Tigerland Read online

  ALSO BY WIL HAYGOOD

  Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America

  The Butler: A Witness to History

  Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson

  In Black and White: the Life of Sammy Davis Jr.

  The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir

  King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

  Two on the River (photography by Stan Grossfeld)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Wil Haygood

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haygood, Wil, author.

  Title: Tigerland : 1968-1969, a city divided, a nation torn apart, and a magical season of healing / by Wil Haygood.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018002138 | ISBN 9781524731861 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524731878 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Basketball—Ohio—Columbus—History. | Baseball—Ohio—Columbus—History. | East High School (Columbus, Ohio)—History | Race relations—Ohio—Columbus—History. | Columbus (Ohio)—Biography. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Baseball / General. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Basketball.

  Classification: LCC GV885.73.C65 H68 2018 | DDC 796.32309771/57—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002138

  Ebook ISBN 9781524731878

  Cover design by Tyler Comrie

  v5.3.2

  ep

  For Phyllis Callahan, and Paul Pennell

  & in memory of Jack Gibbs and Bob Hart

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Wil Haygood

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: 1968, Reverend King Passed This Way

  Part I

  1 Down to the River

  2 Eddie Rat Meets the Afro-Wearing Bo-Pete

  3 The House That Jack Built

  4 Momentum

  5 Keeping Food in the Pantry

  6 So Many Dreams in the Segregated City

  7 Panthers and Tigers, Oh My

  8 The Church Where Martin Luther King Jr. Preached

  9 St. John Arena

  Part II

  10 The Ballad of Jackie Robinson

  11 Twilight at Harley Field

  12 Robert Duncan and Richard Nixon’s America

  13 The Catcher in the Storm

  14 Ghosts of the Blue Birds

  15 Off into the World

  16 Blood in Ohio

  17 Sins Laid Bare

  Epilogue: Still Standing

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Prologue

  1968

  Reverend King Passed This Way

  They were poor boys wedged into the turmoil of a nation at war and in the midst of unrest. They were the sons of maids and dishwashers and cafeteria workers, poor as pennies and too proud to beg, but not to ask or borrow. Their mothers were among the large waves of those who had come from the Deep South, a sojourn begun in the early part of the twentieth century known as the Great Migration. The Pacific coast and the Midwest were favored destinations. Families had fled by train or bus, escaping all those cotton fields and scenes of raw injustice. Columbus, Ohio, was a stop on the above-ground railroad where families had come praying for new opportunities. The boys’ fathers were mostly absent. Garnett Davis, the gifted third baseman on the baseball team, had a father, but he was stuck down in South Carolina, on a damn chain gang. Nick Conner, the pogo-jumping basketball player, had a father too, but one who had abandoned the family for another life in Cleveland. Basketball player Robert Wright’s father had murdered a man. Kenny Mizelle, who played second base, sometimes dreamed about his dead father. At least that’s what he had been told all these years, that his dad was dead. But he wasn’t. Boys will be boys, and blood rolls thick, and when it comes to fathers, it often rolls backward. Their mothers could only implore them to look ahead, especially so because it was a tricky and dangerous time.

  The year 1968 began convulsing and flaming its way toward 1969. There was deep tumult on the streets of America. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had tried to do something about it all—the poverty, the absence of fathers that cut to the bone of despair, the pitiful condition of black men and the uneven social fabric of America. But these boys were athletes—sinewy, quick, and agile basketball and baseball players—blessed with a unique talent that, with the start of 1968, they were hoping could ward off the darkness that seemed to be engulfing their community. They were the Tigers of East High School.

  Some of them lived in single-family homes that fronted a fertilizer plant—and the obligatory railroad tracks—just off Leonard Avenue. Some lived in Poindexter Village, the government-funded public housing project, one of the first of its kind in the nation. (President Franklin D. Roosevelt had even come to the city for the dedication. Crowds had lined the streets as he cruised by in a convertible.) Still others lived in old apartment buildings behind Mount Vernon Avenue, where the bars and speakeasies were, where the gamblers sauntered about like roosters. Laws and boundaries had been drawn against their families long before they were born, consigning them to a segregated world on the East Side of this midwestern city. They were black boys in a white world, running, jumping, and excelling inside that world.

  They played most of their basketball games through that cold winter in a converted rodeo cow palace on the Ohio State Fairgrounds, where you could still get whiffs of the horse manure, but no one seemed to mind as the East High Tigers couldn’t stop winning. The gym at the high school couldn’t accommodate the thousands who wanted to see them play. Their games were often broadcast on radio, an uncommon occurrence at the time for any high school basketball team. Come baseball season the crowds vanished. At the away baseball games, there would sometimes be only one fan in the bleachers rooting for the Tigers, and that was the coach’s wife. The boys actually didn’t mind playing their baseball games away, in and around rural Ohio, because the baseball diamonds were better at the other schools. They simply set about swinging their bats and blasting the ball into the cornfields. They looked like figures out of Negro league baseball, that professional and segregated league which was by now almost two decades removed from existence. The umpires—white men raised in segregation—sometimes would gawk at the East High players with awe. They were so proud at game’s end, tired and smiling as the farmland receded into view on the ride back home. The proud black boys never complained about the well-to-do schools and all their fancy equipment. They realized they didn’t have the luxury of escaping the crazy and murderous times. They were in the center of it all.

  Martin Luther King Jr.’s presence hovers over that season. Rev. Phale Hale was the unofficial minister of the East High basketball and baseball teams. He had known King from his own Geor
gia days and was the first to bring the prophet of black America to Columbus. The gunning down of King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, was an awful deed that unleashed riot and rebellion from Los Angeles all the way to the east coast itself. Small pockets of Columbus burned on the city’s East Side. In nearby Indianapolis, 168 miles west of Columbus, Bobby Kennedy spoke movingly of King’s death, and blacks and whites were weeping around him like a gospel chorus. Then, like King, Kennedy also fell after being shot by a crazed assassin. Hale had counseled these East High athletes with King-like optimism. He had told them to hold on. He had told them change was going to come. Now, with King’s death, Hale, who had given the citywide eulogy for King, was himself emotionally spent. King and his wife, Coretta, had slept in Rev. Hale’s home. It seemed, at ground level, that a nation was unraveling.

  It was a year of endless apocalypse. King and Kennedy had warned that black and white must come together, though King long before and with much more passion than Kennedy. But now the question loomed: What integration? East High, in the 1968–69 school year, and in spite of integration laws, remained an all-black school. In the fall of 1968 when Jack Gibbs—the first black principal at East High—opened the doors to the cavernous school, he did not know what to expect. It had been a hellish summer. He confided to his wife, Ruth, that he was worried that some returning students might think of the all-black school as a laboratory now for dissension and protest. He vowed not to let that happen. The air was uneasy and unpredictable when the doors swung open and the school bells rang out.

  Gibbs had his own tortured story. He had escaped Harlan, Kentucky, a dangerous coal mining town where he had seen murderous deeds on the dirt streets. In Columbus he worked nights, finished high school, and got into Ohio State University, where he played football. He was a benchwarmer, but had gotten into a very important game (Michigan, of course) and made the play that turned the game around. In time he found himself on East Broad Street, at East High School, on the fault lines of rise or ruin, depending on which side of the street you stood.

  The basketball and baseball players of 1968–69 at East High had their own narrative arc to create. They would brush away the fires of discontent and neighborhood pain, replacing it all with a far more glorious timepiece: They would become statewide champions and even heroes amid the upheaval. They would give the citizenry something to remember from that year other than fire and death and haunted dreams.

  Both teams had white coaches, Bob Hart in basketball and Paul Pennell in baseball, big-hearted men who had a social conscience. Hart was a product of rural Ohio and had survived the landing at Normandy during World War II. He came home from the war with medals. And also with a sickening feeling about all he had seen in the military but particularly how badly blacks were treated. In the mid-1950s he took a job at all-black East High. Other white teachers cried their way out of assignments there; he exulted in the posting. “Basketball in the ’60s became a place where the black kid could show off his talent,” is how Bob Hart put it regarding the social and political forces at play. “And there was a different breed of kid. They were hungry.” Pennell, the baseball coach, hailed from the West Side of Columbus, known as the most inhospitable part of town when it came to integration. He was in his early twenties and given the baseball job almost as an afterthought. What he aimed to do was prove to the outside world—anyone beyond this segregated neighborhood—that black boys could play baseball. Because there were so many people who needed reminding.

  Amid all the pain—the martyred deaths, the glass-strewn streets, the military tanks patrolling the neighborhoods, the city’s intermittent juvenile curfew—change was indeed coming. And some of it came in the form of two statewide athletic championships happening just sixty days apart. Blacks, especially, had never witnessed such a collective and back-to-back example of athletic prowess. In a city without a professional major league sports team of any kind, a high school could take on a feverish dimension—not to mention a cult following. Blacks held no political strength in the city, but they did now have athletic strength. The nation may have been on fire, and those embers still burning, but these championships were both undeniable and fortifying. They seemed, in their own unique way, to say to those who needed uplifting: Hold on.

  It was here, through the fall, winter, and spring of 1968 and 1969, when a season of glory unfolded that would make national history. It was here, in the storefronts up and down Mount Vernon Avenue, that the salesmen and saleswomen began, at first, pinning those portraits of the slain Martin Luther King Jr. to the storefront windows. Then a short while later—to the same walls and windows—they began pinning up portraits of those basketball and baseball players from the neighborhood. A dreamer was shot down, but the prophet had left more than just anguish behind. Twenty-seven limber black boys across two sports would rise up through the smoke. They had something to prove to the world.

  This is the story of how it all happened.

  PART I

  · 1 ·

  Down to the River

  He was born in 1924 in Columbus, Ohio, in a tight-knit community on the city’s South Side. It may have been the Roaring Twenties, but Columbus, located in the middle of the state, was a relatively quiet state capital. Cleveland, at the time, had genuine gangsters. Cincinnati had inept gangsters. In Newport, Kentucky, however—just across the river from Cincinnati—the gangsters really gained a foothold during the Prohibition era. Bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution were rampant. Frank Sinatra was just one of the Hollywood stars who popped in for a visit. As for Columbus, it had Republicans, state office workers, and farmland extending in all directions from the center of town. (The Columbus gangsters would, however, make a bit of noise in the late 1960s because of illicit gambling.) It was the annexation of suburban land in succeeding years that would be the cause of the city’s noticeable growth.

  His given name was James Robert Hart, but he would always go by Bob. Families at the time tended to have multiple children, the better to keep the engine of family life humming. Children created hope and a belief that the times would surely get better. As well, children, in time, meant more family earning power. But Jimmy Hart and his wife, Mirza Mae, stopped having children after their little Bob was born. Friends and relatives wondered if the child would be spoiled, such was the attention that his mother, Mirza, heaped on him. But little Bob never complained about being an only child, and he never took on an air of entitlement just because he had his parents all to himself. As the years rolled on, he acquired an independent streak. Other children on the South Side—a brew of whites and blacks who mostly got along—marveled at his sense of discipline. Teachers thought young Bob Hart wise beyond his years. Being an only child, he learned to do for himself when Mom or Dad wasn’t around. He found camaraderie in sports, honing decent enough skills in basketball, baseball, and football.

  Jimmy Hart worked at Union Station, the downtown railway station. Sometimes he’d take little Bobby down there, and his son would gawk at all the Negroes, as they were often called then, bunching about: They had just arrived from southern states. Jimmy Hart’s most common trip was the St. Louis run. On one of those runs Jimmy met famed actress Mae West. He could hardly contain his excitement. “He said she was the most beautiful girl in the world,” Jimmy’s granddaughter, Sherri, remembers. Money was tight during the Depression, and the times were hard for most everyone. Bob’s mother, Mirza Mae, worked as a waitress. She was sweet, loud, and exuberant. Neighbors whispered behind her back about her shameless loudness. She chuckled their snickering away. The Hart parents were respectful of the local black citizenry. Jimmy Hart had worked alongside black Pullman porters on all those railway runs; Mirza Mae’s fun-loving manner seemed to preclude meanness toward others, no matter their racial identity. If the Harts doted on their only son, his affection for them was deep as well. Dinner conversations were full of spirited talk about train travel and the outside world.

  At South Hi
gh, young Bob began to appreciate basketball more than the other sports he played. He liked the nuance of talent, the comraderie on the court, the mechanics of the game and how fast it moved. He noted that selfishness could disrupt a team of gifted athletes as quickly as could an injury.

  After graduating from South High School in 1942—when the nation was jittery and mired in war—Bob Hart enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University, a small Methodist school in Delaware, Ohio, a rural community only thirty miles from his home. He arrived at the school with a continuing interest in sports—as well as a social conscience—and made both the basketball and baseball teams. He wrote letters to his girlfriend, Jean Woodyard, back in Columbus. During his occasional visits home to see his parents, he and Jean went on picnics and snuck away to the homes of friends to drink beer. She was attracted to his focus and his dependability. Bob Hart was no ladies’ man and didn’t try to be. He wore thick glasses and was already a little larger than the average high school boy. He was also serene, fastidious, exact, and particular about his likes and dislikes—sometimes to the point of annoyance—but these were traits that Jean found appealing. The letters he wrote to her were more flowery than her letters to him; he saw the difference, and it only heightened his doubts about her love for him. “Hi Sweetheart,” he wrote her while on a fishing getaway to Buckeye Lake. “I am having a swell time…Have been missing you a lot. Wish you were here. Are you missing me? I love you, Bob.” At times he was so insecure that his mother felt the depths of that insecurity. She’d write Jean telling her how much Bob loved her, and imploring Jean not to tell Bob she had written.