The Boys of Summer (of Sam)
The game of baseball was never really made for television. For every great moment in the history of baseball that was televised—Henry Aaron’s 715th homerun, Carton Fisk’s walk-off homerun in game 6 of he 1975 World Series, and Bill Buckner flubbing a ground-ball in game 6 of the 1986 World Series, to name a few—there are literally millions of 3-2 counts, foul pop-ups and pitchers throwing over to first base that have driven folks away from the game. While watching baseball on television is perhaps only a thing for purists, in contrast, baseball nostalgia makes for great television. Such is the case with the HBO documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghost of Flatbush and ESPN’s mini-series The Bronx is Burning.
The story of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ relocation from Brooklyn, NY to Los Angeles, CA is pretty well known to longtime residents of Brooklyn and most baseball fans. In this story the late Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, is the clear villain. Some 50 years later, folks still have an incredible rancor for the man who presumably moved their beloved Dodgers out of Brooklyn and indeed some of the team’s more well known fans such as Larry King and actor Lou Gossett are almost comical in their rants about O’Malley. Throughout Ghost of Brooklyn, one gets a sense of just how integral the team was to the lives Brooklyn’s working class, which was made up of 1st and 2nd generation white immigrants, black migrants from the south and the first significant wave of Puerto Ricans into New York City. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field, the stadium they played in was the common ground, particularly after Jackie Robinson integrated the Major Leagues in 1947. The common foe in those days was the New York Yankee, who were upscale and as white-as-can-be; The fact that the Dodgers lost to the Yankees so often in the World Series—6 times, before beating them in 1955—only enhanced the rivalry.
While the Ghost of Flatbush makes for great baseball nostalgia it also offers a compelling social history of New York City during a time of great development. Indeed this history presents the real villain of the story: Robert Moses, the New York City Commissioner, who from 1924 until 1968 was arguably the most powerful man in New York City as he could green light any development project he wanted. Under Moses’s watch more than 600 miles of roadway, nearly 700 playgrounds, 13 bridges and numerous beaches, particularly Jones Beach, was developed. It was Moses who denied O’Malley’s request for a new domed stadium to be built in downtown Brooklyn, preferring to build a stadium in Queens at the location where Shea stadium now stands. As the country became increasingly car-centric and the core Brooklyn Dodgers fans were moving to Long Island (courtesy of roadways that Moses built), the 700 parking spaces at Ebbets Field just made it difficult for the Dodgers to maintain their fan base. When the city of Los Angeles offered free acreage for O’Malley to build the stadium of his dreams and Moses refused budge on the request to use downtown Brooklyn, the Dodgers said goodbye—taking the New York baseball Giants with them. Moses erected federally funded housing projects at the site of Ebbets field and I imagine few of the current residents have any sense of the great history to location represents.
Robert Moses was also responsible for the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, making him the only man who can claim to have had a hand in both the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the creation of hip-hop. As Jeff Chang thoroughly details in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, the Cross Bronx Expressway really creates the structural and spatial conditions that allow for the formation of hip-hop in the Bronx. By the mid-1970s, as Chang also details, the Bronx was burning, hence the titled of the HBO mini-series. The title comes from an observation that the late Howard Cosell made during the broadcast of a Yankees game on television in 1977; a burning building could be seen in the background, in what was, at the time, not an unusual occurrence in the Bronx. 1977 was also the summer that New York was under siege by David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam killer. But The Bronx is Burning, shows that the real drama was in the clubhouse of the New York Yankees as the trio of manager Billy Martin (played by John Turturro), owner George Steinbrenner (Oliver Platt) and Reggie Jackson (Daniel Sunjata) fought and bickered their way to a championship. It was Jackson who famously announced, upon signing as a free agent with the Yankees, that he was the “straw that stirred the drink” and stir it he did. Jackson was never a race man, in the sense that we think of Jackie Robinson or even Hank Aaron, but he was in many ways the template for the current generation of black male athletes, who are arguably more comfortable in front of the cameras than they are on the field.
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