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Reviewed by:
  • A City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers, and: Nine Innings from Ground Zero
  • Frank Ardolino (bio)
Rick Bernstein, Ross Greenburg, and Dan Klein. A City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers. HBO Sports, 2002.
Rick Bernstein, Ross Greenburg, and Joseph M. Lavine. Nine Innings from Ground Zero. HBO Sports, 2004.

These documentaries are united by their celebration of the role of baseball—as a game, communal institution, and national tradition—in providing relief from social and political violence during two tumultuous periods of U.S. history. [End Page 175] They interweave the sports events featured, two World Series, with their historical and social contexts and thus provide a dual perspective: the sports highlights and player testimonies recall the exciting games, which are then given importance beyond the ball field. When viewed in tandem they also reveal the triple tenses of documentaries: the times they depict, the time they were issued, and the time we view them. We are still in the 9/11 fallout period, engaged in a brutal and seemingly unending war in Iraq, so this recognition affects our response to the emotional elements in the "ground zero" documentary. In addition, the Yankees' return to being the bad guys, who finally were defeated by the Red Sox to reverse the curse, and the ongoing steroid scandal have tempered our reactions to the presentation of New York baseball as national savior. By contrast the earlier documentary concerns events that are now almost forty years old and thus pass easily into an historical context detached from our current malaise.

City on Fire opens in Detroit in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, at a "blind pig," an illegal after-hours joint in the downtown area. The police rousted a number of people, who felt the rough treatment was racially motivated. Their discontent, fueled by a sense of continuing social and political inequities, spread and soon erupted into a full-scale riot. The film switches back and forth between the riot-torn areas, where there was looting by whites and blacks alike, and Tiger Stadium, a place of refuge, safety, and quietude less than three miles away, from which the smoke from the rivers of fire burning in a twenty-five-square-mile area was visible. A state of emergency was declared, and eight thousand National Guard troops, including Detroit pitcher Mickey Lolich, who was recalled to his unit, were sent in, creating as one resident said a "Vietnam of my neigHBOrhood." The situation became so bad that a home-game series was switched to Baltimore. The fighting finally stopped when Lyndon Johnson sent in tanks and nearly five thousand federal troops. The riot lasted one week and resulted in forty-three deaths, seven thousand arrests, and 2,500 stores looted and destroyed.

Willie Horton, star Detroit outfielder and hometown schoolboy hero, who was the team's link with the black community, appeared in his Tiger uniform in the downtown area in a futile attempt to reduce the violence. Traditionally the Tigers were not receptive to black players; in addition to Horton the only other African Americans were pitcher Earl Wilson and pinch hitter Gates Brown. Attendance at the stadium, which was dominated by white fans, was adversely affected by the riot because people were afraid to travel to the park. The season ended with the Tigers losing to the Angels in a last-ditch playoff bid.

In 1968 the drive for social revolution became more intense as a result of increased American participation in the Vietnam War and the assassinations of [End Page 176] Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Violence spread in the ghettos of cities throughout the United States, but Detroit was spared a continuation of its 1967 summer of unrest. The documentary maintains that the Tigers provided an image of togetherness and athletic excellence that rallied the city to focus on baseball as a beneficial communal experience. Unlike the years when racist owner Walter Briggs set the tone for the team, the Tigers projected an image of racial harmony that led to the increased attendance of black fans.1 The team was a combination of stars...

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