Standing by Their Man

Grilling burgers in the parking lot behind the high school once attended by the most famous athlete to walk these plains, old men pray.

“‘I don’t know,” Orv Kelly says. “Maybe Mark McGwire will slide into second base and twist an ankle.”

“Or maybe,” Wayne Blanchard says, “he’ll get hit with a pitch, break a finger.”

“Not that we want him to get hurt,” Kelly says.

“Nah, nah, of course not,” Blanchard says.

“We just wouldn’t be up all night crying if it happened, know what I mean?” Kelly says.

“Yup,” Blanchard says.

Sitting in a downtown bar a couple of blocks from where this town’s most famous resident lived in a tiny apartment, young men curse.

“The strike zone is as small as a dime,” Jeff Montplaisir says.

“Expansion has filled the league with a lot of bad pitchers,” Craig Montplaisir says.

“Hell,” Joel Christianson says. “I’ve seen every McGwire home run replayed so many times, you’d think he’d hit 5,000 of them, already broken the damn record.”

Down the road, in a small house by a lake, one of the famous man’s best friends holds a nightly vigil.

Bob Wood sits on the corner of a leather couch in front of his TV, with his jelly beans and peanuts and remote control. When he finds a baseball game, he will watch it in hopes of catching information about the home run progress of McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

If there is no game, he will flip to the stations that display constant scores, Channel 35 to 30 to 25, back and forth, watching the clock and the TV, knowing that no news is good news.

At the end of each night, he will look at the calendar, wonder if he and his friend can make it through another day.

“Who knows, maybe those guys can go 30 days and not hit another home run,” Wood says. “I mean, who knows?”

When McGwire and Sosa hit their home runs in the final weeks of their wondrous chase for baseball’s single-season record, the balls will soar high and wide, from coast to coast, thrilling and touching millions.

Except here. Not here.

Not in this rich, flat land marked by the mountainous resiliency of the home run hitter raised and buried within its borders.

Not in the last place on earth unafraid and unashamed to defend the honor of Roger Maris.

Favorite Son

He didn’t move here until the seventh grade. He stopped living here full time shortly after graduating from high school.

But Fargo is where Roger Maris hit his first home run, kissed his first girl, earned his first baseball paycheck.

This is where, he said, he learned to be the type who could survive the pressure of breaking Babe Ruth’s hallowed home run record by hitting 61 in 1961.

This is where he returned after that season, and each of his 12 major league seasons, to shoot pool and play cards and hang out at the Knights of Columbus. He said snowy Fargo gave him warmth.

After retirement, when he was living full time in Gainesville, Fla., this was the only place he agreed to display his memorabilia.

After losing a fight with lymphatic cancer December, 1985, at age 51, this was where he asked to be buried.

“Evidently, he wanted to come back home,” said friend Dick Savageau, smiling. “But maybe, he also wanted Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford to feel what it’s like at 20-below.”

While a couple of Yankee stars were his pallbearers, so were three of his high school friends.

The nation may have been his stage, but in this isolated town of 80,000 were his people, right down to the crew cuts and big hearts and intolerance for all things pretentious.

Even today, it seems each of them has a story.

Visit his grave site at the Holy Cross cemetery in North Fargo. The only diamond-shaped headstone in a grassy patch along a gravel road reads simply, “Against All Odds.”

Out of a nearby building walks a caretaker, Doug Dyrdahl, waving your car to a stop.

“I don’t want to brag on myself, you know?” he says. “But my mother went to school with Roger Maris.”

Visit the Roger Maris Museum, possibly as understated as the man, perhaps because it is simply a 74-foot display case in a local shopping mall.

On one side is Pet Center. On the other, Spencer Gifts. To reach the museum from the parking lot, you walk through the entrance between Walgreens and Sears.

A recent publication listing America’s most unusual tourist attractions cited only two in North Dakota: a big plastic cow on a hill and this.

Pausing in front of the display, with a broom and shy smile, is maintenance worker Brenda Jacobson.

“I wish they would just leave Roger Maris and his record alone,” she says. “He and I had the same birthday, you know.”

Visit the originally named “Sports Bar,” a downtown joint filled with folks who remember Maris from games of cards or golf.

Up at the bar, teacher Christianson laughs.

“My mom once said that when they were both in high school, she saw Roger walking down the street carrying a bat and a ball,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Ma! Why didn’t you hook up with him? Why didn’t you show a little leg, chase him down the street?’

“That happens, hey man, maybe I’m not sitting here.”

Or visit Roger Maris Drive, a winding road through a city park along the Red River of the North.

Not that they are proud of that name around here, but along the 1.6-mile loop, there are 15 street signs.

On a recent afternoon there, retired salesman Carl Hjalmquist slows his bike, shakes his head.

“When somebody breaks that record, for this town, it’s really going to be a blow,” he says. “This town will be hurt. It will be hurt bad.”

Although the city’s leader differs--”It seems the record will be inevitably broken, so we wish Mark McGwire well,” Mayor Bruce Furness says--the city’s pulse confirms it.

While the rest of the country cheers wildly for McGwire and Sosa, the people on the plains are holding their breath and hoping for the worst.

Maris’ record is not only his record, it is their record,

It was not only him overcoming the odds, it was them.

Many here claim this town’s other claim to pop culture fame--the movie “Fargo”--was phony. It wasn’t filmed here. They say they don’t talk like that.

But Roger Maris, he was real. He was them. They will never forget.

“It’s the darndest thing,” said Steve Bergeson, an official with the Roger Maris Celebrity Benefit golf tournament. “In 1961, nobody but us wanted Roger to break the record. And now, nobody but us wants him to keep it.”

What You Don’t Know

Things Fargo knows about Roger Maris that you don’t:

* His name is not really Roger Maris. It is Roger Maras.

That’s the way it appears in a 1952 Shanley High School basketball program and a 1953 newspaper account about his baseball heroics.

When he turned pro, hostile fans in small Midwestern minor league towns began serenading him with obscene “Mar-ass” chants.

His father, a proud and tough railroad worker, was appalled. So in 1954, his son’s second year in professional baseball, his father changed the spelling of the family name.

“One winter Roger came home, and the name was different, and that was that,” Blanchard recalled. “He never did talk a lot about it.”

* While appearing quiet and detached on the public stage, he was a hellion at home.

Working for a florist in high school, he would hassle his female co-workers so much that the boss would send him to a nearby pool hall between deliveries.

On what is now Roger Maris Drive, Maris and Wood used to park in the dark with Wood wearing a woman’s kerchief around his head.

When punks would walk up to hassle them, thinking they were young lovers, Maris and Wood would climb out of the car and whip them.

Maris and Wood once even fought two older boys in the street in front of a storefront where a local radio was broadcasting live. The announcer stopped the music and gave a blow-by-blow of the fight.

“And did you hear the one about the sister and the pancake batter?” Orv Kelly asks.

It is impossible to spend 10 minutes in Fargo and not hear about the time Maris poured pancake batter in Sister Edna’s shoes, earning him a week shoveling coal.

* When Maris broke Ruth’s record, he did not call his buddies back home. That would have been conceited.

When he returned that winter, he did not want to talk about the record and did not want anyone else making a fuss. That would have been putting on airs.

“He took me aside one night and said, ‘Why are all these people treating me different?’ ” Blanchard recalls.

He became so uncomfortable with the attention, he once needed a getaway from his getaway. He took eight of his buddies 90 miles north to a remote and sparsely populated golf course. They ate fried chicken and played in a ninesome.

“That is how I’ll remember him being the happiest: standing around the trunk of a car, spitting chicken bones on to the ground, hanging out with the guys,” friend Dick Savageau says.

* Maris was found to have lymphatic cancer shortly before his first celebrity golf tournament in 1983, yet played that first year without telling anyone but Wood.

The next year, he was too sick to show up.

The year after that, he was dead.

“I remember him telling my wife, who also had cancer, that nobody would ever know how bad it was,” Savageau recalls. “And they wouldn’t, because he never wanted to burden them with it.”

They’ll Never Forget

Fargo was recently judged one of the least stressful communities in the country. Another survey ranked it the seventh-best place to start a career.

North Dakota has the lowest crime rate in the nation, the unemployment in Fargo is less than 1%, the streets here are clean and the traffic nonexistent.

But if there is one thing people in this area do better with their lives than anyone, it is accepting them.

The snow that piles as high as the gutter. The spring flood that carries away the neighbor. The monotony of a land so flat, they say you can watch your dog run away for three days.

“We’ve come to realize, there’s not a whole lot you can do about a whole lot of things,” says Kent McCullough, a policeman standing in front of the Roger Maris Museum. “We’re just a small speck around here. We do what we can, and try not to worry about the rest.”

And so, slowly, they are trying to accept that their most famous son will probably soon lose his chief claim to fame.

They are trying to understand that, as far as the rest of the nation is concerned, Roger Maris will soon be just another George Foster.

They have grudgingly acknowledged that he did not make the Hall of Fame. They endured the years when his home run record was under a mythical asterisk.

They could even understand that, when he broke the record at Yankee Stadium on the final day of the 1961 season, his chase was so unpopular that only about 23,000 showed up to watch.

So, yes, they will handle this.

“Little town like he was from, to accomplish what he did, that will never change,” Wood says.

The directors of the golf tournament have already raised the question of whether the event--which has raised more than $500,000 for local charities, including the MeritCare Roger Maris Cancer Center--should continue if the record is broken.

“There was no debate, we all agreed it should continue,” Kelly says. “This is about more than a record.”

The tournament folks have vowed that even the logo that adorns their shirts--”61 in ‘61”--will not change.

“Heck, he still hit the home runs, didn’t he?” Blanchard says.

The local minor league team, the independent Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks, issued a preemptive strike this winter by retiring the number “8” that Maris wore during his first pro season with the local Class-C Twins.

Club officials were alerted by McGwire’s 58 homers last year and wanted to act before the record was gone. They didn’t know he wore “8” until an intern discovered an old picture in library files. Then they were astonished who had been wearing it since.

“Last year, uh, I wore it,” says Josh Buchholz, team publicity director who served as bullpen catcher.

Then there is that unusual museum, Maris’ real lasting legacy here, filled with Gold Gloves, slugging crowns, uniforms and a constantly running videotape that curator Jim McLaughlin replaces every four months.

How it came to be located in a shopping mall is a Roger Maris kind of story.

When a couple of guys from the local American Legion convinced him that folks here wanted to see his memorabilia, he agreed to display it under two conditions: It had to accessible to a large number of people. It had to be free.

“We looked around and said, well, the only place that would satisfy those requirements in this town would be the mall,” McLaughlin says. “So we said, ‘Why not?’ ”

How did they get all the things from Florida? McLaughlin and a friend drove down a U-Haul to pick them up, of course, opening the museum in June of 1984.

Why the museum will continue to operate--no matter how many home runs McGwire and Sosa hit this year--is another Roger Maris kind of story.

When it opened, Maris signed hundreds of postcards to distribute to the first visitors. But then he signed an extra 100 and told the curator to tuck them away for later.

“He said that after he was dead, he wanted me to give these postcards to people who understand who he really was,” McLaughlin recalls.

So McLaughlin occasionally patrols the hallway in front of the museum, looking for people who understand, waiting to bestow a souvenir that is now worth several hundred dollars.

There was the couple from New York who flew here for their honeymoon. McLaughlin drove home and brought them back a postcard.

There was the elderly man from back East who had been begging his son to bring him here. When McLaughlin returned with the postcard, the elderly man cried.

“They can take away Roger Maris’ record, but they won’t take away what he meant to this town,” McLaughlin says, sighing. “Anyway, they haven’t broken it yet, have they? I watch every night on ESPN, and they haven’t broken it yet.”