The old man was in Detroit in 1968 the day the Tigers won the Series. It was a business trip, so that probably meant a room at the Pontchartrain or maybe the old Book-Cadillac, and certainly dinner at Joe Muir's.
It was a favourite stop of his, carrying a sentimental attachment since the city had been his home for a little while. Loved the town, loved the music, loved the local lore and loved the grand expanse of Woodward Avenue. That was just a year after the riots, when maybe it wasn't yet quite so obvious how much everything had changed.
Even before his reports of the wild celebration (the seventh game was played in St. Louis, Mo., but the real party was in Detroit), before he arrived home with a souvenir of that victory, a hat with a feather in it and a Tigers badge pinned through the felt that kicked around the house for ages afterward, the memory of those games, and that time, stuck.
The 1968 World Series between Detroit and the St. Louis Cardinals, the matchup that will be reprised beginning
Saturday night, was, one suspects, a bit of a watershed moment for a whole lot of people.
It had been an unsettling year for the planet, in Paris and in Memphis, Tenn., and in Los Angeles, and somehow before the fifth game, those anxious feelings found voice in Jose Feliciano, who, after being led out onto the Tiger Stadium infield by his guide dog, turned the Star-Spangled Banner inside out, then was booed by many of those in attendance. (A footnote: It was the great broadcaster Ernie Harwell's idea to hire Feliciano, and he was worried afterward that the club might fire him because of the reaction. He also picked the other two anthem singers in Detroit, Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye. The latter sang the song straight in 1968, but 15 years later made it his own at the National Basketball Association all-star game. Thousands of lesser imitators have unfortunately followed in his, and Feliciano's, footsteps.)
The games themselves blur together in memory, but for flashes of the great Bob Gibson, brilliant and unhittable until finally faltering in the seventh game, Lou Brock stealing bases, Curt Flood's one terrible misplay, the flop of baseball's last 30-game winner, Denny McLain, and the unlikely heroics — including his only career home run — of a dumpy-looking pitcher named Mickey Lolich, who won his first two starts and then won the deciding game on two days of rest.
"I guess you could say I'm the redemption of the fat man," he said.
There was never a player more elegant than Al Kaline, a player who seemed stronger than Willie Horton. The Tigers, champions for the first time since 1945, were easy to embrace. If you lived in one part of Canada, they were also the closest thing you had to a home team, and in that moment, they were glorious.
And then in spring training in 1969, the Montreal Expos arrived, and for many of those same Canadians who loved baseball, focus and affection shifted to Jarry Park.
The Tigers briefly returned to the heights with Sparky Anderson and the Bless You Boys gang in 1984. Then they went to hell as an organization. They gave Harwell the bum's rush (thank you, Bo Schembechler) before being forced to bring him back, they abandoned the best baseball park on Earth, though it could have and should have been preserved (Tiger Stadium still sits like a blue ghost at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues) and moved to fresh digs in the downtown core that, until this glorious, unexpected summer, nobody much liked.
In the days to come, there will be plenty of talk about how Detroit's new football and baseball stadiums have brought about urban revival, how the return to the postwar glory years is close at hand. Well, maybe the parks have done more for the core than the monorail did, but mostly those are the kind of economic lies politicians always tell when they get in bed with professional sports.
The spirit thing, though, is harder to slap down, what it does for a city to get together and shout from the rooftops about what a great team you have and in what a great place you live, an organic act of community. It meant something then, in the uncertain autumn of 1968. For a city still fighting the good fightback, it must mean something now.
