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December 09, 2007
Lights, Camera, [And More] Larsen!
From the Times -
On Oct. 8, 1956, Saul Terry took his 8-millimeter camera to Yankee Stadium, where he and his wife settled into seats in the right-field bleachers, which would cast occasional clouds of darkness onto his film.
Terry was not the only amateur cinematographer at Game 5 of the World Series. Al Mengert, a nontouring golf pro then at Winged Foot, who finished in a four-way tie for ninth at the 1958 Masters, focused his 16-millimeter camera on the field from between home plate and third base.
Two men out of 64,519 fans were unknowingly producing the lost films of Don Larsen’s perfect game, color home movies that complement the few newsreel clips of the game that are frequently replayed, and the NBC broadcast that has been seen only by small groups since it was carried live.
Whether Terry’s and Mengert’s films will be seen by fans depends on efforts to sell or license them. Terry rejected a deal with Major League Baseball last year that would have coincided with the perfect game’s 50th anniversary.
Terry captured Mickey Mantle’s great one-handed catch in left-center off Gil Hodges’s bat in the fifth inning; Mengert followed Mantle’s trot after his home run in the fourth, but not the swing itself. Duke Snider’s tumbling catch in the fourth is in Terry’s; Mengert’s shows Yogi Berra tossing balls to Bill Dickey, who was hitting pregame fungoes. A few feet away, Sal Maglie, the Dodgers’ starting pitcher, warmed up. Terry’s film found the Yankees’ bullpen with Whitey Ford and, it seemed, Bob Grim warming up.
Mengert easily zoomed in on Larsen’s no-windup motion. “I felt like Cecil B. DeMille,” he said recently from Scottsdale, Ariz.
Some day, and some way, someone has to get all the footage out there like this, and the one Doak Ewing has, and make a great DVD that fans can enjoy. It would be a huge seller in Yankeeland.
Posted by Steve Lombardi at December 9, 2007 09:08 AM