The Tigers, Burning Bright in Detroit
The year was 1968. I was 10 years old, and Detroit was still smoldering from the worst urban riot in American history. The insurrection of the year before had left 43 dead, hundreds injured and thousands of businesses burned to the ground. I had watched federal troops, with orders to shoot looters on sight, taking up positions on my street, in front of the burned-out store and the barbershop I used to visit.
Now we all feared that another explosion was imminent. A months-long newspaper strike was stoking the unease, as rumors spread wildly every weekend. Residents began stocking firearms for protection -- I remember my father hiding a bolt-action rifle wrapped in an old blue blanket in a crawl space beneath our basement, and making sure that everyone in the house knew where to find it.
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But Detroit didn't blow up again that year. And a lot of the reason was the Detroit Tigers.
It may seem unlikely that a baseball team could help heal a broken city and prevent another riot. But for Detroiters like me who are old enough to remember, that is precisely what the 1968 World Series champion Tigers accomplished. Over that long sweltering summer and into October, the city took a pause from its problems, forgot about race and became transfixed by the most exciting competition in memory. Instead of a riot, there was a celebration that year, a citywide street party.
Detroit today is desperately in need of a party. The news from the city, and the state, is depressingly familiar of late. Layoffs and buyouts in the automobile industry. A Michigan unemployment rate of 7.1 percent; 13.8 percent in the city. Detroit is the poorest of the nation's large urban centers, with one-third of its residents living in poverty. Total population has plunged to just under 887,000 -- a low not seen since before 1920. And while Detroit is no longer the homicide capital of the United States, the label "Murder City" -- a play on "Motor City" -- has stuck like burned rubber to asphalt.
I left the city in 1976 for college in Ann Arbor, and eventually a job in Washington. I went overseas for nearly two decades, to Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe. But over all those years away, I witnessed Detroit's slow decline through my yearly trips back to visit my family and friends. I've seen slums in lots of places -- Manila and Nairobi and Bangkok and Jakarta. Those were usually overcrowded, teeming. Detroit's old neighborhoods, by contrast, took on an empty, lifeless feel.
The neighborhood where I grew up, Grand River and McGraw, near the epicenter of the '67 riot, has been largely abandoned; most of the small single-family detached houses are boarded up and dilapidated, or have given way to empty lots overgrown with weeds. The few elderly aunts and cousins of mine who remain in the old neighborhood live like prisoners, their front doors and windows barricaded with metal bars. Around the time I graduated from college, my parents moved away to a "safer" neighborhood on the city's western edge, bordering on Dearborn -- after our house on McGraw Street was burglarized for the fifth time. After they left, it was eventually torched by arsonists and burned to the ground. Many friends left the state. Most of those who stayed moved to the suburbs -- even the ones who used to say they'd never live in the suburbs.
Through all my trips back, though, there have always been a few constants. There are the friends who stayed, and who stayed in touch. There's the American Coney Island restaurant downtown on Lafayette Street, still run by the Keros family. And of course, there are the Tigers. No visit home in the summer ever seems complete without a trip to the ballpark -- no matter what their record that year, or whom they're playing.
The Tigers mirror their city: They never get any respect. With one of the worst records in baseball -- they lost an improbable 119 games three years ago, setting a modern record -- they, like their city, have been the butt of jokes, a national laughingstock. My friends from cities with consistently winning baseball teams (think New Yorkers) shake their heads uncomprehendingly: How can anybody continue to love such a lousy team, especially years after moving away from the city?
To know what longtime fans and Detroiters see in their Tigers is to understand how much the team has meant to the city -- and how much it has remained an integral part of it -- especially in the worst of times. The nationwide '68 riots accelerated a white flight to the suburbs north of 8 Mile Road, leaving Detroit an impoverished shell. I remember feeling abandoned as a teenager when the professional football team, the Lions, followed the flight and moved to Pontiac in 1975, and again when the basketball team, the Pistons, left in 1978. (The Red Wings hockey team stayed in the city, moving from their home at Olympia Stadium in the heart of what was the riot zone -- and a block from my old family house on McGraw Street -- to an arena on the downtown waterfront in 1979.)
But through the hard-hit '70s and '80s, the Tigers stayed put in their familiar home -- Tiger Stadium, at Trumbell Street and Michigan Avenue, in the old working class neighborhood known as Corktown, whose waves of immigrants morphed from Irish to Maltese to African American and Hispanic. On game nights, the stadium sounds drifted out to the single-family houses on Trumbell; you could follow each pitch on the transistor radios that broadcast from nearly every porch on those summer evenings. As a kid, I often couldn't afford a ticket, but I could listen to the games outside, on the street.
In 2000, the Tigers finally moved, leaving Tiger Stadium behind. Their new home, Comerica Park, is right downtown, a few blocks from the old Fox Theater where I used to hear Motown bands perform in the 1960s. The Tigers' move to Comerica has been part of a revitalization of a blighted downtown area. Some of the old buildings around the new park are being turned into lofts; a decade of middle-class flight is slowly being reversed, as a few young professionals, black and white, trickle back in.
It's fitting that the team should be at the center of this fledgling rejuvenation. The Tigers have managed to come through repeatedly at crucial points in Detroit history. They did so in 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, by winning their first World Series. In the early 1980s, with the U.S. auto industry in the throes of its first painful restructuring and the Reagan administration cutting off federal funding to the city, they did it again, winning the series a third time.
But never was the Tigers' role more important than in 1968.
Like many parents, mine had planned to send me to the safety of relatives in the South that summer. Instead, we spent nights gathered around the radio listening to the broadcasts of the night games as the Tigers chased the pennant.
I had memorized the names and positions of the '68 Tigers so well that I could probably have recited them in my sleep. I collected the iron-on T-shirt transfers for each of the players -- and quickly ran out of white T-shirts for all their faces. There was Denny McLain, pitching his record 31-win season. And Mickey Lolich, the lefthander who became the series hero. There was Al Kaline and Gates "The Gater" Brown and Willie Horton and Bill Freehan and Jim Northrup. There were only three black players on the team -- Brown, Horton and Earl Wilson -- but in our minds that year, there was no black and no white. If you lived in Detroit, all the players were heroes, and you collected all their pictures and posters.
Robert Ficano, the executive of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, remembers playing baseball as a suburban teenager in 1967 and stopping to watch the National Guard helicopters flying low overhead, heading for the disturbances in Detroit. And he also recalls huddling around the transistor radio with his father the next year to follow the games, and watching the '68 World Series. Then, as now, the Tigers inspired a battered city and state. Whenever it seemed that the city could go no further down, "suddenly the Tigers came and gave everybody hope," Ficano says. Just last year, the team was down and out. But once again it has demonstrated that "if you believe and do the right thing, you can come out of it," he adds.
The Tigers' success this year is likely to bring their city a tangible economic boost. The Anderson Economic Group in East Lansing estimates that for every World Series game played at Comerica Park, the city stands to gain about $9.5 million in revenue -- on top of $5.5 million for each of the American League Championship games played there. The playoffs plus the World Series could net the city a total of about $71.7 million, according to the AEG estimates.
And there may be an intangible benefit as well, however temporary. The Tigers can't bring back the factory jobs being lost. They can't fix the crumbling schools or expand the city's tax base. But for a few weeks in October, and maybe beyond, they can cancel out the most negative perceptions the world has of my hometown. They can once again give Detroiters something to be proud of.
Keith B. Richburg is The Post's foreign editor.
