Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (48 page)

In the meantime, Kay died in 1967, and Maglie embarked on a new relationship with Doris Ellman, the secretary to the Niagara Falls attorney who handled the closing on the sale of his liquor store. Doris was not a baseball fan and knew nothing of Sal’s stature until the time they flew to New York City for a weekend. “There’s probably going to be a lot of people stopping to talk to me,” he told his future wife. To her surprise, Sal’s prediction proved to be accurate. “We couldn’t even get down to the corner coming out of the hotel without someone approaching us,” she later told me.

Sal remained in Niagara Falls after he and Doris were married, and he tried to spend more time with his two sons, neither of whom showed much interest in baseball. One son eventually pursued a career in the air force, and the other son, Sal Jr., a troubled boy with no direction, met a tragic end by falling to his death from a third-story apartment balcony.

Sal pursued a variety of business ventures in Niagara Falls, including a position as the general manager of a local minor-league baseball team. He also spent a fair amount of time on the golf course, and he came home after one round in 1982 complaining to Doris about “the worst headache I ever had in my life.” It proved to be a brain aneurysm that had burst.

Sal did not fully recover from the ensuing surgery, and the situation deteriorated after a stroke in 1985. Routine tasks—even eating—became a challenge. “I would put the plate down in front of him,” Doris later explained, “and he would eat all the food on one side and think he was finished. So I would turn the plate around, and he would finish.” By 1987, he was in a Niagara Falls nursing home.

News of Sal Maglie’s condition was reported in a New York newspaper, which stated—incorrectly—that the former Dodger was in a nursing home in his hometown of Grand Isle (a suburb of Niagara Falls). Doris learned of the mistake when the Grand Isle nursing home called to say that they had some mail for Mr. Maglie. Doris brought home literally hundreds of letters and cards. There was no point in bringing them to Sal because he had already lost most of his cognitive powers. One day Doris began opening up the mail. All were filled with good wishes. And then a five-dollar bill dropped out of one envelope. As she opened the others, more money spilled out—a few dollars here and there—as people offered to do what they could for the pitcher who had given them so much joy in his earlier years.

Sal Maglie finally died in his seventy-fifth year on December 28, 1992.

 

Jackie Robinson retired after the 1956 season. The Dodgers tried to sell his contract to the Giants, but Jackie had already accepted a position as a vice president with Chock full o’nuts, a coffee shop chain in New York City. An ostensible justification for the retirement was to avoid the constant travel that baseball required and enable him to spend more time with Rachel and his three children. But Jackie was, at heart, a social activist, and there was a steady stream of invitations for him to speak at functions around the country and to work with the NAACP and other public-interest organizations in places far from his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

There was a high personal cost for Jackie’s constant travel and the never-ceasing demands of social organizations. Relations with his older son, Jackie Jr., were never good, in part because people were always comparing the son’s pedestrian athletic skills to those of his accomplished father. Jackie Jr. joined the army, returned from Vietnam with a demoralizing drug habit, and, just as he was pulling his life together, fell asleep at the wheel one evening in 1971 and died on a New York highway. “Carl,” Jackie wistfully told former teammate Carl Erskine at one point, “when I think of the hours I spent with other people’s children in a classroom and in youth clinics, I should have been spending more time with my own kids.”

Jackie’s remorse over his son’s death coincided with a deterioration in his health. He had been diagnosed with diabetes shortly after he retired from baseball and was not very diligent in following the doctors’ advice for controlling the disease. His weight ballooned and his legs began to throb because of poor blood circulation. In 1968, he had a mild heart attack, and by 1972 the doctors were contemplating the amputation of his legs. But perhaps the most troubling ailment was the growing loss of his eyesight. By 1972, he could barely see.

The end came that October. He and Rachel were watching a football game in their Connecticut home when Jackie detected a flash in his eye—a possible sign that a blood vessel had ruptured. An appointment was made to see a doctor the following morning, and Jackie got up early the next day and began to dress while Rachel cooked breakfast in the kitchen. She heard a noise and looked up to see her husband rushing toward her. Rachel ran to him. He put his arms around her and said, “I love you.” And then he dropped to the floor. An ambulance was called, but Jackie Robinson died before he reached the hospital.

 

Gil McDougald began the 1957 season by hitting line drives to all fields, and by the time the club reached Cleveland on May 7 for a series with the Indians, the Yankee shortstop was batting .368. In his first plate appearance against southpaw Herb Score—the Indians’ twenty-three-year-old phenomenon (who had led the American League in strikeouts the previous two years with a fastball that approached one hundred miles an hour)—Gil slammed a line drive that caught Score just below his right eye. “As soon as I hit him,” McDougald later said, “I saw blood fly.” Score was rushed to a hospital and his eye was saved, but not his career—he would win only seventeen more games over the next five years. Overcome with guilt, McDougald threatened to quit but ultimately knew that he could not because “I had no way of making the bread to support my family.”

The experience no doubt helped to give Gil the incentive to pursue the formation of a maintenance company near his New Jersey home that would become a multimillion-dollar venture with twenty-five hundred employees. After the 1959 season, the thirty-one-year-old McDougald informed the Yankees that he would be retiring after the 1960 season. “I woke up one morning,” he later said, “and it hit me. What am I trying to prove in this game of baseball?” McDougald became a full-time businessman who devoted his spare time to his family (augmented by the adoption of three children after his four children had grown up) and as coach for Fordham University’s baseball team.

The seeds of heartache were immersed in this otherwise fulfilling life: Gil McDougald was losing his hearing. The cause could be traced back to a game at Yankee Stadium on August 2, 1955 (when Joe Collins’ home run saved the life of an Asbury Park fan). McDougald had been standing behind Frank Crosetti as he was pitching batting practice. At one point, Gil walked beyond the protective screen to pick up a ball and, as he did so, Bob Cerv—one of the Yankees’ more powerful hitters—crushed a Crosetti pitch that hit McDougald in the left ear. Unbeknownst to Gil and the Yankee physician, the blow created holes in the tubes of McDougald’s inner ear that eventually stretched to the right ear as well.

By 1985, the hearing loss was complete. Gil did not like his predicament, but he learned to live with it. So he was not receptive to inquiries from Ira Berkow, a
New York Times
reporter, who called some years later to interview him about his physical impairment. Lucille conveyed Gil’s decision not to grant the interview request. He can’t hear, she explained. No problem, said Berkow. I’ll write the questions out. It was a creative proposal but Gil held his ground. But Berkow was a tenacious reporter, and he would not take no for an answer. “Gil,” Lucille finally said, “this guy’s bugging the life out of me. Would you please sit down with him for twenty minutes and get him off my back?” The article—“McDougald, Once a Quiet Yankee Star, Now Lives in a Quiet World”—appeared in
The New York Times
on July 10, 1994.

The article attracted the attention of a physician at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who called to say that the former Yankee might be a candidate for a cochlear implant, a relatively new device that could be surgically implanted in the ear and be used with an external component to enable a person to hear. In due course the evaluation was made and the operation performed in New York City in November 1995. The operation proved successful, and, not surprisingly, there was much excitement when McDougald reached his Spring Lake, New Jersey, home. “Everyone has come to watch Grandpa hear,” said Lucille. Gil McDougald now spends his time in retirement with his family, playing golf, and hearing all the sounds that make life complete.

 

Sandy Amoros never lost his smile but his life took a downward spiral after the 1956 season. He batted .277 with seven home runs as a part-time outfielder in 1957, but he was not part of the Dodgers’ plans when they moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Instead, he was sent back to the club’s farm team in Montreal. Amoros survived two seasons in Montreal and a few games with the Detroit Tigers in 1960 before returning to Cuba as a celebrity who would attract a trail of young boys wherever he went. There he could enjoy life with his wife, Migdalia, and their daughter, Eloise, on the ranch that Amoros had purchased in Mantanzas. And there too, he hoped, he could continue his baseball career in the Mexican leagues. But Fidel Castro decided otherwise.

The Cuban dictator wanted to form a Cuban baseball league and demanded that Amoros—one of the country’s best-known professionals—manage one of the teams. But Amoros rejected the offer. (“I didn’t know how to manage,” he later explained.) Retribution was quick and costly. No longer was Amoros allowed to travel to Mexico to play baseball. Instead, he was confined to his ranch, a monthly ration of two pounds of meat for his family, and dreams of what might have been.

Sandy eventually secured passage on one of the “Freedom Flights” for his family and arrived in New York City on April 27, 1967. “I no have anything else except my family and my freedom,” he told a reporter as he disembarked. “But that is good now.” Unfortunately, it was not good enough. Migdalia soon left him and took their daughter to Miami. Left to his own devices, Amoros was forced to subsist in New York City on menial jobs and sometimes on public assistance.

The only bright spot was a decision by the Dodgers to give the thirty-seven-year-old Cuban a monthlong contract for $1,200 so that he could qualify for a pension when he reached the age of fifty. But those future benefits could not change his present life. And so moving to Tampa in 1977 seemed to be a wise move. As Sandy explained, “You don’t need so many clothes.”

There was no solace for the former Dodger in the Florida sunshine. He could find only sporadic work and his health deteriorated. Suffering from diabetes, he began to experience poor circulation in his legs that produced excruciating pain. By the time he finally went to Tampa’s Memorial Hospital in 1987, the doctors had no choice but to amputate part of his leg because of the onset of gangrene.

Chico Fernandez, one of Sandy’s former teammates, brought his plight to the attention of the Baseball Assistance Team, and that charity made arrangements for a prosthetic device as well as a monthly supplement to his baseball pension. And then Brooklyn declared that June 20, 1992, would be Sandy Amoros day in the New York borough. There would be a parade and a ceremony that would culminate in the unveiling of a statue to celebrate Amoros’ catch in the 1955 World Series. Amoros was interviewed by a
New York Times
reporter in his daughter’s Miami apartment five days before the affair. Sandy still had that same smile, but whatever joy he felt was soon eclipsed by other events. He contracted pneumonia that very day and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital. There he died on June 27, 1992, at the age of sixty-two.

 

Carl Furillo appeared to have many good years left after the 1956 season. He batted .306 in 1957 (tops on the team) and .290 after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Injuries limited his play in 1959, and in April 1960 he tore a calf muscle as he was running down to first base on a ground ball. He assumed that he would be back in the lineup after the injury healed, but the Dodgers released him.

Furillo exploded when he learned of the Dodgers’ decision because he believed it violated his contractual rights. The Dodgers believed otherwise. (“He had his day in the sun,” said Bavasi. “It was over.”) Carl’s teammates counseled conciliation. (“The Dodgers take care of everything,” Erskine advised him. “They’re not going to let you go hungry.”) But Furillo could not abide by the decision. He retained a lawyer and threatened a lawsuit. The ensuing publicity was not favorable to the Dodgers.

The matter was ultimately settled, but the personal cost to the Reading Rifle appeared to be high. Never again would he be able to find a job in professional baseball as a coach or in any other capacity. Bavasi and other major-league officials, of course, denied that Furillo was blacklisted because of his public challenge to the owners’ prerogatives. But Furillo believed otherwise.

Carl supported his family with a variety of jobs outside of baseball. (When asked at one point why a man of his stature would work construction, the former Dodger had a quick answer: “I like to eat.”) He and his family eventually returned to Stony Creek Mills, and it was there that a physician advised the fifty-four-year-old Furillo in 1976 that the lumps on his neck were a manifestation of leukemia. At Fern’s urging, he supplemented the medical treatment with vitamins, and the leukemia was soon in remission. (“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” the physician told his patient, “but keep it up.”)

Carl felt well enough in 1983 to attend the Dodgers’ fantasy camp in Vero Beach, where he quickly became a favorite among the campers (and long after he had made his last appearance in 1987, campers would insist that the Dodgers hang a portrait of Furillo in the locker room). But nothing lasts forever. One morning in January 1989, Fern went downstairs to make breakfast. When Carl did not join her, she trudged up the stairs into their bedroom. “Hey, sleepyhead,” she said, “are you going to sleep all day or what?” When her husband did not respond, she leaned over to touch him. His skin was cold, and Fern knew immediately that something was wrong.