The Road to Omaha: Hits, Hopes, and History at the College World Series

PROLOGUE: THE ARRIVAL

At 1:00 A.M. on Thursday morning, June 12, 2008, the red Arrow bus turned right off of Interstate 80, climbing up the off-ramp of Exit 454. This was the last exit in Omaha, the final stop in Nebraska before the big highway leapfrogged the Missouri River and landed in Council Bluffs, Iowa en route to all points east.

Seconds earlier, the Fresno State University Bulldogs baseball team had been a typical bunch of chattering college students, carrying on about breaking balls, video games, and girls. Then someone spotted the big green road sign that read, EXIT 454, 13TH STREET SOUTH, STADIUM.

In an instant, they fell silent.

Bus driver Chris Clark chuckled as his suddenly serious passengers scrambled for the windows, glancing into the rearview mirror as he thought to himself, Gets them every time.

There it is! Someone shouted it from the left side of the aisle, causing everyone to jump up and cram into the shouter’s half of the bus. As the trees whipped by, the big black left-field scoreboard began rising into view, topped by the light-traced letters of a semicircle sign, a beacon calling out to baseball fans as if it were their mother ship.

ROSENBLATT. HOME OF THE NCAA MEN’S COLLEGE WORLD SERIES.

The image hardly seemed real. Like every college baseball team, the Bulldogs had talked about Rosenblatt, read about Rosenblatt, seen it on TV, and set it up on a pedestal as the ultimate goal of the season and of their college careers.

Now there it was, and in thirty-six hours they would be one of only eight teams allowed to stand on that field as participants in the 2008 College World Series (CWS).

As they pulled into the parking lot the experience became even more dreamlike. The stadium even had a kind of aural glow about it, a halo provided by the nighttime bank of lights coming off the field and into the rainy night. A hardball mirage in the middle of the gridiron-crazy Great Plains.

Down on that field were a handful of stadium security team members sitting on folding chairs, keeping an eye on the diamond while fighting to stay awake. When asked if they heard voices in the outfield or saw spirits in the grandstands during those long nights, the sentries admitted that they did feel a presence. It’s not a voice or a ghost or anything like that, said one police officer. But there’s something in there with you at night. I keep expecting Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham to come walking in across the outfield.

Joe never played at Rosenblatt, but Joba did, the baby-faced ace of the Nebraska Cornhuskers long before he was Mr. Chamberlain, toast of Yankee Stadium. Moonlight Graham never sat in the Rosenblatt dugout, but Rice University head coach Wayne Graham had and would again in 2008, his seemingly annual return to unleash yet another missile-throwing Rice Owl pitching staff on an unfortunate opponent. The ghosts of the dugouts still talk about his army of Texas-grown arms that hurled their way to the school’s first NCAA championship in 2003 by mowing down an all-star team of traditional baseball powerhouses.

That same mound was once the launching pad for a kid named Dave Winfield, who struck out twenty-nine batters for Minnesota in two days in the summer of ’73. Eight years later that pile of dirt was the ring in which Frank Viola of St. John’s and Yale’s Ron Darling slugged it out for eleven shutout innings, carrying dual shutouts into the eleventh and twelfth innings, Darling yielding no hits, before St. John’s won in the twelfth. The clash was so moving that Hall of Famer Smoky Joe Wood, a man who pitched against Christy Mathewson and who was a teammate of Cy Young, said a better game had never been thrown in all of baseball.

In 1983, a fresh-faced Texan named Roger Clemens toed that same rubber, joined by college pal and future Red Sox teammate Calvin Schiraldi. The Rocket may have been leaner than his more-recognized future Fenway and Yankee personas, but as he won the Series clincher he was certainly no less intimidating at twenty-one than he was at thirty-one or forty-one.

That same year, Arizona State’s Barry Bonds roamed the Rosenblatt outfield along with Oklahoma State man-child Pete Incaviglia—Inky—who drew a crowd of thousands just to watch him take batting practice. And Michigan infielders Chris Sabo and Barry Larkin were in the formative years of a relationship that would win them a World Series with the Cincinnati Reds seven years later.

As their careers moved on past Omaha, each athlete became more famous on much bigger stages for his play, his earnings, and in some cases his flaws. But here at Rosenblatt they were all still kids playing a kids’ game.

It’s the kind of game that still leaves people shaking their heads in disbelief when they stand over at first base. That’s where the entire ’82 Miami Hurricanes baseball team (including the batgirls) should have been awarded an Oscar nomination for their ability to sell a hidden ball trick so masterful that it has its own nickname—the Grand Illusion. That same corner of the diamond is where Oklahoma State’s Robin Ventura’s fifty-eight-game hit streak died, where North Carolina’s hopes for the 2006 title went wide right, and where Louisiana State University’s Warren Morris suddenly leapt into the air, realizing that he hadn’t slapped a game-tying hit, but rather he had won the national championship with a two-run homer.

Second base was once the domain of Arizona State’s Bob Horner, who played at Rosenblatt one day and who was on the field with the Atlanta Braves the next. In 1951, a Popeye look-alike named Don Zimmer manned that same second bag, breaking in the dirt that would later be kicked around and dived into by the likes of California’s Jeff Kent and LSU’s Todd Walker.

Round the horn at shortstop and third they still play the infield in and guard the line just like Georgia Tech’s Nomar Garciaparra, University of Southern California’s Roy Smalley, Long Beach State’s Jason Giambi, and Minnesota’s Paul Molitor.

Since 1950, they came to Omaha by van, train, and plane. In the old days they stayed in local university dormitories and rode in bouncy yellow school buses. Over the years the dorm rooms became hotel suites and the bats went from ash to alloy, but while the rest of the collegiate sports world became buried under money, the College World Series and its comfy old blue home managed to preserve its sense of innocence and wonder. The administrators and event coordinators could have made more cash if they’d wanted to, just as the student-athletes could’ve copped an attitude if they’d so desired. Instead, everyone was kept in line by the ghosts of Rosenblatt . . .

. . . By the memories of Arizona State’s longtime coach Jim Brock, who hacked and coughed his way through the first game of the 1994 Series. It was obvious that the two-time CWS championship coach was dying, but he guided his Sun Devils to a win over Miami, only to be flown back home to Arizona, where he succumbed to cancer eight days later, less than forty-eight hours after his team was eliminated in the semi-finals.

. . . Kept on task by the image of Cal State Fullerton’s Mark Kotsay sending ball after ball into the gap and into the stands, smacking two homers against Southern Cal to win the 1995 title. By Minnesota’s Jerry Kindall, who legged out a triple in ’56 to become the first (and as of 2008, the only) player to hit for the cycle, then returned to coach Arizona to three titles. And by the Bando brothers, Sal and Chris, who each led separate Arizona State teams to championships a dozen years apart.

For every future big league superstar there were hundreds of young Rosenblatt heroes of whom most people had likely never heard, boys who went on to become school principals, insurance salesmen, and car dealers. Like Fritz Fisher, who pitched eleven innings and cracked a game-tying triple to lead Michigan to the ’62 title, then became a bank vice president in Toledo. Or freshman pitcher Brett Laxton, forced to start the ’93 CWS championship game because the LSU Tigers were out of pitchers and who responded by striking out sixteen Wichita State batters to win the title and to earn the first championship game shutout in thirty-three years.

Seven years later Tiger Joe Cresse, who was 1-for-12 in the 2000 College World Series, stroked a left-field hit that won the championship in the bottom of the ninth. The image of that winning run being scored, of LSU’s Ryan Theriot sliding across home, popping up to his feet and tossing his helmet into the Rosenblatt grandstands, is a vision that screams out from every level of CWS experience.

Pure, unhinged, uncorrupted, refuse-to-sellout joy.

It was the search for that joy that brought Fresno State to the doorstep of Rosenblatt Stadium in the middle of the wet night. They knew that no one was going to let them into the stadium to walk around and to try conjuring up those ghosts in person. They also didn’t care. They’d found the holy ground and they merely wanted to look upon it in person. They’d get to walk on its grass soon enough.

Just like their seven opponents, the ones sound asleep in their Omaha hotel rooms, the Bulldogs had earned the right to come and to commune with the spirits of Rosenblatt, those remembered and forgotten.

And who knew? Perhaps they would be able to add their names to the roll call of College World Series greats and moments. Texas . . . Southern Cal . . . LSU . . . and Fresno freaking State.

Why not?

ONE

THE BLATT

Friday, June 13, 2008

Opening Ceremonies

At 3:00 P.M. on Friday, June 13, 2008, the eight head coaches of the NCAA Division I Men’s College World Series strolled one by one into the Hall of Fame Room of Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium. On the field their teams were being rotated through a continuous gauntlet of batting practice, team photos, media interviews, and mandatory all-hands-on-deck autograph sessions. Tomorrow the games would begin. Today was about acclimation, atmosphere, and smiles.

The eight men greeted one another, smiled, shook hands, and took their seats. No one ever actually enjoyed these press conferences, but on a day like today it didn’t feel like the hassle that it usually was. Scattered throughout the United States were 278 other coaches who were sitting at home dreaming of being so inconvenienced.

Since June 14, 1950, every first day of the College World Series looked and felt just like this one.

Omaha, Nebraska.

Rosenblatt Stadium.

Eight teams.

Two weeks.

Double elimination.

One champion.

God bless America.

Every coach knew what was at stake and what had to be done. Their teams had been divided into two four-team double-elimination brackets. Lose twice and you were out. The winners of those two brackets would get a clean slate, erasing any losses from their record, and face off in a best-of-three series for the national championship.

Now they were just anxious to get on with it.

Six hours earlier, Florida State was the first team to hit the field, the much-hyped Seminole sluggers taking their turn in the day’s heavily regimented National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) schedule. Then every hour on the hour until 5:00 P.M. the remaining seven schools made their rounds—Stanford, Miami, Georgia, Rice, Fresno State, North Carolina, and LSU. Team photo, ten minutes of stretching, fifty minutes of hitting and fielding, twenty-minute presentation on the dangers of sports wagering, one half hour of autographs, barbecue dinner at 7:00, opening ceremonies at 9:00, fireworks at 9:40, don’t be late.

What happened if they were?

We’ve never really had to worry about that, said NCAA official Damani Leech, surprised that someone even dared to ask the question. Nobody ever is.

As one team hit away, the next in line entered the ballpark through one of the bullpen tunnels down each foul line. It was the exact same stroll through the exact same tunnel that had been walked by Zimmer, Winfield, and Mike Mussina. At the top of that tunnel waited the same Omaha sunshine that once washed over the not-yet-inflated shoulders of Bonds, Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, and Mark McGwire. Long before their names became identifiable to so many as symbols of everything wrong with the game, they were innocent kids experiencing the same initial reaction to their new surroundings as these, the innocents of 2008.

Holy . . .

Unfailingly, as each first-time CWS participant spilled onto the field, he would simultaneously drop both his equipment bag and his jaw, awed by the sight of the ballpark known lovingly as The Blatt, the home of college baseball’s best since the Truman administration. A typical twenty-year-old collegian’s entire baseball life had been played out in front of crowds of dozens, hundreds if he was lucky. Even a baseball-addicted school such as the University of Miami was lucky to draw a sellout crowd of 5,000.

Rosenblatt seats 24,000.

Dude, one Stanford player said to a teammate, it looks so much bigger than it does on TV.

Above those slack-jawed players, scattered throughout the red, yellow, and blue seats were already several thousand of those fans, each section of the stadium providing its own Norman Rockwell painting. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, school groups, youth baseball teams, and at least a dozen folks who looked as though they had slept beneath the bleachers since the final out of the 2007 Series, waiting fifty weeks for their next CWS fix.

Some were attending the College World Series for the first time. Others were arriving for their tenth, twenty-fifth, or fiftieth. And holding with CWS tradition they had all entered the park to watch the day’s opening ceremonies for the very reasonable price of free.

Just beyond the left-field wall a pillar of smoke rose from the trees lining Bob Gibson Boulevard, a thick white cloud produced by a small city’s worth of purple-and-gold-clad LSU fans. They waved and threw strands of Mardi Gras beads to the conga line of cars that crawled by, slowly snaking its way along the two-lane road, gawking at the tent-sized GEAUX TIGERS flags and rounding the block around The Blatt searching for a parking spot. The stop-and-go traffic, mostly stop at this point, crept left onto Thirteenth Street, the main conduit from downtown Omaha to the nearly sixty-year-old ballpark. Overhead stood a massive fiberglass gorilla, adorned with a banner reading, WELCOME CWS FANS, FROM KING KONG BURGERS, PHILLIES, STEAKS, AND GYROS.

A few blocks south, the marquis at Chop’s Bowling Alley flashed in giant red letters:

CLOSED TODAY. GONE TO SERIES.

The fortunate fans who’d found a place to stow their cars were already strolling the uphill climb of Thirteenth Street to buy T-shirts and caps and consume cold beverages, from the throat-sharpening brews of Starsky’s Beer Garden to free bottles of fan-labeled Jesus Water handed out by a Christian group known as the Ninth Inning Ministry.

They stood in line at Zesto, a self-proclaimed nationally known ice cream stand, they shot baskets and threw strikes in the NCAA’s interactive Fan Fest, and they filed in and out of the neighboring Henry Doorly Zoo to see the tigers and owls before going inside the ballpark to see the Tigers and the Owls.

It’s like going to the state fair, said one red-faced girl as she attempted to slurp down some Zesto strawberry soft serve before the sun got to it first. But it’s even better because there’s baseball.

Inside The Blatt, the grown-ups felt more than a little like the young slurper. And why not? The sky was cloudless, the temperature perfect, and Top 40 hits blared through the concourse, occasionally punctuated by the sounds of . . . what was that? Organ music? Did they still play that at ballparks?

The batting cage was sprawled out over home plate like a dark green opera clamshell. From deep within it came the repetitive, unmistakably metallic sound that has become the instant audible signature of June in Omaha.

Tink.

Tink.

Tink.

Four hundred feet away, the bleacher creatures leaned over the outfield wall, screaming each and every time a ball came sailing their way off the barrel of the aluminum bats, which happened much more often than not. Those same fans bellowed even louder when a smash fell short and the unfortunate fielding player was faced with Rosenblatt’s eternal on-field decision: Do I throw this ball back in for more BP or do I be a hero and toss it into the stands?

In the concourse, the twenty-five-man Miami Hurricane roster was seated at a ridiculously long line of tables and each player was handed a Sharpie marker. As fans began to work their way down the line to collect autographs, the Canes began to bang out a hip-hop beat on the tabletop. Before long the fans joined in with handclaps and foot stomps. Even the concessionaires got into the act, rat-a-tat-tatting with their tongs on the side of the hot-dog cookers.

On the top step of the third-base dugout, LeRoy Swedlund’s sixty-one-year-old grin managed to out-gleam his mirrored sunglasses, spectacles that reflected the spectacle around him. Swedlund had earned the right to stand here as a representative of the Omaha Rotary Club. Standing alongside was fellow Rotarian Jim Stewart, who first attended the College World Series as a preteen batboy in the 1950s.

As long as anyone in Omaha could remember, the eight participating College World Series teams had been assigned hosts from local civic organizations and service clubs, from the Lions Club to Kiwanis to Offutt Air Force Base. Prior to the event, they sold books of general admission tickets to raise money for their favorite charities. Once the Series began, anything a team desired—Gatorade, donuts, dinner reservations, Band-Aids, whatever—they only had to ask their designated hosts and it would materialize. There is no greater symbol of the relationship between the event and the town than the one between the teams and their host.

During the mayhem that followed Cal State Fullerton’s title-clinching victory in 2004, catcher Kurt Suzuki became so mobbed by fans that he couldn’t make his way through the parking lot to attend the team celebration across the street. So Optimist Club ambassador Fred Uhe threw the 200-pounder on his back and gave him a piggyback ride through the masses.

Six years earlier, Long Beach State starting pitcher Mike Gallo stood frozen in the clubhouse, refusing to take the mound until he’d scarfed down his ritualistic pregame snack of precisely one orange and one apple. A heady 49er coach placed a call to Concord Club member and financial adviser Terry Devlin, who sprinted out of his office, raced through a local grocery store, and produced the produce in the nick of time.

Free tickets.

Organ music.

Jesus water.

Piggyback rides.

Good luck finding any of the above at the Final Four or the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) title game.

So far Swedlund and Stewart’s assignment of looking after Rice University had happily lacked such drama. The Owls were making their seventh trip to Rosenblatt in twelve years, so they had the Series routine down pat. But just in case, the Rotarians would be at their beck and call from the moment they’d landed on Thursday until they loaded up and went back home to Houston, either the elated owners of their second CWS championship trophy or a crushed bunch of college kids.

Either way, standing in the dugout with the sun on your face beat the hell out of working in the electronic document imaging business, which is what Rotarian host LeRoy Swedlund did before what he called semiretiring.

I don’t throw the word ‘perfect’ around very much, he said as Owl assistant coach Mike Taylor walked by and slapped him on the shoulder. But you know what this is right here? This is the perfect day. No winner or losers today. Just perfect weather, good old-fashioned baseball, and smiles all the way around.

The perfect day. Back in the Hall of Fame Room, Mike Batesole was missing it.

As the eight head coaches began addressing the assembled media types, the forty-four-year-old skipper of the Fresno State Bulldogs put on a brave face, but was already feeling the pinch of being in charge of the what-the-hell-are-these-guys-doing-here team of the 2008 tournament. Who else would have a damn mandatory head coach’s press conference scheduled at the exact same time of his team’s first session of batting practice?

As Batesole had taken his seat at the far left side of the NCAA’s trademark high-and-long, blue-and-white table, he was greeted by Mike Martin of Florida State, who was bringing his thirteenth team to Rosenblatt and ninth in the last eighteen seasons. To Martin’s left sat Mark Marquess of Stanford, who had recruited Batesole as a player out of high school and who was here for his fourteenth CWS; then Jim Morris, practically a citizen of Omaha after eleven trips in his first fifteen seasons at the University of Miami. And so it went, all the way down to the far end of the table. In all, the seven coaches joining him on the stage had participated in fifty-nine editions of the College World Series, four of them as both a player and a coach.

When Batesole walked into The Blatt a few minutes earlier, it was for the very first time.

Twenty-four years earlier he’d nearly made it here it as a shortstop at Oral Roberts University, but twice his teams fell one game short of clinching a CWS berth, losing to superpowers Oklahoma State and Wichita State.

In 1996, his first season as an NCAA Division I head coach, he took upstart Cal State Northridge, a program he’d saved from execution by a budget-conscious administration, and once again stood on the brink of Omaha. The Matadors stunned Marquess and his Stanford team on their home field, but ran out of steam in their seventieth game of the season, falling to Martin’s Seminoles. Yet again, he’d come up one game shy.

Batesole turned the sting of those losses into motivation, vowing not to attend his sport’s penultimate event until he had earned it. Every time he received his invitation to the American College Baseball Coaches Association meetings that coincided with the Series he gave away the CWS-emblazoned freebies that came with the invite and threw what was left in the trash.

Now, finally, he was here. Rosenblatt f’ing Stadium. And here he was, stuck in a press conference, sitting behind a microphone under blinding TV lights while his team was out there, tinking out big flies and bigger smiles in the sunshine.

In truth, the Hall of Fame Room was merely a large, generic rectangular conference room, buried behind the first-base concourse. Because of the stadium’s full-time tenant, the Class AAA Omaha Royals of the Pacific Coast League, it was decorated with the jerseys and mementoes of the greatest names in Kansas City Royals history. Sadly, that history boiled down to only three men—George Brett, Frank White, and manager Dick Howser. And as with all things pertaining to the Royals, everything in the Hall of Fame Room remained frozen in time, its calendar permanently stuck on October 27, 1985, the night the big club earned its lone World Series title as well as its last real moment of relevance in the baseball world.

Why is all this Royals crap in here? one out-of-town writer asked another, pointing to the three framed jerseys, along with a fourth, number 1/16, belonging to Omaha icon Warren Buffett, annual contender for richest man on planet Earth and coowner of the O Royals.

I’m not sure, his colleague replied. I think there used to be a minor-league team here that had something to do with Kansas City. And the other jersey must be Jimmy Buffett’s. Is he from Omaha or something?

For the next hour, the coaches went through the routine of the pre-Series presser. Each coach gave an opening statement and Batesole was allowed to deliver his first so that he could be dismissed early and get back to his team.

He cracked jokes about pitcher Justin Wilson’s wild ways, saying, He makes me go through a pack of Marlboros every time he starts a game.

He thanked Rice head coach Wayne Graham for leaving the Western Athletic Conference for Conference USA, opening the door for schools like Fresno to finally have a chance to win the league’s baseball championship. We played Rice about fifty times when they were in our conference and I don’t think we scored a run against them.

He even hearkened back to the Omaha-or-bust game against Arizona State in Tempe, a contest his team won in extra innings just five days earlier: They hit fifty balls out of the park in batting practice. We’re still working on our first bucket from the start of the season.

The room of college baseball scribes was more than a little stunned. Batesole wasn’t exactly known for his witty rapport with the media . . . or for that matter, anyone else. Oh well, they thought collectively as he was excused to join his team on the field, he can be as funny as he wants. Fresno won’t be here more than two games anyway.

With Batesole gone, the questions to the seven remaining coaches began in rapid-fire succession. They were asked about individual players, about the sudden increase in parity across the 286 schools playing Division I baseball, and about recent NCAA rules changes regarding shortening the season, tightening schedules, and potentially reducing the number of baseball scholarships.

North Carolina coach Mike Fox was asked about the pressure of bringing back a team for the third consecutive year (I’d rather have that problem than not). Mark Marquess and LSU head coach Paul Mainieri were asked about the relief of getting their storied programs back to Omaha after unusually long absences (Mainieri: I’ll guess they’ll let me keep my job a little longer). Fox, Morris, and Martin were asked to explain how their league, the Atlantic Coast Conference, had managed not to win a College World Series since, of all schools, Wake Forest had taken the crown in 1955 (Morris, conveniently forgetting his twelve seasons at Georgia Tech: It’s not our fault, Miami joined the ACC just five years ago).

Then the entire group was asked to address the difficulty of earning a trip to Omaha. Every year began with fall practice and a fifty-game regular season, followed by each school’s respective conference tournament. Surviving those three stages meant earning a berth in the NCAA’s grueling double-elimination bracket. Like college basketball’s much more famous tournament, baseball began its postseason with sixty-four teams. The first round was referred to as the Regionals, sixteen separate four-team double-elimination tournaments. The sixteen regional winners move on to the Super Regionals, eight two-team best-of-three weekends to determine the eight invitees to Omaha.

March might be Madness, but it used up an entire month to determine the Final Four. The crucible of baseball’s Regional and Super Regional rounds were compressed into two hit-and-run weekends.

Seventy-two-year-old Graham growled at being asked to describe the rigors of the baseball season to stand among the Omaha Eight. It feels like a vampire got a hold of you and left you with just enough blood to live.

For a half hour everyone chatted, laughed, and yawned. Georgia head coach David Perno, despite having his team here for its third CWS in the last five seasons, wasn’t asked a single question that didn’t begin with, This is for all the coaches . . .

Over that first thirty minutes, the media danced around the elephant in the room, the one prominently illustrated with blueprints and architectural drawings, mounted on giant foam-board posters and displayed on a line of easels along the right-hand side of the Hall of Fame Room. A room, it turns out, that had just been earmarked for a bulldozing.

This question is for all the coaches. How do you feel about this week’s announcement that Rosenblatt Stadium will be replaced by a new ballpark in 2011?

That announcement had been made only three days earlier at an outdoor press conference attended by NCAA officials, Omaha municipal brass, and most of the media members in attendance at this press conference. The ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on the approximate future location of the new home plate, in parking lots C and E adjacent to the still-new Qwest Center arena and convention center, right smack in the center of downtown Omaha.

The proclamation had long been expected, yet was no less shocking to hear aloud. The College World Series would be moving to its brand-new $140-million downtown state-of-the-art home in three years. A full three miles south of The Blatt, Zesto, Starsky’s, the zoo, and the ice cream girl’s beloved state-fair atmosphere.

I’ve been coming here about as long as I can remember, said Stanford head coach Mark Marquess, who first came to Omaha in 1967 as the Cardinal first baseman. Over the years I’ve seen Rosenblatt grow from a little minor-league park up on this hill into what it is today. Listen, change is good. But what makes this event great is what hasn’t changed. The commitment from the city of Omaha. What I’ve always seen in those stands. The ten-year-old kids begging for autographs and then returning as adults to watch their kids do the same. When we stop seeing that, then we’ve got problems. . . .

I’ll tell you this, Mike Martin added quickly. I’m glad I’m not the one who had to make that decision.

That decision produced a nearly decade-long debate that at times decayed into good old-fashioned cheap-shot nastiness. The Battle of the Blatt had proved to be one of the longest, most vocal, and divisive public squabbles in Omaha history.

No small achievement by any stretch of the imagination.

The city of Omaha was originally devised as nothing more than a real-estate scheme. Residents of Council Bluffs, Iowa, were desperate to ensure that the long dreamed-of Transcontinental Railroad would someday run through their town. So on July 4, 1854, a group of enterprising locals crossed the Missouri River into the still-new Nebraska Territory and proclaimed their plans to build said town. They then frantically rowed back into Iowa, scared off by a party of Indians who had stopped to watch the drunken white people propose toasts to their own genius. Eleven years and six days later, the first rails of the Union Pacific Railroad were spiked in Omaha City.

The years in between were a constant bloody tug-of-war between those who owned land and those who wanted to. A group of particularly ruthless bastards was known as the Claim Club, known to repeatedly dunk landowners into the frozen waters of the Missouri until, on the verge of an iced-over death, they finally agreed to sign over what was rightfully theirs.

Soon Omaha was declared the capital of the territory, but only after a series of backhanded political moves designed to slant the newly formed House of Representatives in the city’s favor. The reaction was a giant, chair-throwing, nose-breaking bunkhouse stampede of a brawl on the House floor, a throw-down that involved, among others, J. Sterling Morton, founder of both Morton Salt and Arbor Day. For the better part of the next half-century, Omaha slugged its way through fights between cowboys and Indians, cowboys and cowboys, railroad men and Indians, and pretty much anyone who dared to walk its streets.

When Omahans weren’t dragging one another around by the hair, they were dragging each other into court. They sued over land claims and business deals gone bad. A group of local prostitutes even tried to sue to get their well-deserved earnings from an unruly client whom they claimed was blackmailing them. He also happened to be the sheriff of nearby Lincoln.

Wrote one Kansas City paper: It requires but little, if any, stretch of the imagination to regard Omaha as a cesspool of iniquity, for it is given up to lawlessness and is overrun with a horde of fugitives from justice and dangerous men of all kinds who carry things with a high hand and a loose rein . . . If you want to find a rogue’s rookery, go to Omaha.

Nearly a century and a half later, the iron-necked personality of Omaha’s citizenry had become more subtle. But if the situation called for it, they still had the ability to tap back into their venomous Wild West ancestry.

Just ask Mike Fahey.

You know where it’s the worst? You should go with me to the grocery store. As the city’s forty-ninth mayor admitted it, he pulled his lips tight against his teeth and glanced down at the long conference table in front of him, looking more than a little exhausted. "The older ladies love to corner me at the grocery store and tell me everything I’m doing