Pbs Shows

"Custer had never yet encountered an Indian band that wouldn't run when the cavalry attacked. So he pushed to an attack as quickly as it could be mounted -- a dreadful mistake on his part because his men were exhausted. He should have bivouacked, given them a night's sleep, sent out some scouts to find out how far that village extends in this direction and that, because much of it was hidden by woods along the Little Bighorn."

"I’m one of the few who didn’t get into a boarding school system till I was sixteen. I grew up with a lot of the older people, listened to the stories. And those stories were inside of me. And I went into a boarding school system, and they killed those stories in that system. I came out of there totally ashamed of who I am, what I am. In the late sixties, I went back to the culture, on my own. I let my hair grow, I started speaking my language. And one of those times, I fasted. I did the vision quest, for five years.And one of those years -- it was a beautiful night, the stars were out, and it was calm, just beautiful. And it was around midnight, and I got up and I prayed. And I sat down, sat there for a while, and then all of a sudden I had these like flashbacks, of Sand Creek, Wounded Knee. And every policy, every law that was imposed on us by the government and the churches hit me one at a time. One at a time. And how it affected my life.And as I sat there I got angrier and angrier, until it turned to hatred. And I looked at the whole situation, the whole picture, and there was nothing I could do. It was too much. The only thing I could do was, when I come off that hill, I’m going to grab a gun and I’m going to start shooting. And go that way. Maybe then my grandfathers will honor me, if I go that route.I got up, and I came around, and I faced the east, and it was beautiful, I mean, it was dawn, light, enough light to see the rolling hills out there, and right above that blue light in that darkness was the sliver of the moon and the morning star. And I wanted to live. I want to live, I want to be happy. I feel I deserve that. But the only way that I was going to do that was if I forgive. And I cried that morning, because I had to forgive.Since then, everyday I work on that commitment. And I don’t know how many people have felt it, but every one of us, if you’re Lakota, you have to deal with that. At some point in your life, you have to address that, you have to make a decision. If you don’t, you’re going to die on a road someplace, either from being too drunk, or you might take a gun to your head. If you don’t handle those situations.So this isn’t history, I mean it’s still with us. What has happened in the past will never leave us. The next hundred, two hundred years, it will be with us. And we have to deal with that every day."

"For the first time in the history of the United States, the government decided to exclude a group of immigrants on the basis of race. And it set a precedent, because for the first time you have this new thinking introduced. We can not only determine who could become citizens in this country, but we could determine who could come to this country."

"The first white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis and Clark. All the Nez Perce made friends with Lewis and Clark, and agreed to let them pass through their country, and never to make war on white men. This promise, the Nez Perce have never broken. It has always been the pride of the Nez Perce that they were the friends of the white man."

"It is a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed. It's a dream landscape. To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities: powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen."

"The shots quit coming from the soldiers. Warriors who had crept close to them began to call out that all of the white men were dead...All of the Indians were saying these soldiers also went crazy and killed themselves. I do not know. I could not see them. But I believe they did so."

"As they followed the Indians' trail, they did not grasp the full meaning of the fresh pony tracks that seemed to cross and re-cross it. In the last few days, 3,000 more Indians -- Lakotas, Arapahoes and Cheyennes -- had left the reservations to join Sitting Bull. His encampment now stretched out for three miles along the Greasy Grass, a gathering of more than six thousand Indians: eighteen hundred of them warriors."

"Fearful that Sitting Bull would elude him, Custer pushed his column hard -- 12 miles the first day, 33 the second, 28 the third. The exhausted troopers began to grumble about the man they privately called "Hard Ass.""

"Bonds has certainly been singled out, but that's what happens when the results of your cheating are so lurid: It attracts attention if you hit 73 home runs. What do you expect? If some middle infielder tries to buy another year scuffling in the big leagues with performance-enhancing drugs, it doesn't get as much attention. This is not complicated."

"(Discussing Ichiro) You have to make the perfect pitch to get him. And he's going to make you throw pitches too, which we hate. Pitchers hate to throw more pitches than they should. And even if you get him to hit the ball the wrong way, he's got such great speed that you never know. You might break his bat and still, he gets a base hit."

"I think fans have been able to compartmentalize their disappointments and still enjoy it the way they used to, and I think we've built up the same sort of sieve for living experience through that we have with real people in our real lives. We don't expect them to be saints and we no longer expect our athletes to be. We expect them to be the same range of people that we see in the rest of our life. And I think that one of the reasons that baseball has not only not lost popularity but gained it, is as its flaws become apparent, it actually gains depth and humanity even as it loses its fairy tale mythic qualities."

"We respect the people of other generations in baseball perhaps more than we respect other generations in other fields in this country. We’ve been called a disposable society, but we don’t dispose of Babe Ruth. We don’t dispose of Walter Johnson. We treat them as though they are equals, and contemporaries though they’re dead. That’s a very special thing to hand onto children."

"We’ve done a whole lot of things to hurt it, but it’s a type of thing that you just can’t kill it. You can’t kill Baseball because when you get ready to kill Baseball, something is going to come up, or somebody is going to come up to snatch you...I heard Ruth hit the ball. I’d never heard that sound before, and I was outside the fence but it was the sound of the bat that I had never heard before in my life. And the next time I heard that sound, I’m in Washington, D.C.,...I rushed out…and it was Josh Gibson hitting the ball. And so I heard this sound again. Now I didn’t hear it anymore. I’m in Kansas City...I heard this sound one more time that I had heard only twice in my life. Now, you know who this is? ...Bo Jackson swinging that bat. And now I heard this sound... And it was just a thrill for me. I said, here it is again. I heard it again. I only heard it three times in my life. But now, I’m living because I’m going to hear it again one day, if I live long enough."

"Who in the whole country wouldn't take a pill to make more money at their job? You would. "Hey, there's a pill and you're gonna get paid like Steven Spielberg," you would take the pill. You just would."

"I collected baseball cards, so I could take all my Mickey Mantle and other Yankees, Moose Skowron, and I could put them on my bike, and I could ride down the hill and make me sound like I was going faster. There goes $5,200, $5,200 burning up down the highway. Kids today, they go, "How much is your baseball card worth?" And I'm going, "A plug nickel, son. A plug nickel." I'm saying, "Son, be your own person, do not collect baseball cards. It'll be the ruination of you. Maybe you'll learn economics a little bit or learn what value is, but you're being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur takes something of no value and makes money on it." And I do not believe in that in the kids. I teach them right off the bat, "Learn the game. Do not look at Youppi, do not look at the Chicken, do not look at that, look at the groundball. Field it cleanly with both hands, be as smooth as silk. Make the nice throw at second, have the nice breaking curveball, subtract on the change-up, see the ball and hit it. Don't associate with the other things of the game. It will eventually bring you down, eat you up, and spit you out.""

"Aguilera brings it in, to Henderson. Swing...and a long one into left field...that ball might leave the park! It's a home run and Boston leads here in the 10th inning!"

"I hope we’re reaching a period where we don’t look up to the ballplayer or down at the ballplayer, but try to look at him levelly and see his gifts and his determination and his craftsmanship as heroic, but at the personal level, don’t demand more of him than we do of people in our own family, ourselves, or our friends."

"Throughout the 1970s, the Pittsburgh Pirates were a perennial National League power. They had been the first club in major league history to field an all black and Hispanic team, and they saw their team as a tight, close-knit family. In 1979, with the disco beat of "We Are Family", they won the pennant, and in the World Series, again faced their old rivals from 1971: Earl Weaver's Baltimore Orioles."

"It was the Emancipation Proclamation of baseball. When the reserve clause was overturned, it disallowed the owners from signing perpetual one-year contracts to ballplayers, thereby keeping them in the organization for eternity. So, basically, it allowed us to go from plantation to plantation based on the highest bid of the plantation owner. And the owners got very upset about that because it inflated salaries, and then ticket prices went up, and television revenue went up, and they found out they were making more money, and they found out, "Wow, we had a $1.5 million franchise, now we have a $150 million franchise." So, they made money, the players made money. The only people that got hurt were the American public, the fans, the integrity of baseball, and, eventually, the planet Earth."

"Willie Stargell really was a good man. All the hopes that he would direct toward other ballplayers came true in his case. I remember the 1971 World Series where those teams [the Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates], same two teams that played seven games, and Stargell was a great player that year, and the leader, had led the League in runs batted in and did almost nothing in the World Series. He popped, struck out – same in the Playoffs. And he never complained, he never said anything, he walked back, he never threw his bat down. And I went up to him after the series, and near the end, and I said, "How can you do this? You must be dying." And his little son, Wilver Jr., Wilver Stargell Jr. was playing in the locker and Willie made a gesture toward him and he said, "The time comes when a man really has to be a man," it just came out of him like that. And that’s the kind of man he was."

"We have these unreasonable expectations of all baseball heroes. We want them to be good at life as well as good at baseball. If you think about it, it’s unfair. It’s hard enough to expect them to play baseball well. I’m convinced there is the same division in baseball that there is in life itself: of true heroes; of people of strong principle; of ordinary everyday people; of rogues; of weaklings."

"In the decades to come, the memory of the scene might blur. But the memory of the sound will remain with everyone who was here. Not the sound of the cheers, or the sound of Henry Aaron saying "I'm thankful to God it's all over," but the sound of Henry Aaron's bat when it hit the baseball tonight... At home plate, surrounded by an ovation that came down around him as if it were a waterfall of appreciation, he was met by his teammates who attempted to lift him onto their shoulders. But he slipped off into the arms of his father Herbert Sr., and his mother Estella, who had hurried out of the special box for the Aaron family near the Braves' dugout. "I never knew," Aaron would say later," that my mother could hug so tight.""

"I don't want them to forget Ruth," Henry Aaron once said, "I just want them to remember me."

"Sportswriters called manager Sparky Anderson's Cincinnati Reds, "The Big Red Machine." And in 1975, they more than lived up to their billing, rolling past their nearest Western Division competitors by 20 games, then beating Pittsburgh in three playoff games to win the pennant. It was an extraordinary team, and its spirit was best captured by the third baseman Pete Rose, who said, "I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit just to play baseball." Like Ty Cobb of an earlier time, Rose played with a ferocity unmatched by anyone in the game. He stretched doubles into triples, singles into doubles, groundouts into singles. "Baseball is a hard game," he said. "Love it hard, and it will love you back hard. Try to play it easy, and the first thing you know, there you are on the outside looking in, wondering what went wrong.""

"When things look dark, void, and altogether hopeless to the colored youth of America..., when they need an inspiring thought that should urge them onward to the road of achievement despite forbidding obstacles, they will only need to read of and reflect upon the remarkable career of Jackie Robinson."

"What was incredible about Clemente was not only how skilled he was at each part of the game, but this kind of ferocity that he played with on each play of the game — even in years when they were pitiful, and they had no chance to get into the pennant or anything like that. He would throw it in, he would pick guys off who got a single who took too much of a turn going around first; there was just something intense about this guy that was not necessarily what was going on in Baseball at that moment."

"Things happened to me, all through the three years, that I kind of erased out of my mind. I got threatening letters about kidnapping and things like this. Vicious, racist letters. I went to play in baseball parks like Chicago, Cincinnati. All these ballparks I played in, I had to slip out of the back of the ballpark with escorts, and things like this. It was terrible, terrible. It was bad times for me."

"In 1975, two first-rate pitchers–Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos and Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers–agreed to play one year without contracts, declared themselves "free agents", and then filed a hearing for a new three–man arbitration panel. Marvin Miller voted for the players. John Gaherin, representing Major League Baseball, voted against them. The third man was a professional arbitrator named Peter Seitz. He was convinced the players were right and begged the owners to come up with a new and equitable contract. They refused. On December 23, 1975, Seitz voted with the players. "The owners were too stubborn and stupid," he said. "They were like the French barons of the 12th century. They had accumulated so much power, they wouldn't share it with anybody." The owners, claiming this would bankrupt baseball, fired Seitz the next day, and went to court to have the decision overturned. This time, they failed. The arbitration was binding; the reserve clause was dead."

"The Commissioner refused to exempt him from the reserve clause. Flood refused to play, and vowed to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The century-old struggle between the owners and the players was approaching a climax."

"Dear Mr. Kuhn: After twelve years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States. It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I therefore request that you make known to all Major League clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season. Sincerely, Curt Flood."

"My best pitch is a strike. A sinking fastball which you grip like this so you only get two seams into it, and if you turn your hand a little bit like this, it comes out, the wind pushes here, forces it down and away from a right-handed hitter. Thereby, he thinks it's a good pitch; at the last minute, it sinks, he hits the top half of the ball, and he hits a groundball to Burleson, Burleson picks it up, throws it to Yastrzemski, one away. And you do that twenty-seven times in a ball game, make perfect sinkers, then you get twenty-seven outs. Unless the hitters are smart, and then what they do is they know it's a sinker, they get up and drive the ball to right-center field between Lynn and Evans, and that's called a double, and then the pitcher has to run behind third base and back him up, and hopefully, they get the guy out at third, or it's a triple. And then, you get a runner at third and less than two outs, so they bring the infield in, and you don't want them to hit a sinker now, you gotta strike them out, so then you go to a cross-seam fastball, which I don't have."

"In 1966, the Boston Red Sox wound up as they so often had before: at the bottom of the standings. Then, in 1967, they got a new manager, Dick Williams, and a new lease on life. Right-hander Jim Lonborg won 22 games, all the while serving in the Army Reserves as the Vietnam War continued to escalate. But it was the play of one man who made the difference. Carl Yastrzemski, the son of a Polish potato farmer from Long Island and Ted Williams’ replacement in left field, almost singlehandedly carried the Red Sox that year. He led the league in nearly every batting category: a .326 average; 44 home runs; 121 runs driven in; and was named Most Valuable Player. "We went from losers to winners," he remembered. "Suddenly it was a joy to go to the ballpark.""

"But now the pressure on Maris intensified. "Would he break Ruth's record," reporters asked again and again. "How the hell do I know," he answered, "I don't want to be Babe Ruth." He wasn't Babe Ruth, and Yankee fans never let him forget it. Even the front office tried to change the lineup to favor the more-popular Mantle. Under the relentless strain, Maris' hair began to fall out in clumps. Always taciturn, he now kept silent: refusing most interviews, keeping to himself."

"The institution of the asterisk, the most important typographical symbol in American sport, terribly unfair. To take away Ruth's record, his single season record, was to take away something that was held so close to the hearts of the baseball establishment. They couldn't see doing it. Nonetheless, Roger Maris did it. He did hit 61 home runs. And the fact that it took 162 games, well, he also did it having to play at night, having to bat against the screwball, having to travel to the West Coast for games. And to do it all with a parade, a mob of reporters following him around, I think it’s unfair."

"I often wondered what I would do if I were ever traded because it happened many, many times, and it was "part of the game." And then suddenly it happened to me. I was leaving probably one of the greatest organizations in the world to at that time what was probably the least liked and, by God, this is America, and I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods."

"Brooks Robinson," Cincinnati's Pete Rose said, "belongs in a higher league."

"[Marvin] Miller shrewdly offered the owners what seemed, on the surface, a compromise: Players would not be eligible for free-agency until they had played 6 years. The owners gratefully agreed. At least they could still control their most valuable assets for a time. But baseball would never be the same again. The law of supply-and-demand now favored the players."

"DiMaggio played his last game in October of 1951. I was born in March of 1952. So, my dad, and every man that I ever met from my dad's generation, would all tell me the same thing: "Mays: terrific. Mantle: hit the ball out of sight. You never saw DiMaggio, kid. You never saw the real thing.""

"I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."

"Swung on, belted... it's a long one... back goes Gionfriddo, back, back, back, back, back, back, back... heeee makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen! Oh, Doctor!"

"I can't honestly say that I appreciate the way in which he [Babe Ruth] changed baseball..., but he was the most natural and unaffected man I ever knew...I look forward to meeting him again some day."

"That was the great tragic moment in the 50s in New York. It was the beginning of the decline we continue to observe today. Both O’Malley and Stoneham decided to pull their teams out. Both were profitable. There were just more profits to be made in California. It was a cynical, purely commercial-oriented move, which was immensely profitable in that narrow sense and ripped out the soul of New York City."

"At the funeral, Ruth's old teammates had served as pall bearers. "I'd give $100 for an ice cold beer," said Joe Dugan to Waite Hoyt. Hoyt nodded. "So would the Babe.""

"It was one of the greatest times, watching Mickey, Willie, and the Duke. And you go out to the corner bar, and you would hear the arguments. [Harlem accent] "Willie's the greatest! He can do anything!" [Brooklyn accent] "You're nuts, it's the Duke! The Duke is a classic! You ever see him running with his elbows in like that?" [Bronx accent] "Guys, you are both wrong. It's Mickey and that's it! He's strong, he's blonde, he hits from both sides with power, I think you should really reconsider.""

"On July 6, 1944, a month after D-day, a young army lieutenant named Jack Roosevelt Robinson boarded a military bus near Fort Hood, Texas. The driver ordered him to get to the back of the bus where the "colored people belong." Robinson refused and was court-martialed. But the Army judges found him fully within his rights and acquitted him. "I had learned," Robinson wrote, "that I was in two wars: one against a foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home." A few days after Robinson's trial, Kenesaw Mountain Landis died, at the age of 77."

"Through it all, Maris kept hitting. And in mid-September, Mantle's injuries finally forced him out the race with 54 home runs. In the locker room before the 154th game of the season, with the Yankees 1 win away from the pennant and Maris 2 home runs short of Babe Ruth's record, he broke down. His manager, Ralph Houk, consoled him in his office. "If I can help win the game with a bunt, would you mind if I bunted? It wouldn't make me look bad, would it?" Houk replied: "No; it would make you a bigger man than ever.""

"An amazing thing happened, which was that New York took this losing team to its bosom. Everybody thinks New York only cares about champions, but we cared about the Mets. I remember going to some games in June that year, and they were getting walloped; they were getting horribly beaten. But the crowds came out to the Polo Grounds in great numbers, and people brought horns and blew these horns. And after a while, I realized this was probably anti-matter to the Yankees, who were across the river and had won so long. Winning is not a whole lot of fun if it goes on. But the Mets were human, and that horn, I began to realize, was blowing for me. There’s more Met than Yankee in all of us. What we experience in our lives, there’s much more losing than winning, which is why we love the Mets."

"On December 9, 1965, the day Branch Rickey died, the Cincinnati Reds let outfielder Frank Robinson go. He had played magnificently for them since 1956, when he hit 38 home runs to tie the rookie record. He charged into outfield walls to make spectacular catches, hurled himself into opposing infielders to break up double plays. And in 1961, won the National League's Most Valuable Player award. In casting him off, the Cincinnati owner explained that Robinson was too old at 30. He wasn't. Robinson moved to Baltimore, where in his first season he won the American League Triple Crown and became that league's Most Valuable Player. No other player has ever won the award in both leagues. Once, early in Robinson's career, when Branch Rickey had desperately wanted him for the Pirates, the Reds general manager said, "I wouldn't give you Frank Robinson for your whole team.""

"Flood did not report to the Phillies' training camp. "I am a man," he told baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn."

"He'd helped restore the game's integrity after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. He'd also done all he could to keep it white. It was true that there had never been no written law banning black players, but Judge Landis had worked ceaselessly to ensure that the old "gentleman's agreement" against hiring them remained firmly in effect. When the Pittsburgh Pirates sought permission to hire slugger Josh Gibson in 1943, Landis bluntly refused: "The colored ballplayers have their own league. Let them stay in their own league." When Bill Veeck Jr. attempted to buy the 8th place Phillies, then restaff it with stars from the Negro Leagues, Landis made sure the team was sold to someone else. And when Leo Durocher told a newspaper man that he'd seen plenty of blacks good enough for the big leagues, Landis forced him to claim he had been misquoted."