Cowboy Justice

If Gene Autry were alive to see this day, he might shower and shave and read the newspaper over breakfast, just like any other day.

With his Anaheim Angels playing in their first World Series, he and his wife Jackie might leave home in time to stop by the clubhouse and chat with the players, just as they would for any other game. From there, they would go to the owner’s box, where he would sit with a customary scorecard in hand.

“He would be very calm,” Jackie said. “If someone hit a home run, he might stand up and applaud. He never screamed and yelled.”

But deep inside, behind that poker face, might be a different story.

The man they called “the Cowboy” spent almost four decades hoping to see his team play for the championship. He suffered through losing seasons. Even worse, he suffered through playoffs when the Angels came one game, one out, one strike, away from the Series.

For all the renown Autry enjoyed as an actor and singer, all the millions he made before his death four years ago, people who knew him suspect that -- even with the Angels down a game to the San Francisco Giants -- he might never have been happier.

“This was his ultimate goal,” said Bobby Knoop, a former second baseman and coach for the Angels. “You just got the feeling he wanted it so badly.”

The original singing cowboy, the one with the 10-gallon hat and a smile as broad as Texas, loved baseball since the days when he played it well enough to be offered a tryout by the St. Louis Cardinals. Though he chose another career -- Will Rogers discovered him plucking a guitar at his night job as a telegraph operator -- Autry never strayed far from the game.

Performing on a Tulsa radio show in the late 1920s, he befriended Dizzy Dean and other players who came through town for Texas League games. Later, while in Chicago to record albums, Autry frequented Wrigley Field.

His true involvement began near the end of a career that spanned about 94 films and more than 600 recordings. In 1952, Autry purchased the radio station that carried Dodger games and, when he lost that contract, sought the broadcast rights to an expansion club the American League wanted to put in Southern California.

By 1961, almost by accident, he was co-owner of the new franchise.

It was paradise for a baseball fan, recalled Johnny Grant, who met Autry in the Army Air Corps during World War II and later worked for his radio and television stations. At Lakeside Country Club, Autry traded barbs with Bob Hope, a part-owner of the Cleveland Indians. At a house Grant shared with several Angel players, Autry often stayed until the wee hours talking baseball.

“Gene was one of the biggest stars around, but he was like a kid when we would go out and have a meal with Stan Musial or Red Schoendienst,” said Grant, who later became honorary mayor of Hollywood. “He loved it when Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle came through town.”

The admiration was often mutual because, as former manager Gene Mauch said, a lot of players “thought he was a god.” Knoop collected his records, an autographed baseball, even a pair of his old boots emblazoned with a flying “A.”

When minor league clubs needed a celebrity to raise money, they asked Autry.

“I’d drive him up to Bakersfield or San Jose,” Grant said. “He’d sit in the passenger seat the whole way reading the newspaper, from cover to back, even the want ads. When we got to the banquet, he’d get up and tell a few jokes. He would do anything to support the game.”

On one such trip, police kept stopping them even though Grant was watching his speed. The third time, an officer explained why. “They were radioing ahead, saying Gene Autry’s in that car,” Grant recalled.

Outfielder Tim Salmon, born long after Autry’s heyday, learned of this fame when he was searching through his grandmother’s house and found a stack of Gene Autry comic books that had belonged to his father. Salmon brought his dad and the comics to the ballpark.

“My dad was like a kid,” Salmon said. “Here he was excited about me playing in the big leagues, but the biggest thing was that, through his son, he got to meet his childhood hero. For me, it was really finding out who Mr. Autry was through my father.”

Even players who knew little of the singing cowboy became enamored of the owner who spent spring training with the team and threw lavish barbecues behind his Palm Springs hotel. They always asked him to sing his hits, “Back in the Saddle” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

Once the season began, Autry stopped by the clubhouse before and after games.

“Mr. Autry loved his players and he loved to sit and talk,” Knoop said. “He might talk about the game, especially if we won. If we lost, he’d find something else to talk about. ‘How was your day?’ ‘Was everything else all right?’ He was never, ever negative.”

There were reasons to be discouraged. As Autry said years later: “In the movies, I never lost a fight. In baseball, I hardly ever won one.”

The Angels tried to keep pace with their successful neighbors to the north, the Dodgers, by trading away young prospects for big names. Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, Frank Robinson and Nolan Ryan passed through Anaheim but none produced a pennant.

Even when the Angels reached the playoffs in 1979, ’82 and ’86 -- Mauch recalled seeing “happiness all over Gene’s face” -- they found ways to slip before taking the final step to the Series.

The team was said to be jinxed, losing key players to injury or accident or worse, always losing in the end. Grant, who spent many nights with Autry in the owner’s box, said: “I think he was hurting through the smiles, I really do. But he kept smiling.”

And he never meddled. “I have wondered often why a manager did this or that, but I have always tried to restrain my second-guessing,” Autry once said. “I have never ordered a manager to play a certain player, and I have never called a manager at 3 in the morning to ask why he didn’t play the infield back with one out.”

Some wonder if Autry wasn’t too nice, too understanding, the antithesis of New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. As the years passed, his club’s desire to succeed approached desperation, loyal management and players adopting the credo, “Win one for the Cowboy.”

“To my knowledge, Gene never once said, ‘Look, guys, I’m not going to be around much longer, we’ve got to get it done this year,’ ” Jackie said. “Gene wanted to win for the fans and the people who worked for him in the organization, but as he aged and his health began to fail, there were times I got a sense of urgency and even panic from our baseball people that if we don’t do it this year, he may not be around next year.

“We simply mortgaged the future at times,” she said. “We could probably staff two major league teams with the kids we lost from our farm system.”

Autry was 91 when he died in 1998. His team had just finished three games out of first place but, as always, there was hope. “He knew some of these young men like Tim Salmon and Troy Percival, and he knew they would get it done some day,” Jackie said.

Dick Clark, a longtime friend, tries to explain why the club meant so much to Autry.

“He had accomplished everything else he needed to accomplish,” the former “American Bandstand” host said. “He owned everything he needed to own and he was happily married. So that team was his life ... his baby.”

If Autry could look around Edison Field this weekend, he would see the number 26 displayed beyond the left-field bullpen, signifying his place as the extra man on the roster. He would see his smile flashed across the scoreboard and, no doubt, fans still waving signs that read “Win one for the Cowboy.”

“Every team has its star,” said Dean Chance, a former Angel pitcher. “The Yankees have Babe Ruth. The Angels, their star is Gene Autry, the owner.”

The fuss would please Autry, friends say, but he would not crow about it. He would sit in his box and quietly keep score. “And if he had to go to the restroom, he would hand you the scorecard and you’d better make sure you got it right,” Grant said.

At some point, a team official would call to inform him of the attendance before it was shown on the scoreboard. If one of his players hit a home run, he might clap.

“Outwardly,” Jackie said, “he would look the same.”

But inside, that might be a different story. These days, the Cowboy’s team is in the World Series.

These days, his widow said, “he may have been jumping around on the inside.”

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Times staff writer Bill Shaikin contributed to this report.