Shaikin: Rick Monday saved an American flag in 1976. Why the moment resonates 50 years later

For generations of Dodgers fans, Vin Scully was our historian, with words so memorable we feel as if we lived those experiences, so perfect fans repeat them to this day.

In 1965, for the Sandy Koufax perfect game: “There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”

In 1988, for a walk-off home run by the hobbled Kirk Gibson in the World Series: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”

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In 1990, for the Fernando Valenzuela no-hitter: “If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!”

On April 25, 1976, for perhaps the only time in the 67-year career of the best broadcaster in baseball history, Vin Scully didn’t know quite what to say.

“There’s two of them,” Scully said. “All right.”

Two people had run onto the field at Dodger Stadium, in the middle of the game. That was not entirely unusual in the disco era. A woman nicknamed “Morganna the Kissing Bandit” hopped fences and interrupted games to smooch players.

But this was something unfamiliar. Tension was in the air. Three seconds of silence, then Scully resumed his narration, his voice flat for the first sentence, rising with incredulity in the second and with exclamation in the third: “I’m not sure what he’s doing out there. It looks like he’s going to burn a flag.

“And Rick Monday runs in and takes it away from him!”

“It just happened in 10 seconds,” Dodgers historian Mark Langill said. “Fifty years later, we’re still talking about it.”

It was the play that defined an already distinguished career. On Saturday, the 50th anniversary of the day he rescued the American flag, the Dodgers will honor Monday before they play the Chicago Cubs — the team for which he played on that day in 1976.

The flag itself — presented to Monday two weeks later by Dodgers general manager Al Campanis — will be on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, as America celebrates its 250th birthday.

Monday, who served in the Marine Corps reserves during his major league career, has used the flag to raise money for veterans and their families, but he never has loaned it for a long-term exhibition.

Seldom does a day pass without someone coming up to Monday to say thank you, or to shake his hand.

“It is nothing that he seeks out,” said Charley Steiner, Monday’s partner on Dodgers broadcasts for 22 years. “Whether we’re at Dodger Stadium or on the road somewhere, people will just come up and say hi.

“Every once in a while, we’ll get a ‘Follow me to freedom.’”

There was nothing flashy in the rescue. Monday leaned down, grabbed the flag without breaking stride, and delivered it to pitcher Doug Rau in the dugout. He returned to his position in center field, serenaded by a standing ovation.

Fred Claire, the Dodgers’ publicist at the time and later the general manager, sent word to the scoreboard operator to display a congratulatory message. When Monday came to bat in the next inning, the scoreboard read: “RICK MONDAY … YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY.”

Said former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley: “It’s one of the great moments in Dodger history.”

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That moment came courtesy of a guy wearing a Cubs uniform, but Monday grew up in Santa Monica and delivered his spontaneous commemoration of Flag Day in the year of America’s bicentennial.

“It all came together,” Steiner said. “The hometown kid, visiting from Chicago, doing what he did at that time in American history, it was just an unbelievable confluence of events.

“And then, lo and behold, he becomes a Dodger. And he has been a Dodger ever since.”

After the 1976 season, the Dodgers traded Bill Buckner to the Cubs for Monday, who played the final eight years of his career in Los Angeles. He was the first player drafted in the first-ever baseball draft in 1965, a two-time All-Star and 1981 World Series champion that might have been best remembered for hitting the home run that lifted the Dodgers past the Montreal Expos in the 1981 National League Championship Series.

Best remembered, that is, if not for the flag rescue that elevated him from a ballplayer to a hero.

“Whether you’re a casual fan or an avid fan, you know of that moment if you grew up as a fan in Los Angeles,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said.

And beyond. Steiner, who was news director of a radio station in Hartford, Conn., that day, said Monday’s play instantly made headlines on the East Coast. President Ford called Monday after the game.

In 2006, the U.S. Senate formally presented him with a proclamation of appreciation. Two years later, President George W. Bush invited him to the White House.

Rick Monday stands near a flag he rescued from being burnt by protesters at Dodger Stadium during a news conference on Capitol Hill on June 14, 2006 in Washington. The news conference was held on Flag Day to support the proposed Flag Protection Amendment. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

The award-winning photograph of Monday swiping the flag, taken by James Roark of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, was lauded by Times columnist Jim Murray as “the most famous picture of its kind since the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.”

“It about as unique a moment in U.S. baseball history as there’s been,” Rawitch said, “and I think that’s probably why people connect to it.”

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, but that game was on the schedule. History, yes, but no surprise. Same when Bush threw out the first pitch during a World Series game in New York after 9/11.

The father and son that invaded the field at Dodger Stadium that day never have spoken publicly about why they did. But all was not well in America in 1976, in the aftermath of the unpopular Vietnam War and the presidential scandal that was Watergate, and beset by soaring gasoline prices amid crisis in the Middle East.

We hear echoes of all three themes today. In an Ipsos poll released this month, a majority of Americans said the country’s best days are behind us and said we are “splitting apart” as a nation.

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However, 80% said military veterans reflect “core America values,” including service and commitment to the greater good. And, among a list of icons that included the Statue of Liberty and the White House, respondents most often selected the U.S. flag as the one they associated most closely with America.

Perhaps Monday and his flag can help renew a sense of national unity, borrowing from the astonishment that pervaded Scully’s voice that day in 1976, once he finally figured out what was happening: “I think a guy was going to set fire to the American flag. Can you imagine that?”

It turned out to be a great call after all. In 2022, as soon as he learned Scully had died, Monday listened to Scully’s call one more time.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.