Monday’s Sunday saved American flag
Forty years ago, on April 25, 1976, just weeks before America would mark the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a Chicago Cubs centerfielder made an immortal catch that didn’t involve catching a baseball. Instead, it rescued an American flag.
That afternoon, Rick Monday snatched the star-spangled banner from two protestors who had squirted lighter fluid on it and tried to set it on fire at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
Monday’s Sunday action made immediate news around the nation with stories appearing in newspapers from Trenton, New Jersey, to Portland, Oregon, and from Cleveland, Ohio, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Boston Herald American even placed a photo of the event on its front page.
The flag grab became so famous that many people would later remember witnessing the scene live on national television, but the game wasn’t broadcast. What they recall is a classic still photograph, Monday’s post-game remarks and an 8mm film taken by a fan that didn’t surface until 1984.
While the left-handed veteran – of both baseball and the Marine Reserves – would play in the majors for 19 seasons, it was his action that day, which lasted only a few seconds, that immortalized him. The event began in the bottom of the fourth inning, as he stood in the outfield. Waiting for the first Dodger to come to bat, Monday spied a man in his 30s and a teenager who had slipped out of the stands and onto the grass to his right.
“Suddenly, they’re laying out the flag like a picnic blanket,” he later told The Chicago Daily News. Then he saw that the two planned no picnic. The adult sprinkled lighter fluid on the banner and tried to strike a match. When it fizzled before touching the cloth, Monday had time to race to the scene, thinking of the many wounded veterans he had visited in VA hospitals and how they would be appalled by the flames.
Before a second flame could be brought to the American flag, the charging athlete bent down without breaking stride, snatched Old Glory from the ground and raced toward the third-base dugout.
The scoreboard congratulated the Cubbie by posting, “You made a great play,” and the crowd of 25,000 Dodger fans gave the opposing player a standing ovation. Monday insisted that “they weren’t clapping for me, but for what the flag means to them.”
Right after the incident, he said, “I wasn’t trying to be any hero or anything. I just happen to respect our flag and what it stands for, and I don’t like to see anybody treat it like that.”
After a brief time in police possession, the flag was returned to Monday, who has protected it ever since, just as he did that Sunday.
In 2013, the Dodgers paid tribute to his action by handing out a bobble-head that showed him at the moment he raced away with the flag, a rare occasion when one team saluted a rival player.