With the happy exception of Ryan Reynolds and his exuberant stewardship of Wrexham FC, team owners get a bad press these days.
Everyone and his brother – the complainants are invariably male – has a gripe: whether it’s lamenting the deluge of sovereign wealth money into European football and professional golf or decrying the tone-deaf US administration of venerable clubs like Manchester United.
The sports scene in America can be even more combative and strident – as abusive fan behaviour at the Ryder Cup in New York demonstrated recently. Lifelong supporters expect their team’s owners and players to have a winning mentality year after year (rather than an obsession with the bottom line) and aren’t shy about expressing their feelings on social media and talk radio.
It makes me nostalgic for an old-time team owner like Irish-American sports entrepreneur Walter O’Malley, born on October 9th, 1903 in the Bronx and notorious for moving his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers baseball club to Los Angeles at the end of the 1957 baseball season, after city leaders there promised to build his team a sparkling new stadium in the California sunshine.
Ballpark figure: The Irish-American sports entrepreneur who moved Brooklyn Dodgers to LA
Immaculate reception: How an Irish priest helped turn the Pittsburgh Steelers into winners
Howya Heid? - Frank McNally on a visit to one of Glasgow’s toughest pubs
Off track - Alison Healy on how James Joyce disembarked in the wrong country
Ever since, O’Malley’s name has become synonymous with fan betrayal – even though the New York Giants baseball club also uprooted in 1957 and moved west to San Francisco.
Of course, as with most controversial events, there are two sides to the story. In his 2011 book The National Pastime: Endless Seasons: Baseball in Southern California, Paul Hirsch argues that O’Malley was right to relocate and suggests another culprit for the Dodgers’ exit from Brooklyn: New York’s “master builder” Robert Moses.
In the 1950s, gate receipts were an essential source of income for a team, along with concessions sales. But the Dodgers’ home ground, Ebbets Field, was a kip. According to Hirsch: “By 1957 the right field screen hung in tatters, the bathroom odours were stifling, and parking was available for only 700 cars.”
Parking was becoming an issue because many Brooklyn fans were decamping with their families for the Long Island suburbs and were now driving to games.
But it wasn’t just Ebbets Field that was showing its age. The Dodgers star players – legends such as Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, and Carl Furillo – were all well over 30 and unlikely to maintain their championship calibre for much longer.
Reliant on his own resources and initiative, O’Malley needed a new ballpark to bring in the finances that would allow the Dodgers to cultivate new talent and remain competitive. And this required a sympathetic city government.
But O’Malley and Moses, who at the time was the head of several powerful public agencies in New York, had separate ideas in relation to the Dodgers’ needs. Moses wanted a multipurpose municipal stadium located in Queens while O’Malley favoured a privately owned ballpark in Brooklyn, where baseball would remain a civic centrepiece.
In the end, while New York officials dithered, Los Angeles mayor Norris Paulson and others put together an offer that O’Malley couldn’t ignore. The Dodgers wound up in 1962 with a privately owned, 56,000-seat stadium accessible by freeway and surrounded by 16,000 parking spaces. Dodger Stadium remains an attractive ballpark to this day.
Undeterred, Robert Moses finally got around to realising his vision. But Shea Stadium, which in 1964 became home to the fledgling New York Mets, “looked old the day it opened,” according to New York sportswriter Leonard Koppett. Shea was closed after the 2008 season and torn down the following winter.
As for the enduring notion that O’Malley betrayed his fan base, perhaps the Dodgers weren’t as beloved as the popular imagination – inflamed in large part by Roger Kahn’s 1972 classic The Boys of Summer – would now have us believe. In fact, as Paul Hirsch writes: “A reasonable person might wonder how much the typical Brooklyn resident cared about retaining the Dodgers.”
In 1956, only one year before leaving Brooklyn, the Dodgers were involved in an exciting pennant race – hoping to repeat their breakthrough World Series victory over their Big Apple rivals the Yankees in 1955 – and yet attracted only 7,847 supporters to Ebbets Field for a crucial late-season game.
Such attendance figures no doubt emboldened Moses, who along with New York Mayor Robert Wagner “had simply read the tea leaves and determined that there was no pressing need to keep the Dodgers and Giants in New York on anything other than the city’s terms,” according to Hirsch.
Even so, the myth endures that casts Walter O’Malley as the ultimate sporting villain when in fact he simply saw and embraced the future – a future which included two O’Malley-inspired baseball fields in Corkagh Park in west Dublin, built and opened by his son Peter and US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith in 1998.
