A Tribute to a Gentle Giant
Remembering Frank “Hondo” Howard: A Tribute to a Gentle Giant
By Joseph Lewis
Several years ago, I was with a group of friends at a popular establishment in the Georgetown section of Washington D.C. I glanced across the room from our table and noticed a gentleman sitting at the end of the bar holding a schooner of beer and puffing on a long, thick cigar. He was middle-aged and although he was an extremely large man, he gave the appearance of someone in fine physical shape. He laughed heartily as he appeared to share a story with some people seated around him. After studying the man only briefly, I was certain I knew who he was. “Do you know who that is?” I asked one of my friends. “That man at the end of the bar is Frank Howard.”
There wasn’t anyone at our table who didn’t know who Frank Howard was. Growing up in Northern Virginia during the 1960s, we had all been Washington Senators fans. We had all suffered through the years of rooting for a major league baseball team that didn’t have a lot to cheer about. But throughout those years, there was one player who stood above the rest in both stature and performance. Frank Howard came to the Senators in 1965, and immediately became a fan favorite. He was an unusual player whose size seemed to make him more suited for another sport such as football or basketball. He had excelled as a basketball player, earning All-American honors at Ohio State University and would later be drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors of the NBA. But he was also an All-American baseball player in college, and it was the sport he loved.
It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that before coming to the Senators in a trade, Frank had been a very good player for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He won the Rookie of the Year award in 1960 and hit a home run in the 1963 World Series which helped propel his Dodgers over the Yankees in a four-game sweep. Being only a kid at the time, I had only come to know him after he became a Washington Senator.
I remember the many summer days spent with my brother in the backyard emulating the mannerisms of Washington’s favorite baseball star. Frank ran with a lumbering stride that was easy to poke fun at. He waved his huge bat back and forth at the plate awaiting each pitch with an incredible amount of intensity and movement, which very often resulted in an awkwardly swinging strikeout. But when he did connect with a pitch, which he did on a fairly regular basis, it became a pastime of many Washington baseball fans to admire and talk about his prodigious tape-measure home runs. Seats in the upper deck of old RFK Stadium began being painted white so people could see and remember just where many of his home runs had landed. For three successive seasons, 1968, 1969, and 1970, Frank hit 44, 48, and 44 home runs, winning the American League home run crown in ’68 and ’70. When the All-Star game was played in RFK Stadium in 1969, Frank hit a home run to the delight of the Washington fans.
Sadly, by 1971, Washington Senator’s owner Bob Short had decided to move the team to Texas (where they would become the Texas Rangers). This was a new low in Washington sports history. It had only been a little more than ten years before when the original Washington Senators franchise was moved to Minnesota and became the Twins. Now, the same thing was happening again.
I remember well the evening of September 30, 1971. It was the last game of the season and the last game the Senators would ever play at RFK Stadium. It was a school night for me and long before television broadcasts of home team baseball games would become regular nightly viewing. The only opportunity at my disposal was to listen to the game on my cheap transistor radio with a broken antenna. I huddled under the covers of my bed and turned the radio on with the volume as low as I could so as not to alarm my parents that I was not asleep. I could barely make out the sounds of the game as the scratchy voice of the broadcast announcer faded in and out from the radio. As the game progressed toward the later innings, the foremost thought on everyone’s mind was whether Frank Howard could deliver what the home fans desperately wanted––a home run on his final at-bat.
The New York Yankees had taken an early lead going into the bottom of the sixth inning when Howard suddenly turned on a pitch, sending it beyond the left field fence and off the back wall of the bullpen for a home run! Though the sound was not the best from my radio, there was no mistaking the staticky noise of a jubilant crowd cheering for their hero. After returning to the dugout, Howard came out for not one but two curtain calls, tossing his batting helmet into the strands as a souvenir for some lucky fan.
Howard’s homer seemed to ignite the team, and by the top of the ninth inning, the Senators held a 7–5 lead with the Yankees down to their final out. Suddenly, everything became confusing as I strained to hear the announcer describe how the game had been delayed due to several exuberant fans who could no longer restrain themselves as they began jumping onto the playing field from the stands. Suddenly, players and umpires were running from the field as more fans joined in the pandemonium.
I could hear the radio announcer begging the fans to leave the field so that the Senators could close out their last game in Washington with a victory. But it was not to be. Too many fans were already on the field grabbing bases and collecting handfuls of dirt and pieces of sod as souvenirs.
Early the next day, I quickly found the morning newspaper, turned to the sports section, and began searching through the major league baseball box scores. Though I was an avid baseball fan and thought I knew a lot about the game, I must admit to learning something I hadn’t known before. Looking at the previous night’s game, I noticed the score––Yankees 9, Senators 0. Though a forfeit was a rare occurrence in baseball, this was one of the occasions. The winning team is accorded a run for each of the nine innings of a normal game. I also discovered that all statistics leading up to the point of the forfeit remained unaffected which meant Frank Howard’s home run still counted!
A bet was soon wagered at our table with most of my friends not convinced that the man at the bar was Frank Howard. Having a good reason to get up and order another round of drinks, I strolled toward the end of the bar. “Excuse me, sir,” I said to the gentleman, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but are you Frank Howard?” “Why, yes I am,” he said. He extended his right hand toward me and shook my hand with a powerful, firm grip. We only spoke briefly but he could not have been any nicer. He was more than happy to provide me his autograph when I asked him for it––writing it on a paper napkin that I seemed to have lost over the years. “Do you still remember the last game at RFK when you hit the home run and the fans stormed the field?” I couldn’t help but ask him. “I sure do,” he said. “We really lit it up that night!”
Upon hearing the news of Frank’s passing this past week, these and many other memories of a man who was an idol to me and so many other young fans throughout the Washington D.C. area came flooding to my mind. The man who many called “Hondo,” “The Washington Monument,” or “The Capital Punisher,” I can’t help but prefer to think of him simply as a “Gentle Giant.”
Thank you, Frank, for what you meant to so many people and for the way you represented the game. In an era when superstar status too often means big egos and excessive attention to self, you epitomized what it meant to be a great player who was humble, unpretentious, approachable, and a gentleman. You will be sorely missed. Rest in peace.
Winner of the 2024 Jackie Mitchell Creative Nonfiction Prize.
Joseph Lewis is a writer and author who has been a Washington D.C. sports fan for many years. He has also written a piece for The Sport Digest about legendary Washington Redskin great, Bobby Mitchell. You can find that article and much of his other work at https://josephlewisauthor.com
Mark Mosley is a public school 7th grade math teacher. He draws baseball cards when he is not driving his son to baseball or his daughter to gymnastics. His cards can be seen on Twitter @mosley_mark, on Instagram @idrawbaseballcards, and can be purchased at https://idrawbaseballcards.bigcartel.com/
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