996. KANSAS CITY MONARCHS VS NEWARK EAGLES
NEGRO LEAGUE WORLD SERIES, GAME 7
SEPTEMBER 29, 1946
RUPPERT STADIUM
“AUTUMN FOR THE COLOR LINE”
QUALITY OF PLAY
6.41
DRAMA
8.64
STAR POWER
8.75
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT
5.75
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
6.77
LOCAL IMPACT
5.46
TOTAL: 41.78
“The 1946 Eagles would have beat anybody.”
The 1946 Negro League World Series was elegiac. While the games were thrilling and involved great stars, including Satchel Paige, Buck O’Neil, Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Leon Day, and Willard Brown (ten Hall of Famers in all), the plain truth was Jackie Robinson's acceptance into Major League Baseball, aka “White folks ball,” had essentially sounded the death knell for the Negro Leagues. His 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, AAA farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers, overwhelmed the Negro League season in the press, both white and black. Multiple players, including Doby and Irvin, had been told that if Robinson worked out they too would make the jump to MLB. The Negro Leagues would stagger along for a few more seasons, but it was soon gone, its necessity mooted, its unique style slowly subsumed by the majors.
In essence, the ’46 Negro League World Series would be the last of its kind, for better and worse.
But that seven-game set was a dandy, pitting the American League champs, the Kansas City Monarchs, against the National League’s best, the Newark Eagles, the top metropolitan area Negro League team over the decades despite playing in New Jersey, not New York City.
Indeed, the 1946 Eagles were one of the greatest teams in baseball history. They ran away with the Negro National League with a 56-24-2 record, a .700 winning percentage, at last ending the Homestead Grays’ nine-year grip on the title. The Eagles were led by the “Big Four”—Irvin, Doby, Johnny Davis, and Lennie Pearson. Day and Rufus Lewis fronted a strong pitching staff.
The Monarchs were the National Negro League standard bearers, known for having been Robinson’s team during his (brief) Negro career, as well as employing the great Paige, the most enduring Negro League star. At age 39, Paige only pitched occasionally in 1946, but when he did he remained untouchable. His known record that season, according to Baseball Reference, was 4-0 with a 1.29 ERA. K.C. also had the garrulous and lovable O’Neil at first base, and Hank Thompson (who would get away with murdering a man a couple years later before playing in the majors) and Willard Brown anchored the lineup.
The teams split the first six games, played across four different locations. Before nearly 20,000 fans at the Polo Grounds, K.C. won the opener 2-1 when Paige singled and later scored the eventual winning run in the seventh. The Eagles tied it up across the Hudson in Newark two nights later (Joe Louis threw out the first pitch), winning 7-4 behind a 6-run seventh inning.
The Series moved to the midwest for the next three games. The Monarchs pounded out a 15-5 win at Blues Stadium in Kansas City in Game Three, and the Eagles again bounced back with an 8-1 rout the next before just 3,836 at Blues. Organizers hoped a move to Chicago’s Comiskey Park for Game Five would boost attendance, but just 4,000 turned the stiles to see the Monarchs cruise to a 5-1 win behind Hilton Smith.
The teams flew—yes, flew—back east. The Monarchs had purchased a team plane back in 1940, nearly two decades before any Major League team would do likewise. As Paige said, “An airplane might kill you, but it ain’t likely to hurt you.” The Eagles needed a win back in Newark to stay alive in Game Six. A big Friday night crowd saw a thrilling back and forth affair. It was 5-4 Monarchs after the first inning. Willard Brown’s three-run homer off Leon Day got K.C. off to a fast start, but a rally against Monarchs starter Jim LaMarque got the home team right back in it. Monte Irvin slugged a two-run shot to put the Eagles ahead, and they took a 9-5 lead into the 8th. The Monarchs fought back, scoring twice, and had two on with two out. Day, long gone from the mound but playing center to keep his bat in the lineup, chased a deep fly clubbed by O’Neil down after a long run to save the game—and the Series—for Newark.
It came down to Game Seven for the championship.
The game was played on Sunday afternoon, September 29, a cloudy and very humid day at Ruppert Stadium in Newark. The park, in the Ironbound section of the city, was named for Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the New York Yankees, whose top farm team, the Bears, played in Newark as well. Ruppert collected rental fees from Negro League owners who wished to play in his stadia, including Yankee Stadium and this far smaller edition across the Hudson. Indeed, one reason for the long failure to dispatch the color line, beyond racism, was due to owners like Ruppert wishing to keep the Negro League rental gravy train rolling.
7,200 fans, including several scouts for Major League teams, turned out to see the game, but it was an absence that was most notable. Paige was due to start for K.C., but he failed to show at the park. Instead, he was huddling with Bob Feller, the star hurler of the Cleveland Indians, planning a lucrative postseason barnstorming tour. Such was the economic pecking order of the times—a Game Seven in the Negro League World Series couldn’t touch a long series of exhibitions involving white MLB stars.
Instead, Ford Smith got the start for K.C. O’Neil later wrote that Smith was pitching better than Paige at the time, though he gave up an RBI single to Irvin in the first inning to get the home team going. Rufus Lewis started for Newark, and he cruised through the first five innings before O’Neil crushed a solo homer to tie the game. But the Eagles answered back in the bottom of the sixth. Smith walked both Doby and Irvin on eight straight pitches, and Johnny Davis, a multi-position star who grew up in a Catholic orphanage in the Bronx, doubled both future MLB stars in to make it 3-1. It was the seventh hit of the Series for Davis and just the third of the day for the Eagles.
The Monarchs clawed a run back in the seventh to make it 3-2. Lewis escaped and made it to the ninth. Earl Taborn, the K.C. catcher, led off with a sharp single, but Irvin gunned him down when Taborn tried to grab an extra base. One out. The next two Monarchs reached base, putting the go-ahead run at first, but Smith bore down and retired the next two hitters, including Hank Souell, who popped up to first baseman Lennie Pearson to give Newark the championship.
Lewis scattered 8 hits and four walks over nine innings to earn the victory, his second of the Series to go with a 1.23 ERA in 22 innings. Irvin was the unofficial MVP, hitting .462 with three homers and eight RBIs. Brown and O’Neil combined for five homers, but it wasn’t quite enough.
Many in the crowd rushed the field to celebrate with the victorious Eagles. How many were aware that they had just witnessed the final great event in Negro League history is anyone’s guess.
AFTERMATH
Davis, the hero of the NNL Series, was a star in the Paige-Feller barnstorming tour as well, at one point homering off Yankees ace Spud Chandler and picking up Phil Rizzuto and carrying him across home plate in celebration. But Davis never did get his chance to play in the majors. Many others who played in the Series, including Doby, Irvin, and Paige, did get their shot, belated though it was.
The Negro Leagues limped along until 1951, when that season’s American League played what is considered the final Negro League campaign. The National League folded after the 1948 season. The idea that the rafts of great players who competed in the shadows of the Majors for decades is haunting; instead of a handful of games in the NYC 1000 the likes of Satchel Paige might have appeared dozens of times.
WHAT THEY SAID
“The 1946 Eagles would have beat anybody. We wanted to play the Brooklyn Dodgers. Wouldn’t play us, would not play us.”
—Johnny Davis, Newark Eagles
FURTHER READING
The Newark Eagles Take Flight: The Story of the 1946 Negro League Champions edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin
(Leon Day and Willard Brown played in a far different “World Series” the season before—the European Theater of Operations World Series, held in a conquered Nuremberg among victorious WWII soldiers, including the African-American duo. For more on that little-known slice of sports history please get my book The Victory Season)
995. CASSIUS CLAY VS SONNY BANKS
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
FEBRUARY 10, 1962
“FRESH CLAY”
QUALITY OF PLAY
6.05
DRAMA
7.22
STAR POWER
9.05
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT
5.75
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
8.26
LOCAL IMPACT
5.46
TOTAL: 41.79
“I am Cassius Clay, I’m going to be heavyweight champion of the world, and I’m fighting at Madison Square Garden.”
Muhammad Ali fought eight times in New York City, twice under the name Cassius Clay. The first time he stepped into the fabled ring at Madison Square Garden--the old Garden, in this case, on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th—he was just 20, and less than two years removed from winning the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. On February 10, 1962, Clay met Sonny Banks, another youngster with nothing like Clay’s pedigree.
Clay, who trained for the fight at the Department of Parks gym on West 28th Street and slept at the Midtown Motor Inn on Eighth and 48th, entered the bout 10-0, with seven knockouts. He was a freshly opened flower, bursting with vim and vitality, who drank in New York with the hose on full. Wearing a bow tie everywhere he went, Clay would sit in front of Jack Dempsey’s famous midtown restaurant, just down the street from MSG on 49th and Seventh, and watch the “foxes” (his slang for women) go by. He would take the subway and announce to strangers “I am Cassius Clay, I’m going to be heavyweight champion of the world, and I’m fighting at Madison Square Garden.”
John Condon, the longtime public address announcer for the Knicks (“Good evening everyone, and welcome to Madison Square Garden, the World’s Most Famous Arena!”) was also the PR man for boxing at MSG at the time, and thus got an early glimpse of Clay's magic in that department:
"I'm a New York City guy, so naturally I thought it was an act…But he just ate everybody up and had everybody falling in love with him…Promoting his fight, it didn’t even take two to tango, because he did it all for you. Nobody could get more publicity than he did. His round predictions alone were worth the price of admission. He did everything except grab the microphone during the prefight introductions. And I’m sure, if he’d thought of it, he’d have done that too.”
This fight required some buildup, because Banks was, at 21, an unranked and largely unknown quantity. He even confessed he was surprised to get the matchup with an undefeated contender in the Garden (“I’ve never seen him,” Clay said before the fight). Sonny was 10-2, with five straight knockouts. Born in Mississippi, Banks had moved north to Detroit to take a job building automobiles and train under the city’s well-known fistic coaches. Using a crouching style, Banks relied on a mean left hook to do his damage. As with future fights Ali fought against Joe Frazier, the stylistic difference was stark—the dancer against the plugger, the outside jabber against the inside banger. Banks was also quiet where Clay was loud, and a pro from the start while Clay did his amateur fighting.
The famous boxing writer A.J. Leibling described Banks thusly:
“He had a long, rather pointed head, a long chin, and the kind of inverted-triangle torso that pro-proletarian artists like to put on their steelworkers. His shoulders were so wide that his neat ready-made suit floated around his waist, and he had long, thick arms.”
Despite Clay and Condon’s best efforts, only 2,000 fans looked into the future and could say they attended Clay’s first ever fight in New York. Leibling again—“the crowd that had assembled to see Clay’s début was so thin that it could more properly be denominated a quorum.” A live television broadcast hurt the gate some, as did the bitter cold—just fifteen degrees on fight night, a Saturday in the City, where there was just too much New York going on to watch what promised to be a routine bout.
Banks, fighting in dark trunks, charged out at the bell and immediately landed a couple of tight hooks to the body. Then, just after a wild swing and a miss and eating a couple of return blows, Banks threw a speculative left hook that connected with his incoming opponent and put Clay on the seat of his pants, knocked down for the first time as a pro. Angelo Dundee, Clay’s trainer and guru, turned white as a sheet as his fighter bounced off the canvas. “On the way down, his eyes were closed,” Dundee said years later about his fighter. “But when his butt hit the canvas, he woke up. That’s when I saw his recuperative powers.”
Clay bounced up at the count of two, shocked but not hurt by the flashing punch. Then Clay went to work. Flashing his youthful speed he peppered the Motor City fighter with a series of combinations. “Banks was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel,” wrote Leibling. Clay then turned the tables by dropping Banks with a textbook right hook to the chin. Unlike the one he took a round earlier, this one did damage. Banks was wobbly after the blow, though he managed to survive until the bell.
The third round was pure punishment. Clay toyed with Banks, knocking him around the ring with disdain. Twice, Sonny appeared about to sag through the ropes, but both times he summoned enough will to stay upright. At the bell he staggered to his corner. Referee Ruby Goldstein conferred with the ring doctor, Alexander Schiff, who told the mensch in charge to watch Banks carefully.
Banks got off his stool at the bell, but couldn’t make it to the center of the ring before his left leg buckled. He straightened, but Goldstein had seen enough. He called the fight with just 26 seconds gone in the fourth. “Things went sour gradually all at once,” said one of Banks’ corner men afterwards, sounding as though he had absorbed Clay’s rat-a-tat punches.
Clay was now 11-0, and Ring Magazine rated him 9th on the heavyweight charts—with a bullet.
AFTERMATH
In the ring Clay announced he would fight again at the Garden in his next bout, against Bob Cleroux, the Canadian heavyweight champ and #5 ranked fighter on the championship ladder. But it never happened. Instead, Clay returned to Miami and won two easier fights. He returned to NYC in May, 1963, for a 7th-round knockout of Billy Daniels, not at the Garden but rather tiny St. Nicholas Arena at 66th and Columbus, and the following March decisioned Doug Jones in a 10-rounder at the World’s Most Famous Arena. He wouldn’t fight again in the City until he was both heavyweight champ and Muhammad Ali.
Not to worry—you’ll be reading about these fights later in the NYC1000.
As for Banks, he won eight of his next eleven fights before stepping into a Philadelphia ring with hard-punching Leotis Martin on May 10, 1965. Martin punished Banks severely, knocking him out in the ninth.
Three days later, Banks died from the beating.
WHAT THEY SAID
“The man must fall in the round I call. In fact, Banks must fall in four.”
—Cassius Clay, calling his shot.
FURTHER READING
“Poet and Pedagogue,” by A.J. Leibling, The New Yorker
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