Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  “I was a hustler on the field,” Galan said years later. “And I sat a young Billy down and told him that he had to be relentless about hustling for everything. I tried to insert that into him—just never give up, bear down all the time. Never, ever stop until the game is over.”

  Galan and the other big leaguers also took Billy and his friends Rube de Alba and Howard Noble to movies at the showpiece Rivoli Theatre on San Pablo Avenue. The West Berkeley kids with the hand-me-down clothes started to feel like something else—part of a baseball fraternity. The Major Leagues did not seem so far away when a real Major Leaguer was paying for your popcorn at the Rivoli.

  When the Brooklyn Dodgers star Cookie Lavagetto, raised in Oakland, started coming around to Kenney Park, Galan immediately assigned Billy, now fifteen years old, to learn at Lavagetto’s side.

  It was the start of a long, fruitful relationship, one that would last five decades.

  A few years later, when Martin debuted with the Oakland Oaks and Lavagetto was winding down his playing career with the same team, he was asked by a reporter for the Oakland Tribune if he knew Martin.

  “Billy? Sure, he’s the kid from Kenney Park we used to let tag along,” Lavagetto said. “He’s been learning from us for years and we taught him well. But yeah, that’s the same kid. We got kind of a bang out of him. You’ll see.”

  Then Lavagetto said something others in baseball would say for years to come. Different people used different words, or it was paraphrased in other terms, but whatever the language and whatever the town in Billy’s rolling-stone baseball existence, the appraisal was unchanged.

  “You won’t ever meet anyone like him,” Lavagetto said.

  4

  BILLY MARTIN AS AN adult had a lot of sayings, things he repeated from year to year, job to job. It is not an uncommon habit for leaders, and especially baseball managers born before 1940, who were the raconteurs of the game. Before television transformed how fans followed the game, a standard news vehicle was the pregame chat with the baseball manager. In this setting, baseball managers made proclamations, and scribbling newspaper reporters took their notes upstairs to the press box to build entire stories around what they had been told.

  Billy played this game and had a few oft-spoken canons: Games are won by the mistakes you force the opposition to make; the shortstop and second baseman, not the catcher, run the on-field defense; a fastball should never be the first pitch to a hitter without power; a third-base coach isn’t doing his job if no one gets thrown out at home; batting averages are overrated; put your best outfielder in left field at Yankee Stadium, not center field. And, finally, to recall his most bizarre saying in his near-boundless catalog of tenets: “I would play Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini if they could help me win. I don’t have to like them.”

  Billy said this often over the years and never with any indication that he realized it might be considered offensive. He was making a point: he wanted to win at all costs, and he did not play favorites based on personality or good comportment. Whenever someone would suggest that he was prejudiced toward one player or another—or had ulterior motives as a manager based on his prejudices—Billy would rally to defend himself with his patented Hitler saying.

  As this choice of words demonstrably illustrates, Billy would often overdo it when trying to defend himself—both verbally and, as the world eventually learned, physically as well.

  Which leads to another one of his frequent sayings: “I never started a fight in my life.”

  For most people who knew and traveled with Billy, the statement rang true. He often threw the first punch but he did not start the disagreement.

  But for an adolescent in a tough West Berkeley neighborhood, fighting was part of the routine of life. Billy’s childhood friends and family say he did not often instigate fights. It is, looking back, a matter of perspective and understanding the times. In the twenty-first century, there is little appreciation of what America in the 1940s was like, or what the country’s foremost sporting passions were at the time. Baseball might have been king, but boxing was almost as celebrated and nearly as closely followed. The newspapers covered championship fights like presidential elections, and the heavyweight champion of the world was as recognizable as any world leader.

  Billy and his West Berkeley chums—sports fans all—had been schooled in boxing at the local YMCA by the time they were eight. And they had all been in a ring during organized youth league bouts, including ones run by the St. Ambrose Christian Youth Organization. The Sunday morning Bible reading in church might have been about turning the other cheek. The Sunday afternoon tutelage in the church gym was about how to deliver a crushing left hook.

  “I’m telling you Billy didn’t fight any more than anybody else,” Mario DeGennaro said. “He was just better at it. And sometimes when you’re better at it people come gunning for you.

  “We all got into regular scraps and fistfights. But for Billy, his nose was just a constant source of agitation. Kids called him ‘The Horn’ and ‘Pinocchio.’ And pretty soon he developed a quick trigger. He didn’t take it. He would come punch you, and like I said, he was good at it.”

  Jenny Martin had told her son early and often, “Don’t take shit from anybody.” Some Martin biographers have made this into the mantra for Billy’s life. It seems an easy fit. But anyone who knew Billy Martin for more than a month came to understand that nothing about him was ever that simple. Billy did, in fact, take all kinds of shit from all kinds of people in his life. He could be diplomatic and behave politically—if not politically correctly—and he was calculating. He sized up people and tried to appeal to their best interests when it was in his best interests. He was cunning and a strategist, and not just during baseball games.

  Billy did not navigate his existence wildly swinging his fists at a thousand imagined slights. Yes, there were many moments like that, dozens of them that have been documented—and there were certainly many that have not been documented (more on that later). But in most settings, Billy was in control and overly polite because Billy, eager to be seen as someone other than a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, valued politeness. Unless you were one of his players, for whom he had a different set of rules, the easiest way to earn Billy’s respect was to be polite to him and around him.

  Still, if there is an origin of what would become the celebrated, almost mythic code of Battlin’ Billy Martin—a figure carved in American sports history—it begins in adolescence, and by most accounts, it begins with Billy not being the one to start the fights.

  He was, however, good at finishing them.

  “We had to walk through Kenney Park to get to junior high school,” Nick DeGennaro, Mario’s brother, said. “There would be older kids sitting on benches in the park. Sometimes they’d ignore you. Sometimes they wouldn’t. And you know, Billy had that big nose and kind of big ears.

  “They’d say, ‘Nice elephant ears, Dumbo.’ And I saw Billy keep walking many, many times. But then there would be the day when he would put his books down and walk over and say something back. If the kid wanted to fight, Billy knew what to do. He had practiced for that too.”

  At the Kenney Park community center clubhouse, Dick Foster, a former professional prizefighter, worked with all the kids. He was a paid employee, part of the city’s recreational services department. Foster had been a middleweight of local renown with a ring record of 34–11-4. Most of his fights had been at the Dreamland Auditorium in San Francisco or the Oakland civic auditorium, where fight cards were held regularly and much promoted. From 1934 to 1939, Foster was busy in the ring, taking on rising stars and journeymen alike, many with the most colorful names: Midnight Bell, Wild Bill Sutton, Cowboy Jack Potter, Sailor Jack Riley, and Young Corbett III (twice).

  Foster won his first four fights in 1934 by knockout, but in the succeeding years it wasn’t always so easy for him. In a losing bout on March 16, 1938, Foster was knocked down seven times. Proving just how different the times were, the fig
ht was not stopped. Athletes did not get concussions in the late 1930s; those were reserved for auto accident victims.

  It was at this time that Foster was working at Kenney Park, and one of his star pupils was the feisty little Billy Martin.

  “Dick Foster worked a lot with Billy, and nobody could make that speed bag patter back and forth like Billy,” said Jack Setzer, one of Billy’s classmates. “Billy had fast hands and he was coachable. Dick Foster taught him technique—how to fire punches from the inside without looping his arm. He taught him how to use his feet to deliver a harder punch. It was all boxing technique, the leverage, the shoulder and elbow movements, and how to rotate the wrist and fist.”

  And when the kids would spar, everyone recalled that Billy, who was already renowned for his fearlessness, just dominated everyone. His cousin Mario DeGennaro recalls squaring off with Billy.

  “He could fire five or six punches in a machine-gun-like tempo,” Mario said. “And they weren’t jabs. They were hard punches to your nose or side of the head. He would hit you and knock you down. He had what all the boxing trainers called ‘heavy hands.’ He hit really hard.”

  Foster sponsored and encouraged Billy in the amateur boxing circles for a year or so, taking him around the Oakland area for informal bouts. Billy’s friends don’t recall him losing. But there was one significant problem.

  Jenny Downey did not want Billy in the boxing ring.

  “After a while, my mother just wouldn’t let him go anymore,” Pat Irvine said. “I’d hear her yelling, ‘No more boxing. You’re staying home.’ And that was that.”

  Nick DeGennaro said Billy sneaked out and sparred locally anyway, but by the time he was fourteen, he had stopped. That didn’t stop Foster from coming to the Downey home in the mid-1940s hoping to convince Jenny to let Billy turn pro as a boxer. Jenny was unmoved. She didn’t let Billy play football either.

  The unofficial fisticuffs continued nonetheless, in part because there was also a new tension in West Berkeley. The outbreak of World War II thinned the male populace between eighteen and thirty-five. San Francisco and Oakland were major transfer points for troops heading to the Pacific Theater. To equip the convoys heading west, small war munitions factories sprang up, many of them in the Richmond area north of Berkeley. The nearby shipyards were also brimming with work. The new workers manning the factories came from around California, Mexico, and the Deep South, and the new faces changed a West Berkeley social dynamic that had largely remained the same for three decades.

  In Billy’s recounting of the period, new families meant new kids who did not know him. And that naturally led to more fighting.

  “I awoke every morning knowing that there was a good chance I was going to have to get into a fight with somebody,” Billy said.

  His cousins and friends explained.

  “A tough place just became tougher,” said Nick DeGennaro. “It didn’t matter what it was. Take your schoolbooks, for example. I don’t know when but it became not cool to carry schoolbooks through the park but that happened. Being smart or being a kid who studied would get you made fun of. So if you were carrying schoolbooks, somebody would say something. And they’d maybe come up and knock your books out of your hands.

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  Mario DeGennaro answered the question: “You had two choices: fight or run. And you didn’t want to run. Not unless you were never going to come back.”

  The fastest way to and from their homes on or near 7th Street to Burbank Junior High School was through Kenney Park, and that’s where many of the older kids would be hanging out.

  “Seeing if they could get someone into a fight was like their entertainment for the day,” Setzer said.

  Some of Billy’s friends would just take the long route and walk around the park. No one who watched Billy Martin play Major League baseball in the 1950s or manage on national television in subsequent decades would be surprised to learn which route he took to school. Billy Martin may not have started fights and he may have been a happy-go-lucky little kid and he may have been devoutly religious and he may have been the quiet one in the family home compared to his mother, but there was never any backing down when it came to Billy Martin of 1632 7th Street.

  Everybody in West Berkeley knew that, except the new kids in town. And they soon learned.

  As Billy and his friends emerged from puberty, they became more curious about what might be found outside West Berkeley. It wasn’t only a search for girls who weren’t the local girls they had known since kindergarten; it was an adventure. Even on foot or by bike, the crowded communities of Albany and Richmond to the north were easily reachable. And, of course, the hills near Cal-Berkeley were enticing for a host of reasons, including vast, unguarded fruit orchards.

  A group of four wandering West Berkeley teens on one weekend became a group of twelve West Berkeley teens after the original four returned with pockets full of pears and tales of girls in tight, fancy cashmere sweaters. By the next weekend, it was twenty teens out exploring the World War II–era communities not hemmed in by the bay and San Pablo Avenue.

  “I think we did it just to bug the rich Goats,” Mario DeGennaro said. “And it worked.”

  They started to call themselves the “West Berkeley Boys,” whom some considered a gang and others a roving group of friends. Billy, who was prone to portraying life in us-against-them militaristic metaphors, wrote that the group was called “the Prussian Army” and that it could sometimes be a hundred strong.

  “A hundred kids?” Rube de Alba said, his voice rising in disbelief when the number was repeated to him. “No, it wasn’t a hundred kids. Maybe twenty.”

  But de Alba and others, including school administrators who warily watched the changing West Berkeley communal dynamic, agreed on one thing: Billy was a leader.

  “Kids listened to him and he motivated them,” Nick DeGennaro said. “He had an air of confidence and we followed. Things could get pretty tense if it looked like there was going to be a fight with some guys from another town, but Billy wouldn’t flinch. He was like a field general even then.”

  Billy developed a reputation in West Berkeley as a person to watch, and to watch out for.

  “In our world, you got respect for not backing down no matter what,” de Alba said. “And we didn’t lose many of those battles. Although I’ve always said that writers who come around asking about Billy make too much of this. There were no knives, guns, pipes, or whatever. It was just fists and lots of wrestling and swearing.”

  Pat Irvine always thought it was “just boys who were bored.”

  “It was what the teenage boys of West Berkeley did back then to amuse themselves,” Irvine said, waving her hand as if describing a prank like ringing a doorbell and running away. “But it wasn’t a gang. It was mischief. I mean, did anyone get arrested? I know Bill didn’t. My mother would have beat the hell out of him—or out of the cop who brought him in.”

  Laughing, Pat Irvine added, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be that cop trying to drag Bill into our house.”

  Irvine stood in the dining room of her home in the foothills above her old neighborhood.

  “Those boys were doing all this during World War II,” she said. “You know, you have to understand the times.”

  The West Berkeley Boys were too young to enlist, too old to be content with the thirty square blocks of their childhood, and too ornery after years of hardscrabble existence to kowtow to their more privileged neighbors. If they couldn’t go to war to battle for prized territory in the Pacific islands or Europe, they would fight for turf beyond San Pablo Avenue.

  “Things changed when they got to high school,” Pat Irvine said. “It was another way to get out of the neighborhood. Bill, in his own way, thrived there. Of course, I guess it was always his own way.”

  And his own way included a code of behavior, not one suited to many but one that summed up what he learned as an adolescent—and how he lived his life forevermore.

&
nbsp; In 1971, Billy gave an interview to the Sports Illustrated writer Ron Fimrite, who graduated from West Berkeley’s Burbank Junior High School three years after Billy. Said Billy to Fimrite, “I never push first, but if you push me, I’ll push back harder. The day I start a fight is the day I lose one.”

  5

  THE CURRENT BERKELEY HIGH is an eight-building campus of more than 500,000 square feet. The Berkeley High that Billy Martin entered in 1942 was far smaller but still an imposing four-story structure built in 1904 that was the pride of the city, a beacon of secondary education and an attraction for families looking for a respected school district. Berkeley High looked like a fortress from the outside, but within its walls, large windows provided ample ambient light and warmth.

  Into this sunny atmosphere Billy stepped and immediately felt dim and despondent. At Berkeley High, Billy came face-to-face with a culture from which he had largely been shielded. He had navigated West Berkeley’s racial and ethnic divides by ignoring them, or circumventing them when necessary. At Kenney Park and at the park’s indoor community center building black faces were rare, but he had played with the offspring of various ethnicities. His closest friends were the sons of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Germans, Italians, and Irishmen.

  But at Berkeley High, for the first time, Billy was given a lesson in how class in America worked. It was not what he had expected to be taught. He knew he would be relegated to the vocational classes while the sons and daughters of the Goats from the hills took the college preparatory classes. But the segregation at Berkeley High, which had 3,500 students, was more palpable than that.