Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (14 page)

But Carl had his soft side too. (“To get a friend,” he would always tell his sons, “you’ve got to be a friend first.”) It was a sensitivity that few saw, and sometimes he had to struggle with the disappointments he had with some of his teammates (such as the unfair implication in Robinson’s movie that he had signed Dixie Walker’s petition). When he was confronted with those disappointments, his first reaction was not to complain but to walk away and say to himself, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with none of them.” That perspective eluded Furillo’s teammates at the time, and later—when they learned of his hurt feelings—they would express surprise and sorrow. “We never suspected,” said Erskine, “that he felt like an outsider.”

That was not to say that Furillo was without friends. Quite the contrary. In his neighborhood, he was a beloved celebrity. “When he was in New York,” said his son Carl Jr., “he was like a god.” Erskine agreed, remembering that Furillo had “an entourage like Muhammad Ali whenever he went somewhere.” One of his favorite places to go with friends was Tex’s, a local Italian restaurant. Furillo took almost everyone to Tex’s, and in due course they learned that one of their host’s favorite dishes was the scungilli (cooked snails). So Dick Young of the
New York Daily News
started referring to Furillo as “Skoonj,” and before long, everyone—teammates as well as fans—was referring to the Dodger right fielder by that nickname.

In the meantime, Furillo continued to command respect among his teammates and Brooklyn’s fans with solid performances. In 1954, playing in all but four of the team’s 154 games, he batted .294, hit nineteen home runs, and drove in ninety-six runs in the season that saw Durocher’s Giants take the pennant. He improved that record in 1955—a .314 average with twenty-one home runs and ninety-five runs batted in while playing in only 140 games. Furillo’s performance that year was all the more remarkable because Dodger manager Walter Alston often batted him eighth in the lineup—a change that would have disturbed other players, but not Furillo. “What’s the difference where you bat?” he told a reporter at one point during the season. “Just so you hit.”

That 1955 season was particularly memorable because of the Dodgers’ victory over the Yankees in the World Series. It was, Furillo later said, “a thrill of thrills.” It was not just the World Series ring he received—the achievement was that much more special because of the fans’ reaction. “No matter where the hell you went,” Carl remembered, “everybody couldn’t do enough for you. Never in my life have I ever seen a town go so wild.”

The 1956 season brought gratification as well. The Dodgers were an aging team, and it was not easy to overcome the challenge of the largely younger team fielded by the Milwaukee Braves (which included future Hall of Fame inductees Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews). Although his average slipped to .289 (with twenty-one home runs), the Stony Creek Mills native remained critical to his team’s success. “If the Dodgers push through to win this pennant,” said one sportswriter in late September, “a lot of the credit will have to go to Furillo, because Carl was hitting and winning games for the Brooks when victories were vital.”

 

As the Dodgers’ thirty-four-year-old right fielder steps up to the plate in the third inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, Larsen knows that Furillo will be a “tough out” and that he should “never come inside to his power.” Larsen sends a fastball to the outside of the plate which appears to be a ball to the Yankee hurler, but, to his surprise, home plate umpire Babe Pinelli calls it a strike. Larsen’s next pitch is a fastball to the same spot, and Furillo lifts a fly ball to right field that Hank Bauer fields with ease.

Roy Campanella follows Furillo to the batter’s box. Although 1956 was a difficult, injury-prone season for the longtime Dodger catcher, he is batting .333 in the series and is still a dangerous hitter. Larsen knows all about Campanella’s capabilities, and so he keeps the ball on the outside of the plate away from Campanella’s power zone. Within minutes, the Dodger catcher becomes the victim of a called third strike.

Sal Maglie comes to the plate and receives a warm ovation from the crowd. A right-handed batter, Maglie is a relatively good hitter, and that becomes apparent immediately. The Dodger pitcher swings at Larsen’s first pitch and sends a line drive over second base that has all the markings of a ball that will drop into center field for a hit, but, as radio announcer Bob Neal tells his listening audience, “with Mantle’s great speed, he was able to outrace it and grab it.”

Larsen marches off the mound toward the dugout with the satisfaction of having retired the first nine batters to face him.

6

I
t was an event he would never forget, and, more than that, one he would relive in his mind over and over again for more than thirty years. The patches of ice on the winding road leading to his home on the North Shore of Long Island. The large Chevy sedan sliding out of control toward the telephone pole, and the realization that there is nothing he can do to avoid the collision. The thud of the impact and the sudden disorientation as the car flips over and, without a seat belt, he is thrown to the floor and wedged in between the front seat and the dashboard. And that sickening feeling when he tries to turn off the ignition but cannot move his arms—or, indeed, feel anything. He has no medical training, but he knows that he is paralyzed. He lies there, immobile and unable to do anything but cry out for help—but it is about two o’clock in the morning, and there is no one around to hear him. And so, fearing that the running car will explode in a ball of fire at any moment, he repeatedly recites the 23rd Psalm—a remnant of early childhood when he would attend services at a Baptist church every Sunday and his mother would tell him to say that prayer if “things went wrong.” He is finally discovered by a policeman two hours later, and, although they are able to extricate him from the car, they will not be able to disabuse him of his self-diagnosis. It is January 28, 1958, and Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ thirty-six-year-old catcher, is the victim of a spinal cord injury that will leave him paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Neither Sal Maglie nor his catcher can foresee the event that will later transform Campanella’s life. As he walks onto the field in the bottom of the third inning in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, however, Maglie can see that the shadows from the right side of the stadium have moved closer to the pitcher’s mound. But he is focused only on getting the Yankee batters to strike out or hit balls that can be fielded by his teammates. And, like the other Dodger pitchers, he knows that Campanella has the experience to call the pitches to help him achieve that goal. (“No one dared shake him off,” Carl Erskine later said of Campanella.) And more than that, Maglie is confident that Campanella can—despite a compact frame of five feet, nine inches and more than two hundred pounds of weight—move swiftly to field a bunt or catch a foul ball or throw out a runner who is trying to steal a base or even thinking about it (his most remarkable feat on that score being the time he picked off the Giants’ Willie Mays at first base while in a catcher’s squat). “Campy is a picture catcher,” one sportswriter later observed. “He makes it look so easy.”

For his part, Campanella never dreamed when he was growing up in Nicetown, a northern section of Philadelphia, that he would be catching in a World Series game. He played the game as a boy only because he loved it. And then he learned about racial discrimination in the big leagues and knew that his skills alone would not be enough to give him the opportunity to play there. Not that Campanella was entirely unhappy about the situation. Quite the contrary. Long before the Dodgers discovered him, he had fashioned a comfortable life in baseball.

In large part, Campanella’s perspective was a product of his upbringing. John Campanella, his father, was a first-generation Italian whose parents emigrated from Sicily to Homestead, Pennsylvania. Roy’s mother, Ida Mercer, was a black woman who grew up in Chesa peake City on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. After marriage, John and Ida were drawn to Nicetown, a neighborhood populated principally by Italian, Polish, and Irish families (and very few blacks). They had four children, with Roy being the youngest.

It was a close-knit family where hard work was valued highly. At the age of twelve, Roy had to get up at two o’clock in the morning to deliver milk for a local dairy. When he returned from that task around five a.m., he would load the truck from which his father sold vegetables, and, after completing that chore, eat breakfast and go to school. It was a grueling schedule that Roy would recall with pride as an adult, long after he had made a name for himself in baseball. “My dad’s work ethic, which was tremendous, and his sense of discipline in terms of his craft,” Roy’s older son later observed, “was something I’m sure he got from my grandfather.”

Ida’s influence on her youngest child was no less important. She was a religious woman who had no tolerance for ethical indiscretions. If Roy found an abandoned glove on a local ball field, she would make him return it—even though the family did not have enough money to provide Roy with his own glove. And when Roy discovered four dollars on a street one day, Ida became apoplectic when she saw it in his pants pocket, believing that he had stolen the money. “I took quite a pummeling before I could finally convince her I had actually found all that money,” Roy later remembered.

Like other neighborhood kids, Roy was enthralled with baseball. They would play pickup games on sandlots where equipment was at a premium. Even if equipment was available, it did not always fit properly. (There was the time eleven-year-old Roy was catching in a game with older kids, and he dispensed with the mask because it was too large and impeded his ability to see the ball clearly. As soon as he took the mask off, the batter tipped a foul ball that smacked him in the face and broke his nose. “He was catching again,” one of his sisters later explained to their father. “And without a mask. Can you imagine anyone so stupid?”) His interest in the game extended to professional baseball as well. For twenty-five cents he could sit on the top of a row house across the street from Shibe Park, home of the Philadelphia Athletics, and watch the game for a fraction of the cost of a bleacher seat (a venue that gave him the opportunity on June 3, 1932, to watch the Yankees’ Lou Gehrig become the first major-league player in the modern era to hit four home runs in a single game).

Roy was never aware of any racial discrimination in those early years. And then, as he was walking home from school one day when he was a teenager, another student referred to him as a “half-breed.” “I didn’t know what it meant,” Roy later confessed. But he knew enough to know that it was a slur of some kind. So he hit the offender and ran home to his mother for an explanation. Yes, she said, Roy’s father was a white man, but, she added, it was nothing that should cause him any shame. “He gives us what many folks, white or colored, can’t buy with all the money in the world,” she said. “He gives us love, Roy.”

It may have been clear in his mother’s mind, but Roy would encounter rough language and vicious taunts from schoolmates as the years progressed, and he was not one to simply turn the other cheek. “I learned fast,” he later said, “to be pretty good with my fists.” Still, he was able to continue sports in school, and one of the sports that continued to interest him was baseball. But he also excelled at track (running the hundred-yard dash and doing the broad jump), and he pursued that activity in junior high school rather than baseball. And then one spring afternoon, George Patchell, the junior high school baseball coach, saw the 150-pound eighth grader hit a softball over the fence in the field across the street from the school. Patchell summoned Roy to his office the next day. “You’re fourteen,” the coach told Roy, “and I’m a grown man. But I can’t hit a ball that far.” To Patchell, the next step was obvious. “So,” he told the precocious player, “I wish you would come down to the gym after school today and enroll for the baseball team.” Roy obliged and, when everyone was asked to step into a circle for their desired position, he saw that no one had chosen to be catcher. Roy decided to fill the void.

It proved to be a wise choice. With his build and natural instincts, Roy was able to develop skills as a catcher that far exceeded what might otherwise be expected from someone so young. By the time he was fifteen, he was playing American Legion ball with players much older than him. But he held his own, both on the field and at the plate.

In time, Roy’s reputation as a talented catcher reached the ears of Tom Dixon, one of the owners of the Bacharach Giants, a local black semipro team. As Roy was leaving the field after a Legion game in the summer of 1937, Dixon approached the young catcher and asked if he wanted to play for the Giants, who traveled to different cities on the weekends for games. “I’d sure like to play with your team,” the startled teenager replied, “but I’m afraid my mother wouldn’t let me.”

Roy knew what he was talking about. When Dixon and Jack McGowan, the team’s owner, visited the Campanella home, Ida made it clear that she had no interest in letting her youngest child travel to parts unknown with strangers just to play baseball. And in no event, she explained, could her son play on Sunday. That was a day reserved for church and prayer. McGowan pushed back, saying that he too was a churchgoing person and that he would ensure that her son attended services. And more than that, he said he would pay her son $35 for playing two games on the weekend. In those Depression days, that was a considerable sum—in some weeks, more than her husband made with his vegetable truck. Religion was certainly important, but there was no getting around the value of having enough money to pay the bills. And so Ida yielded to the pressure—but before he left on his first trip, she gave Roy a Bible, which he would take with him on his journey through baseball and which he would still have decades later when he was struggling with the challenges of his paralyzed condition. (“The Bible and Campy have always been good friends,” his wife, Ruthe, would later say.)