The Sunday Monday Was A Hero

        Cooperstown -- As America’s Pastime, baseball would seem to have an obligation to join in the festivities (such as they are) marking America’s semiquincentenial (that’s a 250^th birthday, for those of you scoring at home), and during last weekend’s Cooperstown festivities, the National Baseball Hall of Fame rose to the occasion by honoring a former ballplayer who 50 years ago took time out from his center field position to play a game of Capture the Flag.

               Rick Monday originally didn’t know what to make of the two people – a father and his 11-year-old son – who jumped the outfield fence and ran onto the field during the bottom of the fourth inning on April 25, 1976 at Dodger Stadium as Monday’s Cubs played the Los Angeles nine. The two bolted past left fielder Jose Cardenal and headed to shallow left center. “I saw that one of them had something under his arm,” Monday would recall in a story that was published earlier this year. “Are they on the field because they are trying to get with somebody? Because they had too much to drink? Do they not like a certain player? Are they going to make some kind of a statement?”

               Strange as it may seem now, people running onto the field for various purposes, alcohol-infused or not, was not entirely uncommon in those days. After all, 1976 was the heyday of Morganna the Kissing Bandit, who collected smooches on the cheeks of ballplayers as readily as 10-year-olds collect baseball cards.

  But Monday sensed the pair’s intentions were nowhere near as harmless. “When they came to a stop, one guy pulled out an American flag. They put it down on the ground. I can see the guy pull out something real shiny. It turned out to be one of those gigantic cans of lighter fluid. They were dousing it. The wind blew the first match out, I believe, or it went out on its own.”

               Monday reacted quickly. As the adult was trying again to ignite the flag, Monday – running as if he were chasing a fly ball with a runner on third – swooped up the flag and headed for a dugout, where he handed it to Dodger pitcher Doug Rau. Dodgers third base coach Tommy Lasorda, meanwhile, ran toward the interlopers, Monday said, “yelling everything a longshoreman would mutter on a bad day at these two guys.” The crowd gave Monday an ovation.

               “Dodgers Win, 5-4, but Cub Saves the Day,” the Chicago Tribune trumpeted in the next day’s paper. The Los Angeles Times’s response was a little stranger, with a headline that said, “It’s Flag Day, as Cey Singles to Beat Cubs”, and a one-paragraph mention in the game story that gave as much ink to the fact that Monday batted in three of the Cubs’ runs as it did his on-field heroics. The paper would make up for it a few days later, when its main sports columnist, Jim Murray, equated the photo of Monday snatching the flag to the iconic one of U.S. soldiers planting a flag on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima, considered a milestone in the country’s eventual victory in World War II.

The attempted flag burning evoked visions of Vietnam War protests from the 1960s and early 1970s, but on April 25, 1976, the country was about to mark the one-year anniversary of the end of that conflict. And as it eventually turned out, 35-year-old  William Errol Thomas Jr.’s motives were personal rather than political. According to published reports, Thomas was trying to draw attention to the plight of his wife, whom he claimed was being held against her will in a Missouri mental institution. Why Thomas, who hailed from Elton, Missouri, had chosen a baseball game in Los Angeles for his protest, and why he brought his son along as an accomplice was never explained. Thomas pleaded guilty to a single trespassing charge and served three days in jail.

               Monday returned to Chicago, where Wrigley Field fans gave him a standing ovation and the Illinois state legislature passed a resolution honoring him. Two weeks after the game, Dodgers general manager Al Campanis gave Monday the flag, and Monday kept it, bringing it with him when he and his wife, Barbaralee, met with veterans and veterans groups and visited Veterans Administration hospitals.

               “That flag still has a life,” Monday, now 80 years old and still broadcasting (ironically) Dodger games, said over the weekend, as the Hall of Fame honored him with a special award . Over the past half century, he noted, “Not much has changed. “The mail that we get is the same: about respect for this country, and the people who supported what that flag represents for each and every one of us.”

               The Mondays have loaned the flag to the Hall; it will remain on display as part of the museum’s exhibit marking the semiquincentennial. The flag exhibit’s name: “Rick Monday…You Made A Great Play.”