Citing Citation

CITATION WITH EDDIE ARCARO UP

     Yesterday was opening day at Arlington Park and tomorrow is Kentucky Derby day, so today's a good day to reflect upon the Sport of Kings. Horse racing is a game of odds, and each of the three-year-olds who enters the starting gate at Churchill Downs tomorrow will have overcome odds of 1,865-to-1. Of the 37,315 thoroughbred foals registered in North America in 2007, twenty are talented, lucky, and healthy enough to have made it to the Derby.

     The difficulty of getting to the Derby, let alone winning it, is illustrated by the unfortunate case of Eskendereya. He was the runaway winner of the Fountain of Youth Stakes and the Wood Memorial earlier this spring and would have been a heavy favorite in the Derby but for an injury sustained last week in training. Eskendereya's injury appears to be relatively minor, but even if he comes back and wins many more races, he will never add his name to the list of Kentucky Derby winners.

     That prestigious roll will add its 136th name tomorrow. The previous 135 include eleven that have gone on to win the Preakness and Belmont Stakes, thus completing the Triple Crown. Will this year's Derby winner join that extremely select club? Probably not. No horse has since 1978, when Affirmed followed Seattle Slew (1977) and Secretariat (1973) to make it three Triple Crown winners in six years. Prior to that, there was a Triple Crown drought stretching back to Citation in 1948.
     And now we've gotten to the point, which is to recall Citation, one of the very greatest race horses of all time (most experts rank Man O' War above him, and some rank Secretariat above him, but few rank any others above him). A recap of Citation's career in Chicago can be found below.

     Owned by Chicagoan Warren Wright and named after the baking-powder company he had founded, Calumet Farm was the most illustrious stable in racing history. A long line of champions carried its devil-red and navy-blue silks to glory in the forties: Whirlaway, Armed, Twilight Tear, Coaltown, Bewitch, and Citation. The last of these was exceptional even by Calumet’s rarefied standards. While it was not uncommon at the time for the best horses to compete in one top race after another with hardly a pause to catch their breath between starts, it was quite uncommon for any horse to win 19 races in a single year, as Citation did. “He could outsprint the fastest,” Edward L. Bowen wrote, “outstay the stoutest, and do it all with a mechanical rhythm invested of perfection.”
     Citation first came to Chicago in the summer of 1947, his two-year-old season. On July 24, he captured the Sealeggy Purse at Arlington Park, covering the five furlongs in 58 seconds flat for a new track record. He won his first stakes race, the Elementary, six days later at Washington Park. On August 16, he and two stablemates entered the Washington Park Futurity. They were trained by the famous father-and-son team of Ben and Jimmy Jones, who won the Kentucky Derby eight times between them.
     “We ran three horses in the Futurity that year,” Jimmy Jones later recalled, “and we figured we’d take the first three places with Citation, Bewitch, and Free America. So we told the riders before the race that we would split the fees three ways. That way nobody would do anything foolish in the drive. Bewitch, with Doug Dodson up, got the lead and finished a length in front of Citation, with Free America third. Steve Brooks, on Citation, said he could have gone by [Bewitch] at any time.” It was the only defeat of the year for Citation, who went eight-for-nine and was voted champion two-year-old colt. Bewitch was champion two-year-old filly.
     In 1948, Citation enjoyed the greatest three-year-old campaign of all time. He won 19 of 20 starts and earned $709,470 (the previous record for earnings in a single year was $424,195). He not only swept the Triple Crown races with astonishing ease, but he also won the Jersey Derby between the Preakness and the Belmont! “Citation is by far the greatest horse I’ve ever ridden,” said jockey Eddie Arcaro, and even curmudgeonly old-timers began to mention him in the same breath as the legendary Man O’ War, who had died at the age of 30 the year before.
     Fresh from his Triple Crown triumph, Citation returned to Arlington Park for the Stars & Stripes Handicap against older horses on July 5. That no three-year-old had won, and only one had run in the money, in the 20-year history of the event was of no concern to Citation. Before a huge crowd of 46,490, he romped to a two-length victory and tied the track record for a mile and an eighth at 1:49.2.
     Citation got a well-deserved six-week vacation, then devastated his rivals in an allowance sprint at Washington Park on August 21. A week later, the entry of Citation and Free America was sent off at odds of 1-10 in the American Derby, also at Washington Park. The race went true to form, as Citation scored by a length over Free America in a brisk 2:01.6 for the mile and a quarter. It was his ninth consecutive win. By the end of the year, the streak had reached 15, and Citation’s career mark stood at 27 wins and two seconds in 29 starts.
     An ankle injury sidelined Citation for all of 1949, but, because his owners were intent on making him the first equine millionaire, he came back to race 16 more times in 1950 and 1951. He lost on several occasions, in the words of racing writer Joe Hirsch, to “horses who couldn’t warm him up when he was right.” Nonetheless, he went out in style, winning his last three races to bring his lifetime earnings to $1,085,760.
     Citation made his final public appearance on July 29, 1951. While thousands cheered, he galloped down the home stretch at Arlington Park, then was led to that place he knew so well—the winner’s circle.


Adapted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c)2009, 2010 by Christopher Tabbert

Splendid Seasons: Blackhawks MVPs

We're remembering the 19 Chicago athletes whose splendid seasons have earned them the Most Valuable Player award for their respective leagues. Four of these players have represented the Blackhawks, and they are remembered below.

Max Bentley,
1946

     Except on the ice, where he was the slightly superior stickhandler and playmaker, Max Bentley always followed his older brother. Doug joined the Hawks in 1939, Max in 1940. Doug won the NHL scoring title in 1943, Max in 1946 and 1947. Doug was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1964, Max in 1966.
     On January 28, 1943, Max had four goals and three assists, Doug had two goals and four assists, and their linemate Bill Thoms settled for five assists as the Hawks blistered the New York Rangers 10-1. That season, Max compiled a grand total of two penalty minutes and, not surprisingly, received the Lady Byng Trophy as the league’s most gentlemanly player. He missed the next two seasons while serving in World War II, then returned to center the Blackhawks’ famous Pony Line, with Doug at left wing and Bill Mosienko at right wing, in 1945-46. Max won the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s top scorer, with 61 points on 31 goals and 30 assists. He also managed to lead the Hawks to a winning season—their only one between 1940 and 1961. For that feat, he received the Hart Trophy as Most Valuable Player.
     Max was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs (for five players) on November 3, 1947. “It had to be done,” said coach Johnny Gottselig, “because we needed fresh blood and no other club wanted any of our players except Max Bentley.” The Maple Leafs went on to win their second of three straight Stanley Cups that season; they would win four in five years. The Hawks finished last for the second straight year; they would finish last nine times in eleven years.

Al Rollins,
1954

     In 1953-54, the Hawks had the worst year of the bleakest decade in their history. They set a franchise record with 51 losses, against 12 wins and 7 ties, for their sixth last-place finish in the past eight seasons. They were outscored 242 goals to 136. Yet Al Rollins, the Hawks’ goalie, was voted the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player—“apparently,” as George Vass wrote, “for extraordinary gallantry under fire.”
     Rollins posted a respectable goals-against-average of 3.23 while losing a league-record 47 games. In the four games he missed due to injury, the Hawks surrendered an average of more than seven goals.
     Only the third goalie to win the MVP, Rollins had looked at life from both sides now. In 1951 with Toronto, he’d won the Vezina Trophy with a sparkling record of 27-5-8 and a goals-against average of 1.77 as the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. Traded to the Hawks in 1952, he endured five seasons as their regular goalie, during which time they averaged fewer than 18 victories (out of 70 games) per year.
     Crowds at the Stadium dwindled to 4,000 a game, and rumors were rife that the Hawks would move to St. Louis or withdraw from the league altogether. To the rescue came Tommy Ivan, who had coached Detroit to six first-place finishes and three Stanley Cups in six years. Named general manager of the Hawks in July 1954, Ivan engineered a rebuilding program that culminated in a Stanley Cup championship in 1961.

Bobby Hull,
1965, 1966

     Handsome, personable, and extraordinarily talented, Bobby Hull was the first glamorous hockey star of the television age, ranking with such other luminaries of the sixties as Arnold Palmer, Jim Brown, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and Wilt Chamberlain. He was the prototypical goal scorer—the fastest skater in the league, possessed of tremendous physical strength, able to shoot the puck at truly frightening speeds (almost 120 miles per hour). His 50 goals in 1961-62 tied the single-season record, which he broke with 54 in 1965-66. He led the NHL in goals scored seven times, in total points three times, and was selected MVP twice.
     Hull and teammate Stan Mikita monopolized the league’s top individual awards for most of the sixties. To say that Hull was the more electrifying of the two is no disrespect to Mikita. The Golden Jet drew people to the edge of their seats merely by stepping onto the ice. There was always a buzz in the arena in anticipation of what he might do—and he usually did something. “I get as big a kick out of watching Bobby as anybody else does,” Mikita said, dismissing rumors of jealousy between them. “I’d hate to play against him.”
     In 1968-69, Hull demonstrated that he was as tough and courageous as he was entertaining. After suffering a broken jaw on Christmas Day, 1968, he missed only one game (while his jaw was being set and wired), then played for six weeks during which he could eat no solid food. He finished the season with 58 goals, setting yet another new record.
     Hull was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983.

Stan Mikita,
1967, 1968

     “The guy has such tremendous reflexes and so much talent,” goalie Glenn Hall said of Stan Mikita, “that he can change his mind in mid-stride when he’s skating or shooting. And believe me, a guy who can do that drives goalkeepers nuts.” Mikita teamed with Bobby Hull to give the Blackhawks the most feared scoring duo in hockey during the sixties.
     Born in Czechoslovakia, Mikita was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Canada at the age of eight, escaping the Communist subjugation of his homeland. When he joined the Hawks 10 years later, at five-foot-eight and 152 pounds, he made up his mind to hit rather than be hit. “Either they were going to kill me and carry me out in a box, or I was going to survive,” Mikita recalled. “Luckily, I survived.” Mikita was among the most penalized players in the league early in his career, earning the nickname Le petit diable (“the little devil”) from French-speaking fans. Then, in 1966-67, he suddenly decided that he needed to spend more time on the ice and less in the penalty box.
     The new Mikita was a revelation. His high-powered Scooter Line, featuring Ken Wharram on right wing and Doug Mohns on left wing, accounted for 91 goals and 222 points as the Blackhawks broke the NHL record for goals scored in a season. The Hawks won their first Prince of Wales Trophy as regular-season champions, and Mikita was rewarded with three trophies of his own: the Art Ross as the league’s top scorer, the Lady Byng as its most gentlemanly player, and the Hart as the player “adjudged to be most valuable to his team.” No player had swept the three coveted awards in one year before, and no one (not even Wayne Gretzky) has done it since 1968—when Mikita repeated the feat.
     After Bobby Hull defected to the upstart World Hockey Association in 1972, Mikita stayed on for almost another decade. In all, he played for the Hawks from 1959 to 1980. Mikita is Mr. Blackhawk. Like Hull, he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983.

Lincoln, Washington, and Monday

RICK MONDAY RESCUES OLD GLORY

     As the United States prepared to mark its Bicentennial, most Americans were not in a particularly celebratory mood, their confidence having been shaken by the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis, and other recent reversals. Then, a strange thing happened to cheer everyone up.
     It was April 25, 1976, and the Cubs were playing the Dodgers in Los Angeles. A man and his son climbed out of the stands and onto the field. “One of them had an American flag tucked under his arm,” recalled Rick Monday, who was watching the pair from his vantage point as the Cubs’ center fielder. The two went to a spot in left-center field, about halfway between Monday and left fielder Jose Cardenal, where the older man spread the flag out on the grass and began to sprinkle lighter fluid over it.
     “The next thing I saw was the glint of the [lighter fluid] can,” said Monday. “I figured it wasn’t holy water. That’s when I took off. They couldn’t see me coming from behind but I could see one had lit a match. The wind blew it out, and just as they lit another and were about to touch it to the flag, I grabbed [the flag].”
     Monday scooped up Old Glory just before it would have been set afire. He sprinted to the left-field bullpen and handed the flag over to Los Angeles pitcher Doug Rau. As the fans in the ballpark realized what had happened, they rose to give Monday a standing ovation. The Dodger Stadium message board flashed, “RICK MONDAY, YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY.”
     The would-be flag burners were arrested and charged with trespassing. “If you're going to burn the flag,” Monday later said, “don't do it around me. I've been to too many veterans' hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it.”
     In the following weeks, ceremonies honoring Monday were held in every city the Cubs visited. Jose Cardenal, who'd witnessed the attempting flag burning up close, understood why Monday's actions had struck a chord. He had left his homeland of Cuba at the age of 17 in 1960, a year after it became a Communist dictatorship, never to return. Cardenal loved his adopted country and wasn't embarrassed to admit it. “Now we have three great patriots,” he said. “Lincoln, Washington, and Monday.”

American Giant

RUBE FOSTER

    
     Andrew "Rube" Foster was easily the finest black pitcher before Satchel Paige, and perhaps the best, black or white, of his day. Cubs manager Frank Chance called him “the most finished product I have ever seen in the pitcher’s box.” Alas, Foster was born a couple generations too early to play in the white major leagues.
     Foster was a master of the psychological aspects of pitching. “The real test comes when you are pitching with men on bases,” he explained. “Do not worry. Try to appear jolly and unconcerned. I have smiled often with the bases full with two strikes and three balls on the batter. This seems to unnerve them. In other instances, where the batter appears anxious to hit, waste a little time on him, and when you think he realizes his position and everybody is yelling at him to hit it out, waste a few balls and try his nerve. The majority of times you will win out by drawing him into hitting at a wide one.”
     Foster was already the most famous black player in baseball when he started up his own club, the Chicago American Giants, in 1910. He leased South Side Park, an 8,000-seat facility at 39th and Wentworth, from John Schorling, a saloonkeeper and the son-in-law of Charles Comiskey (whose White Sox were just moving into their palatial new home at 35th and Shields). For years, Comiskey would happily reap tidy profits from black baseball while stressing the need to keep the major leagues all-white.
     Foster's new team was a juggernaut. “He put on all the plays and he had the type of men that could do just what he wanted them to do,” Buck O’Neil said. “Can you imagine a ballclub with eight or nine Rickey Hendersons? This was the Chicago American Giants in 1911, 1912."
     The American Giants played few games in Chicago. Instead, they traveled throughout the Midwest, West, and even the South, going to places where few black teams had dared to play. They dressed in the most stylish suits, rode the rails in a private Pullman car, and became black America’s team. In every dusty town they went through, the African-American community greeted Foster as a conquering hero. “I shall never forget the first time I saw Rube Foster,” said Dave Malarcher of Louisiana. “I never saw such a well-equipped ballclub in my whole life. I was astounded. Every day they came out in a different set of beautiful uniforms, all kinds of bats and balls, all the best of equipment.” If one of the local players showed especially well against his club, Foster was liable to sign him up on the spot; this was the equivalent of winning the lottery for a young black man living in the Deep South at the time. Malarcher was among the players who experienced this miracle.
     The American Giants went 123-6 in 1910. They were the dominant force in black baseball throughout the teens, although they were challenged for supremacy by clubs such as the Indianapolis ABCs, Detroit Stars, and St. Louis Giants. These stronger clubs tended to play each other only rarely, because games against white semi-pro and industrial teams generally drew better crowds than all-black contests. Taking note of this, the Chicago Defender complained that it would not be surprising if the American Giants soon “depended on the other race altogether.” But the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South into northern cities during and immediately after World War I changed all that. Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of new fans available for black baseball.
     Throughout 1919, Foster loudly campaigned for a league that would serve this burgeoning pool of potential fans, stop the merry-go-round of players jumping from club to club for a few extra dollars, and eliminate the presence of white investors in the black game. (On these last two points, Foster would have had to be taken with a large pinch of salt. He had built his club by blithely raiding the rosters of others, and he remained heavily dependent on the financial backing of his silent partners, Schorling and Comiskey.)
     The Negro National League was founded in February 1920 in Kansas City. In addition to the American Giants, the league included the Chicago Giants, Cincinnati Cuban Giants, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs, and St. Louis Giants. Its letterhead proclaimed “A.R. Foster” as Chairman of the Board of Directors and as Chairman of the league’s governing body, the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs. It also carried, in a swirling script, the motto “We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea.”
     The NNL’s first game was played on May 2, 1920, with Indianapolis beating the American Giants 4-2. Each of the eight teams was supposed to have a permanent home ballpark and was scheduled to play 100 games, but these plans soon went awry. The Cincinnati Cuban Giants never did line up a suitable ballpark, so they played all their games on the road. Some teams skipped league games on Saturdays and Sundays in favor of more lucrative dates with local white clubs. “Foster spent long hours in his office,” Mark Ribowsky wrote, “seeking to solve every problem in the operation. When teams ran out of money and were stranded on the road, Rube would wire them enough to get home. When teams were on the verge of going bankrupt, Rube would send a payroll advance to keep them afloat. Still trying to pump up weak clubs, he continued to rearrange player rosters.”
     It was rocky going at first, but the Negro National League survived and even flourished. The eight teams drew a total of 616,000 fans the first year, and each made a profit. Foster did not take a salary to run the league, but an entity called the Western Booking Agency, of which he was sole owner, collected 10 percent of all gate receipts; this meant an $11,000 windfall for Rube in 1920, and considerably more in later years. Foster stayed on as manager of the American Giants for the first two years of the NNL’s existence. In the absence of a balanced schedule or official record keeping, and with newspaper coverage of the league spotty at best, no one could say for sure which team had won the first NNL pennant. When the league office declared that the American Giants had, no one complained.
     Foster’s league prospered throughout the early twenties. Total player salaries soared from $30,000 in 1920 to $275,000 in 1925. The first Negro World Series was played in 1924. It matched the Kansas City Monarchs against the Philadelphia Hilldales of the new Eastern Colored League. The 10-game series was a traveling show, with two games played in Philadelphia, two in Baltimore, three in Kansas City, and three in Chicago. Kansas City won the series five games to four with one tie.
     The series was a huge success, both artistically and financially, but it marked the last hurrah for Foster. The Eastern Colored League, which had been formed by white entrepreneurs impressed by the profits Foster’s league had rung up, soon began luring NNL players with its higher salaries. Foster worked harder and harder trying to stanch the flow of stars to the rival league. By 1926 he was physically and mentally exhausted; he had to be institutionalized. He remained in the state hospital at Kankakee for the rest of his life, convinced that he would soon be summoned to pitch in the white World Series. On December 9, 1930, Foster suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 51. Three thousand persons attended his funeral in Chicago.
     Foster had aimed for nothing less than creating a stable, self-sustaining league for black ballplayers that was on a par with the white major leagues. He didn’t quite pull it off, but he came as close as anyone ever would. In the thirties and forties, the Negro Leagues featured players such as Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Satchel Paige, and a few dozen others who were at least the equal of their white counterparts. The undeniable quality of the play on the field, however, was usually accompanied by the same casual approach to contractual commitments, financial management, and other formalities that Foster had fought so hard to overcome.
     After Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the black leagues survived, barely, for another decade while the likes of Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Luke Easter, Sam Jethroe, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron, and even the forty-something Paige became part of a mass exodus to the major leagues.

Excerpted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c)2009, 2010 by Christopher Tabbert

Splendid Seasons: Cubs MVPs, Part 2

We're remembering the 19 Chicago athletes whose splendid seasons have earned them the Most Valuable Player award for their respective leagues. Nine of these players have represented the Cubs, and three of them are introduced below.

Phil Cavarretta,
1945

     Soon after graduating from Lane Tech High School in 1934, Phil Cavarretta moved two miles east on Addison Street to Wrigley Field. He played seven games for the Cubs in 1934 and was an everyday player in 1935, when he was still 18 years old for the first half of the season. Although he had very little power for a first baseman (he averaged less than five homers a year), Cavarretta was an excellent contact hitter who finished his career with a .293 average and more walks than strikeouts. He played on three pennant winners. For the last of these, in 1945, he hit a league-leading .355 with 94 runs scored and 97 runs batted in to take MVP honors.
     It was no fault of Cavarretta’s that the Cubs lost the World Series to the Detroit Tigers in seven games. He homered and scored three runs in the Cubs’ 9-0 rout of American League MVP Hal Newhouser in Game 1, and he ended up batting .423 (highest on either team), with seven runs scored and five RBIs for the Series.
     Cavarretta is the last Cub, so far, to hit a World Series home run. He was also the last in a long line of player-managers for the Cubs—which extended back to Cap Anson in 1879, and included Frank Chance, Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Grimm, and Gabby Hartnett. It was Cavarretta who, in 1953, wrote the name of Ernie Banks on the Cubs’ lineup card for the first time. The next year, he became the first manager ever to be fired in spring training, after he bluntly informed Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley that the club had no chance to contend. The Cubs finished seventh, but being proven right did not get Cavarretta his job back.

Hank Sauer,
1952

     Slow-footed outfielder Hank Sauer was the archetypal ballplayer of the early fifties, an era which decidedly emphasized power over speed. Sauer had a few brief trials during the war years, but it wasn’t until 1948, when he was 31, that he reached the majors to stay. After a season and a half with Cincinnati, he was traded to the Cubs, and he quickly made himself at home: he hit 11 home runs his first month in Chicago.
     Sauer was equally potent to all fields. He averaged a solid 32 homers and 97 RBIs for his first four seasons, then really busted out in 1952. His 121 RBIs topped the league, and his 37 homers tied him for the league lead with Pittsburgh’s Ralph Kiner. He also hit a two-run homer to give the National League a 3-2 win in the All-Star Game. Bleacher fans in the Friendly Confines acclaimed Sauer as the “mayor of Wrigley Field” and showered him with packets of his favorite chewing tobacco after each home run. Although the Cubs finished fifth, well out of the race, Sauer’s performance resonated enough to bring him MVP honors.
     In 1953, the Cubs traded for Kiner, who had won or shared the league’s home run title for seven years running. Alas, dreams of a one-two punch reminiscent of Ruth and Gehrig went unfulfilled. Kiner blasted 28 homers after joining the Cubs in June, but Sauer suffered broken fingers on three separate occasions and had just 19 round-trippers. While Sauer rebounded for a career-high 41 homers in 1954, Kiner managed only 22 and was gone the next year. Kiner later made a droll remark about his and Sauer’s lack of mobility in the outfield, which had made life miserable for Cubs center fielder Frankie Baumholtz: “Between us, we shortened Baumholtz’s career by three years.”

Ernie Banks,
1958, 1959

     Ernie Banks came to the Cubs from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues in September 1953—a wiry, soft-spoken kid from Dallas who in appearance and experience was even younger than his 22 years. A smooth-fielding shortstop and a devastatingly powerful hitter, Banks averaged 44 home runs a year from 1957 to 1960 and didn’t miss a game in that time.
     He was tougher than his genial attitude would have suggested. “In 1957,” umpire Tom Gorman recalled, “Banks was knocked down four times by four different pitchers—Don Drysdale, Bob Purkey, Bob Friend, and Jack Sanford. And each time he was knocked down, Banks hit the next pitch out of the park.”
     In 1958, Banks clubbed 47 homers (the most ever by a shortstop to that time), batted in 129 runs, scored 119, and hit .313, and became the first player in National League history to win the Most Valuable Player award with a losing team. The next year, he had 45 homers, 143 RBIs, and a .304 average, and became the first player in National League history to win back-to-back MVPs.
     His nickname said it all: Mr. Cub. Although the Cubs were often a laughingstock, Banks carried the sobriquet with pride. He played more games for the Cubs than anyone else before or since (over 2,500) but he never made it to the World Series or even the playoffs. He didn’t complain. He kept smiling and kept repeating his motto, “Let’s play two.” Players of later generations could have learned a lot from Ernie, who genuinely respected the game and loved its fans.
     Banks was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977.