Willie Horton excused himself, jumping up from his chair in response to a call from another part of the house. He was gone for about five minutes. “My grandfather,” he explained upon his return. “He has a room downstairs.”
Several minutes later another call took him away again. “That was Dominique, my granddaughter,” he said.
Five generations of family live under Willie’s roof. He couldn’t he happier. It’s a big roof. Horton lives in a fine old house in one of Detroit’s most prestigious neighborhoods, Sherwood Forest. There is plenty of room for everyone.
He sells machinery, and his employer, who is a big baseball fan, prepared a special packet outlining Horton’s accomplishments and career. Not that anyone in Detroit really would need it. Horton is a special man in the city, a symbol of the best that Detroit would like itself to be. “I believe that the 1968 Tigers were put here by God to heal this city,” he says, and he is utterly sincere. If anyone could have been named the designated healer, it was Horton.
Hardly a player in the history of the Tigers was not booed in Detroit. Kaline heard it, and so did Hank Greenberg. McLain and Lolich knew what it sounded like, and Cash knew only too well. But not Horton. He was the kid who came off the streets, an almost mythic figure, a natural who never fell from grace. Instinctively, reflexively the crowds knew that Willie Horton was one of them. And for all the years he played in Detroit, they loved him for it.
How odd that long after his retirement his name should be confused with that of a vicious killer and rapist, a paroled criminal who became a divisive political and racial issue during the presidential election of 1988.
“That did bother me,” says Willie. “I think Johnny Carson or somebody called me up, and we talked about it on the air and I think we got that all cleared up. But you don’t like to see that happen to your good name.”
He came out of Northwestern High, maybe the toughest of all the city’s schools in the early ’60s. Most of the 1967 rioters lived in that neighborhood. The principal of an adjacent Detroit school, also noted for its hard characters, once described it this way: “At my place, if a kid wears a nice leather coat to school, they’ll break in to his locker to get it. At Northwestern, they’ll rip it right off his back.” But just a few blocks away from Northwestern were the studios of Motown Records, which was starting up just as Horton was graduating. There were both hope and despair in those streets.
“We’ve all got a part to play in life as individuals,” he says. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, that’s it. You’ve got to find what you love and do it well. I wish maybe it could have worked out that I work with kids a bit more than I do. Children need heroes today. That’s the big need. I had a job with the Police Athletic League in Detroit, setting up baseball teams all over the city and getting them equipment. They just don’t play ball anymore in the city the way I used to when I was growing up, and that’s a shame. They let the grass grow up on all those diamonds, and the backstops are falling down. It hurts me to see that. Baseball can help these kids. But, you know, a new mayor got elected here, and I lost that job. 1 knew the new mayor, Dennis Archer, very well. But he told me that it was a political thing and there wasn’t anything he could do. I didn’t care about myself. It was the kids.
“When I was growing up my hero was Rocky Colavito. I loved to go out there and watch him hit home runs. When I joined the Tigers I went over and shook his hand. He smiled at me and told me that when I came up to stay, he’d be traded. I couldn’t believe it. Trade the Rock? No way. But that’s just what happened. They traded my hero to make room for me. Sometimes that happens in life.
“It’s funny how people are. When I coached with the Yankees, we had to meet almost every day with George Steinbrenner. I know what his reputation is, but he was always very nice to me. I think he’s just a lonely man. I think that’s why he acts the way he does sometimes, to draw people to him some way.”
As it was for so many of the younger Tigers, 1968 was a break-out year for Horton. He would never again equal the thirty-six homers he hit then, and only twice in his career would he stay healthy enough to play in more games. In the Year of the Pitcher, Horton was a most dangerous character. He was fourth in the league in hitting and RBIs, second in homers and total bases. He combined power and average better than anyone else in the American League.
Horton lost his parents in an auto accident on a snow-covered highway just months before his first full season with the Tigers. His dad, Clint, loved baseball and transmitted that love to his son. When Willie joined the Tigers, he wanted to get his father box seats for a game with Baltimore. Clint Horton wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that he watch Willie play from his usual seat in the faraway center-field bleachers. He cheered silently until Willie tagged one off Robin Roberts in the late innings for a home run. Then Clint couldn’t hold it in anymore. He leaped to his feet yelling: “That’s my boy down there. That’s my boy, Willie.” The spectator beside him was unimpressed. “If that’s your boy down there,” he asked, “what are you doin’ up here?”
The family had little money, but Clint ran a tight house. He was a disciplinarian, knowing what baseball could do for his son. Willie loved boxing as much as baseball as a teenager. He sneaked across the river to Windsor, Ontario, and fought in some amateur bouts under an assumed name. Unfortunately, the fights were picked up on Canadian television, and when Clint tuned in and saw his son with the gloves on, he went through the roof. That ended Willie’s pugilistic career, but whenever there was a fight on the field during his years with Detroit, everyone first looked around to see where Willie was and stayed far away from him.
If Detroit loved Willie, he was always a man looking for family to love. For several years after the death of his parents, Charlie Dressen and Jim Campbell were his father figures. “I talked to Jim practically every day for many years,” he says. “If you had a problem you could always go to him. He knew about things. He could separate being my friend from being my boss, the person from the executive. I knew he would always treat me fair when we negotiated a contract. But he made sure that [Federal Appeals Court Judge] Damon Keith was looking out for my interests.
“I started holding barbecues at the Holiday Inn during spring training for the team. I guess it became a regular thing. A way to draw us closer together. That bunch in ’68, though, we were close-knit. You saw two Tigers, and you saw all of them. Always talking baseball. What do you do in this situation? How do you react on the field? I loved talking about the game with Kaline. I looked at him like Abraham Lincoln. It was an incentive just to come up to his level of expertise.
“I still hear talk about my throw in the World Series, the one that got Lou Brock at the plate in the fifth game. They say that turned the series around. But that just came out of talking about the game, preparing yourself for what could happen. We’d been told that Brock had got himself into bad habits on the bases. Outfielders had just given up trying to make a play on him because he was so fast getting from second to home. So a lot of times he wasn’t watching his coach at third, and the on-deck hitter wasn’t coming out to give him the sign to slide or stand up. He almost never slid. We saw these things. It didn’t happen by accident. When I threw that ball, I knew we had a shot at him. My job was to hit Coyote [Don Wert] right on the nose and for Freehan to make the call on whether to let it go through or not. It was all in the preparation.
“I see players today taking everything so lightly. Making those one-handed catches. What’s that? That’s an emergency catch. What can you do with the ball after you catch it one-handed? You respect every pitcher you face. Whatever he has he’s going to throw his best to you. You’ve got to anticipate that. I don’t believe there’s anybody talking to these young players about these things the way we used to do it.”
In the months after the riots, Horton came under tremendous pressure from members of the black community to become a racial spokesman. It wasn’t in his nature to be a militant. He didn’t feel that he should be representing anyone. His advisor, Judge Keith, tried to shield him from a lot of that. But Horton felt a responsibility that he couldn’t quite define to play a spokesman’s role. He was aware that people looked to him as a symbol, but he didn’t know what kind of a symbol, or what he was supposed to do about it beyond playing ball. In 1969, the pressure was so high that he walked off the team for several days to pull his emotions together. But in the years between, he has grown into a man very much at peace with himself, a grandfather eleven times over, the patriarch of a good house.
“Everything I have in life, I got from baseball,” he says. “I always felt if I didn’t stay focused, didn’t get the most mileage out of my ability, that I was cheating on myself. And I’ve been repaid many times over. You know, little children five and six years old come up to me, and they know about Willie Horton. That’s priceless. But I think it’s because of what we gave to this community back then. Those were special times.”