The Fight of Their Lives Read online

  THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES

  ALSO BY JOHN ROSENGREN

  Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes

  Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid:

  The Year that Changed Baseball Forever

  Alone in the Trenches: My Life as a Gay Man in the NFL

  by Esera Tuaolo with John Rosengren

  Blades of Glory: The True Story of a Young Team Bred to Win

  THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES

  How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption

  JOHN ROSENGREN

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2014 by John Rosengren

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Topps baseball cards used courtesy of The Topps Company, Inc. For more information about the Topps Company, please see our website at www.topps.com.

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Justin Marciano

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0719-6

  To my teammates

  Alison, Brendan, and Maria

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue:  A Moment of Madness

  Chapter One:  El Rey de Ponche

  Chapter Two:  My Own Little Bailiwick

  Chapter Three:  The Pride of the Dominican

  Chapter Four:  Filling Campy’s Shoes

  Chapter Five:  Summer of Fury

  Chapter Six:  Bloody Sunday

  Chapter Seven:  This Ain’t Over

  Chapter Eight:  That’s Not How the Story Goes

  Chapter Nine:  Johnny, I Need Your Help

  Chapter Ten:  The Man Behind the Mask

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Photographs

  It was a moment of madness in a summer of fury, a time when there seemed no relief from violence on the streets, in the news or at the ballpark.

  —Associated Press

  PROLOGUE

  A Moment of Madness

  More than a million people were watching on television, but none of them saw it happen. Those who were there couldn’t believe what they’d just witnessed before the benches emptied into a brawl. Had the batter just clubbed the catcher in the head with his bat?

  KTTV had four cameras positioned around Candlestick Park for its Channel 11 broadcast of the Sunday afternoon game back to the Los Angeles area. After the pitch came in, viewers saw the standard shot of the pitcher—in this case, Sandy Koufax—from the camera trained on the mound.

  That’s when it happened. A different camera quickly picked up the scuffle, which had shifted to the grass in front of the plate: Television viewers see number 27 swinging his bat wildly, the catcher pumping his fists, the batting helmet bouncing to the side, the catcher’s mask torn off. Other players rush in, Koufax off the mound, the on-deck hitter with a bat, the coach from third. The plate umpire moves in. The catcher stumbles to his left.

  He has blood on his head.

  The fans can’t see this from the stands. They are too far away. They are still in shock. But the players rushing in see the blood smeared down the left side of the catcher’s face and think he has lost his eye.

  The ump pulls down the mad batter. Others swarm in. Some swinging. The man on his back kicks his spikes.

  The battle at Candlestick meshes and crushes for 14 full minutes. All the while and long afterward leaving those who saw it and those who didn’t to wonder, what happened to start this madness?

  CHAPTER ONE

  El Rey de Ponche

  Contrary to your first impression of a man who clubbed another over the head with a baseball bat, Juan Marichal was a man of deep faith who read his Bible daily and carried a picture of Blessed Martin the peacemaker in his pocket. His cheerful disposition and easy smile earned him the nickname “Laughing Boy.” He doted on his daughters. He was not the violent sort. Yet violence—and its aftermath—shadowed his life.

  Juan Antonio Marichal Sanchez was born on a farm in the Dominican Republic on October 20, 1937, two weeks after the Parsley Massacre, when the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his soldiers to slay the Haitians on the border 20 miles south of Juan’s birthplace, ostensibly for stealing fruit and cattle. The massacre more closely resembled an ethnic cleansing. For five days in early October, Trujillo’s butchers hacked the foreigners with their machetes and shot them dead. They dumped the 15,000 or so bodies of men, women, and children in the Massacre River, which separates the two nations of the Caribbean island. Such was the world Juan was born into.

  Rum killed Juan’s father when the boy was three years old. Francisco Marichal left his young son without any memory of him. Natividad Marichal took her husband’s death hard. She wore black for 11 years and never remarried. Rooted in her deep Catholic faith, the widow raised her four children on the 60-acre family farm in Laguna Verde where they kept horses and goats. She taught the children—Maria Altagracia, Gonzalo, Rafael, and Juan—to work. Juan did his chores faithfully in the morning and evening, when he and Rafael, four years older, herded the goats into their pens and fed them. They lived in a simple three-bedroom house with palm-bark walls and a roof thatched with banana leaves that sometimes leaked when it rained. The house had no electricity or running water. They used a letrina, or outhouse, in the back.

  Juan wanted nothing more than to play baseball. He and the other boys climbed guacima trees to pluck branches that they let dry in the sun before whittling them into bats. They fashioned gloves by folding burlap over a piece of cardboard and sewing it in place with fishing line. For pelotas they collected golf balls from a course run by the United Fruit Company, rolled one of their mother’s or sister’s nylon stockings around the ball, and paid the village shoemaker a couple of pesos to cover it in leather. Some days after doing his morning chores Juan set off on the 8-kilometer walk to school but wound up in a field playing ball instead, much to his mother’s dismay. A shortstop who loved to hit, Juan tormented Natividad with his talk that he was going to grow up to be a baseball player. “You’ll hear me on the radio one day,” he told her frequently.

  Those were the visions of nearly every boy in the Dominican, where beisbol has long been the national obsession, regarded more as religion than sport. “In the Dominican Republic, baseball has a place all out of proportion to the normal one of sport in society,” sociology professor Alan Klein writes in Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream. “There is nothing comparable to it in the United States, nothing as central, as dearly held as baseball is for Dominicans.” In a country where the people have endured the occupations of the Spanish, French, and Americans and where many live in poverty, the game of baseball bonds communities with its shared suffering and inherent promise. “Through it the village experiences moments of happiness, when its team realizes its desire and wins or passing momen
ts of dejection if defeat becomes a rout . . . but above all, the village experiences the hope that always prevails in baseball of coming from behind or winning the next game,” Dr. Tirso Velez explains in Nota Acerca del Beisbol.

  Juan listened to ball games at home on his battery-powered transistor radio. He dreamed of being one of the players on the national team, the pride of the Dominican Republic. One day, his older sister’s husband took the 10-year-old Juan to see Bombo Ramos pitch for Los Caballeros of Monte Cristi. Ramos taunted batters, telling them a fastball was coming before blowing it by them. He had a distinctive windup, turning his back on batters, then wheeling with a sidearm release. Ramos made such a strong impression on Juan with his shutout that day that the boy decided to become a pitcher himself and began emulating Ramos’s sidearm delivery. “That guy became my idol because of the way he pitched,” Juan recounted years later.

  Not long after Juan watched that game, on January 11, 1948, Ramos and the Dominican national team’s plane crashed in bad weather near the Rio Verde. No one survived. A quickly assembled substitute team won the amateur world tournament in their memory, “fueling an emotional rebirth of the sport that has never subsided,” Jim Kaplan observes in The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century.

  Juan had a life-altering brush with death himself the summer he was 10 years old. He fainted while goofing around with some other kids after eating a meal. He remained in a coma for days. The hospital staff puzzled over his condition. They could not revive him. After nine days a doctor told his family that if Juan did not regain consciousness soon—by midnight, the doctor somehow determined—the young boy would die. His uncles bathed him in very hot water and the family prayed. They believed God delivered Juan from death when he started speaking 15 minutes before midnight. His faith has remained firm ever since.

  Juan’s brother Gonzalo, seven years older, taught him to throw a curveball and a sinker. When Juan was 15 he dropped out of school and left home to live with Gonzalo in the capital, Ciudad Trujillo.* Gonzalo found work for Juan driving a rig in his fleet of dump trucks and a spot for him on the Esso Company baseball team. Juan returned to Laguna Verde in 1955 and played for the Monte Cristi Las Flores team sponsored by the Bermudez Rum Company. He helped the team win a tournament and was selected to represent the city on an all-star squad at the national amateur championship in the capital, where he pitched the team to victory.

  * So named by the country’s dictator. Before and after Trujillo’s rule, the capital has been known as Santo Domingo.

  Juan’s ability to throw strikes and win ball games created a demand for his talents. A division of the United Fruit Company hired him for $12 a week supposedly to inspect banana shipments, mow grass, and water trees, but primarily to pitch. The 18-year-old Marichal, who had grown to 5-foot-11 and filled out to 180 pounds, led the Manzanilla-based United Fruit Company team to the national championship against the Dominican Aviacion (Air Force) team.

  The Aviacion nine was the premier amateur team in the Dominican Republic and run by Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s son and commander of the air force. El Jefe had appointed his son a colonel at age four and a brigadier general at nine. Ramfis shared his father’s sexual appetites and violent tendencies. While his father eliminated political opponents, the boy Ramfis blew away farm animals with a large-caliber pistol. Rafael preferred horse racing to baseball but well understood the latter’s importance to the country. Ramfis’s passions ran toward baseball and especially the Aviacion team he oversaw. The younger Trujillo was not pleased when Marichal stole the national championship for his United Fruit team with a 2–1 performance.

  The following day at 8 a.m., an air force lieutenant arrived at the house where Marichal and his teammates were staying. The officer delivered a telegram—an order signed by Ramfis Trujillo for Marichal to report for duty with the air force immediately. Juan had no desire to join the military; he just wanted to play baseball. Shaken, he packed his clothes and went home to show the telegram to his mother. Doña Natividad said he was too young to become a soldier yet knew no one could refuse “an order from God.” She paced the floor with worry for her baby. Later that afternoon, the same lieutenant arrived with another telegram repeating Trujillo’s demand. “Son, you cannot say no to these people,” Natividad told Juan. The next morning, he volunteered for service.

  Marichal was commissioned to play baseball. His first assignment sent him to Mexico for a Caribbean tournament along with future major leaguers Manny Mota and Matty Alou. The airplane flight to the event was the new air force recruit’s first. He won a game and saved another to put Aviacion in the championship against the home team. When the Dominican pitchers warmed up in the bullpen, Mexican fans flashed revolvers. Fans sitting on top of the dugout brandished knives. The umpire called Juan’s pitches thrown over the middle of the plate balls. “We should have won that championship, but the umpires took it away from us,” Marichal said. Never mind the loss; the Dominican team was relieved to escape Mexico without injury.

  Ramfis Trujillo accepted that defeat but would not tolerate another. After the Aviacion team lost both games of a Sunday doubleheader to Juan’s old United Fruit team in Manzanilla, the general jailed the entire ball club. He appointed a commission to investigate, certain that his players must have been drinking beforehand. Juan, who had pitched well in a 1–0 loss despite having a fever, blamed the loss on contaminated drinking water. Ramfis finally released the players after five days and a monetary fine equivalent to two dollars apiece. He fined the manager $50 and kept him in the clink for 10 days. “From then on, we were sure not to lose a doubleheader,” Marichal said.

  The air force team practiced daily and played games on Sundays. Marichal benefited from the tutelage of Francisco Pichardo, the team’s trainer and one of the country’s top baseball instructors. Viruta, as everyone called him, worked the players hard, having them sprint from foul line to foul line in the outfield and running them through calisthenics to increase their endurance. A former pitcher, Viruta preached control over velocity, the importance of being able to move pitches with precision. “I listened to everything he said and tried to pitch like he told me to—with attention above all else to control,” Juan said. It paid off: During his 14 months in the military, Marichal lost only three games.

  He was learning about baseball but still had lots to learn about life. Knowing rum had cut short his father’s life and adhering to his mother’s Catholicism, Juan didn’t imbibe. The older players called him cobarde, coward, and niño de faldas, mama’s boy. So he finally relented one night and drank with them. The next day, Viruta ran them hard in the hot sun “until most of those guys were puking their guts out,” Marichal said. Viruta made his message clear before that Sunday’s game. “Mira, Juan, stay with those guys and their habits, and you’ll be one of them,” the veteran trainer told the promising pitcher. “They have no future in baseball. You do. If you want to pitch in the major leagues, you can.”

  Scouts started to notice the hard-working kid with the sidearm delivery and excellent control. The Dodgers and Pirates tracked his progress. In 1957, after Juan struck out 16 in a game in Aruba, a Washington Senators scout talked to him but never followed up. Jose Seda, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, scouted the Dominican Republic for the New York Yankees, who had a partnership with Los Tigres del Licey. Seda requested Ramfis Trujillo’s permission to sign Marichal and second baseman Pedro Gonzalez. Trujillo had an allegiance to Los Leones del Escogido, Licey’s crosstown rival.* He approved the signing of Gonzalez but refused to give Escogido’s rival his top pitcher.

  * The Tigers and Lions are two of the oldest teams in the Dominican Republic, with a rivalry analogous to the Giants and Dodgers.

  Horacio Martinez, who had played shortstop in the Negro Leagues and served as the New York Giants’ bird dog, succeeded where the others failed. He had already signed Manny
Mota, Felipe Alou, and Matty Alou to the Giants. The scouting report on Marichal read: “He is devout. He reads the Bible constantly. He has a beautiful delivery. No one taught him anything.” Because the Giants had an arrangement with the Escogido team, Martinez was able to win General Trujillo’s permission for Marichal to sign with them and then the Giants. On September 16, 1957, a Lincoln Continental chauffeured Juan and his brother Gonzalo, who had worked out details of the deal with Martinez, to the home of Francisco Martinez Alba, the Escogido team president and Ramfis Trujillo’s brother-in-law, to sign his contract, which called for a $500 bonus.* That night, Juan was in the Escogido dugout to watch an exhibition against a team of barnstorming major leaguers led by Willie Mays, the first time Juan saw his future teammate play. He was delighted that his dream was about to be fulfilled. The next day, Juan told his mother the news and bought her some new clothes with his signing bonus.

  * By prearranged agreement, the Escogido team sold his contract to the San Francisco club for one dollar the next day, making Marichal a Giant.

  When Marichal arrived in Sanford, Florida, for the Giants’ spring training in March 1958, Alejandro Pompez, the team’s director of Caribbean Basin scouting, surprised him. Pompez, a dark-skinned Cuban-American who used to barnstorm with the Cuban Stars, told the 20-year-old Marichal and fellow Dominicans Manny Mota, Matty Alou, Danilo Rivas, Julio Cesar Imbert, and Rene Marte that they might encounter difficulties with people in the United States who would not like them because of their dark skin. “Be careful,” Pompez warned. And above all else, “Don’t fall in love with a white girl.”