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Bobby Thomson's 'Shot' Reminds Us that the Story Is Never Over

By Roy Peter Clark

I just heard news that baseball legend Bobby Thomson has died at the age of 86. Thomson was a good player, but no Hall-of-Famer. His big moment came on the afternoon of October 3, 1951, when he hit the most famous home run in baseball history, the one now linked forever with American historical myth as "the shot heard 'round the world."

You may know the moment, not just from old film images on YouTube, but from radio announcer Russ Hodges' famous call in which he exults over and over, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

Many baseball fans enjoy revisiting that moment almost 60 years ago just for the spine-chilling excitement of the victory. But that signature event had consequences for the culture of sports and the evolution of news media that linger into the 21st century.

The Shot has become a story about what constitutes triumph and tragedy in America, about how sports defines our identity, about fame, celebrity, race, scandal, myth and mystery, recounted time and again in nonfiction books, documentaries, investigations, novels and even poetry.

As history, the famous game is notable because the three-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers was the first sports event to be broadcast on television coast to coast. The winner would face the New York Yankees in the World Series (and lose!). NBC carried The Shot live -- that broadcast has not survived -- and famed announcer Ernie Harwell made the call.

With TV still taking baby steps, a number of radio stations broadcast the game across the nation and around the world. The most famous announcer call in baseball history survives only because a Dodgers fan tape-recorded it from his apartment radio. The unhappy Bums fan sold it to Hodges for 10 bucks, and Chesterfield cigarettes put the recording on vinyl and turned it into a hot seller.

I was born in 1948 on New York's Lower East Side into a family of passionate Yankee fans. I would have been 3 years and 8 months old when the game was broadcast from the Polo Grounds in the Bronx. I remember clearly things that happened in our little apartment in Knickerbocker Village because we moved out to the suburbs when I turned 4. I believe I remember this game.

Or, more likely, I remember my mom and grandparents hooting and hollering and jumping up and down in front of the cloudy black and white image on a 10-inch RCA Victor television screen embedded in a heavy mahogany console. My parents were not Giants fans, but they were Dodger haters, and I can't think of any other sports event of that time that would have sparked such a jubilant reaction.

As I wrote in "America's Best Newspaper Writing": 

Sitting in the press box at the Polo Grounds that day was Red Smith. A Notre Dame graduate, he had covered great sporting events since the 1920s and once pleaded guilty to editor Stanley Woodward's indictment that he was "Godding up those ballplayers," making them bigger than life.

To be sure, there was a bit of hero worship in his classic account of the game, "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" (a reference to the area around the stadium). Who could blame Smith for his enthusiasm? Here was a game with two New York teams, a pennant on the line, in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two runners on base, with the world tuned in.

"Now it is done," wrote Smith in his lead. "Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead." Those short sentences, filled with overstatement, set a tone for the story of a mythic sporting event.

It would be hard to find in any sports column a better "kicker." That word refers to the end of a story, usually something special and memorable for the reader. In this case, it's a single word, a number, that turns out to be a prophecy about the destiny, not of the batter, but of the pitcher, Ralph Branca, a good man whose life is marked by one fateful pitch.

"Branca's first pitch was called a strike," wrote Smith.

"The second pitch -- well, when Thomson reached first base he turned and looked toward the left-field stands. Then he started jumping straight in the air, again and again. Then he trotted around the bases, taking his time.

"Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse.  The number on his uniform looked huge.  Thirteen." 

Although Smith announced that "fiction was dead," that's not what Don DeLillo thought when he wrote the massive novel "Underworld," which begins with a 49-page prologue devoted to a fictional retelling of The Shot. We see the event from the point of view of a young African-American teen who wins a violent hand-to-hand combat for the ball, in an era when black athletes -- Mays, Robinson, Campanella -- were getting their first crack at the Major Leagues.

"The action of his hand is as old as he is," DeLillo wrote. "It seems he has been sending out this hand for one thing or another since the minute he shot out of infancy.  Everything he knows is contained in the splayed fingers of this one bent hand. ... The whole business under the seat has taken only seconds. ... He's got the ball, he feels it hot and buzzy in his hand."

In real life, the home run ball -- imagine what it would command at auction -- has never been recovered, despite claims by sons that they received the ball as a legacy from their fathers. That story is told in the book "Miracle Ball: My Hunt for the Shot Heard 'Round the World" by Brian Biegel.

In real life, some of our most treasured myths about heroes disintegrate into sand. The dark side of Thomson's heroism and Branca's futility was revealed in the book "The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard 'Round the World."

The word "untold" in a title almost always points to revisionist history. Journalist Joshua Prager tracked down the surviving players of that year to confirm a rumor that the Giants pulled off their winning streak by cheating. Men in the bullpen used binoculars to steal the catcher's signs, alerting hitters to the kind of pitch they were about to see.

Knowing you are getting a fastball is one thing; hitting it over the fence with so much on the line is another. Even though Branca felt some vindication decades later from these revelations of cheating, Thomson remained an icon into the modern era, when some of baseball's most successful athletes were shamed by the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Journalists can draw from this short history this moral: That the big story is never over. The Civil War is still not over. The Depression is not over. Nor the assassination of JFK. Nor the destruction of the World Trade Center. Hang in there -- for a long time -- on the Gulf oil spill.

We may be responsible for feeding a news cycle more voracious then ever, but we should remember, when it comes to great storytelling, the words of the great Irma Thomas anthem, covered by the Rolling Stones: "Tiiime... is on my side. Yes it is."

Full post as published by Writing Tools on August 17, 2010 (boomark / email).