There\u2019s an age when a boy is old enough to admire his sports heroes and young enough to not care about the money and politics in sports.\u00a0 I put that at thirteen, the edge between childhood and adolescence.\u00a0 For me that was 1969.<\/p>\n
Last year I wrote about 1968, surprised how much of that volatile year was stored clearly in the bins of my memory fifty years later.\u00a0 Assassinations, protests, Vietnam, LBJ, and Nixon all found their way to the kitchen and milking barn of my youth.\u00a0 1969 saw more protests and Vietnam, plus a moon-landing.\u00a0 But I\u2019m going to go to the sports pages of my mind this year. \u00a0Fifty seasons ago was a magical time to be a kid-fan.<\/p>\n
Around that time, older brother Marvin or older brother Dale took me to my first Twins games at Metropolitan Stadium.\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember which game was the first; memories blur.\u00a0 Whenever it was, Met Stadium was exactly as I \u201csaw\u201d it on the radio.<\/p>\n
That began a love affair with a ballpark. \u00a0I would go to dozens of games, meeting friends in the Baltimore lot.\u00a0 I still get sad if I think about it, knowing the Met would be torn down and the Twins taken hostage, held in a dank, plastic chamber for thirty years.<\/p>\n
The 1969 Twins roster was speckled with legends.\u00a0 Harmon Killebrew was American League MVP.\u00a0 Rod Carew won the batting title and stole home seven times, which is crazy.\u00a0 Tony Oliva and Bob Allison had good seasons.\u00a0 Jim Perry and Dave Boswell each won twenty games.<\/p>\n
Fans loved the players, but they really loved the manager.\u00a0 1969 was the one and only year Billy Martin managed the Twins.\u00a0 Billy had played for the Twins, coached, scouted, and managed the AAA team.\u00a0 Even as a kid, I knew that fans wanted Martin to manage.<\/p>\n
Martin was passionate, skilled, and knowledgeable.\u00a0 He was also a hothead and battled demons his whole life.\u00a0 He and owner Calvin Griffith were oil and water.\u00a0 When Calvin signed Billy to manage, he said, \u201cI feel like I\u2019m sitting on a keg of dynamite.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Twins played exciting baseball, and attendance soared.\u00a0 But as much as Calvin loved money, he couldn\u2019t accept Martin getting in a bar fight with Boswell, kicking Hubert Humphrey out of the locker room, and ignoring requests to meet with him.\u00a0 Calvin fired Billy after the season, despite winning 97 games.\u00a0 Twins fans never forgave Griffith.\u00a0 Martin would go on get fired eight times, five by George Steinbrenner.<\/p>\n
That was one of the best Twins teams ever.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Baltimore Orioles were one the best Major League teams ever.\u00a0 1969 was the first year of league playoffs.\u00a0 The East Division Orioles beat the West Division Twins in three straight games.\u00a0 They did the same thing in 1970, crushing the heart of a chubby Brown County farm kid two years in a row.<\/p>\n
The Orioles surprisingly lost the 1969 World Series to the New York Mets.\u00a0 That was the Miracle Mets team that went from being the butt of jokes to nation\u2019s darlings.\u00a0 The National League was like another continent back then that I followed from a distance.<\/p>\n
The other tenants of Metropolitan Stadium were the Vikings.\u00a0 The Met was a baseball park, with a football field shoe-horned into it.\u00a0 Regardless, the stadium became part of the Viking\u2019s mystique.\u00a0 There isn\u2019t a fan my age who can\u2019t picture Page, Eller, Marshall, and Larsen lining up, steam rising from their breath in the cold air.<\/p>\n
The Twins and Vikings arrived in Minnesota in 1961, the Twins from Washington and the Vikings from thin air, otherwise known as expansion.\u00a0 The Twins were good most of the Sixties when only one team went to postseason from each league.\u00a0 The Vikings were a novelty under coach Norm Van Brocklin, but not very good.<\/p>\n
That changed, seemingly on a Canadian weather front.\u00a0 General Manager Jim Finks who brought coach Bud Grant who brought quarterback Joe Kapp all came from the Canadian Football League.<\/p>\n
Finks came in 1964 and built the roster that would become the Purple People Eaters.\u00a0 Grant and Kapp came in 1967.\u00a0 The Vikings finished with the odd record of 3-8-3.\u00a0 This was when men were men, and ties were ties.\u00a0 In 1968, the Vikings made the playoffs, losing to Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.<\/p>\n
The 1969 season opened with a loss at Yankee Stadium to the Giants.\u00a0 Then came twelve straight wins and the best record in the league.\u00a0 (Interestingly, every Vikings game that year was in a baseball park: Tiger, Wrigley, Busch, Fulton.\u00a0 The one exception?\u00a0 A game at the University of Minnesota when the Twins had a playoff game.\u00a0 That\u2019ll win you a bar bet sometime.)<\/p>\n
I listened to each game intensely.\u00a0 Listened, not watched.\u00a0 Sports came to me mostly by radio fifty years ago.\u00a0 Usually I was with younger brother Dean who was blind.\u00a0 Having a blind brother may have had something to do with building the fields in my mind where my favorite teams played.<\/p>\n
One visual does come to mind.\u00a0 Bud Grant, arms crossed, ball cap on, oblivious to the weather.\u00a0 Bud\u2019s teams practiced outdoors no matter the conditions.\u00a0 There were no heaters on the sideline, gloves were discouraged, most of the players wore short sleeves in December.\u00a0\u00a0 Bud played at the University of Minnesota after serving in the military.\u00a0 He hunted, he fished; he was stoic, he had a wry sense of humor.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t have scripted the archetypal Minnesotan any better.<\/p>\n
Joe Kapp was Hispanic, breaking with the Norse theme.\u00a0 He was a tough-guy quarterback.\u00a0 He won a championship for British Colombia, and Finks and Grant knew him well.\u00a0 Kapp didn\u2019t throw a perfect spiral, more of a drunken duck.\u00a0 So, it was a shock when he tied a record with seven touchdown passes against Baltimore early in the season, a harbinger to the Vikings\u2019 success.<\/p>\n
The playoffs were epic games in Vikings lore, two good, one not so much.\u00a0 The Rams led by MVP Roman Gabriel flew from Los Angeles to 11-degree Minnesota.\u00a0 The Vikings came from behind to win 23 to 20.<\/p>\n
The next week (8 degrees), the Vikings beat Cleveland handily 27 to 7.\u00a0 The most memorable play was a QB scramble when Kapp ran over the Browns linebacker, taking him out of the game.\u00a0 Over, not under or around, classic Joe Kapp.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the season ended with a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the fourth Super Bowl.\u00a0 The fiftieth anniversary of that is coming up, which seems a perfect time for the Vikings to finally win one of those darn Super Bowls.<\/p>\n
Soon after the season, film of Kapp declining the team MVP award went \u201cviral.\u201d\u00a0 Viral in 1969 meant it was on the 10:00 news.\u00a0 It also opened the Vikings highlight film that we got out of school to watch in the auditorium.\u00a0 Kapp insisted the award should go to forty players who played hard for sixty minutes each Sunday.\u00a0 \u201c40 for 60\u201d became the trademark affixed to that team.<\/p>\n
Like Billy Martin, Joe Kapp would not return.\u00a0 There was some convoluted contract matter that couldn\u2019t be resolved.\u00a0 The money side of sports reared its head.\u00a0 That\u2019s alright.\u00a0 I was turning 14, and my perfect season was ending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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