Sports

Willie Horton Flashes Back to Detroit in '67 Amid Tensions in Baltimore

April 29, 2015, 11:44 AM by  Alan Stamm

Former Tigers slugger Willie Horton can't help thinking of 1967 as he watches coverage of Baltimore's street confrontations, military-enforced curfew and today's game in an empty Oriole Park.

"It's like a flashback," Horton, 72, tells Sporting News in a phone interview from his Bloomfield Hills home.


Willie Horton, shown in 2012: Detroit's riot "took me beyond the field and got me into the community. I'm still there." (WXYZ photo)

Cory Collins, a "digital content producer" who had a timely brainstorm to call Horton, explains why this ex-player has a special reason to recall Detroit rioting:

As the 12th Street riots split apart an inner-city neighborhood, the Tigers split a double-header with the Yankees [on July 23, 1967]. In the second game, Detroit won 7-3. Willie Horton, the left fielder hitting cleanup, clubbed a home run. Then the team told Horton and his teammates to do what he'd already done: go home. Stay safe.

Instead, Horton drove to 12th street. He stood atop a car. He pleaded for peace. He saw the flames, the broken bottles and buildings. With tears in his eyes, the man who grew up in the nearby Jeffries Projects asked angry looters to not lose their purpose. To not destroy what little community and infrastructure they had. . . .

"People were worried and concerned about me being hurt while I was trying to bring peace," said Horton. . . .  "But I told them this wasn't the way to do it. Don't loot. Don't destroy your neighborhood. This is your neighborhood. Your schools."

Collins brings the conversation back to 2015  

"What I see right now is scary. But things will work themselves out. . . .

"We had a better city, a better community [after 1967]. . . . It brought us together as a whole -- as the people, black and white."

Detroit's rioting awakened a lasting civic commitment for Horton, he tells Sporting News:

"It took me beyond the field and got me into the community. I'm still there."

Separately, native Detroiter Ron Fournier comments on the interview at National Journal, where he's editorial director and a columnist. 

He recalls a hospital visit here last year with his late father. They "spoke as we had for so many years. About sport. About heroes. About the meaning of it all."

We started with Gordie Howe, the Detroit Red Wings legend whose career connected our childhoods, and ended with Willie Horton, the Tigers left-fielder who helped heal our city in 1967. "He told them to stop," whispered my father, a retired Detroit riot cop. "He told them to stop burning." . . .  

If my father were alive today, I'm fairly sure his sympathies would lie more with the police than with the protesters. . . . But for as much as he admired Horton, I know he'd love Toya Graham: the mother seen on video repeatedly smacking her son after catching him throwing objects at riot police. . . .

Graham can't guarantee the safety of her son any more than Horton could single-handedly save his beloved city. But at least they tried.


Read more:  Sporting News


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