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1989 ALL-STAR GAME PREVIEW : Time Helps the Anger Subside From All-Star Argument Left Unsettled

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<i> Times Staff Writer </i>

In the summer of ‘67, Roger and I were ready to let our hair grow and experience the country.

We had just graduated from one of those snooty Eastern prep schools with a button-down dress code and an academic environment that made everyone who scored below 1,500 on his SATs feel like an underachieving nincompoop.

After four years of underachieving, we’d had enough of our 40 classmates for a while and decided to head west.

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Mind you, Roger and I were very close friends. We played football, basketball and baseball together. We swiped our mothers’ credit cards and went shopping for blazers, regimental ties and Weejuns every weekend. We liked the same music (Motown) though neither of us could dance a lick, and had the same taste in girls (anyone who would speak to us was acceptable).

We were clones. Except in one area. Roger could never accept the simple fact that Mickey Mantle was the most talented baseball player of all time. He thought Roberto Clemente was better. He was clueless.

“Nobody could ever hit the ball as hard as The Mick,” I’d say. “And if he only had a good pair of knees . . . “

That one really sent Roger off. “You want knees, I gotta knee for you, you idiot,” he say. Then he’d start doing something like quoting statistics, which we all know lie.

Anyway, with this one difference of opinion, we packed up Roger’s Volkswagen Bug early that summer and pointed the nose toward the West Coast. We had all the usual things on the agenda--check out the arch in St. Louis, spit into the Grand Canyon, take a picture at Hollywood and Vine. And get to Anaheim by July 11 for the All-Star game.

Through a friend of my mother’s, we got great tickets to the game. Right behind home plate. But it wasn’t long after we settled in to watch this stinker of a game that the old Clemente-Mantle bugaboo took over. Before we had served the full 15-inning sentence, Roger and I had managed to so irritate each other that we would barely speak to each other for the next five years.

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It wasn’t simply that the game was boring, 30 strikeouts in a 2-1 National League victory. Heck, we had grown up in Washington, where the Senators had spent generations refining boredom into an art form. It was just that Roger and I hadn’t been out of each other’s sight in three weeks. All I wanted out of this game was for Roberto Clemente to fall on his face; all Roger wanted was for Mickey Mantle to trip over the first-base line.

Well, we both got our wish. Mantle was called out on a third strike by home plate umpire Ed Runge as a pinch-hitter in the fifth inning. Roger enjoyed that very much. I was so angry that Runge had the gall to do such a thing that I spit my Coke on Roger’s knee. Roger enjoyed that very little.

Clemente, who struck out four times, didn’t help his mood, either, though I suspect I had something to do with that. After Clemente’s fourth strikeout and the needling from me that went along with it, Roger had had enough. “That’s it,” he shouted. “Shut up, shut up. We have had our last conversation.”

We drove back to my aunt’s home in Los Angeles without saying much that night, then began the long, quiet ride back to the East Coast a few days later. We had scheduled a visit to the World’s Fair in Montreal before the trip had begun, and because we weren’t communicating enough to change plans at that point, we found ourselves there about a week later.

Some fair. Not even a damn roller coaster. I guess we didn’t need one; we’d been riding one ever since the game.

We got back to Washington a few days later, and that fall went our separate ways to college. We got together occasionally during vacations after that; I moved to New England after college and Roger and I lost touch entirely for years. When I moved to Orange County four years ago, there was another couple thousand miles between us.

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Then two years ago, Roger and I found ourselves together again at our 20th high school reunion. He seemed like someone I might like to get to know. Not too long after that, my wife and I with our two kids stayed with Roger, his wife and two kids for a few days when we were visiting Washington.

The two visits were wonderful. We talked about growing up in Washington, raising kids on either coast, mortgages, playing golf and anything else that came up. Almost anything, that is. I never brought up The Mick, and he didn’t mention Roberto Clemente.

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