Prince (History/New York Univ.) turns both an academic's and a
fan's eye on the great love of his youth, the Brooklyn Dodgers.
What is it about Dem Bums? Perhaps no other sports team has
inspired such love, bordering on obsession, in its fans. No other
team has inspired such lasting feelings of loss and betrayal by its
departure from a community. Prince should be well equipped to
answer the question of why this is so. He grew up in Brooklyn a
diehard Dodger fan, the son of two diehard Dodger fans. This book,
essentially nine interconnecting essays, treats the Dodger
phenomenon from a variety of historical perspectives, touching the
now familiar bases of current scholarship: race, class, gender, and
ethnicity. In a racially, ethnically, and religiously balkanized
borough, Prince claims, the Dodgers "inject a generally soothing
common ground." The team was also, he argues, "the most overtly
political sports team of the postwar decade," a judgment engendered
not just by the presence of Jackie Robinson and its repercussions,
but by the rabid anticommunism of the borough, a political stance
in which the team willingly participated, with red-baiting Branch
Rickey in the lead. At the same time, the Dodgers seemed an equally
willing embodiment of the American "melting pot" in a town riven
with ethnic tensions. Prince is a witty observer, and there are
some interesting insights here, but too much of the book has a
second-hand feel, and the author repeats himself from essay to
essay. Any one of the essays in this book could be profitably
expanded into a book of its own; as they stand here, they are just
too slight. A slender volume that other diehard Dodger fans will
undoubtedly want to own. If you rooted for anyone else during the
'50s, skip it. (Kirkus Reviews)
During the 1952 World Series, a Yankee fan trying to watch the game
in a Brooklyn bar was told, "Why don't you go back where you
belong, Yankee lover?" "I got a right to cheer my team," the
intruder responded, "this is a free country." "This ain't no free
country, chum," countered the Dodger fan, "this is Brooklyn."
Brooklynites loved their "Bums"--Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson,
Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and all the murderous parade of
regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series
in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of
devotion to its baseball club.
In Brooklyn's Dodgers, Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and
depth of the team's relationship to the community and its people in
the 1950s. Ethnic and racial tensions were part and parcel of a
working class borough; the Dodgers' presence smoothed the rough
edges of the ghetto conflict always present in the life of
Brooklyn. The Dodger-inspired baseball program at the fabled Parade
Grounds provided a path for boys that occasionally led to the
prestigious "Dodger Rookie Team," and sometimes, via minor league
contracts, to Ebbets Field itself. There were the boys who lined
Bedford Avenue on game days hoping to retrieve home run balls and
the men in the many bars who were not only devoted fans but
collectively the keepers of the Dodger past--as were Brooklyn
women, and in numbers. Indeed, women were tied to the Dodgers no
less than their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons; they were
only less visible. A few, like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne
Moore and working class stiff Hilda Chester were regulars at Ebbets
Field and far from invisible. Prince also explores the underside of
the Dodgers--the "baseball Annies," and the paternity suits that
went with the territory. The Dodgers' male culture was played out
as well in the team's politics, in the owners' manipulation of
Dodger male egos, opponents' race-baiting, and the macho bravado of
the team (how Jackie Robinson, for instance, would prod Giants'
catcher Sal Yvars to impotent rage by signaling him when he was
going to steal second base, then taunting him from second after the
steal).
The day in 1957 when Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn
Dodgers, announced that the team would be leaving for Los Angeles
was one of the worst moments in baseball history, and a sad day in
Brooklyn's history as well. The Dodger team was, to a degree
unmatched in other major league cities, deeply enmeshed in the life
and psyche of Brooklyn and its people. In this superb volume, Carl
Prince illuminates this "Brooklyn" in the golden years after the
Second World War.
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