The Day The Music Died

Related Stories

• Gwynn & Ripken: Waiting for the Call
• My Dinners With Vin
• The Day I...Caught Roger Clemens
• Mission Impossible: Pick the 10 Best Collegiate Baseball Players of All Time
• And That's The Way It Is

Bostonians have their own version of Bye, Bye American Pie and the "day the music died." The city went silent on Friday, August 18, 1967 – 40 years ago this week – when Tony Conigliaro hung his good looks over the plate, and Angels' Jack Hamilton's fastball slammed into the kid's face with the sound of a hurled pumpkin against a car hood on Halloween.

I didn't see it. I heard it. As still is my custom, I listened to the game on the radio as a 15 year-old high school kid with guarded fantasies that the Red Sox could make a pennant run. Just 3.5 games out of first place, and six weeks left in the season, anything could happen. Anything and everything did.

The season was the Impossible Dream year, when manager Dick Williams promised the cellar-dwelling Red Sox would win more than they'd lose. The Red Sox would end in first place, and lose the World Series in seven games to the Cardinals and Bob Gibson's catapult of a right arm.

But the real impossible dream stayed with our Tony C. who was every baseball loving kid in New England's idol. He was one of us, the big brother we all imagined. He went straight from St. Mary's High School in Lynn – not far from the General Electric plant – to the Red Sox farm system and then on to Fenway Park.

Red Sox trainer Buddy LeRoux and catcher Mike Ryan help carry Conigliaro's stretcher.

While still living in his Swampscott home in his rookie year, Tony C. hit .290 with 24 home runs and 52 RBIs in 111 games as a 19-year-old. The next season, he became the youngest home run champion in American League history. He was already the youngest player to reach 100 career home runs.

We all fast-forwarded his career with the Red Sox, his 600 or more home runs, his Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown, and what he might say to inspire us with his words as he had awed us with his bat.

But all that perfect dreaming came to end on that imperfect summer night 40 years ago. He just lay there. Still and silent. Each time I see the grainy, black and white tape, I pray he'll just get up, dust off his pants and clean his cleats, and toast one.

But he didn't get up.

Early predictions had Tony C. back in the line up as soon as the blood cleared from his eye, three weeks, a month tops, just in time to close the '67 season and finish the race for the pennant.

But Tony C didn't play again until 1969. But neither his life nor ours would ever be the same. As if God in the bleachers answered the collective prayers of New England, Tony C. did have a wondrous season in 1970, when he hit 36 home runs and drove in a career-high 116 runs squinting with one good eye.

But the prayers ran short, and the Red Sox front office traded him away to the Angels the next year. In the beginning of the 1975 season – when the Red Sox would again go to the World Series – Tony C. had a brief swan song of 21 games back with his home team before management sent him down to the minors and baseball oblivion.

In 1982, while still trying to stay in the game as a sportscaster, Tony Conigliaro had a heart attack – and later a massive stroke – stuck in a tunnel underneath Boston.

Living with his family again for eight years until his death in 1990 at just 45, Tony C. remained still and silent, much as he lay in the batter's box on that night of horror, August 18th, 1967, the day the music died in Boston.