On August 22, 1965, Juan Marichal struck John Roseboro over the head with his bat, opening a gash two inches long, inciting a 14-minute bench-clearing brawl, and forever linking the two men. But this was not an isolated incident. It happened within the context of the most spirited rivalry in sports and during a period of intense turmoil that affected both men personally. In this excerpt from The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption, I examine those conditions.
Chapter Five “Summer of Fury”:
The specter of violence overshadowed that first matchup of 1965. In the world and on the field. Malcom X had been murdered in February. Two weeks later police in Selma turned a march for voting rights into Bloody Sunday. Also in March, the United States had sent its first troops to fight in Vietnam after launching Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombing campaign of North Vietnam. And civil war had broken out in the Dominican.
