Dodgers' left fielder Sandy Amoros catches a ball from Yogi Berra's bat in the sixth inning of the 7th World Series game at Yankee Stadium, Bronx, N.Y, Oct. 4, 1955. Dodgers won, 2-0, to win the World Series four games to three.The Globe and Mail photo illustration
It's all black and white, the footage at once familiar and achingly antique. The World Series bunting. The ballplayers in their baggy uniforms. The well-dressed fans in the stands, partisans of the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers both, chock-a-block in the Bronx for a momentous Game 7.
Nostalgia is a tricky business, easily overdone, and especially suspect when it's not really your own. I wasn't there. I didn't live it. But the film and books devoted to a baseball game played six decades ago, on Oct. 4, 1955 – the documentary evidence of Brooklyn's beloved Bums beating the detested Yanks at last for their first Series triumph ever – are so affecting they feel personal, like a borrowed memory.
It's at least arguable – and let the counterclaims begin – that no fans of any athletic team anywhere have been more entitled to their bliss than those of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
This was not, after all, just a baseball game. This was a cause, a civil war, a culture clash. This was the lordly, corporate, pinstriped Yankees – the damn Yankees – facing the scrappy, blue-collar Dodgers in the Series for the sixth time since 1941, the previous five all ending in Yankee victories. "Wait 'Til Next Year" had become the Brooklyn refrain, defiant and hopeful and deeply enamoured of these talented also-rans.
"Their skills," wrote Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer, about a club he covered in 1952 and 1953, "lifted everyman's spirit and their defeat joined them with everyman's existence, a national team, with a country in thrall, irresistible and unable to beat the Yankees."
Part of the allure was the place and time. New York was the undisputed capital of baseball then, one of its three teams, the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, winning the Series all but one year from 1949 to 1958. "The Fifties were the last decade when America suffered from the defect of vision known as New York-centrism," wrote columnist George F. Will, noting that the nation's gaze was about to shift south and west.
Then there was the matter of race, the agonizing theme at the core of so many American stories. The Dodgers were the club that broke baseball's toxic colour barrier by signing Jackie Robinson, assigning him to the Montreal Royals for a season, then bringing him to the big leagues in 1947. In the process, they became not just a baseball team but a bold social experiment, one playing out in the chippy, diverse immigrant mecca of Brooklyn.
By 1955, though, the incomparable Robinson was nearing the end of his career and the Dodgers, for all their other stalwarts – Hodges, Reese, Snider, Campanella, Furillo, Newcombe, Erskine – were in tough against the Yanks again. The Bronx Bombers took the first two games at Yankee Stadium. The Dodgers rallied to win three straight at Ebbets Field, then succumbed uptown to set up Game 7.
The clincher was, by all accounts, excruciating. It featured the superb pitching of Dodgers lefty Johnny Podres, two RBIs by Gil Hodges and a dashing, stick-out-the-glove grab that Sandy Amoros, a young Cuban, made on a Yogi Berra slice into the left-field corner. That catch, with two Yanks aboard and no one out, was the game-saver, the start of a stunning double play that dominates highlight reels of the 2-0 Dodgers victory. But the film doesn't quite capture the crackling tension of Brooklyn faithful conditioned to expect the worst.
"In truth," wrote Thomas Oliphant in his lovely memoir Praying for Gil Hodges, "the game was nearly three hours of unrelenting torture and suspense, a roller-coaster ride mostly evocative of all the past years of disappointment until literally the final pitch."
And then – delirium, on the field and back in Brooklyn, car horns honking, church bells ringing, confetti flying. My friend Fred Bruning was there. He was 15 and had heard most of the game on the PA system at his high school, Brooklyn Tech, but after class he'd reached the subway stairs at Flatbush and DeKalb just as the final out was recorded.
"From the Dodgers Café poured the working-class crowd," he recalls, "men and women, and dance in the street they did, just like the books say." It's a recollection for the ages – made more poignant, of course, by the Dodgers' defection to Los Angeles just two years later.
I have some Brooklyn in the blood too. My grandparents lived there; my parents were married there and took an apartment on Prospect Park, and I grew up on Dodgers tales from the 1940s – of Leo the Lip, Ladies Day at Ebbets Field, Pete Reiser crashing into walls. My folks left, though, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia (where I had my own baseball cross to bear, but that's another story). Later, as a young adult, I lived in Brooklyn for a few years, and even in the early 1980s you could still hear the occasional soul bemoaning the Dodgers' departure. I'm sure you hear it still.
But no one can take '55 away, and ever-noisy Brooklyn, wielding the media megaphone of New York, has made certain no one forgets.
Watch the film 1955: Seven Days of Fall and just try to be unmoved – not only by the striking images but by the simpler times they depict. The Dodgers, we're told, actually lived in Brooklyn. They worked in the off-season in factories and on farms, sold clothing and cars. You'd see them and their wives around the neighbourhood. That is not a world we know, and it's worth celebrating its charms and the singular, ecstatic moment when, in the freighted words of sportscaster Vin Scully, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world."
It only happened once but it lasts forever.
Bob Levin is news features editor of The Globe and Mail. He is working on a novel in which the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers figure prominently.