The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption Author: John Rosengren | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I349SDA | Format: PDF
The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption Description
One Sunday afternoon in August 1965, on a day when baseball’s most storied rivals, the Giants and Dodgers, vied for the pennant, the national pastime reflected the tensions in society and nearly sullied two men forever. Juan Marichal, a Dominican anxious about his family’s safety during the civil war back home, and John Roseboro, a black man living in South Central L.A. shaken by the Watts riots a week earlier, attacked one another in a moment immortalized by an iconic photo: Marichal’s bat poised to strike Roseboro’s head.
The violent moment–uncharacteristic of either man–linked the two forever and haunted both. Much like John Feinstein’s The Punch, The Fight of Their Lives examines the incident in its context and aftermath, only in this story the two men eventually reconcile and become friends, making theirs an unforgettable tale of forgiveness and redemption.
The book also explores American culture and the racial prejudices against blacks and Latinos both men faced and surmounted. As two of the premiere ballplayers of their generation, they realized they had more to unite them than keep them apart.
- File Size: 5706 KB
- Print Length: 301 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0762787120
- Publisher: Lyons Press (February 18, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I349SDA
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,235 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Baseball > History - #96
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Biographies
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Baseball > History - #96
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Biographies
August 22, 1965 is a day that has lived in disturbing infamy in the history of Major League Baseball. That was the day San Francisco Giant… future Hall Of Famer Juan Marichal… lifted his bat over his head… and landed a crashing blow… to the head of Los Angeles Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro… in the middle of the game. As a baseball loving child growing up in Los Angeles… I was sitting on the floor in front of the TV… and watched the insanity play out… right before my very eyes.
This book does a fine job of not only laying out what happened on that fateful day… but what unique roads… both Johnny and Juan traveled leading up to it… and then the author… dutifully follows the diverted paths of each man… in the aftermath. And perhaps with the finality… of justice… that can only be delivered… in the completion of a poem… how peace… or what can only be defined as an attempt to discover peace… reunites these two adversaries’.
As I started reading this book… much of what the author wrote seemed very familiar to me… and not just the facts on their own. And the reason I found was based on the following: Out of 277 pages… over 60 pages are sources… bibliographies… and index. In reviewing these pages I found that I had read many of the books he quoted. As a reader… the author’s due diligence made me feel even better about the book. As mentioned… even though I had read many of those books… it impressed me how he so cohesively mixed the two life stories into such a readable sequence for both men… and masterfully… led it like rivers flowing into the same ocean… at the conclusion.
We've all been there: said something we shouldn't have said or done something we wish we could take back, but no matter how much we try to move on for some people what was done will always be a defining moment of how they see us. This is true in all areas of our lives, but the great thing is we don't have to live in that moment. We can choose to move forward.
That is exactly what baseball players Juan Marichal and John Roseboro realized, and thanks to the book THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES author John Rosengren shows us how in spite of troubles for them both they were able to find some peace and some healing.
Now I have to admit that I had honestly not heard of these two guys before. Sports not being my favorite past-time, I learned about them for the first time through this book. That, I believe, was a good thing, because I had no preconceived ideas about the incident that seemed to go down in infamy. What I did learn from Rosengren's book, however, was to look at the two men not just because of that moment but their lives as a whole.
The author does a great job in showing the reader who they were before the fight and how their lives were forever changed because of those moments on the field in 1965. What it also does is show us how through forgiveness and the ability to not be defined by that one incident both men were able to not just better understand each other but themselves as well.
THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES also reminds us that not everyone is so quick to move forward. The book quotes Phil Pepe of the New York World-Telgram and Sun who wrote this about Marichal and how deep the reverberations of his actions could reach: "Juan is a decent and sensitive man, who must know by now that he performed a dastardly act.
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