The Final Season - Fathers, Sons and One Last Season in a Classic Ballpark

by James Hebert | Aug 20, 2001
The Final Season - Fathers, Sons and One Last Season in a Classic Ballpark "The Final Season - Fathers, Sons and One Last Season in a Classic Ballpark" by Tom Stanton; St. Martin`s Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 245 pages, $23.95.

Detroit was always a rough town.

Founded by Antoine Cadillac 400 years ago, the one-time fort passed back and forth under French, British and American control in bloody battles lasting into the 1800s.

In the late 1890s, when they were already playing professional baseball at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, a young inventor in a garage nearby gave birth to an industry whose sudden need for labor led to profound social unrest that persists to this day.

Henry Ford`s factories drew huge numbers of African-American workers from the South who would occupy ghettoes not far from the ballpark, which opened in April 1912, the same week the Titanic sank.

Segregation was strictly enforced by Detroit`s white majority. Tension, anger, beatings and killings mounted over the decades until the summer of 1967, when Detroit erupted in a riot that claimed 43 lives and cost hundreds of millions in damage.

But through it all, Tiger Stadium remained a cathedral of hope. It was a gathering place for blacks and whites alike, a sanctuary. There you could slip the meanness of the streets as you walked up the narrow ramps into the steeply raked stands and saw that great green expanse stretching to the limits of your imagination.

It is not an exaggeration to say the Tigers` magical run to the world championship one year after the riots did more to heal the city and bridge the chasm between black and white than any official attempt at reconciliation.

Tiger Stadium was for 88 years a dear and comforting friend, a constant, reliable place for Detroiters to come together. Far more than nostalgia, that feeling of constancy and community - held almost fiercely by many - is what made the closing of Tiger Stadium in favor of a new ballpark such a mournful thing.

Tom Stanton does an exquisite job of portraying what the hulking old stadium meant to generation after generation of Tigers fans and why it was revered as a place, not just a ballpark.

To accomplish this, Stanton went to every home game of the Tigers` 1999 season. He profiles souvenir hawkers and peanut vendors, ushers and elevator operators, beer jockeys and bleacher bums, announcers and ex-ballplayers - people who had spent much of their lives working and rooting and greeting one another at Tiger games.

Using baseball and Tiger Stadium as a time machine, Stanton connects four generations of his own family, from the grandfather he never knew to his father and uncles, himself and his own sons.

His family history is remarkable only in the telling, in the sweet details that reveal much about the city, the nation and the times. This warm and loving memoir gives great insight into why baseball is so tightly and romantically woven into the American experience.

For those of us who grew up in Detroit as rabid Tiger fans, Stanton`s words hold special meaning. I was 16 when Detroit beat St. Louis to claim the 1968 championship; I saw more than 30 games at Tiger Stadium that year.

I remember the `67 riots, the ugly, race-centered fights at high school football games, the endless headlines about violent crime and "white flight." I remember how a once-great, industrial-powerhouse of a city rotted from social failures and self-inflicted wounds.

But I also remember Denny McLain striking out the heart of the Red Sox order on nine pitches; I remember Willie Horton blasting one into the upper deck and Jim Northrup clearing the roof in right; I remember Al Kaline nailing a runner at third with a rifle shot from the right-field corner; and I remember Bill Freehan celebrating on the mound with Mickey Lolich after another victory.

And I remember sharing every one of those moments with my father, who went with me to one last game at Tiger Stadium on June 16, 1999, a 7-1 loss to Seattle.

Detroit may always be a rough town. But there will always be a diamond close to its heart.

- Mark Sauer

"Racing the Antelope - What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life" by Bernd Heinrich; Cliff Street Books, 304 pages, $23.

On a cool Chicago morning, as the start of a 100-kilometer ultramarathon race draws near, nervous competitors begin stripping off their warm-ups.

Not Bernd Heinrich.

"From a study of tiger beetles and the work I had done in the field in Africa, I knew cold beetles run much slower than hot ones, so I waited," he writes.

It seems fair to surmise that Heinrich was the only runner with bugs on his mind at that moment. But when one is both an elite endurance athlete and a specialist in animal physiology, such helpful observations come naturally.

In "Racing the Antelope," Heinrich draws on his life`s work in science to illustrate the myriad strategies that humans and animals have adopted to attain a common, precious end: movement.

"Movement," he writes, "is almost synonymous with life," and for Heinrich it comes down to that most elegant and elemental manifestation of motion,running.

"(F)or millions of years, our ultimate form of locomotion was running," he notes. "We are, deep down, still runners, whether or not we declare it by our actions."

Of course, not all runners are created equal. Heinrich happens to be a champion, and his effort to win that 100-kilometer race, which took place in 1981, forms the cornerstone of this often lyrical, occasionally opaque meditation on what it means to run.

Heinrich weaves in the science with stories of his boyhood in wartime Germany, where his family was forced to flee advancing Russian troops, and his adolescent idyll in rural Maine, which fed his passions for running and nature.

Further adventures eventually took him to Africa. There, Heinrich stumbled across a millenniums-old pictograph that illuminated a truth central to the book.

"Painted onto the wall under the overhang was a succession of small, sticklike human figures in clear running stride," he writes.

Nothing extraordinary in that, he thought at first.

"But then I noticed something more, and it sent my mind reeling. It was the figure farthest to the right, the one leading the progression. It had its hands thrown up in the air in the universal runners`s gesture of triumph at the end of a race.

"This involuntary gesture is reflexive for most runners who have fought hard, who have breathed the heat and smelled the fire, and then felt the exhilaration of triumph over adversity. The image of the Bushmen remains for me an iconic reminder that the roots of our running, our competitiveness, and our striving for excellence go back very far and very deep."

It`s probably no surprise that a book attempting to tie a discussion of, say, hawk-moth physiology to a play-by-play account of a footrace can feel a bit forced at times. Heinrich includes so many examples from his work with animals that "Antelope" occasionally feels too textbook for comfort. (Also not helping: the occasional snoozer of a sentence, such as, "Physiological synchronization of different systems is now coming to be recognized for energy economy as well as temperature regulation.")

Some of Heinrich`s analogies, though, are downright inspired - and indisputably original. Watching track runners dip their heads in a barrel of water on a hot day in Maine, he likens the cooling technique to one employed by bees, who "regurgitate their stomach contents from their mouth and spread the liquid all over themselves with their forefeet."

He adds, dryly: "Relying on regurgitation for evaporative cooling is probably not a recommended option for us."

The account of Heinrich`s pivotal ultramarathon race covers 62 miles of running (at around a 6:15 mile pace!) in 14 pages.

In the book, as in running, the pleasure is in getting there.

"There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as our running," Heinrich writes, "and nothing quite so savage, and so wild."

(c)Copley News Service

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Author: James Hebert

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