing, Yousef, using another name and passport, flew to Pakistan; two other cell members left within few days.  Salameh needed money for a ticket out of the country, so the day after the bombing, he began pestering the Ryder agency for his deposit on the “stolen” van.  The rental clerk demanded a police report first.

Meanwhile, a multiagency group of bomb experts descended into the vast bomb crater in the WTC basement.  Two members of the team, Donald Sadowy, of the New York Police Department, and ATF agent Joe Hanlin, discovered a part of the vehicle that had carried the bomb.  On the twisted piece of steel, they found a series of raised dots that formed a confidential version of vehicle identification number.  Manufacturers added the hidden and coded dots to vehicles in order to thwart car thieves.  Sadowy and Hanlin raced to the NYPD crime lab with the frame.  By the next day, the FBI had traced the van to the Jersey City Ryder agency.

When Salameh arrived at the rental office with his police report, the FBI arrested him.  Quickly, the whole conspiracy unraveled.  After a lengthy trial that began in September 1993, a jury convicted Salameh, Ayyad, Ajaj, and a fourth man, and each received a 240-year sentence.

v v v

The remainder of the Nosair cell regrouped after the WTC bombing and began planning for further attacks in New York.  Encouraged by Sheikh Abdel-Rahman and led by a Sudanese named Siddiq Ali, the men plotted a “day of terror.”  They wanted to simultaneously bomb New York City tunnels and bridges, the UN headquarters and FBI offices, and kidnap or assassinate prominent politicians.

After the WTC incident, the FBI reinstated the informant Salem amid a flurry of media criticism for their earlier abandonment of the source.  Salem reinserted himself into the Abdel-Rahman circle, and based on his new information, the FBI arrested the cell members on June 23, 1993.  Eight days later, authorities arrested the Blind Sheikh.  A jury convicted all of them of conspiracy charges on October 1, 1995.  Additionally, the same trial convicted Nosair of Kahane’s murder.

Abdel-Rahman, now 74, is serving a life term at Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina.  He was recently in the news when Islamic jihadists seized an Algerian gas processing facility and demanded Abdel-Rahman’s release.

Yousef, upon his return to Pakistan, became the roving terrorist du jour in 1993.  He seemed to be everywhere, and his long face, droopy eyes and mashed nose made him a distinctive character among the inner circles of radical Islamists.  In quick succession, he attempted to assassinate Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto and participated in bombings and assassinations in Thailand and Iran.  Lance dramatically asserts that in the early 1990s, “Yousef emerged as point man for bin Laden’s worldwide terror network.”  Others, however, have doubts about personal relations between Yousef and bin Laden at that time.  For example, the 9/11 Commission Report describes Yousef and bin Laden merely as contemporaries in the broad Islamic jihadist undertaking.  Bin Laden funded an array of jihadist activities then, and his support did not necessarily mean the recipient was an al Qaeda operative.

Yousef flew to the Philippines in the summer of 1994 to train Muslim militants on the island of Basilan; Reeve believes that al Qaeda sent him there.  By September, Yousef had moved to a Manila apartment, which Benjamin and Simon contend had been rented by bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.  Yousef became involved in a plot to kill Pope John Paul, and, according to Reeve, President Bill Clinton, at bin Laden’s request.  Excessive security scotched both plans.

Yousef’s grandest plan targeted airliners flying between the Philippines and America.  Joining him in the scheme during the fall of 1994 was a Pakistani friend, Abdul Hakim Murad, and his uncle, KSM.  They called the plan “Bojinka,” reportedly a word made up by KSM.

Yousef created a small nitroglycerine device with a modified digital Casio wristwatch as a timer.  On December 11, 1994, he tested the bomb on a Philippines Airline 747.  The device killed a passenger, but the plane landed safely.  Yousef planned to have his Manila cell members plant the devices on 11 separate airliners that made scheduled intermediate stops in the Philippines and elsewhere before flying to the U.S.  The timers would have been set to trigger the explosives simultaneously.

On January 6, 1995, Yousef and Murad were mixing chemicals for the 11 bombs in their apartment when a small fire broke out.  Both fled, and the fire department quickly extinguished the blaze.  Later, Murad returned and the local police arrested him and seized Yousef’s laptop commuter.  Yosef quickly retreated and flew to Pakistan.  The fire likely saved thousands of lives.  Bojinka might have been Yousef’s second precursor to 9/11.

FBI and Pakistani officials seized Yousef in Islamabad on February 6, 1995 after a tip from a fellow jihadist hungry for the $2 million reward.  During subsequent interrogations that prosecutors revealed at his trial, Yousef said that he wanted to cause one of WTC towers to topple into the other and kill 250,000 people, the total that he said U.S. atomic bombs killed in Japan.  Yousef also offered his motives for his terrorism: Force America to change its Israeli policy and make Israelis stop killing Arabs.  He felt sorry for the victims:  “It’s nothing personal,” he said, “but bombing American targets was the only way to cause change.”

On January 8, 1998, U.S. District Judge Kevin T. Duffy sentenced Yousef to 240 years in prison for the WTC bombing and a life term for the Bojinka plot.

v v v

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center is a major milestone on the continuum of Islamic terrorism against America that started in 1990 and runs through 9/11/2001 and beyond.  Further, WTC-93 marked the shift from state sponsored terrorism to a broad, global Islamic jihad against America, a campaign that includes al Qaeda.

Yet U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials initially failed to see the significance of WTC-93 to what followed—Bojinka and the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, for example.  No one initially connected these dots, largely because of the quick arrest of Yousef’s bumbling accomplices.  According to the 9/11 Commission, that success “created the impression that the U.S. law enforcement system was well-equipped to cope with terrorism.”  The commission stated that neither the president, Congress, nor the news media considered that further procedures were necessary to protect the American homeland.

Nosair and Yousef were clearly part of the radical, Sunni Islamist jihad against America.  But were they aligned with, or members of al Qadea at the time?  The answer is clouded by America’s propensity to cast enemies as centrally controlled and monolithic—please see Communism 60 years ago.  Paul Pillar recently addressed this point on National Public Radio.  “Having been hit by 9/11, we tend to put everything in an al Qaeda frame of reference.  And by applying that label, we tend to think of a unified global organization that really doesn’t exist and never did exist.”

Most experts have concluded that bin Laden was not directing Yousef in 1993.  The 9/11 Commission, plus Benjamin and Simon, did not see a firm and enduring connection between bin Laden and Yousef.  Also, bin Laden told Peter Bergen in 1997 that he had “no connection” to WTC-93.  Pillar wrote in 2004 that “a decade’s worth of research was unable to conclude that Mr. bin Laden had instigated the attack.”  Yousef and bin Laden certainly shared goals, but Yousef was not a sworn member of al Qaeda.  Moreover, Yousef had a far larger reputation among the jihadists in 1993 than bin Laden.  In 2002, journalists John Miller and Michael Stone offered this assessment of such a connection: “Bin Laden running Ramzi Yousef would have been the tail wagging the dog.”

Conversely, Yousef did influence bin Laden’s thinking.  The Bojinka plot is one example, and his partner in Bojinka, Abdul Hakim Murad, was a trained multiengine pilot.  Murad dreamed up the idea of hijacking a plane and flying it into CIA headquarters, and reportedly talked about the concept with Yousef and his uncle—KSM—when all three were together in Manila.  KSM, now a Guantanamo detainee, pitched the idea of using hijacked airliners as air-to-ground missiles to bin Laden in May 1996.

KSM, rather than Yousef, now appears to be a common denominator between two dots—WTC-93 and 9/11.  When federal prosecutors moved KSM to the military court system in 2011, they disclosed that he had been included in amendments to the original 1993 WTC indictment.  That suggests a continuity of a conspiracy through at least 9/11.  “One big point of these trials,” Karen J. Greenberg of Fordham University Law School said in April 2011, “is that they present the narrative history that we otherwise wouldn’t have.”

Last, there was an utterly false dot-connecting theory about Yousef.  In 2000, Laurie Mylroie from the American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Yousef was an Iraqi agent.  Most experts roundly debunked her conjecture at the time; Peter Bergen, for example, called Mylroie a “crackpot.”  However, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other neocon Iraq hawks liked the theory.  Wolfowitz resurrected Mylroie’s assertion after 9/11 and cited it as one reason to invade Iraq.

By MICHAEL K. BOHN, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

On Jan. 1, 1963, Southern Cal quarterback Pete Beathard stepped up under center Larry Sagouspe, and 93,000 people roared their approval. It was the start of the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl, and the Trojans, on the Wisconsin 12-yard line, threatened to bolster their 35-14 lead. The 5,500 visiting Wisconsin fans had nothing to say.

Beathard took the snap and rolled to his left behind guards John Ratliff and Pete Lubisich. Spotting end Fred Hill on a down-and-in route, Beathard threaded the ball between two Badgers defenders. Hill made the catch near the goal line, shrugged off one tackler, dodged the other and fell into the end zone for a touchdown. After Tom Lupo kicked the extra point, USC led 42-14 with 14:54 to play in Pasadena, Calif. USC seemed on the brink of winning the first-ever bowl game to feature the No. 1 and 2 teams in the country.

Looking back 50 years at that overwhelming lead, Beathard said in early December that his team felt comfortable at that point: “We were already on the bus to the hotel and the party.”

On the Wisconsin sideline, All-America end Pat Richter saw the challenge and thought only about achievable goals. “We wanted to get back to a respectable score,” he recalled in a recent interview. “We knew that we were not as bad as that score.”

Outside of a few optimists on the Wisconsin team, even fewer, either in the immense crowd or the millions watching on TV, gave Wisconsin a chance to come back from a four-touchdown hole. Moreover, no one watching the game could have realized that they were about to witness one of the most exciting finishes in college bowl history.

THE PRELUDE

Trojans coach John McKay had stacked his 1962 team with 13 junior-college transfers, several of whom had been JuCo All-Americans. USC went undefeated during the season and won the Big Six Conference – the predecessor to the Pac-8/Pac-10/Pac-12.

The Badgers had finished No. 2 in the polls after winning the Big Ten title. Their only loss was to Ohio State and Wisconsin had beaten two Top 5 teams, Northwestern and Minnesota. The East Coast newspapers favored Wisconsin by two points.

Coach Milt Bruhn knew that his young and relatively unsophisticated Midwesterners could be distracted by Bowl Week festivities. That certainly had been the case in the 1960 Rose Bowl when the University of Washington shellacked his Badgers, 44-8. So for the two nights before the game, he booked his young team into the local monastery, the Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center in the nearby city of Sierra Madre.

“We needed it,” tackle Andy Wojdula said. “It was easy to get so wrapped up in the hoopla, so it was great to have a place to ‘retreat.’ Most of us had never traveled that far away, and it was easy to act like kids in a candy shop.”

The day of the game was cool, and a layer of Los Angeles smog partially obscured the winter sun. As game time approached, the Wisconsin team stopped in the tunnel, held back by an official. Surprisingly, the pregame marching band show was still in full tilt. The Trojans, however, remained comfortably in the locker room.

“We came out raring to go, but we stood around forever,” said Wojdula. “It must have been a mix-up, and we cooled down physically and psychologically. It screwed us up big time. Some of us thought it was a West Coast scheme to unnerve us.”

The wholesome-looking Wisconsin players enjoyed their milk and steak at a Bowl Week event.  Rose Queen Nancy Davis, right rear, had a date with Badgers quarterback Ron Vander Kelen after the game.  Pete Bruhn

Wisconsin quarterback Ron Vander Kelen has no memories of the delay – he was simply too awestruck by the pageantry. “As a teenager growing up in Green Bay, all I wanted to do was to go to the University of Wisconsin and play football, win the Big Ten and go to the Rose Bowl. As I came on the field, I dang near tripped and fell because I was so excited.”

ROUND ONE

Both teams scored early, with USC getting its first touchdown on a tackle-eligible pass play from Beathard to Ron Butcher. “We had not run that play before, and it caught ‘em off guard,” Beathard said.

The Trojans scored two touchdowns in the second quarter, with the first following linebacker Damon Bame’s interception of a Vander Kelen pass. USC led 21-7, with the Trojans’ Lupo converting the extra points.

A clipping penalty nullified a Wisconsin touchdown by running back Louie Holland with four seconds left in the first half. “That play was big,” recalled Badgers running back Merritt Norvell. “We didn’t know how big at the time.” The Badgers entered the locker room trailing 21-7.

Coach Milt Bruhn, who several players have said was not a fiery locker room orator, sternly reminded the team that they were embarrassing themselves and the state of Wisconsin.

But Coach Bruhn’s appeal didn’t exactly work magic in the third quarter. Beathard and running back Willie Brown combined for a 57-yard pass-run for a touchdown. USC 28-7. Wisconsin countered when Vander Kelen scored on a 17-yard run, but that momentum ebbed quickly when Beathard threw for another touchdown. USC 35-14.

Defensive back Lupo intercepted Vander Kelen on the last play of the third quarter. After the teams switched ends, Beathard hit Hill to take the 42-14 lead.

ROUND TWO

When asked today, players on both teams have theories about why Wisconsin had fallen so far behind. USC’s All-America end Hal Bedsole, who had caught two touchdown passes by that point, gave this unvarnished opinion the other day: “Wisconsin ran a slower, less sophisticated offense. They had no clue on defense, and they certainly couldn’t cover me. They seemed dazed and confused.”

“We made some big plays to build that lead,” said USC’s Hill in a phone interview. “Beathard, Bedsole and Brown – they made the difference.” Guard Pete Lubisich seconded that view: “We were a quicker team.”

Across the line, Wojdula, Norvell and running back Ralph Kurek pointed to the delay at the beginning of the game as a source of their flat start – the standing around robbed their sharpness. Vander Kelen was more self-critical. “We weren’t doing our job. We were well-coached but didn’t perform. On top of that, USC was a whirlwind; they were scoring on almost every play. They never slowed down.”

Vander Kelen gave the offense a talking-to as it awaited the USC kickoff after the Trojans’ last score. “I remember Ron reading us the riot act in the huddle,” recalled Kurek. He said, ‘Get your heads out of your butts. We gotta play ball here.’”

Unknown to his teammates, the Badgers’ quarterback had extra motivation at that point.

“I came off the field after the Lupo interception, and the backfield coach, Clark Van Galder, pulled me aside and said, ‘Coach Bruhn wants to take you out.’ I asked him to give me one more chance. I didn’t want my childhood dream to end this way.”

Vander Kelen, who called his own plays, knew he had to change something. “We weren’t running or passing very well,” he said. “But I had to pick one or the other, and there was no time to run. I decided to pass more. Besides, I was headed for the bench, so what did I have to lose?”

On their first possession, the Badgers scored a touchdown on an 11-play, 80-yard drive. Receiver Gary Kroner made the extra point, as he did without a miss all game. USC 42-21. The fans picked up the noise. A buzz started on the Wisconsin sideline.

Southern Cal’s Ben Wilson fumbled on the first play after the kickoff and Wisconsin recovered. Four plays later, Vander Kelen passed to Kroner for 4-yard touchdown. USC 42-28. “Big Mo” was shifting, and the crowd became engaged again. No trips for a Coke and a hotdog now.

“Nobody said a word in the huddle,” Vander Kelen said of the change in focus. “Everyone would race back to the huddle, keep quiet and wait for the play. No complaints, no talk about who was open, no suggestions. Everybody was focused on his job.”

USC’s Lubisich said that he and his teammates relaxed after going up 42-14: “We sat on the bench, took our helmets off and talked about what we would do after the game. We lost our edge.”

Gary Winslow, a reserve Trojans running back, said they were short of lineman. “When Marv Marinovich got ejected in the second quarter, we were then missing our three best interior linemen, who, like most guys, played both offense and defense. Gary Kirner got hurt before the game and didn’t play, and Mike Gale, who had broken his neck in the Notre Dame game, didn’t play either. The substitutes, who weren’t in game shape, couldn’t keep up the pace, and the restrictive substitution rules then made it worse.”

Bedsole gave a more pointed reason: “The coaches told us to shut it down when the score was 42-14. They told us to just run the ball straight ahead. John McKay didn’t want to embarrass the other team.”

Beathard recalled the coaches telling him to run more to eat up the clock but didn’t remember any instructions to ease up. Pete also played safety and saw an improved Badgers offense. “They started dumping short passes to Holland and he was running past us,” Beathard said. “No long passes, but just picking away.”

The Trojans continued to sputter on their next possession. After the Trojans’ Ernie Jones punted, the Badgers started on their own 32. Vander Kelen marched his team down the field to the USC 4-yard line. But then it was Wisconsin’s turn to trip.

Vander Kelen used Richter as a decoy, and passed to end Elmars Ezerins. But Willie Brown intercepted the pass. “It should have been a sure touchdown, but it was the biggest error in the game,” the former quarterback said.

However, the USC offense stalled again. With the ball on the Trojans’ 25-yard line, Jones readied himself for the punt. The long snapper, Lubisich, sent the ball over Jones’ head and into end zone. Jones ran to the back line and picked up the ball to prevent a touchdown. Wisconsin’s Ezerins arrived at about the same time and tackled Jones for a safety.

Lubisich explained his miscue. “I had broken my wrist on the second play of the game. I didn’t tell the coaches because I wanted to keep playing.”

Wisconsin, now down only 12 points (42-30), was running out of time. And daylight.

By then it was 5 p.m. PST, and the winter sun had dipped below the stadium’s rim. The 69 passes and numerous penalties frequently had stopped the game clock, but nature’s clock kept running.

As the sun set late in the game, the weak Rose Bowl lights barely penetrated the gathering dusk.  Pasadena Tournament of Roses

Unfortunately, the Rose Bowl field lights proved about as dim as Wisconsin’s prospects had been at the start of the fourth quarter. Legendary Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray described the situation at the time: “The Rose Bowl’s idea of lighting is two guys holding a cigar lighter at either end of the field.”

After the safety, and USC leading 42-30 with 2:40 left on clock, Jones punted the free kick. The referees called it back on a USC penalty, and on the second try, Ron Smith returned the ball to the USC 43-yard line. The Vander Kelen Express fired up for another run.

His first two plays took the Badgers to the USC 19. The Trojans expected another pass to Richter, and that’s what Vander Kelen gave them. Touchdown! After another Kroner PAT, it was USC 42-37 with 1:19 left.

By now, the stadium crowd and TV America had whiplash from the quick turnaround. Wisconsin had just about surmounted Southern Cal’s insurmountable lead. One more Badgers touchdown could win the game.

Wisconsin attempted an onside kick, and the first Trojan to touch the ball muffed it. The fans didn’t have time to gasp before USC’s Lubisich fell on it. At least that’s what the announcers told the TV audience, which was largely in the dark.

The Trojans had to punt after three plays for losses and too many USC players holding their breath. Only 11 seconds left. One last chance.

Three Wisconsin players, including Richter and Ezerins, raced toward Jones, the punter. The snap was good this time, and the gathering dusk obscured the action for everyone except for the four players. “From my vantage point,” Richter said, “it looked as if the punter’s foot was going to hit Elmars. But Jones got it off.”

Wisconsin’s Holland mishandled the punt, and guard Jim Schenk picked it up and took a couple steps before the relieved Trojans buried him as time ran out. Final score: USC 42, Wisconsin 37. Wisconsin’s magical run had ended.

POSTSCRIPT

Sportswriters voted Vander Kelen and Beathard co-MVPs of the game. Vander Kelen set a then-Rose Bowl record with his 33 of 48, 401-yard passing performance, and Richter caught 11 passes.

Southern Cal savored the win, but in a subdued manner. “That game was the worst victory that I have ever experienced,” Bedsole said. “In the locker room afterward, you could hear a pin drop. That said, however, I have to give Wisconsin credit for not giving up. They didn’t quit.”

Coach McKay acknowledged Wisconsin’s heroic effort, but puckishly said to the news media, “We must have played one of our better games. We scored 42 points against the nation’s No. 2 team, didn’t we?”

Richter, who as the Wisconsin athletics director from 1989-2004 revitalized the football program, offered his long view: “The game is the most enduring thing that I have ever been associated with.” In his mind, the game was less about winners and losers, and more about its value as a college football entertainment milestone. “For years, people have come up to me and said, ‘That was a great game.’ But they never say, ‘Too bad you lost.’”

Bob Monk was a sophomore Wisconsin lineman that season, and he described the personal impact the game had on him. “That game changed my entire life,” he said on the phone from the northern Wisconsin woods. “I married a Rose Princess, had two wonderful kids and four grandkids.”

Several players from both teams enjoyed success since leaving college. Nearly two dozen played pro ball, and the alumni include lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs, college professors, business executives, teachers and coaches.

Both teams recently marked the 50th anniversary of the 1962 season.  The Trojans gathered at the USC-Oregon game on November 3, 2012.  At the center is USC athletic director Pat Haden.  University of Southern California

This season’s Wisconsin team meets Stanford in the 2013 Rose Bowl – the Badgers’ third appearance in three seasons. Wisconsin is 3-2 in Rose Bowls since Richter invigorated the program, in part by hiring Coach Barry Alvarez in 1990. The most recent coach, Bret Bielema, recently departed Wisconsin to coach Arkansas, so Alvarez, Richter’s replacement as athletics director, will be the interim coach for the Rose Bowl. With luck, perhaps the storybook ending that eluded Wisconsin 50 years ago will reappear this year from the pages of history.

By MICHAEL K. BOHN, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

On Dec. 23, 1972, the “Immaculate Reception” heralded the beginning of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dynasty. The team’s run of four Super Bowl victories in the 1970s, and the wins in 2006 and 2009, arose from a last-second miracle in a playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. Forty years ago this week, the Steelers’ faithful experienced an awakening at Three Rivers Stadium.

Trailing 7-6 with 0:22 left in the game, the Steelers faced a fourth-and-10 situation on their 40-yard line. Dodging a furious pass rush from the Raiders, quarterback Terry Bradshaw threw a pass to running back John “Frenchy” Fuqua. What happened in the ensuing seconds became one of the greatest plays in NFL history, one that certainly showed more divine intervention than routine Hail Mary pass attempts.

Pittsburgh entered the game with a 40-year history of lackluster football in the NFL. The Steelers joined the league in 1933 and had enjoyed only six winning seasons before 1972. No playoff wins, no championships, no answered prayers.

But in one play, a ray of sunshine parted the clouds and shone warmly on Bradshaw, Fuqua and a rookie running back named Franco Harris. The Three Rivers worshipers rejoiced at the outcome and welcomed the reborn Steelers football team into their hearts.

THE PRELIMINARIES

The dramatic game followed an 11-3 regular season in which the Steelers won the AFC Central Division, the franchise’s first title of any sort. Coach Chuck Noll, a future Hall of Famer, had gathered a solid team by 1972. The players’ names would later become household words – Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Jack Ham and Mel Blount on defense, plus Bradshaw, Harris and Rocky Bleier on offense.

Pittsburgh hosted Oakland in the division playoff on a cold and snowy Sunday, with the winner bound for the AFC Championship the following week.

Defense dominated the game, with the first score coming in the third quarter. Pittsburgh’s Roy Gerela kicked an 18-yard field goal to put the Steelers ahead 3-0. His were the first-ever playoff points by a Pittsburgh NFL team.

Early in the fourth quarter, Raiders coach John Madden sent in quarterback Ken Stabler to replace an ailing Daryle Lamonica. Initially, Stabler didn’t fare much better, and soon lost a fumble when popped by Greenwood. Pittsburgh exploited the turnover and Gerela scored again from 29 yards out with 3:50 remaining in the game. Though the score was close, the Steelers had been the better team to that point. Pittsburgh led 6-0.

Stabler moved the Raiders to the Pittsburgh 30 on the following possession. Steelers linebacker Andy Russell described the next play. “We called a blitz, but our right defensive end, Craig Hanneman, missed the call and he didn’t keep containment on that side.”

Stabler, nicknamed “Snake,” slithered to his left to dodge the blitzing linebackers. Seeing no defensive end, he slipped outside and ran down the sideline for a touchdown. George Blanda made the extra point for a 7-6 Oakland lead. The clock showed 1:13.

The remarkable Blanda, then 45 years old and still three years from retirement, hit the Pittsburgh goalpost with his kickoff and the Steelers settled for a touchback. Russell stewed on the sideline. “I was mad that the defense had screwed up,” he told me last month.

Bradshaw quickly directed the Steelers to their 40-yard line with completions to Harris and Fuqua. But on his next three pass attempts, Oakland safety Jack Tatum broke up two, and another fell incomplete to Ron Shanklin. Fourth and 10, with 22 seconds left.

THE PLAY

On the Steelers’ sideline, rookie wide receiver Barry Pearson, who had not played a down that season, still dutifully stayed near Lionel Taylor, his position coach. “Lionel told me to go in for Shanklin,” Pearson said in a recent phone interview. “Someone gave me the play to take in to Bradshaw. The plan was to just get a first down.” Asked if he was nervous, Pearson chuckled, stuck his tongue in his cheek, and asked back, “Why would I be nervous?”

Harris recalled last week what his thought was as he entered the huddle: “This is our last play of the year.”

The play – 66 circle option – had wide receiver Al Young run an out to the left, Fuqua, a curl over the middle and tight end John McMakin, a deep post. Pearson, the primary receiver, was to run underneath McMakin, about 12 yards deep and just past the big Steelers logo at midfield. Harris stayed in to block.

Oakland countered with a prevent defense. Raiders linebacker Phil Villapiano added more detail recently: “Another linebacker, Gerald Irons, and I were supposed to play man-to-man on the running backs, and I had Harris.” According to Villapiano, one Raider shouted, “No penalties. This (expletive) game’s over!”

Bradshaw dropped back to his 30, but the pocket quickly collapsed. Raiders defensive ends Tony Cline and Horace Jones chased Bradshaw to his right. Defensive lineman Otis Sistrunk pushed into Bradshaw’s passing lane to Pearson, so Terry ducked back to his left and saw Fuqua near the left hash marks. With his famously strong arm, Bradshaw snapped a throw to Frenchy, who was at the Raider 34-yard line.

Tatum, nicknamed “the Assassin,” saw the ball and launched himself at Fuqua. The ball and the two men collided violently, and the ball caromed into the air.

“Jack, being the aggressive player that he was, he went for the big knockout,” Raiders safety George Atkinson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this fall. “That was a big mistake for us.”

Harris had stationed himself behind center Jim Clack, but the pressure came from the outside. When he saw Bradshaw scrambling, Harris headed down field. “My thought was to give Terry an outlet pass,” Harris told me. Villapiano picked up Harris as he left the line of scrimmage, and ran on Franco’s right shoulder.

When Harris saw the play going to Frenchy, he moved in that direction. “My Penn State training came into play,” Harris said. “Joe Paterno always hollered, ‘Go to the ball.’”

Backup quarterback Terry Hanratty described what he saw next from the sideline. “The ball popped into the air after hitting a shoulder pad. It flew about seven or eight yards back toward the offense.”

The ball arched in the direction of the oncoming Harris, apparently guided by the hand of God. “Franco caught it just above the ground,” Hanratty continued. “There’s no question that it was a clean catch.”

“It was unbelievable,” Villapiano said last month on his cell phone. Calling from outside his Jersey-shore home that Hurricane Sandy had hammered, Villapiano described the moment: “The ball could have bounced a million places, but it went right into his hands.”

Remarkably, Harris is a bit fuzzy on a few details. “I can’t tell you what happened after I left the backfield. I have no memory until I was running down the sideline. It’s frustrating at times. But when I watch the game film at regular speed, I say, ‘How did that happen?’ It was all so fast.”

Harris barely broke stride as he caught the ball at the Raiders’ 42-yard line and then sprinted for the end zone. Villapiano gave chase, but McMakin took a swipe at Villapiano’s legs from behind. He stumbled and never had a chance. “It was a clip!” Villapiano yelled in mock anger from his tree-strewn front yard.

Defensive back Jimmy Warren gave chase and lunged at Harris near the 10-yard line. Franco stiff-armed Warren, sending him to the ground. Touchdown!

Steelers right guard Bruce Van Dyke, who had been blocking Sistrunk, didn’t see the play at all. “I heard the roar and assumed something good had happened,” he said on the phone. “That gave me the chills.” Van Dyke then ran to the end zone and joined the mob of players around Harris.

THE DEBATE

Field judge Adrian Burk, who trailed Harris, signaled a touchdown, but umpire Pat Harder wasn’t so sure. Harder, Burk and referee Fred Swearingen huddled to discuss the proper call while the frenzied crowd spilled out of the stands onto the field. The officials asked each other, “Did the ball hit Tatum or Fuqua?”

The rules at that time prohibited two receivers from touching the ball consecutively on the same play. So if the pass had hit Fuqua’s shoulder pads, Swearingen would have to rule the pass incomplete. Had it bounced off Tatum, who had the momentum of a human spear at that point, then Harris’ catch was legal. There was, of course, no arrangement then for “upon further review.”

With the game clock showing :05 left, Swearingen pushed his way through the mob to the baseball dugout – Three Rivers hosted the Pirates as well. He grabbed a phone and called the NFL’s supervisor of officials, Art McNally, in the press box. Dan Rooney, son of Steelers owner Art Rooney, overheard McNally’s end of the conversation and recently described the situation to the Post-Gazette.

“McNally kept saying, ‘Call what you saw,’” Rooney recounted. Now the U.S. ambassador to Ireland and chairman emeritus of the Steelers, Rooney has scotched stories that Swearingen had either asked for McNally’s mental replay or extra security if he ruled the pass incomplete. No one used the video recorders in the TV broadcast booth to examine the play for Swearingen’s benefit.

Swearingen ran back onto the field and held both arms aloft. He not only signaled the touchdown, but, at least from the Pittsburgh faithful’s viewpoint, also seemed to point emphatically to the source of the miracle. The score: 12-7, Pittsburgh.

The officials then began clearing the field for the extra point, and Gerela took care of that loose end. But there remained the issue of the remaining five seconds – apparently God had not worked all of the buttons that afternoon.

After the Pittsburgh kickoff, Oakland had time to run a single play. The Steelers’ defense was mentally in the locker room already, so there was a scramble to get on the field. Safety Mike Wagner couldn’t find his helmet. “Mike grabbed a lineman’s helmet,” Harris recalled, “but it was too big and he worried that it would swivel around and blind him.”

Stabler threw an incomplete pass. Game over. Pittsburgh, 13-7.

THE NAME

Steelers fan Michael Ord, celebrating after the game at a nearby bar, thought of a name for Franco’s catch. In his view, Harris’ feat rivaled a religious miracle of the first order, perhaps the Catholic Church’s Immaculate Conception – the belief that Mary was conceived without the stain of Original Sin. Ord quieted the bar crowd, according to long-time sportswriter and Steelers radio broadcaster Myron Cope, and proposed a toast the “Feast of the Immaculate Reception.”

Ord’s girlfriend at the time, Sharon Levosky, phoned Cope and suggested he use the term during his evening show on Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV. Cope wrote in the New York Times in 1997 of his thoughts at that moment. “The Immaculate Reception? Tasteless? I pondered the matter for 15 seconds and cried out, ‘Whoopee!’” Cope went on to describe the origin of the term and a disclaimer: “I accept neither credit, nor, should you hold the moniker to be impious . . .”

AFTERWARD

Back to the play. Swearingen, Burk and Harder began a debate that has endured for the past 40 years – did the ball hit Tatum or Fuqua? In the locker room after the game, Tatum said all of the right things, “All I was trying to do was knock the ball loose. I touched the man, but not the ball.”

Frenchy Fuqua makes part of his living on the banquet circuit today and is coy about what he knows. Throughout his regular after-dinner speech, he hints that he is the only person who knows for sure what happened. But he ultimately ducks the question of who touched the ball. As he mischievously told author Jim Wexell in 2006, “All I can tell you is that it was immaculate.”

“I doubt that Frenchy can remember anything after that hit by Tatum,” Russell said, “because he suffered a concussion on the play.” Hanratty agrees – “Frenchy is making a few bucks telling the story, so if he can actually remember what happened, he won’t spill the beans anytime soon.”

Multiple examinations of the game film have failed to discern definitively if the ball bounced off Fuqua or Tatum. Villapiano gave it a try. “NFL Films sent me clips from six different angles, but I couldn’t tell,” he recalled. “Tatum clearly hit Frenchy early, but no ref would call pass interference at that point in the game.”

Cope, who died in 2008, gave his view in the 1997 Times article. Two days after the game, he examined, frame by frame, film that a WTAE cameraman had taken of the play. Cope wrote that the clip, which had never aired, had been destroyed by 1997. “No question about it: Bradshaw’s pass struck Tatum squarely on his right shoulder. I mean, I saw it.” But then, Cope, the quintessential Pittsburgh homer, may have been just reverently preaching the Steelers gospel.

On the other hand, everyone has agreed that the game and the play changed the face of NFL football in Pittsburgh. After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the Steelers gained a glimpse of the Promised Land. Two years later the team would win the first of it league-high six Super Bowl titles in eight appearances during the period 1975-2009.

“It was the defining moment of the Steelers’ organization,” Pearson declares. Russell agrees, and Van Dyke calls the play “our destiny.” Hanratty acknowledges the enormous impact on the franchise by what he called “the most memorable moment in sports.” Harris likely speaks for everyone in Pittsburgh: “The play meant a lot to the team. We were not losers anymore. We could play against anybody and win.” Even a member of the self-styled demonic Raiders, Villapiano, whispers, “Amen.”

A 2012 Sports Illustrated poll confirmed the players’ opinions. More than 87,000 respondents named the Immaculate Reception the best ever play in the NFL. The folks at NFL Films concur.

Harris reaches out to his Raiders friends every year as the game’s anniversary nears. “He calls me every Dec. 23,” Villapiano said, as he laughed about Franco’s friendly insults. “‘What were you doing 30 years ago?’ he asks, or another time, ’35 years ago?’ Every year he calls to needle me.”

Harris enjoys his give-and-take with Villapiano. “For years, Phil has been saying that I was loafing on that play, and I say to him, ‘Phil, watch the film. You and I were about even when I left the backfield. So Phil, who got to the ball first?’”

The Steelers’ joy was short-lived after the Raiders’ game, however, as they played the unbeaten Miami Dolphins in the AFC Championship game. Miami beat Pittsburgh in a close game to go 16-0 and then whipped the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII. The 17-0 Dolphins remain the only championship team in NFL history to finish a season unbeaten and untied.

Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center has commissioned two life-size statues of Harris making the catch. One is on the main concourse of the Pittsburgh International Airport, with a second in the Center’s Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum.

Harris chuckled when I asked about the statue. “People say to me all the time, ‘Hey, I saw you at the airport.’ But I’m happy that it’s out there. It helps people connect with Pittsburgh.”

On Dec. 22, the Heinz Center will unveil another monument to the Immaculate Reception outside the Steelers’ new home, Heinz Field.

Pittsburgh’s Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum in the Heinz History Center boasts a life-sized statue of Franco Harris making the Immaculate Reception.  (Heinz History Center)

The ball that Franco Harris caught in the Immaculate Reception is on display in Pittsburgh’s Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum.  (Heinz History Center)

By Michael K. Bohn, McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)

It’s World Series time, and all is well among most of America’s baseball faithful, save for Yankees fans and those diehard Cubs people. The Series lets the Barcalounger crowd get a few more fixes at the season’s end before turning to football and the Cowboys Cheerleaders.

The Fall Classic has been a staple of America sports since 1903, a date that baseball historians have declared to be the start of the “modern” World Series. In the best-of-nine series that year between the Boston Americans and the National League Pittsburgh Pirates, Boston won, 5-3. There were, however, a few exhibition games prior to 1903.

Interleague play started in 1884 when the National League of Base Ball Clubs agreed to play a series of postseason games with the American Association. The arrangement lasted until 1890 when the AA folded, but Boston and Cleveland played a series of games in 1892.

These events claimed several names during that period, including “The Championship of the United States” and “World’s Championship Series.” It wasn’t until the American League debuted in 1901 that club owners began talking again about who had the best major-league team at the end of the season.

Every World Series has provided memorable moments, except for 1904, when interleague bickering precluded a Series, and the 1919 Black Sox debacle. Here’s a Whitman’s Sampler of highlights from the early years:

1912: THE $30,000 MUFF

One hundred years ago this month, the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Giants, 4-3, in a best-of-seven series that went eight games. Hmm.

After the Red Sox won the first game on Oct. 8 at the Polo Grounds, the teams were tied at 6 in the 11th inning of Game 2. In the gathering gloom, the umpires called the game on account of darkness. The idea of ballpark lights was not even a blinking light bulb over someone’s head in 1912. Baseball officials declared that the game didn’t count for the title, but did in the games-played column. Instead of continuing the game the next day, baseball officials opted to start with a new game the following day. The Red Sox still led the Series 1-0 when Game 3 started in Boston on Oct. 10.

Boston fans clogged the new Fenway Park as the World Series crowned the park’s inaugural season. The Giants won the third game, and the two teams battled through the Series until they met at Fenway on Oct. 16 for the decisive eighth game with the Series tied 3-3.

Only a few members of the Red Sox Nation showed up that day — 17,000, a bit less than half the total from the day before. Maybe the extra game was some kind of Beantown jinx or a precursor curse to the Bambino’s.

In the bottom of the 10th inning, the Giants were up 2-1 and had the incomparable Christy Mathewson on the mound. Boston pinch-hitter Clyde Engle hit a lazy fly ball to left-center field. Fred Snodgrass settled under it, but when the ball hit his formless glove, it popped out before he could sandwich it with his bare hand. Engle stopped at second and the Sox had a runner in scoring position with nobody out. New life for the Sox.

Right fielder Harry Hooper twice failed to get a bunt down, but with two strikes hit a frozen rope to right-center. Snodgrass, spurred by his error, lunged for the ball and made the play this time. Engle, thinking hit all the way, barely scrambled safely back to second. Mathewson walked second baseman Steve Yerkes, bringing Tris Speaker to the plate. The two Hall of Famers had the Series in their hands.

Speaker disappointed first when he lifted a foul pop-up near first base. First baseman Fred Merkle reacted slowly, so Mathewson and catcher Chief Meyers raced to help. Christy called for Meyers to make the catch, but the ball fell between the three players. According to author Glenn Stout, Speaker taunted Mathewson, “You just called for the wrong man. It’s gonna cost you the game.”

Exploiting his second chance, Speaker singled to right and Engle scored the tying run. On the throw home, Yerkes took third and Speaker, second. Only one out.

Mathewson walked Duffy Lewis, and the next batter, third baseman Larry Gardner, hit a long foul ball. The home plate ump threw Mathewson a new ball, which, as author Stout correctly writes in “Fenway 1912,” would carry much farther than the mushy, spit- and dirt-covered ball that had been in play for most of the game.

Gardner lofted a long fly to right field. Josh Devore’s throw home bounced in behind Yerkes, and Boston won the Series.

The following day, the newspaper reporters pointed to the difference between the winning team’s share of the gate and the loser’s — $29,514. That number, which team members would have divvied up, prompted the sportswriters to call Fred Snodgrass’s error, the “$30,000 muff.”

1922: EVERY GAME’S A HOME GAME

Two Gotham heavyweights met 90 years ago at the Polo Grounds in the 1922 World Series. The New York Giants and New York Yankees played in the same ballpark for several years, including that season when each team won its respective league pennant. Not even a Subway Series, as later Yankees-Dodgers matchups would be called, it must have been the first base-third base Series.

Friends and family of the Meusel brothers, Emil and Bob, must have appreciated the geographic coincidence of the Series. Emil played for the Giants, and Bob was a Yankees outfielder.

The Giants beat the Yankees, 4-0, but needed five games to do it. There’s that extra game again.

The National League Giants won the pennant with a 93-61 season record. Art Nehf had the best record among the starting pitchers, 19-13. Seven of New York’s eight regular position players batted over .300, including Frankie “The Fordham Flash” Frisch, George “High Pockets” Kelly, Emil “Irish” Meusel, and Charles “Casey” Stengel. Only Henry “Heinie” Groh trailed behind with a .265 average. Where are these nicknames today?

The Yankees won the junior circuit, 94-60, behind the pitching of Bullet Joe Bush, who posted a 26-7 record. Babe Ruth, in his second season in New York, had an off year. He batted .315, with 35 home runs and 99 RBI. His production had fallen off dramatically from his 1921 numbers — .378, 59 homers, and 171 RBI.

Babe’s multiple suspensions during the 1922 season prompted his poor production. Commissioner Kenesaw Landis benched Ruth for the season’s first six weeks for joining an unauthorized barnstorming tour the previous fall. Ruth’s repeated outbursts against umpires netted him five more suspensions before the season’s end.

Behind Nehf, the Giants won the first game as the rotating home team, 3-2; Bush was the losing pitcher. In Game 2, the teams were tied 3-3 in the 10th when the players on both teams seemed to be slow-rolling the action in hopes that sunset would force a tie. Irate fans threw beverage containers on the field in protest, with many pointing at the red sun hovering above Coogan’s Bluff behind the ballpark. The game became a non-game and Landis donated the gate receipts to charities supporting military veterans.

The Giants swept the next three games for the Series title.

Three World Series have featured ballparks that hosted both league winners. The Yankees began playing in the Giants’ home field in 1913, and they met each other in the World Series in 1921 and 1922. Irritated with the Yankees’ superior attendance and popularity, the Giants’ owner told the tenants in 1920 to find a new home. The American League team opened Yankee Stadium in 1923 across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds.

In 1944, both the St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals played in Sportsman’s Park (III). Each won their pennants, and the Cardinals won the Series, 4-2. The Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles for the 1954 season.

1932: THE BABE’S CALLED SHOT

The Yankees swept the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series, 4-0. After 80 years, true baseball fans appreciate the Series highlight — Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot.” Legend has it that Ruth, batting with two strikes in the top of the fifth, appeared to wave in the direction of center field bleachers, as if to declare that’s where he planned to send the next pitch. And then, he did.

New York had won the first two games at home, and the Series moved to Chicago for Game 3 on Oct. 1, 1932. In the first inning and before 50,000 raucous Chicago fans at Wrigley Field, Babe hit a three-run homer to stake the Yankees to their first lead. Early on, both teams engaged in mean-spirited bench jockeying and outright threats to each other.

After falling behind 4-1, the Cubs managed to tie the score at 4 by the time Ruth came to bat in the fifth. The following reconstruction is drawn from multiple accounts, but Ruth biographer Robert Creamer offers the most details.

As Ruth walked to the plate with one out, the crowd booed and hissed. Someone threw a lemon at him, and a few called him names that are not tolerated in modern baseball. Cubs pitcher Guy Bush stood at the top of the dugout steps and screamed insults at Ruth.

The Cubs’ pitcher, Charlie Root, carefully went to work on the Yankees’ slugger. Babe watched a called first strike and then raised one finger of his right hand as the crowd and Cubs razzed him. Two consecutive balls slightly quieted the crowd, but another called strike started a crescendo of cheers. Bush edged out onto the grass, screaming. Ruth waved toward the Cubs’ bench and raised two fingers. He muttered to the Cubs’ catcher, Gabby Harnett, “It only takes one to hit it.”

When Root yelled an insult at Ruth, Babe responded, “I’m going to knock the next pitch right down your (expletive) throat!” Root, a right-hander, threw a slow curve that entered the front door of Babe’s wheelhouse. Ruth hammered it 440 feet to the flagpole behind the center-field fence. The crowd fell silent except for the diehard Ruth fans. As he rounded the bases, Babe needled each Cub, starting with the first baseman, player-manager Charlie Grimm. Gehrig hit the next pitch out, and the Yankees held on for a 7-5 win.

Initially, only reporter Joe Williams suggested Ruth had called the homer in the fifth inning. His headline that evening in the New York World-Telegram started with “RUTH CALLS SHOT. . . .” All the other sportswriters took Babe’s final gesture as one waving Bush back into the dugout. Nonetheless, everyone eventually jumped on Williams’ reporting and ballyhooed the home run into sports legend.

When pressed later, Ruth merely pointed at the secondary reporting as the ground truth. On the other hand, Charlie Root said later if Ruth had pointed to center field, he would have knocked him down with the next pitch. When asked to play himself in Hollywood’s 1948 film, “The Babe Ruth Story,” Root refused because the producers wanted the stylized version of the “Called Shot” in the script.

Michael Bohn | McClatchy Newspapers

McClatchy-Tribune News Services

The surprising Washington Nationals have brought joy to baseball fans in the nation’s capital, a city that has hosted lousy teams for generations.  Here are a few images that document Washington’s baseball heritage.

This baseball card celebrated Hall of Famer Connie Mack, formally Cornelius McGillicuddy, who played for Washington’s National League team, 1886-1889, and managed the Philadelphia Athletics, 1901-1950.  Library of Congress.

The Senators were in the field when this photo was taken in May 1905 at American League Park II.  The first version burned in 1903, two years after its opening, and the grandstands shown here burned down in 1911.  The team immediately built Griffith Stadium on the same site.  The separation of the players from the fans was an informal process then.  Library of Congress.

While chasing a fly ball near the right field foul line on July 6, 1924, Babe Ruth slammed into a concrete wall at Griffith Stadium and knocked himself out.  Trainers, policemen, other players and what appears to be a soda pop vendor tend to the unconscious Ruth.  The Bambino quickly recovered and not only stayed in the game but also played the second game of the day’s twin bill.  The players are without uniform numbers, a practice that major-league teams eschewed until the 1930s.  Library of Congress.

President Calvin Coolidge and Senators Hall of Fame pitcher Walter “Big Train” Johnson shook hands on June 18, 1925 before a Washington home game.  Library of Congress.

Members of the U.S. Congress have played an annual baseball game in Washington since 1909.  In 1926, the Republicans beat the Democrats and posed on their party’s mascot near first base at the Senators Griffith Stadium.  Library of Congress.

Yankees first baseman and Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig was safe at home, as the ball bounced in front of Senators catcher Hank Severeid at Washington’s Griffith Stadium in 1926.  Library of Congress.

President Richard Nixon threw out the ceremonial first pitch to start the 1969 season at the Senators home opener.  Joining the president were Washington manager Ted Williams, left, and Yankees manager Ralph Houk on the far right.  Senators owner Bob Short stood behind Houk.  Behind the president is Major Jack Brennan, USMC, the president’s favorite military aide.  Presidential pitching on Opening Day in Washington started with William H. Taft in 1910.  Library of Congress.

Slugger Frank Howard led the second Senators team, the one that played in Washington from 1961 through 1971.  His monstrous home runs often landed in the upper deck of RFK Stadium, and the team painted a seat white where the ball landed.  Several of the white seats remain today in soccer-only RFK, including this one in section 542.  Michael K. Bohn

By MICHAEL K. BOHN, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, October 3, 2012

As the surprising Washington Nationals prepare for the postseason after winning the National League East Division, fans in the nation’s capital are rejoicing after generations of lousy baseball in their city. For most of Washington’s baseball history, the team played in the Junior Circuit, and an old vaudeville joke captured the city’s plight: “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”

In addition to a litany of losing seasons, baseball in Washington has been marked by repeated team failures and flights. The city enjoyed two early franchises in the NL, 1886-1889 and 1892-1899, but each folded after never sniffing .500 ball.

More disheartening were the team departures, and not by train for road trips to New York and Boston. Twice, team owners packed up and left Washington and its tired and huddled masses yearning for a winning team in the 1900s.

When Major League Baseball caught expansion fever in the early 1960s, Senators owner Calvin Griffith looked for a new home for the Senators. Caught in a downward spiral of bad play and the resultant bad attendance, Griffith gained league approval to move his team to Minneapolis for the 1961 season. Renamed the Twins, the team quickly doubled home attendance from that endured in Washington. In 1965, the Twins, who still fielded many of the Washington holdover players, won the AL pennant.

The AL immediately backfilled an expansion team into Washington without missing a game. But the “new” Senators continued to play in the league basement and lost at least 100 games in each of the first four seasons. Overall, the team won about four games out of every 10 during the period 1961-1971. To quote Yogi Berra, it was “deja vu all over again.” Finally, the team left for greener pastures and became the Texas Rangers, beginning in the 1972 season.

Amid all of the weary sighs and grumbling, there have been a few scattered huzzahs among the faithful in years past. The old Washington Senators won the American League pennant in 1924, 1925 and 1933. The team’s only World Series title came in 1924 against the New York Giants, with the incomparable Walter “Big Train” Johnson winning Game 7.

During the time without a baseball team – 1972-2004 – Washington reverted to another of the city’s equally disappointing spectator sports – partisan political wrestling. Finally, the lowly ward of MLB, the Montreal Expos, moved to the capital for the 2005 season. This latest transfer cemented the moving van as an enduring symbol of Washington baseball.

All of this coming and going started in Washington just before one of the capital’s other tough times, the Civil War.

Organized baseball began in Washington in May 1860 when two teams of “gentlemen” met for a game on the White Lot, a field of land that later became the Ellipse south of the White House. Players were government clerks, and the Potomacs beat the Nationals, 35-15.

Abraham Lincoln reportedly followed “base ball,” as players called it then, and a political cartoonist used the game as a metaphor to depict his 1860 election as president. He stood on a bag labeled “home base” and held a split rail, while his symbolic opponents held more recognizable bats.

Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, attended an 1865 tournament hosted by the Nationals that featured the Brooklyn Atlantics and Philadelphia Athletics. Johnson became so enamored with baseball, that, according the late Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich, the president ordered the Marine Band to play at every Saturday game. Local baseball promoter and pool hall owner Mike Scanlon built the first enclosed baseball field in Washington for the Nationals in 1870.

After a few false starts with professional teams, Washington gained a spot in the National League in 1886, and variously used the names Nationals, Statesmen and Senators. Among the team’s best players was catcher Cornelius McGillicuddy, who as “Connie Mack,” would later manage the Athletics for 50 seasons. After the Nationals folded in 1889, the NL transferred the franchise to Cincinnati.

A Washington team rejoined the majors when the NL expanded from eight to 12 teams in 1892. Playing centerfield was William E. Hoy, a holdover from the 1889 team. Known as Dummy Hoy because he was deaf and spoke with difficulty, Hoy was an intelligent player regardless of nicknaming practices of the era. At age 99, Dummy Hoy threw out the first ball in the third game of the 1961 World Series. The baseball field at Washington’s Gallaudet University, a leading institution for deaf students, is named for Hoy.

In 1894, a pitcher for the visiting Chicago Colts, Clark Griffith – Calvin’s uncle and adoptive father – took several hidden baseballs to the top of the Washington Monument. He wanted to see if his catcher, Bill Schriver, could catch the ultimate pop fly at the base of the monument. “I had time to make two throws before the monument police hustled up the elevator and demand to know what nonsense was going on in the monument,” Griffith said later.

Griffith flipped the first ball too far away from the top and Schriver missed it. Griffith merely dropped the second, which acted like a 555-foot knuckleball. Schriver muffed it as the cops arrived. Others have attempted the dangerous stunt since then.

The NL contracted back to eight teams after the 1899 season and bought out the Washington franchise for $46,500. Washington fans went into one of their hibernation periods until Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson created the major-league version of the AL for the 1901 season.

Johnson assembled eight former minor- and major-league teams into the Junior Circuit: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Washington. Povich wrote that Johnson included the nation’s capital “with blithe disregard for Washington’s wretched record as a major-league town under the old National League banner.”

For the first 11 years in the AL, the Senators languished in either sixth, seventh or eighth place. The lowlight was in 1904, when the club posted the franchise’s worst record, 38-113. The fans must have said, “Here we go again,” predating both Yogi’s more famous phrase and the Cubs lament, “Wait ‘Til Next Year.”

The period’s highlight, however, was President William H. Taft’s ceremonial first pitch at Washington’s American League Park on April 14, 1910. The tradition continued in Washington, with periodic interruptions, until the city ran out of baseball teams during the years 1972-2004.

In 1912, Clark Griffith arrived to manage the team. The former Chicago pitcher had gone on to manage the White Sox, New York Highlanders – later the Yankees – and Cincinnati. He led the Senators to a second-place finish in 1912, followed by another second and a third in the following years. Part of the team’s success, however, arose from their headline hurler, Walter Johnson, who many consider Washington’s finest player.

The big right-hander signed with Washington in 1907, but poor teams smothered his brilliance until Griffith arrived. Johnson went 33-12 with a 1.39 ERA in 1912, and led the league in 1913 with a 36-7 and 1.14 marks. The fans loved the mild-mannered and sober Johnson, a man conspicuously removed from the high spikes and cheating of baseball’s dead-ball era.

For his career, Johnson finished with 417 wins, second only to Cy Young (511), and still holds the career record for shutouts with 110.

Griffith became part owner of the team after the 1919 season and replaced himself as manager with several men before making his 27-year-old second baseman, Bucky Harris, the player-manager for the 1924 season. Opposing teams called Harris “Baby Face” and “Snookums,” but the team responded by winning the team’s first ever major-league pennant with a 92-62-2 record. First baseman Joe Judge and outfielders Sam Rice and Goose Goslin paced the team in hitting, and the 36-year-old Johnson led the starting pitchers with a 23-7, 2.72 record.

The Senators beat the Giants, 4-3, for Washington’s only World Series title. Judge, Goslin and Harris provided the firepower at the plate. Pitcher Tom Zachary won two games, and Johnson lost his two starts but won the deciding seventh game in relief.

After winning the league pennant in 1925 and 1933, the Senators escaped the “lower division” of the eight-team AL -places five through eight – only four times during the period 1934-1960. They ended the season in either last or next-to-last place 13 times during the long slide toward the Senators move to Minnesota in late 1960.

In 1936, while the Senators were winning a respectable 82 games (out of 153), the retired Johnson attempted to replicate George Washington’s mythic throw of a silver dollar. Legend had young George pitching the coin across the Potomac River, an impossible feat below the falls. But the story arose out of a more likely tale of young George throwing a rock across the Rappahannock River at his family home in Fredericksburg, Va. At that location, Johnson twice threw a silver dollar across the river, with his second measuring 286 feet.

Washington baseball rolled into the nation’s culture again in the mid-1950s. City native Douglass Wallop wrote a novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” in which a Senators fan reprises the Faustian legend and sells his soul to the devil to help the Senators win the pennant. The musical play based on the book, “Damn Yankees,” opened to great reviews on Broadway in 1955 and has been a theater staple ever since.

Starting in 1961, the replacement team, Senators II, struggled during its 11-year tenure. Baseball purists partially blame the bad run on the team’s home field starting in 1962 – D.C. Stadium, later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. The first of the “cookie-cutter” multi-use venues, the round bowl just didn’t have baseball bones.

Other, more tangible problems came from multiple owners, each using the revolving door approach to hiring managers. Included among the six men who managed at least one game were baseball greats Ted Williams and Gil Hodges. Williams had been fishing for eight years after retiring from the Red Sox in 1960 and recognized the dangers of taking over a losing team. Speaking with the Washington Post in February 1968, Williams said, “I may end up with an ulcer. I’ll need plenty of aspirin and Alka Seltzer.”

Last, the turbulence of the late 1960s made Washington a rough town beyond baseball. The nation’s capital suffered through riots after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, and then anti-war protesters clogged the streets until the team’s last season there in 1971. Washington shortstop Ed Brinkman, a member of the Army National Guard, lost playing time when he patrolled the city’s streets during the 1968 riots. “I hadn’t realized when I signed up that Washington D.C. is probably the worst place to join the National Guard – there’s always something going on,” Brinkman told author Frederic Frommer in 2005.

Slugger Frank Howard provided many of the limited highlights during the run of Senators II. The outfielder and first baseman played for Washington in 1965-1971, and led the AL in homers twice, with 44 in both 1968 and 1970. The team celebrated his monstrous home shots in RFK Stadium by painting white the wooden seats where the balls landed. Even today, some are still visible in the aging, 51-year-old stadium.

Bad trades, poor attendance and cash shortages led Senators owner Bob Short to seek and later gain approval from the AL to move his team to Arlington, Texas, in 1971. In the season’s final game on Sept. 30, 1971 in Washington, the Senators led the Yankees 7-5 with two outs in the ninth . . . but lost, 9-0. Then, fans, whose emotions ranged from angry to glad, stormed the field in search of souvenirs – bases, dirt, grass strips and everything that wasn’t nailed down. Unable to clear the field, the umps declared a forfeit by the Senators and the official scorer entered the traditional forfeit tally, 9-0.

The Baltimore Orioles quickly filled the void for greater Washington area fans, and the Oriole owner, Peter Angelos, threatened to veto any AL expansion into Washington D.C.

Reversing a century-old trend in 2005, a major-league team actually moved to Washington. The Montreal Expos, an NL expansion team in 1969, had been the first major-league team in Canada. The Expos enjoyed some success – a division title in 1981, and the best record in the majors in the strike-shorted 1994 season. But crowds diminished, and in 2001, MLB considered tossing the Expos out of the NL. Instead, the major-league owners collectively bought the franchise and began looking for a new home for the team.

Washington was a long-shot candidate to host the Expos, largely because of the Orioles’ opposition and the city’s record as a major-league loser. But weaker alternatives – Las Vegas and Portland, Ore., for example – forced MLB to reinstall baseball in the capital. Officials worked out a compromise on broadcast rights with Angelos and the Orioles, which eased their threat to block any team in Washington.

The new club became the Nationals, the official name of the Senators from 1901 to 1956. Both the fans and the press had preferred the name Senators all those years, but the fine print still celebrated the Nationals teams that started in 1860.

While the Nationals played the first three seasons in RFK Stadium, the city built a publicly financed, baseball-only stadium. Real-estate developer Ted Lerner and several others bought the team from MLB in 2006. The owners set in motion a plan to find the right combination of front office, manager and player talent. That plan came together for the 2012 season, and the “Nats” have been the toast of the NL this season.

Beyond the Senators and Nationals, there is one corner of Washington baseball that is often overlooked – the Negro Leagues. In the 1900s, team owners kept African-Americans out of the big leagues until 1947 when the Brooklyn Dodgers sent Jackie Robinson onto the field. In response to baseball’s segregation before Robinson, blacks could only play on what the public and the press called “negro” or “colored” teams. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the Homestead Grays, based near Pittsburgh, played some of their “home” games in Washington’s Griffith Stadium.

The Grays won the pennant in the Negro National League nine straight years, 1937-1945, and won three Negro World Series titles in that run. The team’s stars included baseball Hall of Famers, Josh Gibson, the “black Babe Ruth,” Buck Leonard, the “black Lou Gehrig” and James “Cool Papa” Bell.

Now, the Nationals play at Nationals Park – home of the 2012 NL East champions.