A born winner who hated to lose. A businessman-turned-showman who attacked his work with a vengeance. Generous to the needy but tough on his ballplayers — he paid them a lot of money and expected a lot for it, both on and off the field. A complex and volatile man. You may have loved or loathed George Steinbrenner, but, in this town, whether it was April or October, you couldn’t ignore him.
Here, the late, legendary sportswriter Dick Schaap tells the inside story of the man who went from humble beginnings to quarterbacking a multi-million dollar ship building company and then to dominate the sports headlines year in and year out as the fiery owner of the Yankees.
In the second of five exclusive excerpts, Schapp tells the tale of Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, two Yankees with egos and personalities equal to The Boss’.
Neither Billy Martin nor Reggie Jackson was a virgin when he met George Steinbrenner. Each had lived at the heart of controversy and each had thrived under extreme pressure.
Martin had begun as a fiercely competitive and inventive ball player, a journeyman during the regular season who turned into a giant during the World Series. Drummed out of the Yankees when his 29th birthday party at the Copacabana erupted into a brawl and headlines, he later became a manager for Detroit, Minnesota and Texas, building a winning team in each city, then getting himself fired, never lasting as many as three full seasons in one job.
He cultivated a reputation as a man with a lightning baseball mind and a matching temper, a temper that drove him to arguments with employers and to fistfights with almost anyone.
Managing Minnesota, he even punched one of his own players; managing Texas, he swung at his team’s traveling secretary, a 60-year-old ex-sportswriter.
Jackson, who was much quicker with words than punches, spent his first eight seasons on the Oakland A’s, performing brilliantly while feuding bitterly with his employer, Charles O. Finley, baseball’s most notorious owner.
Jackson grew famous for his long home runs and longer speeches, so articulate and so egotistical that one Oakland teammate once said, “There isn’t enough mustard in all America to cover that hot dog.”
Martin joined Steinbrenner a year and a half before Jackson, in the summer of 1975. Billy Martin didn’t want Reggie Jackson. George Steinbrenner did.
Before he set out personally to persuade Jackson to become a Yankee, Steinbrenner talked to star catcher and acknowledged team leader Thurman Munson to see how the players would react.
“Go get the big man,” Munson said. “He’s the only guy in baseball who can carry a club for a month. And the hell with what you hear. He hustles every minute on the field.”
Steinbrenner pursued Jackson, flew him to New York, sent his personal limousine with the “NYY” plates to pick him up at the airport, escorted him to “21,” pointed out the most elegant shops and the most luxurious apartment houses, and told him he could own the city.
A few days later, the Yankees held a news conference to announce the signing, and Jackson, wearing a World Series ring and a gold bracelet with the name “Reggie” spelled out in diamonds, positively beamed.
“The reason why I am a Yankee,” he reiterated, “is because George Steinbrenner outhustled everybody. George Steinbrenner dealt with me as a man and a person.
Later Jackson told a reporter: “It’s going to be great with the Yankees because George and I are going to get along real good, and that’s very important.”
When Martin read Jackson’s words, he progressed from simmering to steaming. “I said to myself, ‘You’re going to find out that George isn’t the manager,’ “ Martin said.
JACKSON had one misgiving as he waited for his first spring training as a Yankee.
“I can’t understand it,” he
said. “Here he’s gotten the best player in the whole world, and Billy Martin hasn’t called me up even once.”
Of course, Jackson did not call Martin either, and, once, when both of them happened to be in the same restaurant in Manhattan, each waited for the other to make the first overture, and neither did. The two of them were living proof that monumental egos could also be incredibly delicate.
Jackson wanted to be greeted by his teammates, if not as the second coming of Babe Ruth, at least the way ancient Greek cities greeted a returning Olympic champion.
But he found himself instead treated more like a leper. Many of the Yankees didn’t want to touch him, not even conversationally. Jackson’s feelings were wounded.
“I don’t know if I’m going to fit in,” he admitted at one point. “Maybe I can have a rotten year,” he confessed at another.
But most of the time, Jackson simply counted his blessings, out loud. He counted his money the same way.
Rebuffed by most of his teammates, Jackson was embraced by writers, particularly those with a good ear and a fondness for metaphor.
A writer named Robert Ward, on assignment from Sport magazine, offered Jackson his good ear, and Jackson responded with hundreds of good words, quotable and provocative.
“This team, it all flows from me,” Jackson said. “I’ve got to keep it going.”
Then he hit the metaphorical jackpot: “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson. But really he doesn’t enter into it. He’s so damned insecure … Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.”
THE Yankees won their opening game before 43,785 fans, a crowd four times larger than the one that had turned out for the last pre-Steinbrenner opening in 1972. But then they lost eight of their next nine games and sank into last place in the Eastern Division of the American League.
Their slump was punctuated by a series of ominous events, the first confrontation between Martin and Jackson (who was benched because he told a group of reporters he had a sore elbow) and the first reconciliation of Martin and Jackson.
Jackson spent much of the summer of 1977 in varying degrees of shock. Advance copies of the Sport article began to circulate in the Yankee clubhouse.
Munson, on the brink of a rapprochement with Jackson, was enraged, and almost all of his teammates took Munson’s side. Yankees walked past Jackson’s locker and kicked at his spiked shoes. When he took batting practice, his teammates looked away. No one spoke to him.
He was virtually ignored until the third time he came to bat against Boston pitcher Bill Lee, who said before the game that he had a dream in which he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“It had Steinbrenner’s face and Billy Martin’s body,” said Lee, conjuring up the most distasteful vision he could imagine.
Jackson attacked Lee with his bat, hammering a home run that tied up an important game at two runs each.
As Jackson jogged around third base, his teammates, responding to his achievement, forgot their animosity and prepared to greet him with handshakes and pats on the back, the tradition reception for a home-run hitter.
As Jackson crossed home plate, he pointedly ignored his waiting teammates and headed toward the far corner of the dugout, returning snub for snub.
THE next day in a meeting he requested with Martin, Jackson said, “Every player on this team hates and despises me.”
So did the manager, who wouldn’t admit his feelings to Jackson, perhaps not even to himself. The closest Martin would come to articulating how much he hated Jackson was to say that he would play Hitler and Mussolini in his lineup if he thought they could help the team.
During this crisis Steinbrenner avoided saying anything publicly to antagonize either man.
Eventually the tension sub sided. Munson began shaking Jackson’s hand again, permitting him back into the Yankee fold. Jackson’s batting average began to perk up. In early June, in fact, he hit safely in 14 straight games, his longest hitting streak in three years.
The streak ended on June 18, the day that any pretense of a decent relationship between Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson also came to an end.
Reprinted from “Steinbrenner!” by Dick Schaap by arrangement with G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright © 1982 by Dick Schaap.