When Penelope Spheeris learned that Tommy Lasorda died on Thursday at 93, she knew that many people would be touched by the sad news, especially in Los Angeles. The city has been their home, and it is also where Lasorda has become a baseball icon, leading the Dodgers to two World Series titles during their Hall of Fame career.
But Spheeris’s mind quickly turned to another person in the Lasorda family she met and missed: her son, Tommy Jr., known as Spunky, who was gay and died in 1991 at the age of 33 from AIDS complications. She cried.
“I always thought it should be more public that you had a beautiful, gay son and everything Tommy was,” she said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “He was a very, very memorable person.”
There is a lot to remember about Tommy Lasorda Sr.’s long life in the public eye: his extraordinary personality, his profane humor, his success in leading teams, his decorated career, his charitable side and his ardent love for the Dodgers. In the past few days, other people have also been discussing and learning about another part of Lasorda’s history – his relationship with his son – and what that said about the society and culture of baseball at the time.
“My son was not gay,” Lasorda told Peter Richmond, who wrote about the pair’s complicated relationship for GQ magazine in 1992, in some of his few public comments about his son.
“No way,” he continued, with some bad words spread. “No way. I read this in a newspaper. I also read in that newspaper that a lady also gave birth to a monkey. This is not true. “
Lasorda was also irritated by reports that her son was an AIDS patient. He said to Richmond, “I don’t care what people … I know what my son died of. I know what he died of. The doctor released a report on how he died. He died of pneumonia. “
In a recent commentary article for the Los Angeles Blade, Karen Ocamb, a former news editor for the publication, said Lasorda once acknowledged at a charity event that her son was gay and that he had died of AIDS. Lasorda’s family did not respond to a request from The New York Times for comment.
Spheeris, 75, was happy that more people were talking about Tommy Jr. because the subject was more secret at the time. She said that Tommy Jr. also did not want people to talk about his sexuality, because he wanted to protect his father’s wishes. She thought it was sad, but said that Tommy Jr. did not resent his father for it.
Spheeris, a director who made films like “Wayne’s World” and “Suburbia”, met Tommy Jr. in Los Angeles in the 1980s. They met at a punk rock club.
“I remember very clearly the moment I saw him for the first time: he was sitting alone on the edge of a sofa and everyone there was punk and everyone was dressed in black, but he was wearing a white suit,” she said. “I know it sounds strange, but he had a kind of glow around him.”
They quickly became friends, leaving their apartment in West Hollywood or nearby clubs. She called him a sweet, kind and loving person with an impeccable sense of style. She said that one of the reasons she had such a relationship with him was because her own brother, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1984, was gay, and many of her friends died of AIDS complications because medical treatments were not so advanced as now.
Spheeris said that Tommy Jr. and his father loved each other. Tommy Jr. would be excited to meet his father for a meal or at Dodger Stadium, where he would sit on the bench before the games.
“He told me he liked to go because he could flirt with the guys,” she said, laughing. “But he could never say that to his father, obviously.”
She added later: “I don’t want to be angry with Tommy Lasorda, Mr. … I don’t want to be angry with someone who just passed away and someone that everyone loves. I will be angry is the culture that allows this type of thinking. That’s what I don’t like. You can imagine? It was a great struggle between the two trying to maintain a balance between the two. legacy and career on the right track by having a gay child in an environment where people just don’t tolerate gays. “
While his father was the Dodgers’ manager, Tommy Jr. befriended Glenn Burke, an outfielder on the team, which damaged Burke’s relationship with his boss. Burke is the first player in Major League Baseball history to reveal himself to his teammates during his playing career. It came out publicly in 1982.
Al Campanis, the general manager of the Dodgers at the time, offered Burke a cash bonus if he married – something he said later was not a bribe, but because the Dodgers encouraged the family’s stability and maturity on his list. (Campanis was fired in 1987 for racist comments he made about blacks in a television interview.) Burke, who was black, declined the offer.
Burke was negotiated with the Oakland Athletics in May 1978, an unpopular move at the Dodgers’ club. Two of Burke’s teammates, Davey Lopes and Dusty Baker, later said that Burke was traded because he was gay. In the 2010 documentary “Out: The Glenn Burke Story”, his former athletic teammate Claudell Washington said that manager Billy Martin introduced Burke to his new team with homophobic slander.
Since then, a few more players, referees and officials have been launched. Most prominent: Billy Bean, who became the first ambassador for MLB inclusion after his playing days. Still, in recent years, several players, such as Kevin Pillar and Yunel Escobar, and broadcaster Thom Brennaman have had to apologize for using homophobic slanders.
But baseball culture has progressed since the days of Lasorda, said Dave Pallone, a former MLB referee who said he was fired in 1988 for being gay. He went public soon after and wrote a book entitled “Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball.” He said that attitudes in sport began to change slowly as more people took over publicly.
“Hopefully, this has helped to turn the tide and perhaps baseball culture will improve,” said Pallone. “And with young people playing the game, and the youngest in management, the game will change in terms of opening up to the LGBTQ community, and it won’t be that difficult for fathers and mothers who are part of the baseball game to accept their children. and daughters. “
Pallone, 69, said this in a telephone interview Friday night, the day after Lasorda died of a sudden cardiac arrest. Pallone considered Lasorda a friend and regretted his loss. He had fond memories of the time they spent together during and after the days in the country; Lasorda appeared on Pallone’s radio show once and told him that he should never have lost his job as a referee.
Pallone, however, said he never talked to Lasorda about his departure in 1990. Nor did he speak to Lasorda about his son after Tommy Jr. died. Pallone, who used to see Tommy Jr. at games, did not think it was up to him to address the subject matter.
“There was no doubt that he had a hard time with that,” said Pallone of Lasorda. “But on the other side of the coin, Tommy was a very generous person outside the baseball field. We had our differences on the pitch, but he was also fair. He was generous outside the field. If he could help you with something, he would do it. So you try to see the whole picture, especially when I was a closeted gay. Even though I knew in my heart what was going on, I also wanted to try, as I do now, and to look at the whole person. “
Pallone said that although Lasorda’s public comments about his son were horrible, he attributed Lasorda’s attitude to, among other things, a macho culture, a generational gap, a Catholic origin “and that he is Italian, as if my father were Italian”. He added: “It is difficult to accept a child’s sexual orientation when it is not what you are used to.”
When Tommy Jr. died, Lasorda, his wife and daughter were at his side, a family spokesman told The Los Angeles Times at the time. Lasorda was absent from the team for three days. He later told GQ that he cried a lot about his son’s death, but never close to the team.
“I had it for 33 years,” Lasorda told the magazine. “Thirty-three years is better than nothing, isn’t it? If I could see God, and God would say to me, ‘I’m going to give you a son for 33 years and take him away after 33 years’, I would say, ‘Give him to me’ ”.
Pallone said he believed Lasorda channeled his pain into his charity work, which was generally aimed at helping young people. In 1997, Lasorda and his wife donated $ 500,000 through the Thomas Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation to maintain a public gym in Yorba Linda, California, not far from where they lived. The facility was renamed Thomas Lasorda Jr. Field House.
Pallone, who became a motivational speaker giving presentations on diversity for companies, schools and teams, said he mentioned Lasorda’s story in his talks.
“The story is that you don’t close the door on your family,” said Pallone. “You just can’t close doors, period, because you never know how it will hurt you. And that is what happened to Tommy. “