'61*' Premieres Tomorrow on HBO
JOIE CHEN, CNN ANCHOR: Tomorrow night, 61 in '61. Do you know what that means? Well, if you're a real baseball fan, you know what we're talking about. One of the great rivalries of the game played out in the summer of '61 between Yankee hitters Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, a home-run battle played out in the house that Ruth built. Yankees' fan Billy Crystal directed a movie which premiers on HBO tomorrow night about that contest, about those boys of that special summer. Take a look. (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "61*") UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, come on, Mick, with expansion this year, you know the pitching is going to be thinner.</s>THOMAS JANE, ACTOR: Come on,</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, but this year you got eight extra games on the schedule.</s>JANE: Come on, Artie, it can't be done. Even if they get close, you aren't going to get nothing to hit.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're just being modest. You know if you stay healthy, you could do it.</s>JANE: That's just great. One guy has got me all washed up, the other one has got me beating Ruth's record. You guys ought to get together and make up your mind, tell me how I am, so I know how to play.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, what do you say, Roj?</s>BARRY PEPPER, ACTOR: I don't know, Artie. You know, we haven't even played a game yet, so maybe we will wait and see after we have played one.</s>CHEN: Tied into the movie, a book called "61: The Story of Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle and One Magical Summer" is also out. Joining us now from St. Louis is the sporting news' editorial director Steve Meyerhoff. Your publication put this book out. We appreciate you joining us to talk a little more about it. In that clip we saw from the movie, there's a little bit of a reference to why there's a little asterisk, a star, right next to the 61. Can you explain that to us?</s>STEVE MEYERHOFF, "THE SPORTING NEWS": Sure. It's actually quite a fallacy. You know, the summer of '61 was noted -- has been noted for the last 40 years by an asterisk that never really was there. In the middle of that summer, the commissioner of baseball Ford Frick had decreed that if either of these guys would break the record that Babe Ruth had held since 1927, that a mark would go next to it, and that that they would have to recognize two records, one from a 154-game season and one for 162 games. There never really was a mark given to it, but it's gone down in lore, and it sounds good, and we stayed with it for 40 years.</s>CHEN: Part of legend there. We've got questions now from live chat. This one from Andrew Wislock: "What was the greatest challenge in making this movie?" You have been actually involved more in the book than the movie, but can you explain any of the challenges there?</s>MEYERHOFF: Well, I think the challenge for Billy Crystal and Russ Greenberg, the directors of the movie, were really to get everything right. You can deal with sports movies, and actors aren't athletes -- and getting everything, the detail, the visual shots and the active shots of players, and actually throwing the ball the right way, hitting the ball the right way, was probably the biggest challenge that they had.</s>CHEN: Well, I understand Billy Crystal is a real Yankees' fanatic. So, that probably helped in putting this together?</s>MEYERHOFF: He's intense. And you know, the HBO people came to "The Sporting News" in St. Louis, and we used our research center to -- as a resource for them to check everything, and how it went. Billy has got a great mind for detail, and this summer all came back to him when he was doing this.</s>CHEN: Right.</s>MEYERHOFF: And you know, a number of places, plus his memory, made this movie just right.</s>CHEN: You know, looking back on it with the advantage of 40 years of history to look at, you would think that Roger Maris would have come out of that summer like the biggest Yankees hero since Babe Ruth. And yet, he never did. Why?</s>MEYERHOFF: It's a really good question. You know, Roger went into New York in 1960 and was really viewed as the outsider, the villain. He came from North Dakota. He wasn't a Yankee up through the farm system. So he was always looked at by the media and by the public, by Yankees fans, as the outsider. And you know, that summer became a battle between those two guys in the media. And you know, that was the way he was seen until he left New York for St. Louis in '67. He was -- it's the Yankee pride, and it really came back and I think hurt Roger.</s>CHEN: It was played as, really, as you note, a big rivalry played out that in the press. But was it really? I mean, behind the scenes, were these guys at each other's throats, or were they close?</s>MEYERHOFF: I think they were closer than a lot of people really believed at the time. You know, to the point, in 1961, that they actually lived together, and Roger had Mickey come out and stay in an apartment with him and another teammate. And you know, really had Mickey concentrate on baseball, or try to concentrate on baseball. So you know, they had, I think, a rivalry on the field and they probably had some personality clash, but they were closer than a lot of people give them credit for.</s>CHEN: Sounds like a great story, subject of the movie coming out tomorrow on HBO. Thanks for your insight into the story behind the movie. Steve Meyerhoff from "The Sporting News," thanks for being with us.