The Cowboy’s Last Roundup : He Rode Tall Even Without World Series

Gene Autry detected the depression and devastation on the other end of the line. The World Series would proceed without Autry’s Angels yet again, after a most excruciating elimination.

In 1986, the Angels needed one victory in three games to advance to the World Series. They lost at home, coughing up a 5-2 lead in the ninth inning. They flew to Boston and lost twice more to the Red Sox.

Mike Port, the Angels’ general manager that year, could barely endure the pain as he telephoned Autry after the team returned home. Win one for the Cowboy? The Angels had failed again, and yet the Cowboy told his general manager to buck up.

“What’s the matter with you?” Autry asked. “Aren’t we going to play next year?”

Port shared the story with affection and respect Friday, as Angels past and present offered tributes to the founder and owner--and biggest fan--of the franchise. Autry died Friday at 91, without the championship ring that so many worked so hard to win for him.

“In 46 years of baseball, my only regret is not getting Gene into the World Series,” said Buzzie Bavasi, who preceded Port as the Angel general manager after assembling championship teams for the Dodgers. “I have four rings. I’d love to give him one.”

The mission will not cease with Autry’s death.

“He’ll always be a part of this franchise,” Angel President Tony Tavares said. “The first time this team wins a championship, it will be dedicated to him.”

Autry’s unquenchable optimism for a team identified with failure reflected his love for the sport and for the promise of each spring.

“If being a great fan gets one into the Hall of Fame, he would have been there long ago,” Bavasi said.

While a younger generation of fans and players was born too late to enjoy the legendary “Singing Cowboy” in music, film, radio and television--”Gene Autry was always my dad’s childhood hero,” outfielder Tim Salmon said--the whole world might have been deprived of those talents had Autry hit well enough to pass a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals.

“With all the great things he did in his life and all the lives he touched, I’m not so sure he wouldn’t have rather been a good-hitting shortstop,” Port said.

Autry found baseball, or vice versa, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and agreed to air their games on his radio station. After Dodger owner Walter O’Malley shifted stations in 1960, Autry heard the American League planned to expand to Los Angeles. He headed to the baseball meetings in St. Louis, intending to acquire the radio rights to the new team. He got the rights--and the team.

Within six days, Autry hired Fred Haney as general manager and Bill Rigney as manager. On Dec. 14, 1960, eight days after the birth of the Los Angeles Angels, Haney and Rigney selected 28 players in the expansion draft, the first of them pitcher Eli Grba.

And, on April 11, 1961, four months into their existence, the Angels took the field. Grba pitched a complete game, and the Angels beat the Baltimore Orioles 7-2.

“I remember the look he had on his face that day in Baltimore,” Rigney said. “I remember how proud Mr. Autry was. He looked like we had just won the World Series.

“Baseball lucked out when he became an owner. He had been a great Cardinal fan. He was a great friend of Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang. He was such a great fan that to end up an owner was something he loved more and more.”

The Dodgers may have invented the promotion of Hollywood Stars Night, but Hollywood stars--Autry’s show business buddies--joined the Angels every night. Outfielder Albie Pearson accompanied Marilyn Monroe in a pregame ceremony one night, in what Pearson believes was her last public appearance. Pitcher Bo Belinsky dated actress Mamie Van Doren.

“I was a big Gene Autry fan even before I got to the Angels. I loved his movies,” Belinsky said. “I have fond memories of Gene. He was a sport, not some wound-tight, old fogie of an owner.”

Autry staged spring training in Palm Springs, at a time when the desert resort was Hollywood’s favorite hideaway. Catcher Buck Rodgers recalled the likes of Cary Grant, Lucille Ball and Dwight Eisenhower saddling up alongside Autry at the exhibition games.

“For a guy from Ohio to see all the stars from that era, especially in Palm Springs, it was amazing,” Rodgers said. “We’d just say, let’s get the workouts done so we can go see the stars.”

Autry loved his players, strolling through the clubhouse to meet and greet and dispense good cheer. He relished the team barbecues at his Palm Springs hotel each spring. When Belinsky pitched the Angels’ first no-hitter in 1962, Autry picked up the payments on his Cadillac, in a year in which Belinsky’s salary was $7,500.

“I met a lot of owners, but he was one of the few I admired,” Belinsky said.

The Hollywood connection faded after Autry moved the Angels to Anaheim and its new stadium in 1966, out of Dodger Stadium and the Dodgers’ shadow. The bond tightened with the players, though, particularly after Autry lavished free-agent dollars on Don Baylor, Bobby Grich and Joe Rudi in 1977.

The Angels won the American League West for the first time in 1979 and won again in 1982, after the signing of Reggie Jackson. The Angels had not yet retired any uniform numbers, but Baylor led the players in 1982 in retiring No. 26, symbolic of Autry’s enthusiasm and participation as a 26th player.

“The thing I remember most was when we shot some promotional commercials,” Grich said. “Gene and I were in the runway, and he called me ‘son’ and I called him ‘dad.’ That experience remains dearest to my heart.

“After every road trip, he would come down to the clubhouse at least once to see how each of us and our families were doing. He was never aloof, and he was the best owner a ballplayer could work for.”

General managers loved him too, because he did not interfere. In 1979, when Bavasi allowed Nolan Ryan to depart as a free agent and declared he could replace him with two 8-7 pitchers, Autry declined to overrule Bavasi.

“I should have gotten more personally involved,” Autry said later. “If I had, I don’t think Nolan would have ever left.”

The World Series albatross remains, glued to the Angels’ collar most painfully in 1982 and 1986, each time under the management of Gene Mauch. The 1982 Angels won the first two games of the best-of-five American League championship series against the Milwaukee Brewers, then lost the next three. The 1986 Angels lost the best-of-seven series to the Boston Red Sox after leading three games to one.

“Mr. Autry was a remarkable man--kind, generous and a good guy. That’s what made him such a good owner,” Mauch said. “He didn’t act like an owner. He was your friend. My biggest disappointment was not being able to win it for him in 1982 and 1986.”

Angel fans curse the 1986 loss to this day, particularly the defeat in Anaheim that preceded the final two in Boston. With the Angels one strike away from the victory that would admit them to the promised land of the Series, with Anaheim Stadium jumping and creaking as never before, with champagne on ice in the clubhouse and Autry in the elevator headed downstairs for the celebration--with all that, Dave Henderson hit the home run off Donnie Moore that canceled the party.

“That was the only time I ever saw him visibly shaken,” former Angel president Richard Brown said of Autry. “It was really depressing for him.”

For the players too, as pitcher Mike Witt recalled. In the team meeting that followed the loss, Witt said, “For almost an hour, all the players on the team talked about how we wanted to win for Mr. Autry.”

The “Win One for the Cowboy” rallying cry grew in urgency with each passing year, with managers and general managers and free agents and rookies all passing in the night, with Autry perhaps too kind to suggest his team might never win with philosophies and managements that changed almost yearly.

“Everybody wanted to win one for the Cowboy,” Brown said. “He didn’t want to win for himself. He wanted to win for the fans.”

Finally, in 1991, Autry turned to two old friends. The Angels hired Rodgers, the former catcher, as manager. Then they lured former Angel manager and longtime Autry favorite Whitey Herzog out of semi-retirement, assigning him the title of director of player personnel and asking him to duplicate the success he enjoyed as a manager of the year and executive of the year with the Cardinals.

“If I can do one thing in my career, I’d like to get Gene Autry into a World Series,” Herzog said at the time. “If I can do that, I’d be the happiest man on this earth.”

Herzog and Rodgers failed too, but the lack of a ring failed to dampen Autry’s spirit. In 1995, after the Angels blew an 11-game lead, they faced a one-game playoff with the Seattle Mariners. The winner would play the Yankees in New York, and Autry prepared to fly there. The Angels lost, of course, and Autry stayed home.

Yet his team could not break his heart. As he outlived his Hollywood contemporaries, he found no greater joy than in watching his Angels play.

“He kept score until he was 90 years old,” Bavasi said. “He stopped last year because he couldn’t see well enough.”

But, as his failing health permitted, he continued to attend games. He was in a wheelchair for his final visit to the clubhouse last month, but he was sharp enough to recognize pitcher Mike Fetters, whom the Angels had acquired in August after trading him away seven years ago. And a twinkle graced his eye as he chatted with his favorite player, pitcher Chuck Finley.

“I have a lot of fond memories of the stories he’d always tell,” said Finley, who first met Autry as a rookie in 1986. “This team was one of the things that made him happy, and I know he was disappointed we didn’t get to the World Series. But he’d always tell me, ‘As long as you try your best and work hard, then what happens happens.’

“I’m sad we didn’t get to the World Series for him, but I’m sure he’ll be watching us from above in the future.”

Autry and his wife, Jackie, sold a 25% ownership share to the Walt Disney Co. in 1996, and his death allows Disney to purchase the remaining interest. Can Disney win one for the cowboy? Perhaps, but the angels Autry walks among today are the ones that never lose.

Said Belinsky: “He’s up there with a winning franchise now.”

*

Times staff writers Mike DiGiovanna, Chris Foster and Mike Terry contributed to this story.

* COWBOY TYCOON

Entertainment, business, sports--Gene Autry, the good guy in the white hat, left his imprint on all. A1

* AMERICAN ICON

Colleagues cite a legacy of films and music and say he represented an old-fashioned hero. A25