Thanks again, Rick Monday, forty years on! It was exactly four decades ago today, when playing centerfield for the Cubs Monday executed what many think of as one of the greatest plays in baseball history: He saved the American flag from being burned. Just as the bottom of the 4th inning was starting out at Dodger Stadium April 25, 1976, two protestors, a father and his eleven-year-old son, walked into the outfield with a flag, a can of lighter fluid, and matches. They lit one match, remembers Monday, but the wind blew it out. When they lit the second, Monday swooped into save the flag. As Monday explains, then Dodgers third-base coach and future hall of fame manager Tommy Lasorda was racing from the other direction to rescue the star-spangled banner but the younger and swifter Monday got there first.
The home team’s fans gave Monday a standing ovation when he came to the plate in the top half of the inning. Now a broadcaster with the Dodgers for more than two decades, he remembers that the crowd out at Chavez Ravine broke into a spontaneous rendition of “God Bless America.” “If you’re going to burn the flag, don’t do it around me,” said Monday, who served in the Marine Corps Reserve. “I’ve been to too many veterans’ hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it.”
