Ghosts Of Flatbush Hbo Sports State
In the excellent new HBO baseball documentary?Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush,? Executive producers Rick Bernstein and Ross Greenburg once again elevate sports to the level of myth in American life. As they have done in some 15 films in this decade alone, the pair show how the teams, players, stadiums, and other key figures on the U.S. Sports scene are often the equivalent of deities and sanctuaries to the assimilated American in the stateside cultural landscape of the last 100 years.Again narrated by the reliably poetic Liev Schreiber,?Ghosts of Flatbush?
Jul 16, 2007. Da Bums' decline and departure is told in HBO's Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush. Though—like Ken Burns's Civil War series—it occasionally displays the overwrought sentimentality and nostalgia that often comes in the reckoning of defeat, the documentary has a sensitive eye for the political,. Brooklyn Dodgers: Ghosts of Flatbush was a 2007 documentary produced by HBO sports that chronicled the last ten years of the Brooklyn Dodgers tenure in the borough of churches. The documentary begins with Jackie Robinson's history making debut with the big club on opening day 1947 and ends with the team's sudden departure after the 1957 campaign.
Tells the story of Brooklyn and baseball?s Dodgers, a franchise started in the late 1800s,which became the class of the National League in the 1950s after decades of failure. Integral to the story is the coalescing of the variety of races and ethnicities who congregated in Brooklyn, once its own city before becoming a borough of New York City in 1898. With immigrants from Europe and Asia mixed with African-Americans from the U.S. South, Brooklyn was the ultimate melting pot in a country that increasingly became one of many colors, languages and customs.
For Brooklynites, the common ground that they all shared was Ebbets Field.One of the best aspects of the documentary is its chronicling of Ebbets Field, built in 1913 to accommodate only 25,000 spectators, as a ritualistic meeting place where the disenfranchised working class could for a short time feel like mainstream Americans. Every viewer was close to the field at Ebbets, and after an increase of 7000 seats in 1932, for the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, a close-knit group of devoted fans would routinely attend games in ceremonial fashion where fans interacted with players, many of whom lived in the Flatbush neighborhood of the ballpark. With only 700 parking spaces nearby, many fans instead walked or rode trolleys to the stadium.
Stepping out of the way of the oncoming cars became known as?trolley dodging,? Hence the original name of the franchise? The Trolley Dodgers.Examined in great detail was the team?s ascension to greatness in the 1940s, when they formed a stable group of core players who won seven National League pennants in the 1940s and 1950s in Brooklyn, though a World Series win constantly evaded them until a long awaited seven-game triumph over the Yankees in 1955.?Wait?Till Next Year? Had become the team?s mantra, and the crosstown Giants and Yankees gave them regular fits through that era.
The stage is already set for an epic showdown, and we're only two episodes into the season. That's an impressive bit of momentum. Green lantern animated series online.
Yet, with stalwarts such as Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, and of course, Jackie Robinson anchoring the team, the Dodgers were as much a success story in the period as they were a failure for the preceding decades.Much is made over the Dodgers torch-passing from 1940s owner Branch Rickey to 1950s owner Walter O?Malley, and the latter?s subsequent decision to move the team. By the mid-1950s, attendance had fallen at Ebbets Field as post-war white flight had set in through most of the East Coast, leaving Brooklyn?s infrastructure sadly neglected. When fans moved from New York?s city boroughs east to Long Island, traveling to Brooklyn and to Manhattan?s Polo Grounds to watch the Giants became more trouble than pleasure.O?Malley wanted a location at the Atlantic and Flatbush intersection where a train station would bring fans from the eastern suburbs directly to a new ballpark. He even showcased the unprecedented concept of a domed stadium and was willing to pay for such ventures himself.
But while his plans were delayed and subverted by New York developer Robert Moses, who instead was pulling for a stadium in adjacent Queens, north of Flushing Meadow, O?Malley entertained a lucrative offer from Los Angeles.Much debate has ensued as to whether Moses ultimately forced O?Malley out of the area, or if O?Malley moved the Dodgers to the more spacious pastures of LA strictly of his own volition. However, for Dodger fans, O?Malley has forever been labeled a traitor for his actions. While a new ballpark in LA?s untapped Chavez Ravine laid waiting, the Dodgers upped and left after the 1957 season, followed by the Giants, who O?Malley coaxed to move to San Francisco. By 1962, O?Malley got his land and park two years after the wrecking ball had turned the full city block where Ebbets Field stood into space for apartment buildings. Much worse than the absence of the team and park for the fans was the lack of a common meeting ground for Brooklynites from that point forward. The film alludes to the racial and cultural tensions thereafter being a product of Brooklyn?s recent failure to provide adequate social gathering for all of its inhabitants.Through its two hours,?Ghosts of Flatbush?
Ghosts Of Flatbush Hbo Sports State Farm
Is just that: a story about perennial mainstays that have disappeared from the existence of an outerborough neighborhood for whom the Dodgers represented a touchstone in the rapidly changing world of the 20th century. The idea of them leaving? Much less the reality of their departure? Has still left fans and players in a permanent state of disbelief. When one?s idols cease to exist, one?s cathedral is torn down, and the kinship one shared with fellow fans suddenly stops, for no comprehensible reason, it leaves a spiritual vacuum that cannot be filled.Even the New York Mets, who started as National League expansion team in 1962 and eventually played in Queens? Shea Stadium on the very spot where Robert Moses wanted his stadium, could never replace the Dodgers.
Ghosts Of Flatbush Hbo Sports State Games
Despite the Dodgers? Massive economic success in Los Angeles, their leaving Brooklyn fifty years ago left a giant hole in the hearts and souls of New Yorkers that to this day has yet to be filled.Interesting Footnote: the site on which O?Malley wanted to build his new Brooklyn stadium in the late 1950s is the current spot where the NBA?s New Jersey Nets are vying to build an elaborate basketball arena and entertainment complex.