"He Flipped Us And Got What He Deserved": A Royal Mugging In Chicago

"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.

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."

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.

but you cannot help but hope he never noticed Konerko and the White Sox standing doing nothing as the attackers struck and beyond.

The writer got this part wrong. It was Willie Harris who was covering first. The umpire had the best view and did nothing. Part of his job is to maintain order on the field and he did nothing. He had time to react and didn't.

From what I've read, White Sox fans are just as disgusted by this incident as anyone. These two idiots gave their town and team a blackeye. Last night at the Royals game there was extra security both in the stands and on the field. Gamboa got a standing O when he took the field. A group of 7 or 8 young men brought a great sign. It said "Gamboa, we've got your back". Noticed several Cleveland players and the 1st base umpire shaking Gamboas hand.

Lived in the western suberbs (Lombard, Villa Park) of Chicago for 11 years. Used to follow the Cubs.

1. These people were doubtless on drugs--you know, the same drugs that the Libertines here want to tell you are a personal choice and affect no one else (they are liars, but most people know that).

2. Our society continues to degenerate into barbarity. True, not all are barbarians, but enough to make a difference. Add to that the INdifference such as displayed by the White Sox players, or the "I don't want to get involved" types that regularly allow muggings in densely populated urban areas, and you have the makings of a breed of lawlessness that far outstrips the "Wild" West of a century and a quarter ago.

I have nothing further to say to you. You have accused me of saying things I did not say, and you have attributed to me words or sentiments which I clearly enough attributed to others. At worst, I could be said to accuse the White Sox of temporary indifference, which are not the same thing as cowardice. I have not once accused them of cowardice, and I would not do so, because I do not think cowardice was involved in this disgrace. I made it a specific point of saying to you earlier that I have heard others make the charge. I thought at the time I heard them (for your information, I made it a point of listening to the sports radio people Friday morning; I had switched to a particular political talk show in my area in the afternoon and that host actually came right out and used the C word, too. And I still think now that they were, if you'll pardon the expression, off base. Inaction - or perhaps the better term is momentary indifference, who knows - is not equivalent to cowardice in all situations.

Gamboa is saying he has no hard feelings at all that the ump and Chicago first baseman (especially those two because they were right there) did nothing because "we were all just stunned."

Gamboa is a class act all the way. That's better than the White Sox - and the ump - deserved in this instance. I have a suspicion we might not know what really went through the White Sox' head for a long time on this one. But at minimum the first baseman and ump should have been on those two's tails immediately. I'd like to think most of us on this thread (myself included), had we been in their position, would have been.

The writer got this part wrong. It was Willie Harris who was covering first.

Didn't he cover first on the bunt play which happened moments before the thugs jumped the coach? On the video I saw of the incident, it seemed to me Konerko was returning and closer to first base than Harris (I couldn't tell his number or his name in this clip) would have been. And, you're quite right - the umpire did have precisely the responsibility you attribute. All the umpires do, of course, but this attack happened practically on his front stoop, so to say.

Let's assume the two thugs were wired on something. (Between you and me, I'd bet only too many people are thinking precisely that - me, I'll wait for a toxicology report, if any is being done.) In a sense, it wouldn't matter. Why? Because if you commit a crime it doesn't (it shouldn't) matter whether you had consumed cocaine, Coca-Cola, cold cuts, or chicken cutlets just prior to committing the crime. Jumping and beating up an older man from behind is still assault and battery no matter what they'd consumed before they jumped him. And, from the look and sound of these two birds, they didn't impress me at first as being guys who needed to get high before getting obnoxious and even violent.

Whether we are as far gone into barbarism as you fear is not something I would be prepared to say empirically, though I suspect we are still not even close (if I'm right about this, thank God for it and no praise to me for it). I sometimes think it's not so much we are more barbaric as it is the barbaric among us, whom we will never eradicate entirely, simply choose to practise their barbarism far more spectacularly than those of our earlier generations. And because of the spectacle, it becomes too easy to think we're halfway gone and a short distance to go completely beyond the edges.

But perhaps if we started getting back to punishing the damn crime, period-dot-period, without bothering about who ate, drank, smoked, injected, inhaled what before they did the crime, we just might be a lot better off. I cannot easily accept that one murder is less evil than the other murder based upon whom between the two consumed certain somethings. If anything, I could just about believe that a murder committed stone cold sober and in completely sound mind - God only knows how many such murders have been committed - might well strike as far more evil.

I have nothing further to say to you. You have accused me of saying things I did not say, and you have attributed to me words or sentiments which I clearly enough attributed to others.

Look at this thread. The record is clear.

At worst, I could be said to accuse the White Sox of temporary indifference, which are not the same thing as cowardice. I have not once accused them of cowardice, and I would not do so, because I do not think cowardice was involved in this disgrace. I made it a specific point of saying to you earlier that I have heard others make the charge. I thought at the time I heard them (for your information, I made it a point of listening to the sports radio people Friday morning; I had switched to a particular political talk show in my area in the afternoon and that host actually came right out and used the C word, too. And I still think now that they were, if you'll pardon the expression, off base. Inaction - or perhaps the better term is momentary indifference, who knows - is not equivalent to cowardice in all situations.

If you fingerpointers would consider the situation fully, there would be no need to call the players or the city of Chicago any names over this incident. You attacked the entire city of Chicago. It's on this thread.

Something else we should probably thank God for: that at least concerning baseball games, fans like this pair of beauties are the rare enough exceptions, rather than the rule. We could all probably think of those sports where fans like this are practically an every-game occurrence.

I have still never forgotten maybe the most disgraceful thing I have ever seen of fan behaviour involving any major sporting event or team sport: in an NHL playoff game during the 1980s, the New York Islanders playing the New York Rangers in Madison Square Garden. (This was during the Islanders' stupefying early 1980s streak of four straight Stanley Cups.) An Islander (his name escapes my memory for the moment) got badly enough injured on a bone-crunching bodycheck that he was taken off the ice and to the hospital. Well, now. As medical technicians were loading the injured player aboard the ambulance, a pack of Ranger fans outside the Garden actually tried tipping the ambulance over. Almost two decades later, that grotesquery still jars. (I still remember the Rangers themselves, almost to a man, condemning those "fans" after they learned of the incident - and you're talking about one of the most grinding rivalries in the NHL.) Not even in the worst of an NFL or a soccer crowd have I known of anything like that to happen.

Personally (and I said this in my original article) I think that majority crowd at Comiskey Park should get a standing O for the way they gave Mr. Gamboa the standing O as he was brought to his feet and escorted for help.

Oh, please. "Chicago Hall of Shame" doesn't refer to the whole damn city, it refers a hypothetical institution within the city (a city I happen to like - I have been there a few times, though when I think about baseball I'm more likely to go to a Cubs game because I'm so fond of Wrigley Field), even if it might be only in the city's mind. Which is precisely where I'm sure this incident has been enshrined. And appropriately so.

I've never heard of it. It's fans like you that always assume the worst of players that makes sports events hard to watch or discuss. There are bad apples in sports but to just shoot off your mouth like you did without knowing the facts, and not even knowing for sure who the first baseman was or what he saw, or even what he said about it is totally unfair, gossip mongering, and false accusatory. Have you seen another angle of it that may show the Royals on the way before the ump or the player even saw the situation?

The Hall of Shame bit is actually more common an analogic device than you might think. (Surely you have heard people in debate punctuate an argument against someone's thought, word, act, with, "Put 'im in the Hall of Shame"? Well, here's where I would say, "Put 'em in the Chicago Hall of Shame." That sort of thing.)

But I happen to know a) that Paul Konerko is the White Sox first baseman, b) that second baseman Willie Harris was covering first on a bunt play that occurred just prior to the jerkwater twins jumping the rail and blindsiding the Royals' coach (in fairness, I'd be willing to bet you that as time passes a lot of people will forget the play which occured just prior to the jerkwater twins' entry onto the field - just like people forget, for example, that the 1926 World Series ended not with Grover Cleveland Alexander coming in hung over from the St. Louis bullpen to strike out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded, but with Babe Ruth getting caught stealing at second with Bob Meusel at bat and Lou Gehrig on deck), c) that Konerko returned to first after the play and just before the rail jumpers jumped, ran and struck, was still closer than anyone else short of the first base umpire to the attack.

Incidentally, when I criticised those radio hosts who alluded to whatever the second baseman did or did not say about the incident, I thought I made it clear enough that they were leveling a charge that could not be proven, but that I was leveling no such charge. (I alluded to having tried to find any such quote from the second baseman in the Chicago or the Kansas City press, the media groups most likely to have picked up on such a comment - I mean, this wasn't exactly a pennant-significant game, and I don't think ESPN would have had too many reporters covering the game at the ballpark in such a case. And I thought I also said that, having found no such quote from that second baseman, he would owe an apology if he said it but he would be owed an apology if he did not say it. That isn't the same thing as me accusing him of saying it. I'll admit that if he did say it I would have been dismayed about it, but without a confirmation that he said any such thing, I wasn't going to jump him the way the radio hosts I heard alluding to it jumped him.)

All that said, I almost can't wait to know what the jerkwater twins who started the whole business say about it in court, if they get there. (With the courts and the lawyers these days, who knows?) I'd almost pay money to sit in court hearing them say what they told the press as they were being carted off to the can: "He flipped us and got what he deserved."

By the way, one more regarding the Hall of Shame bit: there was a charmingly funny series of books written by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo called The Baseball Hall of Shame - stories of the game's classic foulups, bleeps, blunders, and even batteries. The twosome also wrote a hugely funny book called The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book. Perfect reading on a dreary morning such as exists outside my window in Huntington Beach this morning. Now, I don't think their title indicated baseball itself is a Hall of Shame. Neither, I think, would you. :)

Found this in this morning's Chicago Tribune...

Commissioner Bud Selig has seen many shocking things around ballparks, but rates the attack on Kansas City first base coach Tom Gamboa "near the top" of that list.

"I was stunned," Selig said. "This was just one of those horrifying things you see and you're just overwhelmed that it happened."

Selig's first call Friday morning went to Major League Baseball's executive vice president Sandy Alderson, who was ordered to join White Sox officials in an investigation of the incident. But Selig is not expecting it to turn up any major flaws in stadium procedures at Comiskey Park.

I'm glad our alleged commissioner at least had something to say about it. (Confession: I am not even close to being one of Bud Selig's fans...)

You forget two small details: 1) The White Sox had a better sighting of the two thugs than the Royals' coach had. They saw the bastards first and could have - should have - stopped them from getting anywhere near him. Unless, of course, you think a 54-year-old coach whose days as a full-time athlete are well enough behind him is better able to protect himself from a blindside attack than a 20-something full-time athlete who sees the attack coming before the intended victim does.

What I also want to know is where the heck were the White Sox's security. It seems like there are always plenty of guards around to prevent fans from sitting in vacated box seats during the later innings, yet here not one but two idiots jump onto the field and nobody stops them!

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