By Daniel Brown
San Jose Mercury News
SAN FRANCISCO — On the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, Fay Vincent remembers the officer’s shoes.
“My recollection is that he had on big, shiny motorcycle cop boots,” Vincent said this week from his Connecticut home. “He looked liked a stereotypical police commander. He looked exactly like what he was supposed to be: He was perfect.”
Vincent was two months into his job as the commissioner of baseball on Oct. 17, 1989, when an earthquake rocked the Bay Area and rattled Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and A’s.
The hero of Candlestick Park was a rising young star named Isiah Nelson III. The San Francisco Police Department commander was in charge of making sure that a blend of 60,000 shaken fans, a damaged stadium and darkening skies did not descend into chaos.
Nelson took control — demanded it — and orchestrated an evacuation that Vincent still describes as “the American public at its best.”
Everybody got out safely.
Less than a year later, however, the Loma Prieta claimed one last victim. Like a distant aftershock, the hero of Candlestick Park died on a closed-off stretch of freeway just after midnight. Nelson was 40.
Vincent thinks of him often.
“I do because it’s such a poignant story,” Vincent said. “He died so young and he had such a terrific future. It’s just one of those awful aspects of life. It’s a tragedy.”
Friday marks the silver anniversary of the day Vincent experienced the first earthquake of his life. He was in his field-level commissioner’s box at 5:04 p.m., just 27 minutes before the third game of the World Series, when the ground shook for about 20 seconds. It registered a magnitude 6.9 on the Richter Scale and Vincent, a lifelong East Coaster, found it so bewildering that he looked toward the sky.
“I thought that’s where the noise was coming from,” Vincent, 76, said Wednesday from his home in New Canaan, Conn. “It sounded to me like someone had scheduled a flyover of jet bombers. That’s how loud the roar was.
“My wife, who is much smarter than I was, said, ‘Fay, I think this is an earthquake.’ And sure enough I was lurching from side to side.”
The quake killed 63 people and 3,757 people were injured. In the immediate aftermath, with the stadium awash in confusion, Vincent was among the first to learn the extent of the quake’s reach. He was sitting near a flock of television cameramen and had access to their live feeds from around San Francisco. Peering into the tiny playback screens, Vincent saw scenes of devastation.
This was a major moment for the novice commissioner. He had been MLB’s deputy commissioner until Sept. 1, when his friend, A. Bartlett Giamatti, died of a heart attack. Now, he had to navigate the postponement of a World Series game amid an epic natural disaster.
That’s when Nelson rolled up and stepped out his car with those boots.
“He drove up in that scout car, right after the earthquake, I would say within 5 or 10 minutes,” Vincent recalled. “And it was chaos in the ballpark. People were milling around in the field.
“He said, ‘I’m Isiah Nelson and I’m in charge of the police detail here. Commissioner, we have a major problem. We have all these people here. Our lighting system is down and it’s getting dark. I’m strongly recommending that you cancel this game.
Vincent assured him that the game was already canceled. With that, Nelson set the course of action: He would drive around in his scout car and use the loudspeaker to alert fans of the cancellation. And he would ask them to exit as calmly as possible.
Still, Nelson knew that the commissioner’s demeanor would set the tone, so he told Vincent:
“If they panic, it’s going to be tough. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to stay right here. Don’t go indoors. Don’t go under the stands. Don’t go anywhere. Stay right here. As long as you’re visible and calm and talking to people, we have a good chance.”
What the commissioner didn’t know is that Nelson was suppressing his own anxiety. His wife, Dorian, was somewhere outside the stadium with their 7-year-old son. Their newborn was home in Oakland, somewhere on the other side of that broken bridge.
“My mother was at home thinking we had fallen into the bay,” Dorian says now.
They were married for 18 years. Dorian, like others who knew him, quickly recognized Nelson’s promise. The San Francisco native was 36 when he was promoted to the rank of commander, making him the youngest officer and the first African-American to serve that rank in San Francisco.
He started working at Candlestick at a time when behavior at the ballpark reached its beer-soaked low. An infamous, brawl-filled doubleheader against the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988 all but demanded reform.
Nelson partnered with Jorge Costa, who in 1989 was hired away from his post as the chief of operations at the Oakland Coliseum, to work toward creating a different environment at The ‘Stick.
“He was a very special person,” Costa said Thursday, while preparing for a playoff game at AT&T Park. “He had a unique ability to read the room and to work with everybody no matter where you were in the hierarchy of life. ... And I think that really resonated with everybody.
“He was someone that was confident, self-assured, but humble.”
On the night of the earthquake, Nelson put all his skills to use. Costa recalled the way the commander inhaled “the fast and furious information and details and mood swings based on the latest reports” and exhaled a plan of action for the officers, the crowd and the commissioner.
At some point during his command, Nelson dispatched an officer to find his wife and his 7-year-old son outside the stadium. When they reunited, the family hopped into Nelson’s squad car as the commander escorted baseball executives and other personnel to the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
“Then he drove us home to Oakland, gave the baby a kiss, and turned right around and drove back to San Francisco,” Dorian recalls. “It was 4 in the morning.”
Vincent is so grateful for the commander’s actions at Game 3 that he commemorated Nelson’s death by writing a 1,000-word tribute for The Washington Post. In it, the thing he remembers most from the quake is “the memory of him and all he did.
“I felt better after writing that,” Vincent says now, “because he had two little kids. I thought, ‘They’ll never know what their father really meant.’ What I wrote for The Washington Post was an effort to put some permanence on his reputation.”
Gabriel Nelson, now 33, is an airline pilot. Anthony Nelson who was only 11-months old when his dad died, studies at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He tells his mom that he somehow remembers his dad’s voice. Dorian says both boys look just like their father.
Nelson died on April 14, 1990, in a solo crash of his motorcycle at 12:15 a.m. He was en route to the Hall of Justice from Candlestick Park and drove on a portion of I-280 that had been shut down for repairs. He struck a cement barricade near 25th Street.
Art Agnos, the mayor at the time, ordered city flags to half-staff and called him “a brilliant police officer whose professional future had no limits.”
Since 1990, the Giants have given out Commander Nelson Award to be presented to an employee who best exemplifies Nelson’s “spirit, dedication and professionalism.” The team also presented the family with the bases from the Game 3 that was never played. Dorian said she looks at them every day.
Vincent, meanwhile, said he remains forever in debt to the hero of Candlestick Park.
“The crowd behaved absolutely perfectly,” he said. “And Isiah Nelson behaved better than anybody.”
Copyright 2014 San Jose Mercury News