Old Glory. Stars and Stripes. Star-Spangled banner.
America’s flag is, for some, a sacred fabric. Rick Monday represented those devotees during a Cubs-Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium on April 25, 1976, when he prevented a duo—father and son—from igniting the red, white, and blue banner on the outfield grass.
In a 2006 article by Ben Platt for mlb.com, Monday said, “My thoughts were reinforced with my six years in the Marine Corps Reserves. It was also reinforced by a lot of friends who lost their lives protecting the rights and freedoms that flag represented.”
What followed put an exclamation point on the ribbon rescue, which received an extra infusion of national pride during America’s bicentennial year. “It was a very quiet moment,” described Monday. “A smattering of applause as they got these two guys off the field. And it got quiet again. And if memory serves correctly, from one part of the stadium, I don’t know where, and then from another part, and then from another part, and then kind of collectively, people began to sing ‘God Bless America.'”
When Monday swiped the flag, which had already been dosed with lighter fluid, America’s psyche had suffered a series of rabbit punches during the past two decades—more than 58,000 servicemen dead and thousands others wounded in the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon; the Cuban Missile Crisis; four students shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard during a war protest at Kent State University; two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford; two oil crises; inflation; race riots; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Cynicism abounded, laced with fear. Bobby Kennedy offered hope, which crumbled when Sirhan Sirhan murdered him in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after Kennedy’s victory in the California Democratic primary. “Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills, misery, ignorance, and violence,” said Kennedy. “Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.”
Would that it were so. Optimism about America teetered with each headline.
Hence, Monday’s act, though only occupying a few seconds, triggered a patriotic catharsis for the 25,167 in attendance, plus those watching the game on television, listening to it on radio, or learning about it in the next day’s sports pages.
The Dodgers beat the Cubs 5-4 on that April day. Monday knocked three hits, scored two runs, and notched one RBI. But snatching the flag from imminent torching captured headlines and hearts—and continues to do so.
In a 2006 interview for mlb.com, Monday explained, “From time to time, people ask, ‘Are you upset because you spent 19 seasons in the major leagues and you’re known primarily for stopping two people from burning the flag?’ If that’s all you’re known for, it’s not a bad thing at all. It solidified the thought process of hundreds of thousands of people that represented this country in fine fashion and lost their lives.”
Rick Monday played with three teams in his career:
- 1966-1971: Athletics
- 1972-1976: Cubs
- 1977-1984: Dodgers
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on April 25, 2016.