Book Excerpt: The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption

Chapter Five “Summer of Fury”

There is more to the story than you may know. With the Dodgers in San Francisco for the weekend, this seemed like a good time to highlight this fine volume.

Below is a paragraph by author John Rosengren to introduce the book, followed by the excerpt, with the footnotes omitted:

On August 22, 1965, Juan Marichal struck John Roseboro over the head with his bat, opening a gash two inches long, inciting a 14-minute bench-clearing brawl, and forever linking the two men. But this was not an isolated incident. It happened within the context of the most spirited rivalry in sports and during a period of intense turmoil that affected both men personally. In this excerpt from The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption (Lyon’s Press, 2015, Paperback $18.95), I examine those conditions.

Chapter Five “Summer of Fury”:

The specter of violence overshadowed that first matchup of 1965. In the world and on the field. Malcom X had been murdered in February. Two weeks later police in Selma turned a march for voting rights into Bloody Sunday. Also in March, the United States had sent its first troops to fight in Vietnam after launching Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombing campaign of North Vietnam. And civil war had broken out in the Dominican.

Violence always lurked when the Giants and Dodgers played, dating back to the first encounter in 1889 between the New York Giants and the then Brooklyn Bridegrooms in a best of eleven championship series that initiated the nation’s oldest rivalry in professional sports, one dirtied by beanballs, brawls and bad blood. A winner-take-all intensity charged the ballpark every time the two teams squared off. The Giant players felt it the moment they arrived in enemy territory two weeks into the 1965 season. “When you stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, you could hear the electricity,” San Francisco’s power-hitting first baseman Willie McCovey said. “Even the skycaps at the airports were all wrapped up in the rivalry. It carried over to the hotel and finally the ballpark. The tension was always there.”

The atmosphere and tradition pushed the players to compete at a higher level. “Those of us who have been around a while always play this series just a little harder, and it’s contagious among the young players who aren’t as familiar with the background,” explained the Dodgers’ hard-throwing pitcher Don Drysdale, who would figure into both ends of the anger in that first series of 1965.

On April 29, 1965, a playoff atmosphere saturated the Los Angeles ballpark with both teams top contenders for the National League pennant. The Dodgers had reinforced their already strong pitching corps–Johnny Roseboro said in spring training he thought this was the best Dodger team he had ever played on–and the Giants relied on the strong bats of McCovey, Mays and Jim Ray Hart. Drysdale took the mound at Chavez Ravine that Thursday night against Juan Marichal. Juan had won his last three starts after losing a 1-0 decision on Opening Day. He had already thrown two shutouts.

But that night required additional focus beyond the Dodger Blue. Five days earlier, the rumblings of revolution that Juan had heard two months previous in the Dominican were realized. Rebels loyal to Juan Bosch–who had won the election in 1963 but been ousted shortly afterward in a coup–pushed aside the military-imposed junta and set up their own government. The next day, Juan could barely breathe. As often happened with him, the stress manifested itself in a physical ailment. This time, it attacked him in the sinuses. But he started the game against the Mets. Dominican military forces loyal to the ousted junta staged a countercoup. The people of his country tuned into the broadcast of the Giants-Mets game found solace in Marichal’s success that night–until static bewitched their radios. The Western Union operator at Candlestick Park knew before Juan did that something had gone wrong in his country when he lost contact with the two Santo Domingo radio stations seized by the rebels. Juan continued to strike out Met batters and blanked New York, but the news from his country shook him after the game.

He and Alma worried about their families. Juan could not call his mother and siblings to check on them. The farm had no telephone. Letters took a week each way. He went to the San Francisco consulate to read the Dominican papers, but they were three days behind. Best he could make out, bands of soldiers and insurgents stalked the capital’s streets, looting and executing hundreds–so many that the Dominican Red Cross workers buried them where they fell–but he could not be sure that his and Alma’s families were safe. Even though his wife’s family did have a telephone, the fighting interrupted phone service and it sometimes took days to make contact. On April 28, the day before Juan was scheduled to start against the Dodgers, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched several thousand U.S. Marines to the Dominican in Operation Power Pack.

The President explained to congressional leaders in his office and later to the American people on television that he wanted to protect the 2,000 American citizens in the Dominican and prevent the spread of communism in the Caribbean. No one wanted another Cuba, did they? The specious threat provided a good cover for the protection of $150 million of American investments. The deployment of U.S. troops made the nightly news, which Juan watched with increasing alarm. By the 29, he had still not heard from his family. Not knowing unnerved him. Much as he tried to concentrate on the batter in front of him, he could not suppress his worries.

The Giants took a 1-0 lead in the second inning when Drysdale walked McCovey then gave up two singles. Marichal grounded out to end the threat. The next inning, Drysdale faced Willie Mays. Roseboro knew the Giants’ best hitter had an Achilles heel: “He hated to be hit by pitches,” Roseboro wrote. “He especially hated to bat against Drysdale because Don would drill him.” Johnny liked Willie–the two were friends off the field–but the only loyalty any player had in those Dodger-Giant duels was to his own team, and his only aim was to beat the other. Even when Willie came to the plate sweet-talking him, Roseboro didn’t hesitate to call for an inside pitch.

With Drysdale, he didn’t have to. The Big D thrived on throwing hard inside. He had been tutored in intimidation tactics by one of the best: Sal Maglie had ended his career with the Dodgers and found an eager pupil in the young Drysdale. Over the course of his fourteen-year career, the six-foot five-inch right-hander set a record for hitting the most batters (154) that still stands. He knocked down countless more. Fines and suspensions from the league president didn’t deter him. “He liked to teach hitters respect by knocking them down,” Roseboro wrote. “He was the meanest, most intense competitor I ever saw.”

Sure enough, Drysdale delivered a fastball under Willie’s chin. “What’s wrong with that motherfucker?” Willie whined in his high pitch to Roseboro. “Why does he want to hurt me?”

Johnny laughed. “Willie, he don’t want to hurt you. He just wants your respect.”

Willie grounded out harmlessly to third base.

The majority of the 30,219 fans in Dodger Stadium loved seeing their pitcher smear the Giant star in the dirt. The animosity animated them as much as it did the players. In one game, Dodger shortstop Maury Wills tried to turn a doubleplay but beaned Giant runner Jim Ray Hart when Hart didn’t slide. Hart lay on the ground, the Giants stormed the field, and a Los Angeles woman in the left-field seats clobbered a female Giant fan over the head with her shoe.

That dimension dated back to the beginning, too–to the late 19th century when the fisticuffs between the two sides were as likely to involve fans as players. Ebbets Field, where Giant outfielders had to dodge rocks and other missiles thrown at them, became an equally dangerous place for Giant fans. In New York, the Dodgers and Giants were the only two major league teams from the same town competing in the same league. One couldn’t be neutral; the rivalry demanded you choose a side. If you loved the Bums, you hated the Jints-and vice versa. The circumstances tampered with the character of otherwise good people. Legend has it Monsignor Woods, a Catholic priest from Brooklyn respected for his charitable works, declared in 1923, “I hate the Giants!” Whether or not he actually said that, the legend speaks to the grip the rivalry had on those it possessed.

In 1938, a postal worker named Bob Joyce sought comfort at a Brooklyn saloon after his beloved Dodgers had lost to the Giants. He didn’t find it from the bartender, William Diamond, who needled Joyce. Frank Krug, a patron and Giants fan, spiced up the taunting with his own comments.

“Shut up, you bastards,” Joyce said. “Lay off the Dodgers.”

Not surprisingly, that only incited more teasing. The laughter chased Joyce out of the saloon. He soon returned with a revolver and shot the bartender Diamond in the stomach. When Krug tried to intervene, Joyce plugged him in the head. After police arrested him, Joyce pleaded a temporary insanity brought on by rage from hearing the ridicule directed at his Dodgers.

The rivalry also took shape from the character of the two boroughs where it originated. They pitted glitz against grit: Broadway, Park Avenue and the Upper East Side versus Flatbush, Bed-Stuy and Prospect Park. Dodger fans resented the urbane elitism of the Giant following; Giant fans disdained the blue-collar vulgarities of the Brooklyn faithful. The move to the West Coast changed the complexion but not the intensity of the rivalry, which accentuated the animosity intrinsic between the capitals of Northern and Southern California. “Los Angeles and San Francisco had long sustained a mutual disregard, hatred blended with a tinge of jealousy for what one town possessed that the other did not,” David Plaut writes in Chasing October. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen characterized the reciprocal hatred as one of congenital convenience, “a reflex built in at birth. It is firmly a part of the mystique of each city, and why not? It’s fun to have an object of automatic disdain so close at hand.”

The pundits from the two places reflected their constituents’ views with the mud they slung up and down the coast. The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray criticized the loose morality and weather to the north: “San Francisco isn’t a city–it’s a no-host cocktail party. It has a nice, even climate: it’s always winter.” His compatriot Melvin Durslag at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner poked fun at the town’s new team in its early years: “San Franciscans (who expect a pennant) are advised to stay away from coarse foods . . . avoid stimulants that irritate the stomach walls . . . if seized by a choking feeling, lay quietly and well-covered until the physician arrives.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Art Rosenbaum sniped back with “Smodgers,” referring to the LA smog, and the “city whose women would attend the opera in leopard shirts and toreador pants if indeed they attended the opera at all.” Caen threw in the remark, “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”

There were those who thought the move across the country or expansion in 1962, which reduced the times the teams faced each other every summer to eighteen, might dull the intensity of the rivalry, but it remained robust in California. Alvin Dark, who had played for the Giants in New York and managed them in San Francisco, said, “I don’t care where you play these games, the Dodger-Giant rivalry is always intense.” The move simply built upon what was already there. “You can talk all you want about Brooklyn and New York, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Dallas and Fort Worth,” said Joe Cronin, who was born in the City by the Bay. “But there are no two cities in America where the people want to beat each other’s brains out more than in San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

In the fourth inning, the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis pleased the locals with a triple that drove in a run to tie the score. Two innings later, Maury Wills singled, moved to second on a bunt, stole third and scored on another Tommy Davis hit, this a single to center field, and the Dodgers led 2-1. Perhaps Marichal’s concentration had slipped. Herman Franks lifted his pitcher for a pinch hitter in the seventh (ending Juan’s streak of nine complete games going back to 1964) and replaced him with Bobby Bolin. Juan remained on the bench, intent upon the outcome of the game he started against the hated Dodgers. When Drysdale knocked down Mays with another inside pitch in the top of the eighth, Marichal seethed.

Juan had been around long enough to have internalized the enmity. Each player felt a personal stake in what Time characterized as “baseball’s bitterest rivalry.” They didn’t forget the hard slides, the inside pitches, the angry words of those games. “The grudges got carried not only from game to game but from year to year,” Wills wrote in his autobiography On the Run. “It was like a war all the time.”

In the days before free agency mobilized players and fertilized fraternization between opponents who had formerly been teammates, the rivalry stuck because teams remained virtually the same from year to year, which thickened the players’ loyalties. As with any longstanding conflict where the next generation inherits the elders’ feud, the veterans inculcated the younger players with their hatred–to the point where they saw red in orange and black or Dodger Blue. “We hated the Giants,” Carl Furillo said. “We just hated the uniform.”

So when Don Drysdale led off the eighth and Bobby Bonin retaliated with a slow curve that thumped him on the posterior, everyone expected it. But the pitch was not enough to assuage Marichal’s sense of injustice. “For the five years I’ve been in the league, I’ve seen too much of this sort of thing,” Juan said afterward in the clubhouse. “He (Drysdale) has hit Mays and Cepeda and has knocked just about all of us back from the plate. I do not say he tries deliberately to hit us, but he has good control and shouldn’t be that wild. This stuff has got to stop. I’ll do something about it if he continues. Somebody’s going to find out we can protect our hitters. Next time he comes close and I’m pitching, he’ll get hit. And real good, too.”

Sportswriter Arnold Hano interpreted Marichal’s statement as more than an idle threat: “The young Dominican declared war (on Drysdale).” National League president Warren Giles also took Juan seriously. Giles warned that any pitcher deliberately “protecting” his hitters would be assessed a one thousand dollar fine. [To a pitcher like Marichal making $60,000 in 1965, that would be the equivalent of a $304,167 fine to Giant pitcher Tim Lincecum, who made $18,250,000 million in 2012.

Drysdale, meanwhile, did nothing to mollify Marichal or the other Giants. Rather, the Big D incited his antagonists with the retort, “I’m only about sixty feet away from them in any direction. They know where I am. If they get me, they better get me good or I’ll take four guys with me, and I don’t mean those .220 hitters, either.”

Marichal lost the first matchup 2-1. The Dodgers came away from the series with three wins in four games. The two teams met again in San Francisco four days later on May 7. Johnny Roseboro had a big game, going three-for-three, with his biggest hit coming in the eighth, a leadoff single that eventually became the winning run in the Dodgers’ 4-3 victory. That same day, the Dominican Republic’s civil war became Time magazine’s cover story. The American press widely supported the President sending troops to intervene in the region for the first time in forty years. “If ever a firm hand was needed to keep order, last week was the time and the Dominican Republic was the place,” Time stated, referring to Santo Domingo as “a city gone berserk in the bloodiest civil war in recent Latin American history.”

The Marines did not readily succeed in restoring order. The rebels included a loose collaboration of Bosch loyalists, aspiring communists, opportunistic insurgents and defiant army soldiers battling the military junta’s air force and U.S. Marines in a chaotic urban guerrilla war that ranged from one neighborhood to another. Ad hoc execution squads lined up victims against walls, snipers fired at U.S. helicopters and a mob paraded the head of a police officer on a pole like a trophy. Bodies littered the streets. The smell of rotting flesh hung pungent in the air. In the hospitals, doctors operated on the wounded by flashlight and without anesthesia. “Santo Domingo was a city without power, without water, without food, without any semblance of sanity,” Time reported.

Juan couldn’t read these reports–many of them sullied by misinformation–without worrying about his family. Nor could his wife Alma. They had allegiances on both sides. Alma’s brother was a lieutenant in the military, and her sister had married an officer. Juan had friends among those revolting and those resisting. They craved a stable government for their country and wanted their loved ones to be safe. “With troops in the streets and people being hurt and killed, it gives you a strange feeling to talk political abstractions when you are thousands of miles away, playing baseball for a living,” Juan wrote. He felt powerless being so far from his loved ones during the war. The anxiety overwhelmed him. His sinus troubles persisted. He was scheduled to start the third game of the second series with the Dodgers on Sunday afternoon, going up against Sandy Koufax, but throwing his warm-ups before the game he fought for breath. Herman Franks substituted Gaylord Perry for Marichal.

Franks called upon Marichal to pitch in the seventh. He picked up the 6-3 win. Still, the Dodgers remained in first place, five and a half games ahead of the Giants, mired in eighth place with an 11-13 record.

The teams did not play each other again until June 15, when Marichal faced Drysdale in their first meeting since they had traded taunts in the papers. The Giants had found their winning stride, going 20-13 since Marichal beat the Dodgers on May 9, and climbed up to third place, though they remained five and a half games behind their first-place rivals. Marichal had won nine games, led the league with four shutouts and allowed only 1.85 earned runs per game. Drysdale had won eleven games, most of any NL pitcher.

As the civil war continued in the Dominican, Marichal’s sinuses raged unabated. Time referred to his condition somewhat dismissively with the comment that he had been bothered by “an allergy his doctor blamed on the revolution in his native Dominican Republic.”

But the strain on Marichal was serious. On television, he saw the scenes of his countrymen rioting, stealing from stores, killing one another. The images disturbed him. “There’s no way you can concentrate while that is happening in your country,” he said. The Braves rocked him for nine runs in less than four innings, one of the worst outings of his career, in late May. He and the Alou brothers received word at the end of the month that their families were safe–for the moment. Juan’s sinuses continued to trouble him. Sneezing fits shook him so violently that he had to pull over his car when he was driving until they passed.

Over 50,000 fans filled Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, June 15, for the Marichal-Drysdale rematch. Neither pitcher hit any batters. Both delivered top performances. Drysdale pitched a complete game, gave up only two runs and cracked two hits of his own. But Marichal outdid him, scattering five hits over nine innings, allowing only one run and getting a hit himself. San Francisco won 2-1. The Dodgers took the next two, and the Giants left Los Angeles six and a half games back.

Two weeks later, they met again in San Francisco, once again Drysdale against Marichal. The 35,000-plus San Francisco fans booed Drysdale and cheered merrily when the Giants scored a quick run in the first inning. But then the two pitchers took turns retiring batters quickly with strikeouts and ground ball outs. When Marichal gave up a single in the third, he induced the next batter to ground into a double play. When Willie McCovey singled in the fourth, Roseboro threw him out trying to steal.

But the Dodger battery came undone in the fifth. Drysdale committed two errors on the first two batters. Roseboro made another to let a run score. Then Johnny let a ball get by him, and the runner advanced. A walk and two singles later, the Giants led 5-0. Drysdale buckled down for the final four innings, retiring the twelve batters he faced in succession, striking out four of them. Roseboro atoned by singling during a Dodger rally in the seventh and making it to third but did not manage to score. Marichal got Drysdale to ground out weakly with the bases loaded to end the threat. Juan was simply too good for the Dodgers that day, shutting them out on six hits. The victory marked Marichal’s tenth consecutive win over the Dodgers at Candlestick. Los Angeles remained in first place, but the Giants had whittled the gap to two and a half games.

Juan continued to fret and to win. In his first outing after the All-Star Game, he shut down the Astros 7-0 for his fifteenth win and eighth shutout. Joe Morgan, Houston’s future Hall of Fame second baseman, said of Marichal afterward, “There’s only one more in his class, and I’m not so sure about him (Koufax).”

On August 4, Juan beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-3 in ten innings. In his seventeenth win of the season and one hundredth of his career, he struck out 14, his high mark for the summer. He had pitched 18 complete games and allowed only 1.65 earned runs per game. His performance had been remarkable; given the circumstances, it was absolutely amazing.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Johnny Roseboro wasn’t repeating his success of the previous year. He had put together an eight-game hitting streak in April but his back bothered him and took him out of the daily lineup. He had some timely hits, like his eighth-inning single that produced the winning run against the Giants in May, but he was putting up a lot of goose eggs in the box scores with hitless games, the worst being an oh-for-seven night in Houston in mid-May. By July 5, his 33 RBI were second-best on the team, but he was hitting only .239.

Roseboro’s hitting picked up some during August. The first nearly three weeks of the month, going into a critical series with the Giants, he went nine for thirty-four, a .265 clip. Not great, but an improvement on his July. His biggest contribution remained his defensive play. That season he posted a stellar .994 fielding percentage, allowed only eight passed balls–his best mark since 1958–and threw out nearly half of the runners who tried to steal on him.

On August 6, the Dodgers played the Reds in Cincinnati, Roseboro went one for three with two walks, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in a ceremony that heralded the new law as the completion of the Emancipation Proclamation, eliminating voter qualification tests and adding more than one million African Americans to the voting rolls. Referring to slavery’s legacy in America, Johnson said, “Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.” But the stroke of the President’s pen did not erase the prejudice. That week, white thugs beat five civil rights workers in Americus, Georgia; night riders burned two black churches in Slidell, Louisiana; and white neighbors of Chicago mayor Richard Daley pelted demonstrators outside his house with eggs and tomatoes. Despite the landmark legislation, racial tension remained taut throughout the nation.

The Dodgers returned to Los Angeles for an eight-game home stand beginning Tuesday, August 10. Around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Lee Minikus, a white California highway patrolman, clocked a gray Buick doing 55 in a 35 miles per hour zone on Avalon Boulevard. Minikus gave chase on his motorcycle and pulled over the Buick near 116 Street in the midst of the Watts neighborhood. The altercation that followed incited a riot that lasted six days.

Looters emptied stores. Mobs burned buildings. Hospitals scurried to treat the wounded. The city morgue tallied the dead. The governor called in the National Guard. That week, Watts resembled the streets of Santo Domingo.

The players at Dodger Stadium could see the smoke ten miles away where angry African Americans chanted, “Burn, baby, burn.” Team management announced fans who feared coming to the ballpark could exchange tickets for a September game. The stadium scoreboard listed highway exits closed by the rioting. The day the city imposed martial law, August 14, Sandy Koufax won his 21 game, but the violence had almost rendered baseball irrelevant to Johnny Roseboro, a black man living in south central Los Angeles. When he picked up the newspaper, he skipped the sports section for the first time in his life and read the latest reports of the violence, which pained him. “It’s bad for my race,” he said. On the field, he had to remind himself that his job mattered. “I’d wake up in the morning and say to myself, ‘Why are they playing games?”

His drive home from the ballpark took him past the fires and fighting and shook him. The rage and violence that had collected and exploded here was unlike anything he could have imagined in Ashland thirty years earlier. The riots laid bare to him the bitter truths of racism that he had missed in his youth. He was dismayed that the anger and frustration had erupted into such destruction to property and life.

One night that week word spread of a protest march that would pass in front of their house on its way to a nearby park. Worried what might happen along the way, Johnny gathered the guns he had collected over the years and sat guard by his front door that night, prepared to protect his family and his property. Turned out he didn’t have to fire a shot–the march never happened–but the conflict tormented him.

By the time the Dodgers headed north to San Francisco for a four-game series with the Giants, the riots had caused $40 million in property damage, claimed thirty-four lives and left another 1,032 people injured. The wounds cut even deeper.

Juan Marichal continued to worry about his family. He wrote to them, but then had to wait for a response. Two weeks passed between his posting a letter to them and receiving a response. “It was a long wait,” he said. His teammates the Alou brothers suffered the same worry. “We just wanted the season to be over so we could go home and see our loved ones,” Juan said.

Amazingly, despite his fragile emotional state, Juan continued to dominate on the mound. On the eve of the Giants’ four-game series with the first-place Dodgers, he blanked the Mets on three singles 5-0. That marked his ninth shutout of the season. He improved to 19-9 with a league-leading 1.73 ERA. Koufax had won two more games than Marichal, but Juan had five more games left to play, which meant at least one more start than his rival, and his significantly stingier ERA and nine shutouts seemed to give Juan an edge in the Cy Young competition. If Marichal could keep up this pace and his Giants could edge the Dodgers, he stood an excellent chance to win his first Cy Young Award.

But the situation at home had skinned his nerves raw. In August, he barked at the official scorer at Candlestick over a decision that didn’t go his way. The Saturday before his ninth shutout, he lost his ninth game to the Phillies by giving up three runs in the eighth inning. He turned his temper against home plate umpire Lee Weyer in an argument over the strike zone. Weyer did not eject Marichal but did write him up. Juan’s teammates had obviously noted his condition. “I really don’t think Juan should have been playing at all,” Willie Mays told the New York Times. “He was pretty strung out, full of fear and anger, and holding it inside.”

So when the Dodgers traveled to San Francisco for another series between the bitter rivals, it wasn’t simply two teams contending for the pennant. Larger, darker forces worked their influence on the stage of America’s game.

About the author:

John Rosengren, a recent Pulitzer nominee, is the author of 10 books, including Classic Baseball: Timeless Tales, Immortal Moments, a collection of iconic, unbelievable, and intimate stories from baseball history that celebrate the enduring impact of the national pastime; Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes, the definitive biography of the Jewish Hall of Fame slugger; Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year that Changed Baseball Forever, about the 1973 season; and Blades of Glory: The True Story of a Young Team Bred to Win, which chronicles a season spent with a Minnesota high school hockey powerhouse. In May, Mango Press will release his debut novel A Clean Heart, about a young man who gave up a college hockey scholarship to get sober–an act his mother could never forgive.

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