PAINFUL MEMORY
40 YEARS ON, MUNSON DEATH STILL HAUNTS
ACROSS the years, I have heard so many stories so eerily similar to this one. We should never pretend the death of an athlete has anything close to the historical meaning of the death of a president, but I wasn’t alive on Nov. 22, 1963. I don’t have that horror frozen in my brain, as my older cousins do, as my parents did.
But it doesn’t take very much at all to summon precisely what I was feeling at dinner time on Aug. 2, 1979. I can still feel the mugginess of that summer creeping in off the porch when I opened the door and my friend, Kevin Walsh, dashed inside, sweaty and out of breath, with tears in his eyes, his message joined together into one long impossible word.
“THURMAN MUN SON DIED IN A PLANE CRASH!!!!!!!!!!”
It took a second to process. “Thurman died in a plane crash?” Kevin shook his head. He was a Yankees fan, and a big one. I was a Mets fan, but in those years — or at least in my house — that didn’t mean you hated the other guys. Plus, I was a catcher. I wore 15 because what 12-year-old catcher in 1979 growing up in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut didn’t want to be Thurman?
The next few days were a blur. I can still remember off the top of my head the attendance at Yankee Stadium that first game against the Orioles — 51,151 (go ahead, look it up) — and how Reggie Jackson bawled his eyes out in right field. I remember seeing the pictures of Billy Martin weeping at the funeral, and Mickey Rivers nearly fainting there, and the Yankees beating the Orioles on “Monday Night Baseball” when Bobby Murcer, Munson’s best friend, hit a three-run homer and a two-run, walk-off single. I remember thinking, the whole time: how can this happen? And across these last 40 years, I have met dozens of people, hundreds of them, more, who spent that awful summer weekend feeling exactly the same way, looking at exactly the same images, a terrible shared grief that is, at the same time, almost comforting in how familiar it all feels in our shared mind’s eye whether you lived in Nassau County, Westchester County, Bergen County, Fairfield County. It wasn’t the first time sports made grown men and little kids cry at the same time. Forty years before Munson, Lou Gehrig held Yankee Stadium spellbound on the Fourth of July. Rocky Marciano died in a plane crash. Ernie Davis got leukemia, and died before he could ever carry a football in the NFL. Everyone had seen “Brian’s Song” by Aug. 2, 1979.
And in the 40 years since, we have seen too many athletes, as the poet A.E. Housman famously wrote, who “will not swell the rout/of those who wore their honour out”: Payne Stewart. Hank Gathers. Reggie Lewis. Malik Sealy. Drazen Petrovic. Too many others.
But Munson’s passing, it sticks with so many of us of a certain age. Still.
INTERLUDE I: When Munson died, there was an immediate spark of stories that perhaps the baseball writers, as they had seven years earlier with Roberto Clemente, might waive the five-year waiting period and elect Munson with the Class of 1980. They actually did allow Munson’s name on the 1981 ballot, three years early, and he got 15.5 percent of the vote. But he never again reached double figures and fell quietly off the ballot in 1995.
Munson was on a Hall track — and certainly would’ve put up a comparable career to his eternal rival, Carlton Fisk, had he been given the gift of longevity — but his career numbers (10 full seasons, .292/.346/ .410, 1,558 hits, 113 homers, seven All
THIS was maybe a year before Murcer, too, passed far too young, at age 62, in 2008. Murcer was talking about his longest day, when he delivered Munson’s eulogy in Canton, Ohio, on the afternoon of Aug. 6, 1979, talked his way into the lineup in The Bronx that night, then drove in all five runs in that epic 5-4 win that still plays in regular rotation on “Yankees Classics” on YES Network.
“What was bittersweet,” Murcer said, “was that Thurm and I played on some bad teams my first time around [they were teammates from 1969-74] and always talked about how great it would be to play on Yankees teams that got back to October, where they belonged.” He shook his head. “Never happened.” When the Yankees were becoming world champs in 1977 and ’78, Murcer was biding his time in Chicago, on some awful Cubs teams. Murcer did finally play on two Yankees postseason teams, in 1980 and ’81. But Rick Cerone was the everyday catcher by then.
When they were young, they’d
been dubbed “The New M&M Boys” by the headline writers, a nod to the bygone days of Mantle and Maris. Munson and Murcer did have their moments, particularly 1973, when they were both All-Stars, both finished top 12 in the MVP vote, combined for 53 homers and kept the Yankees in first place much of the summer.
“After I left, he went from star to superstar,” Murcer said. “I always felt like he was playing those big games for the both of us.”
INTERLUDE II: Here is a trick you learn early in the game when you’re a sportswriter: when people want to know what their sports heroes are really like, they don’t really mean it, at least if the reality differs from the fantasy.
Munson? Folks who covered him will tell you he could be ornery and temperamental. In a 1977 column by Dave Anderson in the Times, written the day after the Yanks won the World Series, he quoted Munson directly using some raw language in addressing Jackson that, even in a less evolved time, was off-putting.
But I asked Reggie about that once. The two men famously had their differences while playing with each other, much of it due to one of the most famous quotes in baseball history: “I’m the straw that stirs the drink … Munson thinks he [can be] but he can only stir it bad.” (Jackson has regularly denied saying that in the years since.)
But Jackson also told me:
played with a lot of good teammates, but only one guy I’d want in my foxhole. I’d want Thurman in my foxhole.”
FORTY years later, the loss is still palpable. Munson never heard an Old-Timers’ Day roar. He never saw his number retired. He never did get to play out his days for his childhood team, the Indians, a desire he had when most players would’ve rather played in Siberia than Cleveland. He never saw his children grow up.
I remember a few years ago I had dinner with my old friend Kevin. I asked him if he remembered that day as I did.
“How do you forget that?” he asked.
You don’t. Every year, on this day, I remember what I felt. I remember turning on the TV and hearing Warner Wolf confirm what Kevin told me. I remember the disbelief, the anguish, the grief. Of course I do. Because if you’re old enough, so do you. You remember. You will always remember.