Where Are They Buried? (21 page)

In his last years, Steinbrenner mellowed some. He divested himself of most of his business interests—American Ship Building filed for bankruptcy all the way back in 1993—and he enjoyed spending time at his Florida stud farm which entered horses in the Kentucky Derby six times. Nostalgic, he cried in public on several occasions, including the time a group of West Point cadets cheered him at a Yankees home opener. “This is a very important thing that we hold,” he said of the Yankees, his voice cracking. “This is the people’s team.”

With impeccable timing, he died of a heart attack at 80, six months after the federal estate tax expired, saving his wife and children about half a billion dollars. He is buried at Trinity Memorial Gardens in Trinity, Florida.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 19 off the Suncoast Parkway, turn west onto Route 54, and the cemetery is about three miles on your left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Turn south on Community Drive and then left onto Memorial Drive. As you approach the main gate, his mausoleum is obvious on the right.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1913 – MARCH 31, 1980

During the 1936 Olympic Games, Jesse Owens achieved the finest one-day showing in track history by winning an unprecedented four gold medals. What made his accomplishments even more memorable was that they unfolded directly in front of Adolf Hitler, in his own Nazi Germany capital, where it was expected that the Games would be a forum for his supposed Aryan supremacy. Instead, a black athlete named Jesse ruined Hitler’s day by affirming that it was again only individual excellence, rather than race or national origin, that distinguishes one from another.

Upon his return to the States from that tremendous performance, Jesse was showered with accolades. But in those days athletes were not offered lucrative endorsement contracts, and Jesse needed to support his young family. Taking a position as a playground director in Cleveland, Jesse took his first step toward a lifetime of working with underprivileged children, and for the remainder of his life, he was tirelessly and continuously involved in the promotion of youth guidance activities. In 1976, Jesse was
recognized for his efforts with our nation’s Medal of Freedom award, the highest civilian honor.

Seventy years ago, the detrimental effects of smoking weren’t as well-known, and certainly not as well-publicized, as they are today. Many professional athletes smoked, and some even appeared in print ads advocating smoking because they had been led to believe that it helped open the lungs. Jesse was one of those misinformed athletes but, by the time the dangers of tobacco were widely publicized in the 1960s, it was too late for Jesse; he was hopelessly hooked on cigarettes.

Jesse died of lung cancer at 66 and was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Oak Woods is located on 67th Street, just east of I-94.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right, then bear left at the “Y” onto Memorial Drive. After the lake, turn right and Jesse’s grave is on the right.

JANUARY 25, 1951 – MAY 30, 1975

At the University of Oregon, track specialist Steve Prefontaine won four consecutive NCAA titles in the 5,000-meter event and later held every national outdoor track distance record above 2,000 meters.

At the 1972 Olympics, he was a relatively young 21-year-old, but still managed a fourth-place finish in the 5,000. Always a crowd favorite for his talent as well as his exuberance—after a win Steve would often take not just one, but two or three
victory laps while shaking his fists—he was well on his way to becoming perhaps the greatest American distance runner ever and it was generally expected that Steve would win gold in the 1976 Olympics.

But fate intervened, Steve’s life was cut short and instead, his is a story of what might have been. Less than five hours after running the second fastest 5,000 meters in U.S. history, Steve died in a single-car crash in Eugene, Oregon. In his MG convertible, driving alone with a blood-alcohol level of 0.16, he lost control and the car flipped and pinned him underneath, where he suffocated.

Steve was only 24 when he was buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Coos Bay, Oregon.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the center of town, follow Route 101 south for 1½ miles. At the yellow flashing light, turn right onto Millington Frontage Road and drive up the hill to the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Just 75 feet up the hill from the cemetery office, next to a small Alberta Spruce tree, is the flat stone marking Steve’s grave.

FEBRUARY 25, 1918 – OCTOBER 25, 1995

Bobby Riggs was one of the most resourceful and calculating tennis players the game ever saw. He had his best record, and the best in the world, in 1939 when he won nine of thirteen tournaments and went 54-5 in matches. It was that year that he also swept all three titles at Wimbledon, the only time he played there. An inveterate gambler, he said, “I scraped up every dime I could find,” to take a London bookmaker’s 200-1 odds against him winning the singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles titles. At tournament’s end, Bobby pocketed $108,000. During the 1940s, he was one of the best players on the planet—he also won three U.S. Open titles—but his enduring legacy is surely his notorious “Battle of the Sexes” matches.

In 1973 Bobby seized center court by emerging from retirement claiming that any decent male player could defeat even the best female players. He challenged Margaret Smith Court, then the world’s top-ranked female, to a winner-take-all Battle of the Sexes match on national television; Margaret accepted the challenge but lost. After the match, Bobby declared, “I want Billie Jean King … I want the women’s lib leader.” These were the early years of the women’s
movement, and Billie Jean King was an outspoken advocate and top-ranked player; such a match would transcend the boundaries of sport.

Like Margaret, Billie Jean gamely accepted the challenge and the contest attracted the attention of a broad spectrum of people. In a hyperbolic swell of promotion before the September 1973 event, Bobby brought sexist posturing to the level of self-parody, practicing in a “male chauvinist pig” tee shirt and vowing to jump off a bridge if he lost.

The “Libber versus the Lobber” match was broadcast live from the Houston Astrodome and in the circus atmosphere Bobby made his grand entrance in a gold-wheeled Chinese rickshaw pulled by six beautiful models, while Billie Jean was carried in on a red velvet-covered Cleopatra-style litter, held aloft by men clad in mini-togas. But once play began, the 29-year-old Billie Jean was all business, and she methodically overpowered the bespectacled Bobby, the pre-match favorite despite his 55 years, trouncing him in consecutive sets.

Bobby was humiliated before an estimated 40 million television viewers while Billie Jean was awarded the $100,000 prize, proving that female athletes could indeed excel in pressure-filled situations. The match, and especially Bobby’s hype, inadvertently fueled an interest in women’s tennis and helped make it the major spectator and money sport that it is today. Neither Bobby nor Billie Jean held any hard feelings and the two became good friends.

Bobby continued to enjoy the limelight as an over-the-hill hustler-player and, as women’s tennis became popular, he softened, then abandoned his chauvinistic stance. In November 2002, at a tennis gala marking the match’s 25th anniversary, Billie Jean said, “After the fact, he really understood he did make a difference. He’d be thrilled to be around for all these things this year. And I really want people to appreciate him for being one of the top ten players in history. I mean, he was number one at one time, and he won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.”

In 1988, long out of the spotlight, Bobby was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After battling the disease for six years, he made his condition public during the opening ceremony of the Bobby Riggs Tennis Museum Foundation in Encinitas, California. In the last year of his life, Bobby worked as a spokesperson to educate the public about the disease.

At 77, Bobby died of the cancer. He was cremated and, per his wishes, his ashes were sprinkled over a few of his favorite tennis courts.

JANUARY 31, 1919 – OCTOBER 24, 1972

DECEMBER 20, 1881 – DECEMBER 9, 1965

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson, grandson of a slave, crossed the white chalk line at Ebbets Field to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke Major League Baseball’s rigidly enforced color barrier. It’s true that if not he, then some other black player would have integrated the national pastime eventually, but it was Jackie who did it, and because he did it so incredibly well, he became a near-mythic figure.

After a four-sport college career at UCLA and a stint as the top player in the Negro League, Jackie was asked by Branch Rickey, general manager of the Dodgers, to play for one of their farm teams. At first Jackie was disbelieving, not even interested, but Branch persisted and Jackie signed on. Many owners, sportswriters, and fans were against the integration, claiming that it would destroy Major League Baseball, but Branch ignored his detractors, advanced Jackie through the ranks, and added him to the team’s Major League roster. The Brooklyn Dodgers instantly became the favorite team of African Americans nationwide.

It’s now been more than 60 springs since that day when Jackie first walked onto Ebbets Field and today it’s difficult to appreciate
the full weight of the event; it would be eight years before Rosa Parks would refuse to move to the back of a Montgomery bus and no one had any idea who Martin Luther King Jr. was.

While black fans huddled around radios and crowded together in the bleachers to delight in Jackie’s achievement, Jackie himself suffered lonely indignities; pitchers took pleasure in picking him off, base runners tried to spike him, fans mocked him, and he was subjected to a steady stream of racial insults and hate mail. But Jackie let his playing do the talking. He was named Rookie of the Year and just two seasons later won the Most Valuable Player award. Renowned for his daring steals of home, Jackie came to be one of the sport’s most exciting players, and baseball fans both black and white filled ballparks to see him in action. The Dodgers set new attendance records, he led them to the World Series six times, and by 1950 he was the highest paid player on the team.

He retired in 1957 and during his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame five years later, Jackie asked Branch Rickey to stand with him on stage as he accepted the honor; time hadn’t eroded his appreciation for the opportunity that Branch had afforded him and all others of his race.

For all of his strength and athletic prowess, Jackie’s health deteriorated at a relatively young age and, nine days after throwing out the ball to open the second game of the 1972 World Series, he succumbed to complications from diabetes at 53.

Jackie was buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. His epitaph reads:
A man’s life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the Interboro Parkway, take Exit 3 and head south on Cypress Hill Street. (Watch the signs—it’s not the same as the nearby Cypress Avenue.) At Jamaica Avenue turn left and the cemetery entrance is a short way on to the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right, and drive past the office. After the road’s left-hand bend, turn at the first right, then take the next left. Drive up the hill to Memorial Abbey and Jackie is buried across the drive from the abbey, next to the Sluter tomb.

Four years after bringing Jackie into the majors, Branch Rickey quit the Dodgers’ front office and became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Concerned about players getting struck in the head by errant pitches, Branch presented the idea of a batting
helmet to tinkerer Ralph Davia. In 1953 the Pirates’ batters were obligated to don the new protective headgear and within three years batting helmets were a league-wide requirement. To meet demand, Branch formed the American Baseball Cap Company and today, headed by Branch’s grandson, ABC thrives as a leading manufacturer for a variety of baseball equipment.