Dispatches from the Sporting Life (24 page)

Ça, alors.

November 1983

P
ronouncing on Montreal, Casey Stengel once said, “Well, you see they have those polar bears up there and lots of fellows trip over them trying to run the bases and they’re never much good anymore except for hockey or hunting deer.”

Unfortunately we have no polar bears up here, but kids can usually heave snowballs at the outfielders at the opening game of the season, and should the World Series ever dare venture this far north, it is conceivable that a game could be called because of a blizzard.

Montreal, it must be understood, is a city unlike any other in Canada. Or, more important, the National League. On the average, eight feet of snow is dumped on us each winter, and, whatever the weather, we can usually count on three bank robberies a day. This is the city of wonders that gave you Expo in 1967—the baseball Expos a couple of years
later—and in 1976 the Olympic Games. Their legacy, among other amazing artifacts, is a stadium that can seat (or intern, as some have it), fifty-five thousand baseball fans—the monstrous Big Owe, where the Expos have been disporting themselves in summer ever since they moved there from Jarry Park in 1977. For years the Expos’ endearing idea of loading the bases was to have two of their runners on second. Hello, hello. Their notion of striking fear into the heart of the opposition was to confront them with muscle, namely one of their pinch-hitting behemoths coming off the bench: group average in 1978,.135.

Major league baseball, like the Olympics and the Big Owe itself, was brought to this long-suffering city through the machinations of our very own Artful Dodger, Mayor Jean Drapeau. Bringing us the Games, the mayor assured Montrealers that it would be as difficult for the Olympics to cost us money as it would be for a man to have a baby. He estimated the total cost of all facilities at $62.2 million, but what with inflation and unfavourable winds, his calculation fell somewhat short of the mark. Counting stationery and long-distance calls, the final tab was $1.2 billion. Never mind. To this day our ebullient mayor doesn’t allow that the Games were run at a loss. Rather, as he has put it to the rest of us, there has been a gap between costs and revenue. Furthermore, considering the spiffy facilities we have been left with, it would be churlish of us to complain.

Ah, the Big Owe. The largest, coldest slab of poured concrete in Canada. In a city where we endure seven long months of winter, and spring comes and goes in an afternoon, it is Drapeau’s
triumph to have provided us with a partially roofed over six-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar stadium, where the sun seldom shines on the fans. Tim Burke, one of the liveliest sportswriters in town, once said to me, “You know, there are lots of summer afternoons when I feel like taking in a ball game, but I think, hell, who wants to sit out there in the dark.”

Shivering in the dark might have been more accurate, watching the boys lose line drives in the seams of the artificial turf.

“The outfield,” another friend remarked, “looks like the kind of thing my aunt used to wear.”

It’s a shame, because the Expos, admittedly major league in name only, at least until recently, came to a town rich in baseball history. To begin with, we were all charged with hope. On April 14, 1969, the 29,184 fans who turned up for the home opener at makeshift Jarry Park were electrified by an announcement over the public-address system. “When the Expos play a doubleheader,” we were informed, “the second game will go the full nine innings, not seven.”

Those of us old enough to remember baseball’s glory days here, the Montreal Royals of the old International League, nodded our heads, impressed. This was the big time, baby. “Montreal,” said Warren Giles, president of the National League, “is a growing and vibrant city.” Yes, yes. So we hollered and stamped our feet as our champions took the field under the grim gaze of manager Gene Mauch, who had the look of a marine drill sergeant.

The morning after the season’s home opener, the big bold front-page headline in the
Montréal-Matin
exclaimed: “
30,000 PERSONNES ACCLAMENT LES EXPOS SOUS SOLEIL RADIEUX: ECLATANTE PREMIERE.”
La Presse
pronounced the occasion, in which our expansionist Expos humiliated the National League champion St. Louis Cards 8–7, a
“VICTOIRE HISTORIQUE.”

If that wasn’t sufficient glory to sustain us through the long losing streak to come, only four days later one William Hambly Stoneman, a pitcher hitherto noted for nothing so much as mediocrity, a youngster who had deservedly never started a major league game in his life, strode to the mound, adjusted his potent red, white, and blue Expo cap for the nth time, fingered the rosin bag, loosened his shoulders, and, before you could utter
shazam,
reared back and threw a no-hitter against the Philadelphia Phillies. Canada, only two years older than major league baseball, had entered league history like a lion. Never mind that the
habitant
hero of the day, the suddenly incomparable Stoneman, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and bred at Antonio Junior College in Walnut, California; his hobbies, like those of many a red-blooded
Canadien,
were golf and fishing. Something else. “Stoney” Stoneman’s heart was in the right place. On his return from Philadelphia, he revealed to reporters, “I’m especially happy for the town…Montreal, I mean. Now they know we’re not up there just to appear on the field. We’re going to win ball games.”

Jim Fanning, Expo GM at the time, responded munificently. “It is customary to give a no-hit pitcher a new contract or bonus, usually about $1,000,” he said. “But Montreal is an unusual city and this is an unusual team. We are giving him a $2,000 raise.”

The team was also paying Maury Wills, who had been caught stealing base fifty-two times the year before, more than he ever earned in his halcyon years with Los Angeles or Pittsburgh. “Why,” a reporter asked Sam Bronfman’s then thirty-seven-year-old son Charles, “did you sink more than a million into the team in the first place?”

“I learned from my father,” he replied, “that citizenship means more than paying taxes or writing cheques for charity.”

Let’s face it, from owner to batboy, no-hit pitcher to bullpen bum, everybody connected with the Expos was … beautiful.

Canada, the prescient Bronfman told reporters in Florida, has a national inferiority complex and will gain status by being major league in baseball. “Nothing is so big league as major league baseball. Mr. Average Citizen of Montreal can now feel just as good as Mr. Average Citizen elsewhere.”

Happily for Montreal, the supreme importance of major league baseball was also undoubted by big John McHale, club president and investor, who was formerly with Milwaukee and Detroit. Soon after joining the Expos, McHale was announced as a favoured candidate for the office of commissioner of baseball. He turned down the post rather than abandon Montreal—our Montreal, his investment—but not without first informing the picayune natives that in the United States the job of baseball commissioner was second in importance only to that of the U.S. president. Of such conviction, surely, were future World Series winners made.

To come clean, when I first read that one of the most untiring and tiresome of our city councillors, hand-pumping Gerry Snyder, had cajoled a couple of second-generation multimillionaires, Bronfman and Lorne Webster, into staking a major league ball club, enabling them to make their very own mark, I was exceedingly skeptical. After the grandeur that was Expo, Montreal was enduring the inevitable business slump as well as a sobering morning after of whacking bills to be paid, with the upshot that escalating city property tax had become the highest in the country. Furthermore, French Canada was growing increasingly restive, separatists finally knitted into one respectable political party by the formidable René Lévesque. English-speaking Montreal was beginning to feel the chill. While Ontario burgeoned, its investment plans calling for a 14 percent growth rate, all that went boom in the Montreal stock exchange was a separatist bomb, brokers sliding under the desks faster than Maury Wills ever broke for second base.

If this seemed a dubious climate for an expensive, risky new venture, then cynics, myself
numero uno,
had not counted on the energy of Gerry Snyder and Mayor Drapeau’s consummate hunger for glory. Or Charles Bronfman’s boyish eagerness and matured money.

Among the supplicants for an NL franchise in 1968 were Milwaukee, Dallas, San Diego, Buffalo, and Montreal. Milwaukee, with a lawsuit pending against the league, was immediately counted out. Dallas, deserving maybe, would have bitten into the Houston Astros’ TV pie. The Buffalo ballpark, league
officials ordained, was unsuitably located, vulnerable to race riots. From the onset, Montreal was the most cherished of all the cities applying for entry into the NL. After all, the city had a proud (and profit-proven) baseball tradition. Until 1960, it was the home of the Montreal Royals.

An article in the memorable opening-day program of the Expos noted that while the province of Quebec had never been known as a hotbed of major league talent, we had nevertheless produced a few ball players, among them pitchers Claude Raymond and Ron Piché, and that three native sons, Roland Gladu, Jean-Pierre Roy, and Stan Bréard, had once played for another ball club here, the Royals.

Oh, I remember the Royals—yes indeed—and if they played in a Montreal that was not yet growing and vibrant,
pace
Warren Giles, it was certainly a place to be cherished.

Betta Dodd, “the Girl in Cellophane,” was stripping at the Gayety, supported by twenty-three Kuddling Kuties. Cantor Moishe Oysher, the Master Singer of His People, was appearing at His Majesty’s Theatre. The Johnny Holmes Band, playing at Victoria Hall, featured Oscar Peterson; and a sign in the corner cigar and soda warned Ziggy Halprin, Yossel Hoffman, and me that

I first became aware of the Royals in 1943.

Many of our older brothers and cousins were serving overseas. Others on the street were delighted to discover they suffered from flat feet or, failing that, arranged to have an eardrum punctured by a specialist in such matters.

Even in fabled Westmount, where the very rich were rooted, things weren’t the same anymore. H.R., fashion emporium to the privileged, enjoined Westmount to “take another step in further aid of the government’s all-out effort to defeat aggression!”

Nineteen thirty-nine was not only the date we had gone to war, it was also the year the management of the Royals signed the contract with Branch Rickey, making them the Dodgers’ farm team. Before we had even reached the age of puberty, Ziggy, Yossel, and I had learned to love with caution. If after the first death there is no other, an arguable notion, I do remember that each time one of our heroes abandoned us for Ebbets Field, it stung us badly. We hated Mr. Rickey for his voracious appetite. “There has been no mention officially that the Dodgers will be taking Flowers,” Lloyd MacGowan wrote in the
Star
on a typical day, “but Rickey was in Buffalo to watch the team yesterday. The Dodgers can’t take Flowers without sending down a flinger, but chances are the replacement for the burly lefty will hardly be adequate.”

The International League, as we knew it in the forties, its vintage years, was Triple A and composed of eight teams: Montreal, Toronto, Syracuse, Jersey City, Newark, Rochester, Baltimore, and Buffalo. Newark was the number-one farm team of the Yankees, and Jersey City filled the same office for the Giants. But organized baseball had actually come to Montreal in 1898, the Royals then fielding a team in the old Eastern League, taking the pennant in their inaugural year. In those days the Royals played in Atwater Park, which could seat twelve thousand. From all accounts it was a fine and intimate stadium, much like Jarry Park. During the twenty-one years the Royals played in Atwater Park, they offered
Montreal, as sportswriter Marc Thibault once wrote,
“du baseball parfois excitant, plus souvent qu’autrement, assez détestable,”
the problem being the troubled management’s need to sell off their most accomplished players for ready cash. Be that as it may, in 1914, long before major league baseball came to Montreal, George Herman Ruth took to the mound in Atwater Park to pitch for the Baltimore Orioles. Two years later the Royals folded, a casualty of the First World War, and another eleven years passed before the team was resuscitated.