Posted on 09/21/2002 12:06:43 AM PDT by BluesDuke
"He Flipped Us And Got What He Deserved"
A Royal Mugging in Chicago
by Jeff Kallman
Flipping the bird to the Ebbets Field boo birds got Casey Stengel a standing ovation in 1919. Flipping the bird to a pair of lithe, wired Comiskey Park birds (so they say was done), for whom booing might have been their least vile emissions, got Tom Gamboa a mugging Thursday night.
It probably helped Stengel that his was a very literal flip; it surely hurt Gamboa that his two assailants were probably too thick to appreciate it, if he had thought about trying it Casey's way.
Stengel with the Pittsburgh Pirates was getting it but good from the Brooklyn bellowers who had rooted for him in Dodger flannels just a season arlier. With a little help from old an old Dodger buddy, pitcher Leon Cadore, Casey started the next day's game with a little surprise under his cap for his erstwhile fans. Just in case.
He came up for his first at-bat of the day and the Flatbush flayers let him have it. Borne of an awkward courtliness knitted within his roughtumble puckishness, Stengel let his bat fall from his hands, faced the crowd, and bowed elegantly enough as he tipped his cap.
Out flew a sparrow that Cadore had caught and given to Stengel for the occasion. Ebbets Field rocked with screaming laughter.
Gamboa spent most of Thursday night's game on the first base coaching line for the Kansas City Royals. When not counseling the occasional Royals baserunner, he spent the game hearing an uninterrupted barrage of venomously obscene abuse from a group of shirtless, tattooed fellows.
Come the top of the ninth, the 54-year-old coach did or did not give them the usual flip of the bird. Gamboa says nay; the tattooed thugs say otherwise. What no one disputes is that Gamboa's attention was trained entirely between home plate and the pitcher's mound, watching Royals right fielder Michael Tucker bunt back to Chicago White Sox pitcher Mike Porzio for the inning's first out, Gamboa's hands on hips and eyes fixed firmly.
The World Trade Center attacks were less sneaky than two of the shirtless tattoo sewermouths hopping the rail, sprinting toward the coaching line, and blindsiding Gamboa. With the first base umpire and, more tellingly, White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko - in fact, just about the entire White Sox team - standing their positions and doing nothing.
Nothing.
The thugs had barely brought Gamboa down when they were swarmed themselves by the entire Royals roster, pouring out of their dugout, giving a deserved enough pummeling to what turned out a father-and-son thug team, 34-year-old William Ligue, Jr. and his 15-year-old son. The Royals actually got to their coach's rescue, loosened him from his assailants, and loosened a pocket knife from one of the pair's belt loops, faster than the guards and gendarmes who finally hustled the Ligues off the field and off to the local cage.
It was enough that Gamboa never saw his muggers coming, but you cannot help but hope he never noticed Konerko and the White Sox standing doing nothing as the attackers struck and beyond. Sportsmanship be damned; if you can't beat 'em (the Royals held on to win the game, 2-1), let 'em get beaten up.
Just what Chicago needs. Let the whole country think one of your teams lacks the common decency to keep a defenceless 54-year-old coach from getting beaten into mulch by a younger, wired, and wiry father-and-son thug team without an unfried brain in their heads.
If you think they were just your usual run of sewermouthed swine of the kind that periodically punctuates the normal pack of boo birds, be advised that one law enforcement source reported to the Associated Press that the elder Ligue telephoned a relative by cell phone, around the seventh inning, asking if she were watching the game. She wasn't; she couldn't find the channel.
"Well," Ligue replied, according to the law enforcement source, "just watch the news."
The Comiskey Park crowd was better than the White Sox deserved. They gave Gamboa a standing O as he was led off the field with cuts and a bruised cheek.
"It's like I was playing a football game," Gamboa would say of the attack later, "and I was the only player they forgot to issue equipment to."
Did Gamboa really flip the fans the bird? "The only thing that's really got me upset even more than the incident itself is the charge that there was something going on between us," said Gamboa, who made some media rounds Friday morning. "I have never in my professional career ever responded to fans. At no time, no matter how bad it got, have I ever made a hand gesture or verbally done anything to the fans."
On the other hand, so what if he had?
The Ligue vermin offered no excuse for their assault other than that Gamboa "flipped us and got what he deserved." As if taking nine innings worth of such abuse as might have been deemed obscene in a porn film (various reports indicated those surrounding the Ligue party heard precisely such abuse) was supposed to be just part of the job. As if even an apparently mild-mannered, good-humoured fellow like Gamboa was just supposed to shut up and take it.
Those baseball fans are rare enough (thank God) who assume their ticket to the ballpark confers a licence to abuse eons beyond mere booing, razzing, or sarcastic catcalling. They ought to be grateful that more players or other field uniform personnel haven't fed them with knuckle sandwiches for their hunger.
But suppose a less mild-mannered man than Gamboa decided it was time enough to teach the Ligue swine a lesson in manners before their hop-sprint-mug. He would not get away with, "Well, they were givin' me the potty mouth inning in and inning out, and I gave 'em what they deserved."
Think I talk beyond my competence? Meet Cesar Cedeno. In 1973 he got himself into an off-the-field scrape that ended up with someone getting shot and Cedeno getting convicted for involuntary manslaughter. (I am not entirely sure of this, but memory instructs that Cedeno's gun was used in the shooting and it was not clear that Cedeno was the actual, but a law in the state where the crime occurred deemed one's ownership of the weapon involved was as good as the owner himself pulling the trigger.)
That fact didn't stop a few particularly merciless Astro fans from slamming Cedeno relentlessly, game in and game out, for at least a few weeks, including one sleazebucket firing Murderer! N-gg-r Murderer! as if repeating a tape loop...in 1981. Eight years after the incident in question.
Lesser men than Cedeno have snapped under that kind of continuing assault a lot sooner than Cedeno finally did. At last, during a September 1981 game the Astros were losing (3-2, to the Atlanta Braves), Cedeno charged into the stands to pound the living hell out of the mouth that bored into him without letup.
Cedeno was hit for a $5,000 fine but no suspension. The National League sometimes has the more enlightened view than the American League. If you think that's a stretch, then fast forward a decade and shake hands (if you dare) with Albert Belle.
Yes. That Albert Belle. Well, he wasn't even Albert yet; in 1991, he was still going by his childhood nickname, Joey, a diminutive of his actual middle name, Jojuan. Coming up with an outsize talent, a disconcerting but not yet intimidating insularity, and an alcohol problem from which he was already trying recovery, Belle was struggling enough with the recovery without a Cleveland Indian fan named Jeff Pillar getting hold of him.
Pillar slammed Belle incessantly with drinking taunt after drinking taunt, even with Belle's alcohol struggle public enough knowledge. Then Pillar hit Belle with, "Hey, Joey, keg party at my place after the game, c'mon over," and Belle had finally had as much as he could stand, firing a baseball full strength into Pillar's chest.
Just as most Comiskey Park fans cheered Gamboa when he got up from his assault and walked off the field Thursday night, a majority of Jacobs Field fans cheered Belle after he drilled Pillar. Then-American League president Bobby Brown suspended Belle for a week and ordered him to pay a week's salary to a charity of his choice.
Belle reverted to his first name after the incident and turned his back on just about everyone, except the pitcher he was about to face or the fences in front of which he played the outfield gamely if not virtuosically. Without once condoning the jerk he became (not to mention the relapsed drinker - he was arrested for DUI in his native Arizona last week), could you really blame Belle for thinking of fans from then on as one step removed from terrorists, after the Pillar incident and a punishment which really didn't fit the crime?
Speaking of crime, the Ligue louses are not exactly alien to criminal charges like the aggravated battery charge they face in the Gamboa attack. Police reporting indicated the elder Ligue's history includes charges for domestic battery.
Gamboa, for his part, is doing his best to make it no big deal. "It's 15 minutes of fame for a no-name guy," said Gamboa of himself, in the Friday morning wake of the attack. "It's like I'm today's Kato Kaelin. Ten years from now, somebody will point to me and say, 'That's the guy who was attacked'. Nobody likes to be remembered for that. I'd like to be appreciated for the job I do."
So did old-time umpire George Magerkurth, after a fashion. Big Mage was as legendary for his short fuse as for his huge enough (as in, 6'3") presence. He made his bones when he threw no less than New York Giants legend John McGraw out of a 1929 game. Magerkurth was going at it with (what a surprise) Brooklyn Dodger manager Leo Durocher in 1940 when he got blindsided by a hefty runt of a fan, knocking the surprised ump down and sitting over him beating him senseless.
Magerkurth seems to have had a heart as big as his temper was short, telling the judge he didn't want to see the man charged with anything. "Poor fellow just lost his head," the big ump told a judge. "I don't want to see him in jail. I've got a boy of my own."
The attacker turned out to be a professional pickpocket, among other small time criminal expertises. A few years later, he was hauled before the same judge on another petty crime charge. The judge - also a Dodger fan - remembered him from the Magerkurth incident and asked, at last, just what on earth made him attack Big Mage like that?
Oh, sure, he was P.O.ed at the Dodgers not winning the game and Big Mage making a couple of close calls against the Bums.
"But to tell you the truth, Judge," the little guy continued, "I had a partner working the stands. We was doing a little business."
Perverse as it might sound, that is more in the way of honour, somehow, than Gamboa's father-and-son muggers can claim.
I was hoping it was the islamaanic who was giving the double finger outside the NY court where ythe NY 6 Yemeni terrorist cell are being held pending bail hearings.
The Cubs may not be a good ball tea, ; however, neither they, or their fans have done anything like this; that I know of.
The behavior , of the thugs, was bad enough ... that the Sox ignored what was happening, is just beyond the pale.
This was nice, I enjoyed that well-turned sentence.
After that, it got tiresome. A writer should not be more in love with his own words than with his audience.
Very true. The author spends most of the article condemning a group of people for not running ten times farther than the Royals bench had to run.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.