Upon hearing the news yesterday of the passing of George Steinbrenner, the first thing that ran through my mind was a remembrance of the fact that it was because of The Boss that I made my first appearance in the pages of the New York Times. And no, it wasn't for anything I'd written, as this was a good decade or so before my first byline ever appeared there.
To paraphrase the paper's old ad for their classified section ("I got my job through theNew York Times"), allow me to boast that "I got my picture in The New York Times through George Steinbrenner."
In 1981, I had finally talked the Village Voice, which I'd be contributing to for years as a music critic, into letting me become the paper's first ever baseball beat writer, alternating weekly reports on both hometown New York teams. The Mets were truly horrendous that season, but when the Yankees made it to the World Series, I found myself out in LA when Steinbrenner had his notorious, either real or imagined (depending on who you believed) fight with a Dodger fan in a hotel elevator. He then came back to New York showing off his badge-of-honor bandaged hand, trying to whip up the (in his mind, clearly dwindling) fighting spirit of his team.
The Yankees, after all, had confidently marched off to LA up two games to none, but were swept three straight in California, and were now trying to stave off elimination back in the Bronx in Game Six. They didn't, of course. The Dodgers finished them off in a 9-2 rout, and while many younger Yankee fans may not remember this, before the game was even over, Steinbrenner had his PR department distribute a press release he'd hastily dictated during the final innings of the game -- a signed statement in which he formally apologized "to the people of New York and to the fans of the New York Yankees everywhere for the performance of the Yankee team in the World Series."
In the subdued New York clubhouse after the game, I was with a group of reporters talking to Reggie Jackson, who'd just played what everyone knew was going to be his last game in pinstripes. (His contract was up, and the soon-to-be free agent knew he wasn't coming back.)
We asked Jackson if he'd seen Steinbrenner's apology. "Apologize?" an incredulous Reggie responded when informed of George's letter. "For who? For me? For the team? We got beat, that's all. I have no regrets ... I tried as hard as a I could every (expletive) time I stepped out on the field, every time I got to the plate? Apologize? Goddamn."
A moment later, Steinbrenner appeared in the Yankee clubhouse, and made his way around the room. He saw Reggie, came over and shook his hand. They didn't really say much to each other, and afterwards, Reggie was still shaking his head in disbelief at what his owner had done.
I had been right there when all of this transpired, and the next day, I stated getting phone calls from friends. "Did you see the Times today?" they asked. No, I hadn't. "You're in a picture with Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson!" I ran down to the corner newsstand, grabbed a copy, opened it up and, lo and behold, there I was, standing right between the two of them.
Photo or no photo, that moment in the Yankee clubhouse has certainly stayed with me over the last three decades -- in large part because the respective attitudes shown by athlete Jackson and owner Steinbrenner were such a primer to me on the entire notion of competition and sportsmanship. Players always talk about leaving everything on the field, and that, if they do, win or lose, they know they've done their best, and simply move on. But throughout most of his time as the Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner could not and would not accept anything less than being on top, all the time. To just about anyone outside of New York (and plenty of folks inside, I might add), he was primarily viewed as a boorish bully -- a quintessentially Ugly American bully -- who relished in throwing his money and his weight around to try and always get his way.
I was watching some of the video obits yesterday, and one of them featured a snippet from (I think) a 60 Minutes profile from some years ago in which Steinbrenner answered a question about all the different managers he'd fired over the years (at least up until the Joe Torre regime) and what that said about him as an employer. He noted that people get fired all the time and worry about how they're going to support themselves and feed their families, but that when he fired his managers, he offered them other jobs, and just about all of them took him up on his offers. It was kind of sad to watch, actually. He talked as if he was trying to convince himself that as long as people stayed working for him and taking his money, he couldn't really be treating them very badly, now could he? No wonder he loved that nickname The Boss. It certainly fit.
Ask most baseball people about the contributing factors to the Yankee turnaround in the mid-1990s and they'll tell you that it coincided with the multi-year suspension imposed upon him by commissioner Faye Vincent after Steinbrenner went into cahoots with a low level gambler in an effort to dig up dirt on outfielder Dave Winfield. It's no coincidence that it was during that precise time, in which the formidable baseball man Gene Michael ran the team, that the scouting, signing and trading foundations were laid out for the championship and ever- contending teams from the late '90s to the present.
To his credit, the George Steinbrenner who returned from that suspension did emerge a somewhat humbled person, and apparently willing, finally, to delegate and perhaps even actually respect those who worked for him. And the Steinbrenner of the last decade, whose health -- physical and mental -- seemed in noticeable decline, certainly came across as a mellower (or at least quieter) human being. He did admirable things, to be sure, especially philanthropically, and he usually insisted on anonymity in so doing. Now that's he's gone, just how much of it was conscience on his part for making the world put up with him is something we'll never really know. All told, yes, he was a larger than life figure, in all -- good and bad -- that that can entail. And, no, we won't soon see his likes again. Whether that's good or bad, only time will tell.