A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (2 page)

- Arny “The Stinkin’ Genius” Spanyer/Fox
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You know baseball like few people I've ever
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Congratulations . . . a tour de force.

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City

I can't stand Bonds, but you've done a good
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Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan
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Diego

A great book about a great player.

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A gem.

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Here's the man to talk to regarding the
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He's enlightened us on the subject of Bonds,
his father, and Godfather, Willie Mays.

- Brian Sussman/KPIX TV. San Francisco

I hate Bonds, but you're
okay.

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York sportstalk host

One of the better baseball books I've
read.

- KOA Radio, Denver

. . . the "last word" on Barry Bonds . .
.

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. . . a hot new biography on Barry Bonds . .
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. . . one of the great sportswriters on the
current American scene, Steve Travers . . .

Joe Shea/Radio talk host;
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www.American-Reporter.com

To a real pro.

- Jeff Prugh, former
Los Angeles Times
Atlanta
bureau chief

It was a good read.

- Lance
Williams/Co-author,
Game of
Shadows

You’ve done some good writin’, dude.

- KFOG Radio, San Francisco

A very interesting read
which is not your average . . . book . . . Steve has achieved
his
bona fides
when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like
this.

- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San
Francisco

Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a
loyal Trojan!

- Former USC football player John
Papadakis

Pete Carroll calls you “the next great USC
historian,” high praise indeed.

- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles

You’re a great writer and I always enjoy
your musings . . . particularly on SC football - huge fan!

- Oakland A’s general manager Billy
Beane

A's Essential: Everything
You Need To Be a Real Fan
offers a breezy
history (with emphasis on the Oakland years), player biographies,
Top 10 lists, trivia questions and more about the Athletics'
franchise that has resided in Philadelphia, Kansas City and, since
1968, Oakland.

- Bruce
Dancis/
Sacramento Bee

Steven Travers is one of the most
accomplished sports journalists in our nation today . . .

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times . . . I can't say enough!

- Lonnie White,
Los Angeles Times

Steve is
the
USC historian whose
meticulous attention to detail is a revelation. He is the best
chronicler of USC ever.

- Chuck Hayes, CRN “Sports Corner”

This is fabulous, just a terrific look at
our history. Travers is one of the best writers around.

- Rod Brooks, “Fitz & Brooks Show,”
KNBR/San Francisco

You have created a work of art here, an
absolutely great book. We love your work.

- Bob Fitzgerald, “Fitz & Brooks Show,”
KNBR/San Francisco

When it comes to sports history, this is the
man right here.

- Gary Radnich, KRON/San Francisco

Steve combines . . . social and historical
knowledge in his writing.

- University of Southern California

Author Steven Travers discusses his new book
. . .

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Orange County Register

. . . Join Steve Travers . . . at the
Autograph Stage . . .

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. . . Steve Travers,
author
of One Night, Two Teams: Alabama
vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation
. . .

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Steve Travers, a sports historian . . .

-
Los Alamitos News-Enterprise

Here this dynamic speaker tell how this
famous game changed history.

- Friends of the Los Alamitos-Rossmoor
Library

Travers presents this particular game in
1970 as a metaphor for the profound changes in social history
during the emancipation of the South.

-
Publishers Weekly

. . . Explored in rich, painstaking detail
by Steve Travers.

• Jeff Prugh,
  L.A. Times
  beat writer
  who covered the 1970 USC-Alabama game
  

This is a fabulous book.

- Michaela Pereira/KTLA 5, Los Angeles

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: The worship book

Go ahead, take a bite out of the Big
Apple

The cultural divide

The heroes

The New Rome

Empire

A midsummer's dream

There's no business like show business

Los Angeles

San Francisco

Death struggle

Beat L.A.!

Meltdown

The Missiles of October

The brink

Rivals then and now

Carthage is destroyed

The October of their years

Bibliography

Index

Bibliography

My thanks go to my wonderful literary
manager, Peter Miller of PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc. in
New York City, and to his assistant, Adrienne Rosado. Also to John
Horne and Pat Kelly of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Ron Martirano,
and Mary at George Brace Photos in Chicago. Thank you to: the New
York Yankees, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the San Francisco Giants,
the New York Mets, and the Los Angeles Angels. Thank you, Bruce
Macgowan, Lon Simmons, Blake Rhodes, Vin Scully, Donna Carter,
Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, John Shea, Glenn Schwarz, the late Bo
Belinsky, and the late Bill Rigney. Thanks to my wonderful
daughter, Elizabeth Travers, and my supportive parents. Above all
others, my greatest thanks go to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
the source of all that is decent and true.

Foreword

The worship book

It was a dark and snowy night, some time in
the early-to-mid-1960s. The place was my parent’s ski cabin in
Squaw Valley, California, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics. It was
a small alpine-style lodging with a perilous, icy pathway leading
from a narrow, pine tree-shrouded street to the door; to be
negotiated using small, mincing steps so as to avoid falling on
one’s face, or worse, fracturing a hip.

Located on the side of the mountain, we
overlooked the valley. Below us was a cabin owned by Walt Disney.
In the distance, the Olympic Village, which had since been turned
into a ski Mecca by the visionary Alex Cushing; an ice rink where
the United States had defeated the mighty Soviets in hockey a few
years before, a pre-cursor to the 1980 “miracle on ice”; the
daunting KT-22, for only the most advanced of ski experts; and east
of that the ski jump ramp. With good binoculars one could see the
competition from our balcony without paying a ticket.

But all of that was over with, and on this
night my folks were out to dinner. I was left in the cabin with my
babysitter, a neighbor girl whose family lived there year-round. We
had no television and boredom set in quickly. I looked around for
something to occupy my attention. A board game, some toys perhaps.
I opened a drawer and there it was, in paperback, black-and-white,
225 pages: the
1963 Official Baseball Almanac
. On the cover,
Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek completing a double play at the
Stadium despite the best efforts of Chicago’s “Jumbo Jim” Landis
barreling into second.

Edited by Bill Wise, published by Fawcett
Publications of Greenwich, Connecticut, it was the “most
authoritative . . . most complete baseball book on the market! A
great buy for any fan at 50 cents!”

In the re-make of
Planet of the Apes
,
the apes discover an astronaut’s manual along with a chimpanzee.
They determine that the manual is their “Bible,” the chimp their
“savior,” and his “return” foretold as Holy Scripture. The
1963
Official Baseball Almanac
had a strangely similar effect on me.
It was, for me then and in succeeding years, my “Bible,” a holy
book to be revered, memorized and worshipped.

Now, what this says about me, a four- or
five-year old boy, which was my age at the time of discovering this
document, is questionable. I was definitely not normal. Discovering
rock music, singing, guitar-playing, a hidden copy of
Playboy
, or the actual
playing
of baseball; those are
all typical events that might stir like passions. Reading books in
and of itself was certainly not an unusual thing for a little boy
to learn and love; Jules Verne,
Alice in Wonderland
, the
Brothers Grimm; something like that, yes. But the
1963 Official
Baseball Almanac
? Are you kidding?

Half that book was
statistics
that
looked thus:

Pena, Orlando, KC 13 31 2 5 5 0 0 0 0 4
.161

Okay, it had pictures, too. Not pictures, as
in illustrations, but photographs, and truth be told that was what
attracted me at first. I still have that dog-eared little
paperback, and leafing through it reveals its true, original
purpose: I turned it into a coloring book. I used crayons and a
pen, outlining the features of players apparently onto a piece of
paper pressed against the back in order to create images, but I
also colored in the uniforms. I favored black-and-orange,
particularly the San Francisco Giants’ color scheme. I somehow
sensed certain things, too, such as a photo of Los Angeles Angels
manager Bill Rigney with pitcher Bo Belinsky. I was too young to
know that Bo was a major playboy and denizen of the night, but I
drew a “five o’clock shadow” on his face, apparently out of
reference to the fact that he was haggard from his nocturnal
activities.

But over the course of years, I started
reading
that book, and I really mean
reading
it. I
poured over it, memorizing every single piece of data; every stat,
every player, the fortunes of every team, the All-Star Game (there
were two played in those days), the Cubs’ “revolving managers,” the
pennant chase and play-off between the Giants and Dodgers, and of
course the Fall Classic; a rain-delayed thriller won by the
slimmest of margins by the Yankees over San Francisco.

I became a “62er” of the first order. Over
the years, as my knowledge base increased, other things became
apparent to me. I learned about John Glenn, the astronaut who
became a hero in 1962. I learned that my favorite football team,
the Southern California Trojans, had won a National Championship
that year.
American Graffiti
came out and asked, “Where were
you in ’62?” The sense of nostalgia for that year became
palpable.

I learned that John Kennedy had been
President in 1962. He seemed to be something out of the past, and
that year was part of the past in ways that increasingly seemed to
be impossible to re-capture; in style, in politics, in music and
culture. Then there were the teams: the Yankees, Giants and
Dodgers. As I developed into a baseball fan, the championship teams
seemed to be the Twins, the Red Sox, the Tigers, the Orioles, the
Cardinals and the Reds. The Yankee dynasty was a myth to me; in my
formative years they were “New York’s other baseball team,” the Big
Apple’s passions stirred by a team that was comically bad in 1962,
the Mets. The Dodgers of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale seemed to be
an old B movie, like one of those CinemaScope features in which the
screen narrows in the artistic stylings of the late 1950s and early
1960s. The Giants were a shell of whatever I knew them to have been
in 1962; fans stayed away from Candlestick, which within a decade
was old, resembling a prison, their stars over the hill. Bay Area
sports excitement resided in the East Bay: the three-time champion
A’s, Al Davis’s marvelous Raiders, and Rick Barry’s shoot ‘em up
Warriors.

I developed an incredible baseball library:
The Glory of Their Times
by Lawrence Ritter,
Ball
Four
by Jim Bouton; Pat Jordan’s wry reminiscences of a failed
minor league career; anything and everything. I still have all
those books, wonderful works inscribed with love by my mom and dad:
“To our darling boy from Mommie, X-mas 1969,” or “To Champ, this
brings back memories, Love, Dad, 1970.”