John Arthur

The last time the Milwaukee Brewers made the World Series, their manager had one leg. Two years earlier, Harvey Kuenn had his right leg amputated below the knee. He was back at work six months later. Then he took over a team that was under .500 and got it to Game 7 of the World Series. Here is the whole thing. He met his wife, Audrey, at her parents' bar a few blocks from the ballpark in Milwaukee. The two of them ended up running it, and they lived in the back. After he retired, he became a coach for the Brewers. And then his body started giving out. In 1976, open heart surgery. A quadruple bypass. Then the circulation in his leg went. Four operations on his foot and leg did not fix it. In February 1980, at 49, doctors took the leg below the knee. Here is how Audrey described the doctors. They "couldn't believe the strength of this guy." Six months later he was back in uniform. In June of 1982 the Brewers fired their manager. They were 23 and 24. The team asked its captain to take over first, and he said no. So they gave it to the coach with one leg. He did not change much. He let them play. Ted Simmons remembered his first team meeting. "I hate meetings. And this meeting is over." The Brewers went 72 and 43 the rest of the way. They hit so many home runs that people called them Harvey's Wallbangers. They won the division on the last day of the season, beating the Baltimore Orioles 10 to 2. In the playoffs they fell behind the California Angels two games to none and came back to win three straight. Then the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. All the way to Game 7. Here is the honest part. They lost Game 7. Milwaukee has never won a World Series. And he did not have long after that. He passed away in 1988, at 57. But his players never forgot what he was to them. Don Money put it like this. "Even though he was my boss, he was just like a father to me." And Audrey said it about the whole team. "We were like a family." There is one more piece of him left in Milwaukee. One of his prosthetic legs ended up hanging from the ceiling of 4th Base, a bar and restaurant in West Milwaukee. The staff treats it like a good luck charm. Nobody agrees on how it got there. One version is that the family that owns the place was friends with the coroner, who gave it to them after he passed. The bar's manager likes the other version. "I got one myth that says he got drunk here one day and left his leg and never came back to get it." When local TV went to see it in 2018, it was still up there, with a Brewers cap on it. This week the Brewers are back in the World Series for the first time since his team. The last man to manage them there did it on one leg.