fatigues and a crooked helmet.
Dahl and Lorelei landed at second base and led the crowd in chants of “disco sucks!” There was a box of disco records on the outfield side of second base. Many fans took records to their seats. Then the records were blown up, and all hell broke loose.
About fifteen minutes before the second game was to begin, fans stormed the field. I didn’t throw my Rod Stewart record on the field; I had given it to the ticket taker. My clearest memory of that night is the cloud of smoke that hung over the field. “Beer and baseball go together; they have for years,” said the late Tigers manager Sparky Anderson. “But I think those kids were doing other things than [drinking] beer.”
Once the riot began, Miller and I departed immediately. There was no pushing or shoving to get out of “The Baseball Palace of the World.” Maybe most of the fans were on the field.
Thirty-nine fans were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but there were no reported injuries. At first, the second game was postponed, but American League President Lee MacPhail ordered a forfeit to the Tigers the following day. It would be the last forfeit in Major League Baseball until 1995, when Los Angeles Dodgers’ fans threw souvenir baseballs on the field, resulting in a forfeit to the St. Louis Cardinals. The announced attendance for the Disco Demolition game was 47,795 people. Bill Veeck guessed that between 50,000 and 55,000 people were in the ballpark. The capacity of Comiskey Park was 44,492. Chicago police were worried that crowds outside would also riot, but that never happened. Over time, Disco Demolition assumed the fable-like characteristics that are so common to baseball: 70,000 people were in the ballpark; 10,000 people were on the Dan Ryan Expressway in front of the ballpark. It was big, but not that big.
After the game, Sox pitcher Richard Wortham told reporters he was a fan of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and then added, “This wouldn’t have happened if they had country and western night.”
Wortham’s teammate Thaddis Bosley, Jr. is one of the most thoughtful of the more than fifty people I interviewed for this book. Born in Southern California in 1956, his fourteen-year Major League Baseball career included stops with the Chicago Cubs (1983–86) and the White Sox (1978–80). After Bosley retired in 1990 he became a coach for the Oakland Athletics and hitting coach for the Texas Rangers. Bosley continues to pursue his first love of songwriting, releasing original songs in vintage soul and gospel genres. He writes poetry in his spare time.
Bosley split the 1979 season between the White Sox and their Class AAA affiliate in Iowa. He hit .312 in thirty-six games for the White Sox while battling injuries.
“I remember Disco Demolition, but truthfully I don’t remember if I was physically there,” he told me in September 2015 on a break from his job as executive director of athletics at Grace University, a private Christian school in Omaha, Nebraska. Such honesty is a good sign. Today, everyone says they were there. “Some of the guys told me how afraid they were,” he continued. “I specifically recall that during that time there was a tremendous transition of musicology. From an industry standpoint there seemed to be a push into disco music even though traditional rockers weren’t into that. The backdrop of the Comiskey event had some of those undertones. People said it was racially motivated. I don’t know if it was or not, but there certainly was a divide into what traditional rock should be versus disco.”
Bosley was traded from the California Angels to the White Sox in 1977. He played for the White Sox from 1978 until the spring of 1981 when he was traded to Milwaukee. In 1983, he was traded back to Chicago, this time to play for the Cubs.
“Chicago was a whole new dynamic for me,” Bosley said. “I had never experienced segregation like that. Chicago in the late seventies was very stressful for me. Then the whole Comiskey Park incident, you know how things implode? It seemed like things exploded in terms of what was really going on, not only in the cities but in the nation as a whole, as far as music was concerned.
“The thing that fascinated me the most about the event is that, boom, the next day disco died.”
Bosley got quiet as he collected his thoughts. “After that there was a shift. When I was traded to the Cubs I ended up buying a place in downtown Chicago and lived there for twenty-three years. That’s a reflection of how much the shift occurred. Harold Washington became mayor of the city (in 1983). A lot of good things birthed themselves out of that experience, out of that time.”
Steve Dahl with a box of disco records waiting to be blown up
Fans wait to enter Comiskey Park the day of Disco Demolition
Every good story has a point of conflict. Steve Dahl’s career ascended after Disco Demolition. Mike Veeck’s career crashed, and never really recovered.
Bill Veeck, Jr. took the blame for Disco Demolition.
The elder Veeck sold the White Sox two years after the event and spent the last summers of his life in the center field bleachers at Wrigley Field. Veeck died of cancer in 1986 at the age of seventy-one and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.
“The first time I came into Comiskey was the last time I felt safe in this world,” his son, Mike Veeck, said during a conversation on a rainy spring afternoon at U.S. Cellular Field in 2015. “I remember holding Dad’s hand and seeing this beautiful green diamond in the midst of all this macadam. It seemed like he knew everybody in the world. Everybody said, ‘Hi Bill!’ It was the most wonderful thing.”
Mike Veeck had a promising career in Major League Baseball until the night of the promotion.
“I’m the one who triggered it,” Veeck said. “My old man did what a good leader does. He took the heat. For ten years it was very painful for me. Steve Dahl’s career took off. I couldn’t get a job in baseball. I was red hot with soccer clubs because they like riots, and every radio station in the world wanted me as a promo director. I went to hang drywall in Florida. I got divorced. I never wanted to hear the phone ring again.
“Why do you think I disappeared at the bottom of a bottle for ten years? I drank two bottles of VO a day, Extra Calvert was my favorite, not the Lord Calvert. My Dad was the only person in the ballpark who understood exactly how I felt. We weren’t the greatest father and son, in terms of Ward Cleaver. But professional to professional there was nobody better, and he knew this was one that got away—from everybody. I know the event stung my Dad.”
Actually, Veeck didn’t even have the soccer crowd.
In the aftermath of the event, the late Chicago Sting soccer team owner Lee Stern said in the Chicago Tribune, “When I heard about the success of this Dahl guy and his anti-disco nights, we looked at the possibility of having him come to one of our games. But after seeing that weirdo on TV tonight, there’s no way we’d do it now.”
Veeck sat in the open air patio at U.S. Cellular Field as we talked. Members of the Cincinnati Reds were running laps. Yes, the Reds who beat the White Sox in the 1919 World Series, rigged by gamblers. The series is on record. It was worse than Disco Demolition.
“I never talk like this, you know this,”
