In 1968, Kathy Kusner went to court to become a jockey in America. That same year, Penny Ann Early was ignored when she tried to get a mount at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Jockey Barbara Jo Rubin’s trailer was stoned in 1969. In those days most female riders became regulars at small tracks and never made a mark on big-time racing. Trainers and horse owners didn’t think the “gentler sex” could handle the brutal, 1,200-pound beasts.
Then Julie Krone came along. At 4-foot-10 and 100 pounds, tiny even for a jockey (average size: 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds), the energetic blond with the high-pitched voice became the world’s winningest female jockey and the only woman ever inducted into thoroughbred racing’s Hall of Fame.
In a career that spanned 18 years Krone won 3,545 races and more than $81 million in purses. By the time she retired in 1999, she had put 17 percent of her mounts into the winner’s circle. Kusner, Early and Rubin had paved the way for all the firsts in Krone’s career, including first woman to ride in the Belmont Stakes and first woman to win a jockey championship at a major racetrack, among other distinctions.
Trainer John Forbes, who often worked with Krone, told USA Today this year that prejudice against female riders is “still out there, and I don’t think it will ever go away. The notion that a rider has to be very strong and powerful so he can control a 1,000-pound animal and hit it really hard with a whip is something that has been ingrained. The resistance we had was unbelievable.”
“It was like a girl playing shortstop for the Yankees,” said Krone’s then agent, Larry “Snake” Cooper, to London’s Independent in 1990.
What Krone proved was that brute whipping ability isn’t always the answer. From childhood on, she seemed to have an ability to communicate with her horses, to discover what made a horse want to work hard — and what it needed for thanks.
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Julieanne Louise Krone was born July 24, 1963, in Benton Harbor, Mich. She was raised on a farm in nearby Eau Claire, where her parents let her and her brother, Donnie, three years her senior, run wild.
The family never ate dinner together. Julie sometimes feasted on dog food with the dogs. At 5, she led her horse right into the house for her mother to saddle. Occasionally, she slept with her whip. At 9, she harnessed a Great Dane to a sled and went for a ride in the snow. At 13, dressed only in a deerskin tied around her midriff, she stood on the back of her galloping horse and headed into the barn, dropping to a sitting position just before the top of the barn doorway nearly decapitated her.
“I could count on one hand the times my parents made a meal for me, and it wasn’t because we were poor,” Krone told the New York Daily News in 1988. “I guess I never even realized it until one day when I was older and my friend from next door asked why there was never any food in my house.”
Her father, Don, an art teacher and photographer, wouldn’t stop his daughter from doing back flips off a horse. Instead, he’d ask her to do it again for the camera.
“Every day was a missile launch,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “Yes, there was always that element of possible disaster, but it was just like a missile — if it goes, god, there’s going to be that moment of glory. You can’t tell a kid to go for it, to be whatever they want to be, and also tell them to be careful. If we all ride the safe road, who will we look up to? Who will be on the high road? No, we didn’t worry about the little things.”
Her mother, Judi, a riding instructor and former Michigan State equestrian champion, forged Julie’s birth certificate when she was 15 so that she could get work at Churchill Downs as a groom and exercise rider. Why Churchill Downs, where she would have to move away from her family? “Because it’s the logical place to become a jockey,” Julie has said.
The night before heading to Kentucky, Judi Krone came home from her part-time bartending job at 1 a.m. to find Julie waiting up. Instead of shooing her off to bed, the pair rode their horses into the Michigan night, singing “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Setting off for Kentucky marked the beginning of Julie’s professional riding career, but her relationship with horses had been going on since birth.
Julie’s first time on a horse came at age 2. Her mother was trying to sell a palomino and plunked little diapered Julie on its back to demonstrate the horse’s gentle nature. The horse immediately began to trot away. Julie’s mother didn’t bat an eye; she just kept trying to sell the horse. The horse stopped and toddler Julie reached down and grabbed the reins as natural as can be and tugged them. The horse turned and came back.
Krone won her first event at the age of 5 — in a 21-and-under event. She continued riding and competing in horse shows, but when she was 14, her life changed.
That marked the year her parents divorced, but another 1978 event seems to have had a more lasting effect on Krone: Steve Cauthen, 18, won the Triple Crown on Affirmed. The jockey became her hero and she quickly read Pete Axthelm’s Cauthen biography, “The Kid.” She decided then to be a jockey.
“He was my inspiration,” she has said. “I read his story and thought, ‘If he could overcome all the difficulties, so could I.’”
The next year, though, her sophomore year in high school, she was invited to join a traveling circus as a trick rider and nearly did. At the last minute, she decided she didn’t trust the guy running the show and went back to her jockey dream. When the school term ended she went to Churchill Downs, with no sleep and a forged birth certificate in hand.
She stayed for three months, earning $50 a week and living with an older trainer. The following summer, she raced in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. Krone made it halfway through her senior year of high school before she felt the need to split again. Much to her teacher dad’s consternation, she dropped out of school and headed to Tampa Bay, Fla., to live with her grandparents and work as an exercise rider and apprentice jockey at Tampa Bay Downs. But the guards wouldn’t even let her through the front gate. So she and her mother walked down the length of fence and then climbed it. They started toward the barns only to be picked up by a woman who thought she had found a lost little girl and her confused mother.
The woman took Krone to her boyfriend, Jerry Pace, a trainer. “So,” he said, “I’m told you want to be a jockey.”
“No,” Krone said, “I’m gonna be a jockey.”
Pace took her out and let her ride, thinking he was merely humoring her. Five weeks later, in February 1981, she sat atop Lord Farkle in the winner’s circle.
She began working her way up, battling fellow jockeys and winning lots of races. Most horse owners and trainers wanted nothing to do with a “jockette.” She told USA Today this year, “I learned how to climb into people’s hearts like you can’t believe. I worked so hard to — we will loosely use the term — ‘seduce’ people.”
Her seductions may have included the free doughnuts she was handing out or her bone-crushing handshake. Maryland horse trainer Ben Perkins Jr. told the New York Times about meeting Krone for the first time, at his barn in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1981: “This cute little girl, looks about 10, comes up to me and squeaks, ‘Hi! I’m Julie Krone! I’m a jockey!’ and takes my hand and brings me to my knees. Well, we let her ride, and she rides like a god.”
More and more trainers started accepting the fact that Krone, despite her sex, could get the job done. “The perfect thing,” Perkins continued, “would be this little small person who could just sit on the horse’s back and go along for the ride, just to keep the horse out of trouble. That was Julie.”
She could coax horses to win instead of pushing them. Trainers often spoke of her patience and her hands, which seemed to guide the horse to victory, no matter the odds. But she wasn’t necessarily a gentle rider and, when necessary, she wasn’t a gentle person.
In 1982, Yves Turcotte smacked her horse with his whip during a race and, when the race was over, Krone shoved him off the weigh-out scales. Jockey Jake Nied wrestled with her after a match until others pulled them apart. In 1986, Miguel Rujano hit her in the ear with his whip and she punched him in the face. He pushed her into the jockeys’ swimming pool and she hit him with a lawn chair. In 1989, she exchanged blows with jockey Joe Bravo and left him with fewer teeth. She was fined for these infractions, but they gained her much respect.
That wild streak spilled over to her personal life. She drove a red Porsche with a wooden block on the accelerator so her short legs could stomp the pedal all the way down. In 1983, when she was racing at Pimlico Race Course in Maryland, authorities found marijuana in her car, a habit she had picked up when she was 12. According to Sports Illustrated, she was lucky they didn’t find cocaine.
Krone attended a drug-rehab class and urinated into a jar once a week for the next year. But the most brutal punishment was the 60-day suspension. It was the first time in her life that she couldn’t ride. It drove her crazy. She went to the racetrack and stood outside the fence. She went clean.
Upon her return, she continued to steamroll through boundaries (1987: first woman to win a riding title at a major track; 1992: first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby; one of only a handful of American riders to win six races in one day) and victory tape. In the 1980s, she won 1,898 races. In 1986, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and Krone asked her what she could do for her. In a moment straight out of “Rocky,” Judi Krone told her daughter that all she could do was win. And so she did.
In 1993, she reached her peak. She became the first woman to win a Triple Crown event, the 125-year-old Belmont Stakes, astride 13-to-1 long-shot Colonial Affair. She was named the person of the week by ABC News. ESPN gave her an Espy award as 1993′s top female athlete. Krone was on top of the world.
After the race, she made it clear how she felt about being the first woman to break into the Triple Crown winner’s circle: “I don’t think the question needs to be genderized. It would feel great to anyone. But whether you’re a girl or a boy or a Martian, you still have to go out and prove yourself every day.”
Just two months later, Julie’s life took a drastic turn. It was the last day of racing at Saratoga Raceway in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Krone’s third race of the day. Her horse, Seattle Way, was in the middle of 11 horses at the top of the stretch when another horse veered into her path. Seattle Way’s hooves became tangled with the other’s heels and Krone was thrown free. She landed awkwardly on her feet and bounced grotesquely into a sitting position, and then another horse, aptly named Two Is Trouble, ran directly into her, kicking her in the chest. Her ankle was shattered. If she hadn’t been wearing a 2-pound flak jacket, the kick might have killed her. As it was, she suffered a cardiac contusion, a bruising of the heart.
The ankle injury required two steel plates and 14 screws to repair. She was bedridden with morphine dripping into her arm. A friend brought her a horse brush that she called her “aroma therapy.”
It took nine months for Krone to get back onto the racetrack. In August 1995, she married TV reporter Matt Muzikar. The same year, she published her autobiography, “Riding for My Life,” written with Nancy Ann Richardson. Then on Jan. 13, 1996, at Florida’s Gulfstream Park, she went down again, this time breaking both her precious hands.
“When I was lying there on the ground, I knew my life was going to change,” Krone told the Associated Press this year. “And as I was getting ready to come back, I had trepidation.” She had nightmares about falling. She got lost on streets she’d been driving on for years. She wondered on a daily basis how she would kill herself that night.
That accident “fried” her, she told the Seattle Times this year. “I couldn’t talk. The straw didn’t break the camel’s back; it gutted the sucker, left the camel for dead. I was numb, couldn’t think. I was afraid of horses, hated riding.”
Upon her return six weeks later, trainers didn’t trust Krone and she gave them no reason to, either. She rode long-shot horses and lost handily. She continued having nightmares filled with horses’ hooves. She grew more and more timid.
“Horses felt my anxiety, they got weird, they reared up,” she has said. “I had been given a magical talent to positive-image a loser right into the winner’s circle … And then suddenly it was all gone, and I was exhausted.” All Krone could think of was suicide.
One day at Saratoga in the summer of 1996, after another lousy day that included getting yelled at by a trainer, she bumped into a casual friend, Tom Qualters (a horse owner and frequent Saratoga visitor), who told her, “Well, there’s tomorrow.”
Krone said, “Well, there might not be any tomorrow.”
Qualters, a psychiatrist, suggested she stop by his office, which she did the next night for a two-hour “emotional purge,” Krone told Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times. “I felt full and empty at the same time, joyful and like I was peeling off my skin.”
Previously, she had resisted any type of therapy. “I’m a jock,” she has said. “I can do anything on my own. I thought it was humiliating to get help. Meanwhile, the only real relief I felt was planning my suicide. I saved sleeping pills, but I was going to drink alcohol, slit my wrists and maybe hang myself, too. I wanted to do one thing right.”
Qualters diagnosed Krone with post-traumatic stress disorder and began seeing her four times a week. The pair visualized success for her and talked about issues from her childhood. Mostly, though, Qualters talked Krone through each painful experience, each new race — and slowly, she began winning again. She never returned to her earlier form, but that was one of the mental barricades that she conquered, realizing that she was doing just fine at the level she was performing at.
Two years after meeting Qualters, she found a doctor in New Jersey who prescribed Zoloft. “When I started taking Zoloft, things got better. All the things I lost came back and I got to be myself again. It was a turning point in my career and life,” Krone, who has a contract with Pfizer, the maker of the drug, told the Associated Press.
“I’m not sorry I didn’t start the medicine sooner. I needed to first get to a place in talk therapy,” she told the New York Times. “You don’t fully realize how weird it was until you have yourself back. I’d been spending the minutes before a race using all my energy to defeat an anxiety attack, and now, well, listen to this. At the end of last year, in a 60-day period, my mother died, I got divorced and I moved to California. And I’m here, I’m OK.”
When she finished second in the jockey standings in 1998 at Monmouth Park, N.J., Krone felt that she had beaten back her demons. “I wasn’t the leading rider and I didn’t have those multiple-win days, but the fear left me, the trauma left me and it was better,” she told the New York Post. “I didn’t even think about anything. I would get on horses that people said were wild, and they’d just melt in my hands, relax and do stuff they’ve never done before.”
She retired April 18, 1999, after riding three winning horses and two seconds that day. Not too shabby.
Since retirement, she has worked as a horse-racing analyst for the Television Games Network, done some voice-overs for Nickelodeon (“Having a squeaky voice is paying off,” she told the AP) and has taken some correspondence classes toward an undergraduate degree in psychology. She finished her high school degree in the late ’90s. In January, she will begin work at Gulfstream Park as a spokeswoman for the track.
Her biggest achievement, though, was to become the first woman accepted into thoroughbred racing’s Hall of Fame this year.
At her acceptance speech in August, she said, “I want this to be a lesson to all kids everywhere. If the stable gate is closed, climb the fence.”
At 1999′s All-Star Game at Fenway Park in Boston, Major League Baseball showcased its All-Century team. It was expected to be a sweet history lesson for baseball fans, a reminder of the names and stats of yesteryear. But it turned into an almost religious experience the second Ted Williams rolled onto the field in a golf cart.
Today’s baseball biggies — Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr., Mark McGwire — gathered around Williams, basking in their hero’s glow. Each wanted his own special moment with the last man ever to bat .400, and many, including Williams, were moved to tears. No one wanted to leave the field.
“It was kind of funny,” Boston shortstop Nomar Garciaparra told the Associated Press. “When the announcer asked everybody to go back to the dugout, everybody said no. It didn’t matter. What time was the first pitch? Nobody cared.”
Why did Williams — more than Yogi Berra, Sandy Koufax or Mike Schmidt, who were also on the field that night — inspire such an emotional tribute? Look to his full-throttle energy, his stated dedication to being “the greatest hitter who ever lived” and the clear drive he had to make it so; his absolute refusal to bow to media pressure and the fact that when Williams makes a promise — to himself or others — you better believe he’s going to follow through on it. And don’t forget his nearly mythic status as one of the game’s wildest characters.
This is the man who has worn a necktie only a handful of times in his 82 years, because he can’t stand the things. This is a man who has had the finest Chesapeake oysters and bayou crayfish flown to his home in Hernando, Fla., because he refuses to eat second best. This is the guy who, when he was drafted in World War II (he served in the military for four and a half years), set a still-standing gunnery record in training. This is the guy who refused to ever tip his cap to Boston fans from his second season with the Red Sox onward, no matter how much they begged, and who can’t let an argument go. If he doesn’t like the outcome of a conversation, he’ll spend a week gathering information until he decides he’s ready to pounce again. This talent led Sports Illustrated to name him the last man to “hit .400 and argue 1.000.”
Hitting .400, of course, is Williams’ biggest claim to fame. When he hit .406 in 1941, he joined 17 other big hitters in the history books, including Rogers Hornsby, who batted .424 in 1924. And, of course, although a few talented fellows have come close, no one’s done it since. Hornsby, who also made the All-Century team, gave Williams a piece of advice early in his career: Be patient; wait for your pitch. It became a Williams mantra.
Although he gained fame for his rages against the Boston press, Williams managed to remain patient at the plate and rode Hornsby’s advice to six batting titles, two American League MVP awards, 18 All-Star appearances and an induction into the Hall of Fame in ’66. He also used the tenet as the cornerstone for his bestselling 1970 book, “The Science of Hitting,” written with John Underwood. That book may be single-handedly responsible for raising the collective batting average of generations of Americans.
Of course, Williams’ killer 20/10 eyesight played a big role in his batting prowess, though he’d never admit it. When he took his physical for World War II, the examining physician called in a colleague to marvel over Williams’ visual acuity. A couple of other things that didn’t hurt the 6-foot-4, 198-pound string bean in his quest for greatness: He didn’t drink, hated smoking and was always in by curfew. He also disliked parties; he wasn’t interested in standing around “listening to a lot of bullshit,” he told Esquire’s Richard Ben Cramer in 1986.
But what truly brought him such a sweet swing was his devotion: He spent his whole life swinging a bat. As a child, he’d go out in the yard at night when everybody was sleeping and swing, swing, swing at an imaginary ball. His nocturnal ritual continued when he turned pro. In fact, his Red Sox road-trip roomies would often be awakened by Williams swinging a bat, a newspaper, a pillow, anything, and accidentally hitting something: a wall, a bureau, a bedpost.
Williams would also spend hours working over his bats to make sure they were precisely the proper weight (between 32 and 33 ounces). He kept his bats off the ground so they wouldn’t pick up moisture and put on excess ounces. Just to be certain, he’d take them to the post office to weigh them.
Williams no doubt inherited his extreme enthusiasm from his mother, May Williams, known to all in his San Diego hometown as Salvation May. A dedicated Salvation Army missionary, she spent her days and nights in the bars and bordellos of San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, tambourine in one hand and collection plate in the other. When Williams was a child, his mother took him on her proselytizing parades; he recalls trying to hide behind the pounding bass drum.
Salvation May’s zeal would haunt Williams even after he signed with his first team after high school, San Diego’s Pacific Coast League Padres. May Williams would show up at games, ask spectators for cash and point out her son on the field. Deeply embarrassed, Williams asked her to knock it off and even gave her money to stop. She took the cash and kept passing the plate at his games anyway.
One of the few things Teddy Samuel Williams’ father, Sam, gave him was his name (Teddy, not Theodore, though Williams hates being called that). Sam Williams, known for rarely cracking a smile, had spent time in the Philippines with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Busy running a tiny photography shop or working as a prison inspector in Sacramento, Calif. — or, more often than not, drinking — Sam was seldom around. Williams didn’t hear much from him until the scouts started coming around, talking big money.
Williams was a star even before high school. Neighborhood kids would finish up their paper routes and go watch him hit at North Park. He would go there every day after school (and sometimes during) and take pitches from playground instructor Rod Luscomb, a former minor leaguer and one of the slugger’s many surrogate fathers. Later, Williams led Hoover High to the state championship and, on the way home, ate 18 Popsicles to celebrate.
Williams started playing with the Red Sox in 1939. His first season he could do no wrong. Everybody loved him. What’s not to love when the new kid is having the best rookie season (31 homers, 145 runs batted in and a .327 batting average) of all time?
Outside the stadium, adoring kids followed Williams around. Occasionally, he gathered them together, took them to a local amusement park and rode the roller coaster with them. Sometimes, he took the whole team fishing, a passion of his. On other days, the 19-year-old would come to the park early and shoot pigeons in the outfield with Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Once, he just went ahead and shot out the scoreboard’s ball, strike and out lights. What the hell! He gladly tipped his hat after big plays in 1939. Life was good.
But that winter, his parents divorced and he wanted none of that mess. So instead of going home to California, he spent the off-season with a girlfriend in Minneapolis, Doris Soule (whom he later married; they had a baby girl, Bobby Jo, in 1948, and divorced in 1955). He started the 1940 season slow. For the first time in his life, Williams couldn’t hit the baseball. Fans wondered what had happened to the golden boy, and the press started writing about his sophomore jinx.
While Williams was out of town with the team, one writer finished a screed against him with the following: “Whatever it is, it traces to his upbringing. Can you imagine a kid, a nice kid with a nimble brain, not visiting his father and mother all of last winter?” The seven other ultracompetitive Boston papers went nuts for this story, with none of them digging up the real dirt. Williams returned to Boston as public enemy No. 1. Oh, that burned him. So he let members of the press know they were on notice, that he didn’t trust them one iota — and he wouldn’t ever again. And Williams is a man of his word.
Later, when reporters came into the locker room, he yelled, “Hey, what stinks? Hey! Something stink in here? Oh, it’s you. Well, no wonder with that shit you wrote.” The sportswriters kept on him, and fans eventually followed suit. Their incessant heckling, despite his consistent batting feats, led him to his self-imposed no-cap-tipping rule. He’d show them. Finally, late in the year, Williams told a reporter he didn’t like Boston anymore; he wanted out, which the fans and the press just loved. As he grossly understated in his autobiography, “My Turn at Bat” (also written with Underwood), “I am certainly in the upper bracket of sensitivity, maybe the top 3 percent.”
This sensitivity burned Williams’ teammates. Fellow Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx called him a “spoiled child,” and Lefty Grove threatened to punch him in the nose if he didn’t get his act together. But the left-fielder railed on. And as the years progressed, other Boston players stopped talking to the press, too, out of reverence for his ball-playing prowess.
Despite eventually having a great year at the plate in 1940 (.344, 23 homers, 113 RBIs), Williams had blown it with Boston. Who would let their kid ride a roller coaster with this bum? Nobody. In fact, he began spending more time alone, going to movies during the day, sometimes three at a time, tying fishing flies into the night and giving extra time to his beloved bats.
He did nothing to solve the media problem in the ensuing years, and that cost him an MVP award (voted on by sportswriters) in 1947. One Boston writer left Williams off the ballot that year simply because he didn’t like him. The “Splendid Splinter” lost the MVP by one point to Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Ouch.
Even in the short speech he gave before his final game, Williams made sure to mention that he didn’t appreciate the treatment he had received from the “knights of the keyboard,” as he called them. The lowest point in their relationship came when Williams hit his 400th home run (of an eventual 521) in 1956. He deviated from his usual trot around the bases, which John Updike once described in the New Yorker as “hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of.” This time, Williams created a storm of his own when, after the ball had safely cleared the fence, he paused and spat toward the press box. He spat again after he crossed first base, second, third and then — in case you missed it the first four times — on his way back to the dugout. Williams doesn’t do anything halfway.
America’s entry into World War II, in 1941, immediately followed one of the best baseball seasons of all time. DiMaggio had captured the nation’s attention with his 56-game hitting streak (still unmatched) and Williams had finished the year with his ever-famous .406. At season’s end, with one more double-header to play the next day, Williams’ batting average stood at .39955. Manager Joe Cronin offered to let him sit out the games in order to guarantee the rounded-up .400 average. Williams and clubhouse boy Johnny Orlando walked the streets of Philadelphia that night and just talked about hitting, the A’s pitchers he might face and whether he should play the game. Williams finally said, “The record’s no good unless it’s made in all the games.” And so he played, batting 6 for 8 and bringing his average up to the now seemingly insurmountable .406. The Splinter had taken home his first batting title and had conquered the Boston media, the fans, the world.
The euphoria didn’t last long, of course. With World War II breaking out, Williams’ draft status was 1-A. He requested — and received — a deferment because his mother was dependent on him. By the time he got to spring training in 1942, his press pals were making his “un-American” life miserable. The fans crucified him. It was becoming increasingly popular in New England to hate Ted Williams. The heckling got so bad that, in one early-season game, Williams intentionally hit foul balls into the stands in attempts to hit one vociferous verbal attacker. Eventually, Williams relented and enlisted in the Navy Reserve, where he spent the next three years discovering a new love: flying.
He never made it into battle and returned to the field in 1946 with a vengeance, jawing at journalists and striking poses at the plate, hitting the first pitch he saw for a homer. That year, he had a new problem to deal with: a new defense, designed specifically for him by then Cleveland Indians manager Lou Boudreau. The “Williams shift” consisted of the opposing team moving right, leaving the left side of the field open, since Williams rarely hit there. It proved fairly successful until Williams clinched Boston’s first pennant in 28 years with an inside-the-park homer poked up the left side — away from the dreaded shift. Still, it was a tool managers used sporadically and effectively for years against Williams. Once, in an exhibition-game joke, nearly the entire opposition went and sat in the right-field bleachers when Williams came to bat. Even with the shift, Williams took the American League MVP that year (.342, 38 homers, 123 RBIs).
Finally, Boston was in the World Series and Williams had a chance to prove himself on higher ground. He bombed, batting .200 with one RBI. The poor numbers are mostly the result of an extremely swollen elbow from a league-demanded exhibition game. But the Boston press didn’t care. Williams failed them.
Around this time, he had his first real temptation to tip his cap. Sox catcher Birdie Tebbetts nearly convinced him that when he did it, the crowd noise would be so loud he could say whatever he wanted to the fans — “You goddamn SOBs!” — and nobody would ever know. As Williams wrote in his autobiography, “That kind of appealed to me.” When he hit his next homer at Fenway, he took the bases slowly, but he was still turning the idea over in his mind when he reached home plate. He took another batting title in 1948 (.369) and missed one by two-thousandths of a point in the 1949 season. He had to settle for just MVP that year.
In the ’50s, Williams spent his time fighting a war in Korea, attempting to stay off the injured list, spending endless hours with kids with cancer and occasionally having lunch with Vice President Richard Nixon.
Williams’ involvement with kids with cancer began through the Jimmy Fund, which raises money for research and for a Boston hospital. “I love kids, that’s all, it’s no virtue. A guy likes kids, he has to hope their lives are going to be good, that they will avoid the pitfalls he had. I think one of the greatest things ever said is that a man never stands so high as when he stoops to help a kid,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Williams particularly enjoyed making speeches and visits to sick children without the media’s attention. As former Jimmy Fund chief of security Mort Lederman told Ed Linn, author of “Hitter,” a Williams bio: “Unlike most celebrities, Williams never had a demand. He doesn’t care about getting into front door, back door, special car, special food, special spot. He never saw himself as a celebrity. He was a back-door guy, and I admired him for that.” Perhaps because his brother had died of leukemia in 1960 or solely for his love of the cause, Williams didn’t stop his work with the Jimmy Fund when he stopped playing ball. He is still sending plenty of checks, publicity and goodwill the fund’s way.
As for Nixon, he began calling Williams’ D.C. hotel to ask for lunch dates whenever the Sox were in town to take on the Washington Senators. What did they talk about? Well, Williams’ passion, the Jimmy Fund, of course.
The Korean War put Williams in contact with quite a different kind of American celebrity: John Glenn or, as his war pals called him, Old Magnet Ass, because of the number of anti-aircraft artillery always coming after him. Glenn, who became an idol for Williams, chose Williams to fly at his wing and the pair went through some harrowing times together. While Williams earned a slew of medals, he also lost part of his hearing (resulting in his booming voice gaining even more volume), contracted a mysterious virus that stuck with him for years and had a couple of near-death experiences as he crammed his tall body into the tiny cockpit for 39 missions.
He was discharged in the summer of 1953, and he didn’t think he ever wanted to play ball again. But the league invited him to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game and he was welcomed like the hero he was. So he started working out and he was back in action for the last 37 games, hitting .407. You couldn’t make this guy stop hitting — except when he got hurt.
Williams broke his elbow in the 1950 All-Star Game going up for a Ralph Kiner fly ball. Everybody thought he was done. He was back in two months. In 1954, his first full season back from Korea, he broke his collarbone in the first 10 minutes of spring training. He missed six weeks after getting a pin put in his shoulder. According to Updike, he forever looked like “a Calder mobile with one thread cut” after this. When Williams returned to the lineup against Detroit, he hit two homers, a double and four singles in a doubleheader. Yankees manager Casey Stengel said, “I’m going to have all my players put pins in their shoulders.”
Through the late ’50s, he battled injuries, but the real problem was his mind-set. Even though he kept up his hitting feats (.388 in 1957!), the old man grew increasingly disappointed. His team, after all, was one of the worst in baseball. In 1959, he had his worst year ever, hitting .254, the first time he had ever gone below .300. Owner Tom Yawkey asked the paunching Splinter if he wanted to hang ‘em up, but Williams couldn’t go out that way. Not only did he not quit, he asked for a huge salary slash — from $125,000 to $95,000 — possibly the first and last time that’s happened in professional sports.
The 1960 season, his last, ended up being a decent year: He batted .316, drove in 72 runs and hit 29 homers. The last of those homers came in his final at-bat in Boston. While the crowd heaped huzzahs on him, he decided by second base that he couldn’t tip his cap. It just wasn’t his style. He ran right into the dugout and out of baseball and wouldn’t come out again. His teammates prodded him to go take a bow. The umpires waved at him to get his 40-year-old ass back on the field. And the fans howled for him. But he couldn’t do it. He just sat in the corner of the dugout with a huge smile on his face and said, “Fuck ‘em.”
Which is pretty much what he said in the ensuing years: He fished, hunted and cooked (another love) to his heart’s content. He married and divorced two more women. One was a socialite model from Chicago, Lee Howard, who thought she was marrying a celebrity and instead got a dedicated fisherman who got up at 4 a.m. and disappeared for the day. The other was a former Miss Vermont, Delores Wettach, who had never heard of Ted Williams. They had two children: John Henry, born in 1968, who handles most of his father’s business dealings these days and runs Hitter.net, and Claudia, who was born in 1971.
In 1966, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He went up to Cooperstown, N.Y., gave his speech, took his plaque and went home. He didn’t even go inside.
He made a splashy reappearance in the majors in 1969, managing the Washington Senators. He earned manager of the year that first season, but those good times were short-lived. “I could see it was the kind of job you suffer through,” he wrote in “My Turn at Bat.” And suffer he did through three more seasons as the team moved from D.C. and became the Texas Rangers. Still, they lost. He finished out his contract and moved on.
Since then, he has started his Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame in Hernando, Fla., a pilgrimage destination for young players. He met another woman, Louise Kaufman, whom he never married (he’s not the marrying kind anymore), but she stayed with him longer than the rest, at least 20 years. She died three years ago. Williams isn’t in the greatest shape, either. Since 1994, he’s had two strokes and a broken hip, and his once-stellar vision is eroding rapidly. These days, he stays at home and receives visits from his family and close friends. And, of course, he still follows the Sox. He can’t get them out of his system.
But it’s not the ailing Ted Williams that America will remember. We’ll remember his smooth, sweet swing flickering in sharp black and white; his long, thin figure turning with his lethally lightweight bat; that unsmiling, “just doing my job, ma’am” way he put his head down and took off for first base after he slapped another one over the wall. It’s all been permanently tattooed onto the American sports consciousness. We’ll remember him yelling, “Goddamn, what the hell stinks in here?” (even though we never witnessed it). And we’ll remember him for his absolute passion for a boy’s game.
In 1991, 50 years after Williams had hit .406, Fenway Park hosted Ted Williams Day. He got up and gave a little speech that started with the following: “I realized about 42 years ago I was playing for super-great fans. I had a love affair with them, but I never showed it. When I finally consented to do this, I started to think, ‘What am I gonna say?’ Then I thought it might be nice to tip my hat.” And he did just that.
Forget the Olympic Games. The most inclusive international quadrennial competition is the World Monopoly Championship. After all, more than 500 million people worldwide have played the game — a tad more than are involved in, say, competitive trampoline. Toronto hosts the 11th such event this weekend.
America’s chances rest with 21-year-old national champ Matt Gissel, a laid-back university student majoring in biochemistry. The United States hasn’t had a world titlist since 1973. Starting Saturday, Gissel goes up against the current world champion, 40-year-old Christopher Woo, a teacher from Hong Kong, and more than 30 other national champions. The youngest is a 14-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago and the oldest is a 53-year-old father of three from Spain.
Monopoly, invented in 1933, came to fame during the Depression as American families lived vicariously through the world of Uncle Milton Pennybags, the game’s mascot (who, according to game manufacturer Hasbro, collects pennies, avoids the luxury tax and enjoys strolling on Boardwalk).
The game is sold in 80 countries and has been translated into 26 languages and currencies. It has also gained an odd collection of fans — who play Monopoly in the strangest places and for extremely extended periods of time.
In 1983, the Buffalo Dive Club played for 1,080 hours underwater. Some 350 divers took turns to keep play going for 45 consecutive days. A group of high school students in New Mexico once played for 99 hours in a water-filled bathtub. And one game was played in a moving elevator for 16 days.
Players have also adjusted the game’s physical size through the years. In 1987, students of Juniata College in Huntington, Pa., turned part of their campus into a Monopoly game board larger than a city block. Giant foam-rubber cubes became dice, and cyclists with walkie-talkies kept players informed of opponents’ moves.
The heaviest Monopoly board — 95 pounds — was made in 1964 specifically for underwater use. Neiman Marcus once had a game made out of chocolate that sold for $600. And a $25,000 set made for tobacco king Alfred Dunhill boasted solid gold and silver houses and hotels.
Since Monopoly has such intense fans, it was no surprise when hundreds of them showed up in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1972 to block changes to some of the local street names that the game uses. To help upgrade the city’s image, the gambling haven’s City Council had proposed changing Baltic and Mediterranean avenues to Fairmont and Melrose, respectively. But after players flew in from around the country to attend the public hearing and mailed thousands of letters, the street names remained intact.
U.S. champ Gissel prefers his Monopoly straight up: on a table, in the house. The pro wrestling fan from St. Albans, Vt., started playing Monopoly in fourth grade, just fooling around with his dad. In sixth grade, Gissel noticed that the local library was hosting a Monopoly competition during his April vacation. “It was just something to do,” he says.
It became something to do every year during his April vacation. From 1993 to ’97, Gissel led the state in total Monopoly properties and assets earned. And so Vermont crowned him state champ and sent him to the national championship in Las Vegas, all expenses paid.
“It was surprising,” Gissel says of the phone call informing him of his champion status. “I had forgotten about it. Then I came out of shock.”
And so he prepared for the ensuing battle: “Before I went, I played my college roommates twice and lost both games. It didn’t worry me. I figure each game is different and sometimes it doesn’t work. As long as I win when it matters.”
This weekend’s tournament consists of four rounds. Players accrue as much capital as they can in three 90-minute preliminary games. The five players with the most moola at the end head to the final game, played on Monday. This match has no time limit — it’s played until only the winner remains.
It took Gissel just two hours to bankrupt his fellow contestants at the 1999 national championship. In the final round, his father, brother and sister huddled around the game table to follow each roll of the dice. His mother waited outside, too nervous to watch. “It was intense,” says Gissel.
His strategy? “I try to get the railroads. If you get all four of ‘em, you’re just sucking money away from the other people. There’s always a chance to land on them.” An added bonus: The B&O Railroad is one of the three most-landed-on board positions. The other two are Illinois Avenue and Go. “And then I get at least part of as many color groups as possible. Other than that, you just kind of work with what you got.”
Meanwhile, world champ Woo prefers to own the orange property group — New York Avenue, Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place — immediately before the “Free Parking” area.
Both Woo and Gissel say that maintaining a good relationship with the other players is key to their strategy. “It’s important to not be a jerk,” says Gissel. “And when you’re negotiating, try to let them see how it benefits them. For example, if you’re in the final round and only one person has a monopoly, that person is going to win and it’s a matter of you and the other people getting desperate and working together against that other person. It’s sort of like ‘Survivor.’”
In Toronto, competitors will be using a Canadian-themed board. Generally, Gissel prefers playing with the thimble and Woo the top hat, but the pair will have to choose new tokens for this weekend’s competition — Canadian icons such as a moose, a sled and a hockey player.
Woo, though, isn’t taking any chances. He’ll be bringing along the lucky marble he found just before winning his national champion title.
Gissel doesn’t have any lucky items. He’s just ready to go for broke. “I understand the game pretty well,” he says. “When we sit down, I figure I have as good a chance as anyone to win.”
The winner takes home a top-hat-shaped trophy and $15,140, the amount of fake cash in every Monopoly game. When asked if he thinks he has picked up any practical applications for the real world by playing Monopoly, Gissel says, “Uh … I don’t think so.”
It’s a wonder Tommy Lasorda didn’t spontaneously combust while he was in Sydney guiding the U.S. baseball team to its first gold medal in three attempts.
“I have tasted it all! Manager of the year! Sixty-three playoff games! Two world championships! The Hall of Fame! And there’s nothing bigger than this! Nothing!” Lasorda crowed, even before Team Tommy had won the big one. “This is bigger than the World Series! This is bigger than the Dodgers! This is bigger than Major League Baseball!”
Bigger than the league you’ve given most of your 73 years to? Bigger than the team you’ve spent nearly a half-century with as a player, scout, coach, manager and now VP of Whatever You Want To Do? Don’t even try to stop the Tommy train: Moments after trouncing the Cubans 4-0 in the gold-medal game, he proclaimed, “When the Dodgers win a championship, the Dodgers fans were happy. Today, the United States of America is happy!”
What he didn’t know, of course, was that most Americans hadn’t bothered to tune in to the 27th Olympiad, so they probably had no idea that he was even involved in another one of his huge upset victories.
Upset victory? Shouldn’t American baseball players be powering through the Olympics like the Dream Team basketball players, the gold medal almost an afterthought to the consistent obliteration of opposing teams? After all, as Lasorda said, “This is our game. We can’t let those people beat us.”
“Those people” were the Cubans, Koreans and Japanese, who all sent their most talented players to the Games while America stuck with a bunch of washed-up has-beens and rejected minor leaguers who practiced together for only three days before heading Down Under. “I want 24 players who play baseball the way my wife shops: all day long,” Lasorda said — and that’s what he got, a bunch of basically unknown gamers, as hardscrabble win-at-all-costs types of players are known. To this group, the gold medal wasn’t an afterthought.
Only one loss came for the Americans, from the Cubans, the class act of international baseball in recent years and the winners of the first two baseball gold medals in 1992 and 1996. Lasorda has special memories of Cuba. During his minor league days, he found himself in the kingdom of the mojito cocktail during the changing of two governments, in 1952 when Fulgencio Batista took over and again in 1959 when Fidel Castro overthrew Batista. “Yeah, I met Castro,” he says, “But now I’m sorry I did. I have a lot of friends living in Miami. I just hope and pray before I die, I see a free Cuba.”
And yet here were the Cubans, pummeling America’s team 6-1. The teams nearly ended up in a full-out bench-clearing brawl after an American player was “accidentally” beaned. All this extracurricular excitement just helped Lasorda — who is clearly not applying for work as a diplomat anytime soon — fuel the team’s fervor when they reached the gold-medal game against our new baseball arch rivals. He simply said then that he wanted to beat the Cubans as a favor “to all the exiles living in Florida.” So that’s what they did.
A lot of the victory can be credited to Lasorda’s pure motivational ability, a skill he’s honed with the Dodgers and in the 100-plus inspiring speeches he gives annually. He’s often quoted as saying, “I bleed Dodger blue and when I die I’m going to the Big Dodger in the Sky.” This verbal dexterity has helped bring him ’81 and ’88 World Series victories, not to mention four pennants, seven Western Division titles and a slew of manager of the year awards from all different organizations. The man compiled a 1,599-1,439 record during his 20 seasons managing the Dodgers, and as he once said, “About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.” So he just kept winning.
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In June 1948, after a two-year stint in the army, Thomas Charles Lasorda, then a promising 21-year-old lefthander in the Philadelphia Phillies farm system, pitched the game of his life: He struck out 25 Amsterdam Rugmakers in a 15-inning game. He even drove in the winning run for his Schenectady (N.Y.) Blue Jays.
Lasorda caught the eye of the Brooklyn Dodgers when he followed up his effort with another 15-strikeout affair and then a 13-strikeout game. The team picked him up from the Phils for a little cash, and Lasorda headed to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla., in the winter of 1949, joining more than 700 other players: “I walked into my room, and there were five other guys there, three double bunks. The next morning, the line for breakfast stretched out to the street. I thought, Oh my God, how am I going to survive here? I went to Fresco Thompson, the general manager, and told him I wanted out of there.”
Lasorda was sent to the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club, where he spent nine of the next 11 years except for a few unimpressive call-ups to the majors and his two-year stint with the Kansas City Athletics’ organization. In Lasorda’s three short appearances in the majors as a player (two with Brooklyn, one with K.C.), he went 0-4 in slightly more than 58 innings. But he did set a then-major league record; unfortunately, it was for most wild pitches in an inning: three. In 1955, he was sent down for the final time as a Dodger to make room for eventual fellow Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax.
While his major league career was a bust, Lasorda’s minor league adventure was a different story. The southpaw compiled a 98-49 record, going 17-8 in 1953 and 18-6 in 1958, when he led the International League in victories, complete games and shutouts. And the Royals took five league championships while he was there. Probably his minor league high point (other than the 25-inning marathon) occurred with Montreal when Lasorda borrowed $500 from Dodgers head honcho Branch Rickey to get married. Buzzie Bavasi, the general manager, gave Lasorda the cash from Rickey and never took a nickel out of his paycheck. On Lasorda’s anniversary every year, Bavasi still sends flowers to Tommy’s wife, Jo, with the same note, “I’m sorry.” So far he’s sent 50 bouquets.
Lasorda kicked around the minors till 1960 and then became a Dodger scout for four years before he discovered his true talent: managing. He won five pennants during his eight seasons managing in the minor leagues, spending time with the Pocatello (Idaho) Chiefs; the Ogden (Utah) Dodgers; the Spokane (Wash.) Indians, where he won the 1970 Pacific Coast League championship as well as the minor league manager of the year award; and the Albuquerque (N.M.) Dukes, who won the Pacific Coast League championship in ’72.
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As the second oldest of five brothers growing up in an Italian-American neighborhood in Norristown, Pa., a western suburb of Philadelphia, Lasorda’s father once took him to the doctor because he feared the boy had a tapeworm. How else to explain Tommy’s mighty appetite? No dice. This boy could simply put the food away. His mother would pack him monstrous lunches for school: 10 sandwiches (the fried egg and pepper were a favorite), a banana and Philly-favorite Tastykakes for dessert. He would often put several sandwiches away before he even got to school. As Lasorda has said, “When we win, I’m so happy I eat a lot. When we lose, I’m so depressed I eat a lot. When we’re rained out, I’m so disappointed I eat a lot.” It’s been long rumored (but never confirmed) that Lasorda once had a bumper sticker on his car that read “Honk if you have groceries.”
He doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke (or sleep that much, actually). But Lasorda is constantly going on and off diets and exercising. (He even represented Slim-Fast from 1989 to 1993.) He often swims 50 or more laps at a time. His 1996 heart attack helped him put some of his Weekly World News-worthy eating choices behind him (100 oysters during an ’86 pregame meal!), but he’s still a dietary dabbler. “Tommy will eat anything,” says New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, “as long as you pay for it.”
Another childhood passion of Lasorda’s that’s still present: his fighting spirit. One of his former neighbors has said that Lasorda’s two favorite things to do were fight and play baseball. If he heard there was a new tough guy in town, he would go find him. “And he never lost,” his brother Morris has said. While Lasorda isn’t known for his fisticuffs these days, he can still give a mean verbal jab. “Like Tommy says,” says Bill Russell, Lasorda’s longtime pal and eventual Dodgers managing successor, “he doesn’t get ulcers, he gives them. By blowing off steam, he gets rid of all those frustrations.” While some of Lasorda’s steam-blowing scenes are legendary, much of it amounts to, well, in the words of broadcaster and former major leaguer Joe Garagiola: “You can plant 2,000 rows of corn with the fertilizer Lasorda spreads around.” But the fertilizer tends to keep his players loose. A Dodger clubhouse with Lasorda at the helm could have kids, girlfriends, even dogs roaming around, and in the middle of it all, Lasorda would lean down and motion to one of the children: “Come to Uncle Tommy.”
This kind of paternalism is part of the reason Lasorda managed nine major league rookies of the year: Rick Sutcliffe, ’79; Steve Howe, ’80; Fernando Valenzuela, ’81; Steve Sax, ’82; Eric Karros, ’92; Mike Piazza, ’93; Raul Mondesi, ’94; Hideo Nomo ’95; and Todd Hollandsworth, ’96. Not too shabby. In fact, Piazza probably owes his career to Lasorda’s fondness for kids. Piazza’s pop, Vince, is one of Lasorda’s best friends from Norristown. Mike started taking tips from Tommy when the kid was just 11. No wonder the Mets catcher is so damn good.
Lasorda had that fatherhood gene kicking all the way back when he was playing for the Schenectady Blue Jays under manager Lee Riley. Riley’s 3-year-old son, Pat, found a consistent dugout playmate in Lasorda (and eventually found himself the co-owner and head coach of the NBA’s Miami Heat). “I used to hold Pat in my lap,” Lasorda has said. “Every time I see him now, I think of his father. He looked just like Pat does now. He combed his hair straight back, too. He didn’t dress like Pat, of course, because he couldn’t afford to.”
Lasorda also had kids of his own: a daughter, Laura, and a son, Tom Jr., who died in 1991 of “probable acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” according to the death certificate. Lasorda, who doesn’t bring God up too often unless it’s followed by a few choice epithets, told a Tampa (Fla.) television reporter in 1993, “If I could’ve seen God the day I got married and God said, ‘Tommy, I’ll give you a son, but I’m going to take him back after 33 years,’ I would’ve said immediately, ‘Give him to me, Lord.’”
When Lasorda retired from managing the Dodgers in 1996, it was partly to play with his granddaughter, Emily Tess, now 4, and to spend more time with his wife, Jo, in their small home in a residential neighborhood of Fullerton, Calif. But most of it had to do with his heart attack that year. He just couldn’t keep up the energy level he once had. “I was getting tired really fast, and there was no way I was going to go back if I couldn’t manage the way I wanted to. I didn’t know if I could go through the effort it would have taken because I have to manage with a great deal of enthusiasm and a lot of excitement. I couldn’t do it any other way.”
But when he was doing it, he was a rolling ball of energy, 90 percent of the time (OK, forget the 1992 season), pulling completely unconventional managerial magic tricks out of his well-worn Dodgers cap and producing yet another winner. In the ’88 World Series, he was part of one of baseball’s mythmaking moments, one that ranked up there with Babe Ruth’s 1932 “called shot” and Ted Williams’ home run in his last at-bat, in 1960.
To say Kirk Gibson hit a game-winning home run in the first game of that Series is like saying, well, that Lasorda likes linguine. Gibson had spent the game on the trainer’s table in the clubhouse, watching his extreme-underdog teammates work back from a 4-0 deficit against the Oakland A’s. Lasorda called on him in the bottom of the ninth with two out and a man on base with the Dodgers down 4-3. Gibson could barely walk, let alone swing at a pitch. He worked All-Star closer Dennis Eckersley to a full count. Then the magic moment every little kid dreams of came true: Gibson smacked the ball over the fence, paving the way for the Dodgers to win the Series four games to one. In sports bars across America, you can still find “Where were you for Gibson’s homer?” conversations from time to time.
And, frankly, for Dodgers fans, that moment is only minutely sweeter than Rick Monday’s National League Championship-clinching home run against the Montreal Expos in 1981, which led the Dodgers to Lasorda’s first World Series win. To true Lasorda lovers — and to Lasorda himself right now — both those dingers suddenly take a back seat to Olympian (and Minnesota Twins reject) Doug Mienkiewicz’s bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning smash against Korea (his second such slam of the Games) in the semifinals. Where were you for that one? (Sleeping, I am certain.)
Lasorda seemed to manufacture such drama on a regular basis. Even if the Dodgers were losing, you could at least revel in his shouting from the dugout, sometimes seemingly apropos of nothing, “I’ve seen more life in a mortician’s office!” or “Wear the uniform with pride!” Or, if you were lucky, you’d get old No. 2 (a number now retired by the Dodgers) charging onto the field to contest a call and getting thrown out. Lasorda never just walked away. He’d go right back in for more, maybe even throwing the resin bag on the mound or leaving his cap on the field after it somehow got tipped off in his rage. And he loved every second of it: “Guys ask me, don’t I get burned out? How can you get burned out doing something you love? I ask you, have you ever got tired of kissing a pretty girl?”
For 20 years, the portly, white-haired Lasorda sat in his office, walls covered with celebrity photos, and filled out the lineup card for the Dodgers. Meanwhile, for all the other teams in the bigs, more than 210 men passed through the major league managing turnstile. Since Lasorda stepped down in 1996, the Dodgers have gone through three field leaders and are now looking for their fourth. He may have seemed unstable while he was out there throwing tantrums and cursing to high heaven, but he was always there the next day, ready to talk.
His secret? “A patient owner. Understanding general managers. Good players. Not necessarily in that order,” he’s said. That little formula puts Lasorda fourth on the longest-managed list. He’s only topped by his predecessor Walter Alston (23 seasons), Connie Mack (the Philadelphia A’s, a whopping 50 seasons) and John McGraw (31 seasons with the New York Giants). But McGraw and Mack were also the team owners — a little difficult to fire. Also since Lasorda traded in his spikes, the O’Malley family, who had owned the Dodgers for his entire career with the team, sold the whole shebang to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. in 1998, taking away a certain old-school charm that fewer and fewer clubs can claim anymore.
So what’s next for Lasorda? He’s got himself a pretty sweet deal right now: helping scout and train, assisting players and coaches, and going out and talking up baseball and the Dodgers to whomever will listen. Although, from the sound of it, you can hear the manager in him itching to breathe free. As the U.S. team prepared for its gold-medal game, Lasorda got so charged by his team that he seemed to have the old managerial thinking cap back on. “If you don’t love this team, then you don’t like Christmas,” he shouted. “If you gave me this club right here with me managing, in two years we’d win the World Series!”
