McLain Always Pointed The Finger At Someone Else

McLain, in between bad business deals


Denny McLain, for anyone who cares to know, is not my kind of guy. In fact, if I found Denny trying to tread water in a lake, and there was a life preserver near me, I might hesitate to use it.

Rough? Not if you are a resident of Chesaning, Michigan -- where Peet Packaging was located, before Denny and a business partner made off with people's hard-earned pension money. What I just wrote is nothing when it comes to those folks -- many of whom would like to see McLain six feet under.

McLain was full of those sorts of business deals -- the kind where he reaps all the benefits and the rest of the world can go to hell. It hasn't been reported much, but Denny hoodwinked a bunch of his Tigers teammates into investing into a paint company. That went belly-up, too.

"If Denny McLain was caught on the playground with a knife and a stabbing victim," former broadcaster Dave Diles once said, "He would tell you that he was just standing there and the victim ran into his knife a dozen times. And he would expect you to believe it."

I bring up McLain because every year during spring training, I think of his dousing of some sportswriters with a bucket of ice water, which was actually one of his more benevolent misdeeds.

"Yeah, he got me," the Oakland Press' Jim Hawkins told me several years ago. "I was one of the guys he got with the water."

McLain was beefing about negative ink, and so decided to take matters into his own hands. This was 1970 -- Denny's last year as a Tiger. It was also the year he got suspended for half the season by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for possessing a loaded gun. There were also rumors of his involvement with organized crime -- fueled by McLain's "mysterious" foot injury toward the end of the 1967 season, which was thought to be the result of a mobster stomping on it. Years later, the organized crime connection seemed like a good bet, when McLain got himself involved in racketeering and extortion, among other niceties. He went to prison for those misadventures.

Yet he kept reinventing himself, on TV and radio, all while pointing the finger elsewhere for his nefarious activities.

He was a 31-game winner in 1968, and a 22-game loser in 1971. And he's been at least that many times a loser in his life since then.

There aren't many sports folks that I hold in contempt, but Dennis McLain is at the top of the short list. From leaving fellow Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich stranded at the 1969 All-Star Game in Washington, D.C. to the shameful stripping of Peet Packaging employees' retirement monies, McLain has been a real darling.

But I am nothing if not fair -- and mindful that bozos like McLain are polarizing figures whose words still enrapture certain segments of sports fans in this state. So it is with that fairness that I agreed to profile McLain in the May issue of Motor City Sports Magazine. Denny wants to talk, which always sends up a red flag, but we'll listen, write, and present. And most of you will read.

Heck -- I even would, even if I wasn't forced to do so in my role as editor-in-chief.

Meanwhile, I hope those of you who have read the March issue of MCS Magazine enjoyed it, and are looking forward to April's book, which includes a 23-page baseball section.

For more info on MCS Magazine, click here.