By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
Anyone who knows me for any length of time knows I am a huge history buff.
The study of history has fascinated me since I was a small child. My grandmother taught eighth-grade history in Columbus for many years, and she passed her love of history on to me.
She was on the textbook committee for the Columbus Public Schools back in the early 1960s, and any sample history texts that weren’t selected for classes she sent to me, all of which I devoured.
The study of history doesn’t just entail the study of what happened, but why, and that often leads to a study of what didn’t happen but could have.
Counterfactuals – the what-ifs of history – are a useful sideline to the study of history. Parsing the potential effects of an alternate telling of events goes a long way into studying what actually did happen and why it happened the way it did.
These counterfactuals can be benign, they can be amusing or they can be controversial.
For example, there is an entire book, called Dixie Rising, which collects essays from noted Civil War historians surrounding the premise that the South won the war and achieved its independence.
And counterfactuals have a long history in sports. Every fan of every team in every sport has an alternate view of a key event in their team’s history, such as New Orleans Saints fans pondering the what-ifs from the recent NFC Championship Game.
Recently, while browsing the shelves at a local bookstore I came across one such collection, titled Upon Further Review, edited by Mike Pesca, who hosts a podcast on Slate called The Gist.
Upon Further Review, published last year by Twelvebooks.com, collects 31 essays by a wide range of writers, not all of them sports writers, who create their favorite counterfactuals.
Some tackle serious sociological issues, such as what would have happened if Muhammad Ali had gotten his draft deferment in 1967, if Major League Baseball had begun steroid testing in 1991 or if Title IX had never happened.
A few are just too absurd for words, like one that asks what would have happened if tug-of-war hadn’t been dropped as an Olympic sport in 1921 (really?) and another that posits the assertion that a blimp full of money had exploded over World Track headquarters in Philadelphia in 1952, leading track and field to becoming the sport of choice for urban blacks over basketball.
A few offer intriguing alternatives involving superstar players, like one that asks what would have happened if Wayne Gretzky had not played for the Edmonton Oilers or if Drew Bledsoe hadn’t gotten hurt in 2001, leading to the dawn of Tom Brady’s legendary career with the New England Patriots.
One flips Bucky Dent’s famous home run over the Green Monster at Fenway Park for the New York Yankees into Jerry Remy hitting a game-winning homer just inside the Pesky Pole in right field for the Boston Red Sox in the 1978 American League East playoff game.
By the way, the writer of that particular fantasy, Stefan Fatsis, is a die-hard Yankees fan who gives a very good account of how a group of four high school kids might have ditched class to attend that game with just enough money to scalp tickets and buy a round-trip train ticket from New York to Boston, which is almost as much fun as the alternate-game commentary.
But of all of them, the centerpiece is one that is still debated hotly among baseball fans, especially those in New York, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.
Written by Robert Siegel, host of National Public Radio’s program All Things Considered, it is written as a counterfactual within a counterfactual. That is, it posits what really happened as the alternate history. Tricky, but it works.
Siegel’s thesis is that Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley was able to get the Governor of New York at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, to help him get the stadium location O’Malley wanted on the waterfront in downtown Brooklyn, and the Dodgers stayed in New York.
A little actual history is in order here. It is a matter of record that O’Malley desperately wanted to stay in Brooklyn. But he was stuck with Ebbets Field, a decaying stadium in rapidly-deteriorating neighborhood with no parking and located six blocks from the nearest subway station.
O’Malley had funding for a stadium, with plenty of parking and mass transit access, but not to purchase the land, so he needed Title I funding help from the City of New York.
He had an ideal location picked out (which, ironically, is now the site of the Barclays Arena, which opened in 2012), but NYC city planner Robert Moses – who was the unelected czar of the city – wanted to build the Dodgers a stadium in Queens, near where the city ultimately built Shea Stadium and later, Citi Field.
O’Malley refused, arguing that, “I could be 30 miles or 3,000 miles outside Brooklyn and it’s not going to matter to me.” O’Malley and Moses could not reach an agreement, and when the City of Los Angeles made O’Malley an offer he couldn’t refuse, he broke Brooklyn’s heart and moved the Dodgers to California, taking the New York Giants with him to San Francisco.
In Siegel’s alternate history, the Giants moved to Minneapolis, the Dodgers stayed put and the new Dodgers Stadium sparked a renaissance in Brooklyn that led in 1970 to Brooklyn seceding from New York City and becoming its own city again, with O’Malley as the new mayor.
And it was the Cubs who abandoned the North Side of Chicago to become the National League’s Los Angeles Angels. It’s not in the narrative, but I would presume then that the old Washington Senators, instead of becoming the Minnesota Twins, moved to L.A. and became the AL’s California Earthquakes (or whatever). Fascinating stuff.
One can, of course, apply counterfactuals to local sports history as well, none more so than the question of what would have happened if the University of Southern Mississippi had hired Blake Anderson or Todd Monken, both of whom were finalists for the job, as its head football coach in 2011 after Larry Fedora announced he was leaving for North Carolina.
As Golden Eagle fans recall painfully, USM hired retread Ellis Johnson, who “guided” the team to an 0-12 season, one year after it finished 11-2 and won the Conference USA championship game, obliterating a streak of 17 consecutive winning seasons.
To be perfectly honest, due to a large number of key graduation losses and a couple of mediocre recruiting classes, it was clear that Southern Miss was going to struggle in 2012 no matter who was the coach.
But you can’t tell me that Anderson or Monken couldn’t have gotten four or five wins out of that team if they’d been in charge, enough to keep interest and spirits reasonably high, or that they wouldn’t have brought in a much better recruiting class in February of 2012 to begin the reloading project.
And they certainly wouldn’t have committed Johnson’s most grievous sin, which was eviscerating what had been a rock-solid strength and weight program that ultimately left Monken, when he was finally hired after the 0-12 debacle, with a junior college-caliber offensive line in 2013 and 2014, which resulted in seasons of 1-11 and 3-9 respectively.
Although Southern Miss has regained some of its pride and been back to a couple of bowls in recent seasons, interest and attendance have continued to lag in the wake of the Ellis Johnson disaster, which serves as an object lesson for the future.
More than anything else, then, by creating an alternate version of events, counterfactuals are a good exercise in learning from earlier mistakes and (hopefully) not repeating them.
Upon Further Review is a brisk page-turner, an easy read, and if you have any interest in sports history, I highly recommend it.
Stan Caldwell is a 35-year veteran sports writer in the Hattiesburg area, and most recently served as sports information director at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi.
