Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I
lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time
we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of
Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their
American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront
neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean
men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places
where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become
Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray
hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson
walk on big league grass.
All of us were going to Ebbets Field.
In memory, encoded in all those unreliable images printed upon me as a boy,
the place was huge. It was, in fact, the largest structure I had ever entered,
larger than any church, larger than any movie house. I know now that it was
sneered at as a bandbox: TK feet down the right field line, TK feet to center,
TK to left. But if you were eleven, and you were sitting in those centerfield
stands, and Terry Moore of the Cardinals was directly below you, and home
plate seemed a mile away, it was huge.
It was also beautiful. As kids, we used free tickets from the Police Athletic
League to get in, or brought one of our friends who had been crippled by
polio and played on the sympathies of the special cops, who always let us in,
with a growl and a wink. Then we climbed dark ramps, higher and higher,
climbing to the distant reaches and the cheapest seats in the ball park. Finally
we were at the top level, and walked through a gate, out of the darkness, and
there before us was the field. No grass has ever been greener. Each time I
went back to Ebbets Field, and made that climb, and saw that field, my skin
pebbled once more, at the sight of all that beauty.
There was no television then, and so we knew the Dodgers and Ebbets Field
from stories and photographs in the Daily News and from the voice of Red
Barber on the radio. Most of us imagined the Dodgers before we ever saw
them. Nothing in newspapers or radio ever matched the experience of being
there: the smell of hot dogs, the signs along the walls (“Hit Sign, Win Suitâ
€�), the barking of beer hawkers in thick Brooklynese (“Getcha cold one
now, heah day are, cold as da Nawt’ Pole�) the music of the
Brooklyn Sym-Phony, the shouting and argument, dismay and joy in the
stands. Everyone was joined in the rough democracy of the upper deck.
The great accomplishment of Robinson in 1947 was not so much that he
integrated baseball, but that he integrated those stands. Which is to say he
started integrating his country, our country. And so when Robinson jittered
off second base, upsetting the enemy pitcher, the number 42 sending signals
of possible amazements, we all roared. Whites and blacks: roaring for
Robinson. And when he broke for third, the roar exploded to another level,
and birds rose from the roofs of the ballpark and the stands shook so hard
you thought they might fall. They would eventually fall, but not from the roar.
There was much to roar about. Kids my age were granted an amazing gift
that went beyond the crowded intimacy of the park itself. Branch Rickey had
built for us an extraordinary team: Snider, Furillo, Reese and the others.
Robinson was their engine. Driven by his passion (the way 40 years later the
Chicago Bulls would be driven by Michael Jordan) , they fought for every
victory; they did not shrug away a loss and call their agents. Most of them
had no agents. Most of them even lived in Brooklyn; Gil Hodges had a small
house on a good street about eight blocks from the tenement where I lived.
The great ones stayed with the team year after year; we knew them, we
celebrated their great victories, and plunged into gloom at their defeats. We
thought we would have them forever, and that when they got old they would
come back to Ebbets Field on Old Timers Day and we’d see the Dook
slash one off the concave wall in right field or Robinson walk to bat in his
pigeon-toed way and dare the pitcher to throw at his head. We would have
our children with us. We would tell them the tale of that great team, those
boys of summer.
None of that ever happened and we should have known it, even as boys.
The last game was played in 1957, and then they were gone. For some
people, the departure was an immense wound, a betrayal, a rejection. Walter
O’Malley, the Dodger owner, had played with our emotions, made fools
of us, and some people never forgave him. I didn’t go to another major
league baseball game for twelve years; my father, an Irish immigrant made
into an American by baseball, lived another 28 years and never entered a
single ballpark.
Within a year after the Dodgers lammed to Los Angeles, Ebbets Field was
smashed into rubble. From the rubble would rise a project called Ebbets
Field Houses. Years later, I went out there for a look, and there was a sign
on the wall beside the front door.
NO BALLPLAYING ALLOWED, it said.
I started walking home, the way I did as a boy, through Prospect Park, and
all around me I could hear a roar, and there in my mind, as it will be forever,
was the image of Robinson, dancing off second, about to break for third.
Copyright 2004 Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill on Ebbets Field
from www.petehamill.com
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