Mr. Met by Jay Horwitz

Author:Jay Horwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2020-03-24T18:28:31+00:00

13. Household Names

The World Series victory turned all the players on that 1986 Mets team into public figures. I always thought that Mookie Wilson could have run for the United States Congress and, not only won, but done a great job. Spike Lee didn’t actually name his “Mookie” character in his debut film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), after Mookie, but everyone thought he did, since he was a huge Mookie fan, so he might as well have.

We wanted to use the higher public profile to work for positive change where we could. After we won the World Series in October 1986, a violent clash broke out on the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, campus that pitted white Red Sox fans against a group of African Americans who were Mets fans. It was a race riot, basically. Ten students were injured seriously enough to be sent to the campus infirmary. “The university was also investigating whether there were racial overtones, as some students reported,” United Press International reported at the time. “At first, there was some innocent heckling between Mets and Red Sox fans. But… the dispute escalated and the fans began throwing bottles.”

Bart Giamatti decided it was important that baseball do something to try to defuse the tension on campus after the clash. He asked us to send a Mets player to Amherst to talk to the kids and asked the Red Sox to send a player as well. For us it was an easy choice. We decided to send Mookie up to Massachusetts, and Bart and I flew up with him. Boston decided on second baseman Marty Barrett.

That was an experience I’ll never forget, spending the day with Bart Giamatti, who was always gracious and humble and engaged with everyone he met. He knew the importance of what those two players were trying to accomplish that day. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported from Amherst, “Two champions—one black, one white, one from the Mets, one from the Sox—visited here yesterday as peacemakers. In a packed auditorium at the University of Massachusetts, black outfielder Mookie Wilson of the World Series champion New York Mets and white second baseman Marty Barrett of the American League champion Boston Red Sox entreated a mixed-race audience of about 650 students to, in Barrett’s words, ‘combine with each other, live with each other.’”

Even in Massachusetts, there were a lot of Mookie fans.

“Wilson, greeted by an affectionate low-pitched chorus of ‘Moo-oo-o,’ told the students, ‘The team spirit—rah, rah, rah—that’s what we have to do.’”

The afterglow of the 1986 Series even had more people interested in me. Hard to believe, I know. I don’t remember how it developed, but in January 1987 I ended up doing a guest column for the Hackensack Record, not about the Mets, not about baseball at all, but about my experiences as a football fan.

“Here is my scorecard from 25 years of having a season ticket for Giants games: seven broken pairs of binoculars, 11 cracked radios, one fractured wrist, six hours in a police station, and one cousin who will never speak to me again,” I wrote.

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