Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  The Sport magazine piece was being read throughout the Yankees’ clubhouse when Reggie arrived for the Yankees’ home game with Boston on the night of May 23. Those players who had not read it were told about it by reporters, all of whom were writing stories before the game about Reggie’s comments.

  Billy dismissed questions about the story, refusing to say anything.

  But by the time the Yankees headed out to batting practice, no one but Reggie’s good friend, the backup catcher Fran Healy, was making any attempt to talk to Reggie. It was a blatant snub. The silent treatment continued throughout the pregame. Reggie was being ignored.

  The Red Sox were leading 4–2 in the seventh inning that evening when Reggie hit a solo home run. As Reggie crossed home plate, Piniella, the on-deck hitter, was waiting with an outstretched hand to shake or slap. Reggie ran past Piniella without extending his hand or greeting Piniella.

  As is customary, a gaggle of Yankees players and coaches, and Billy, waited near the top step of the dugout nearest to home plate to greet and congratulate Reggie.

  But Reggie ran through foul territory toward the end of the dugout closest to right field and away from the crowd waiting for him. He descended the steps without acknowledging anyone and sat down in the corner of the dugout.

  It was not a gesture that went unnoticed.

  After the game, which the Yankees lost 4–3, reporters asked Reggie why he refused to shake hands. He said his right hand was sore and he didn’t want to aggravate it.

  Told of Reggie’s excuse, Munson, who was not usually that forthcoming with reporters, said loudly, “He’s a fucking liar.”

  Other Yankees were just as angry.

  Years later, Reggie said it was just a reaction to the silent treatment he had gotten before the game.

  “You guys are going to be that way? Okay, I’ll deal with it,” he wrote in Becoming Mr. October. “Let’s just move on and be open about it. You don’t like me. I don’t like you. Why hide it?”

  Reggie conceded he was sulking. Billy would not get drawn into the fray publicly.

  “I didn’t notice,” he said about Reggie’s dugout snubbing.

  On most occasions, Billy was far more diplomatic than he will ever get credit for. His willingness to be diplomatic just had a limit. He did the tactful and judicious thing for a while until he felt pushed into standing up for himself.

  Even after a tough loss, for example, 90 to 95 percent of the time he would politely answer questions from reporters—even those that bordered on second-guessing. If the question came from a reporter he knew at all, he would usually be candid or try to clarify his thinking. A stranger would get an answer but perhaps not an insightful answer.

  But if the second-guessing persisted—two questions could easily be enough—and heaven help everyone in the room if it came from a reporter with whom he was unfamiliar, Billy’s expression would grow suspicious. By the third question on the same topic or play in the game, you could see the tension in Billy’s hands as he grasped a cup or the arms of his chair.

  His willingness to be diplomatic would be running out. His tank of tact was near empty. Those who knew him or studied him knew to leave the room or change the subject. Those who did not know him—or in many cases wanted to provoke a scene—would keep pressing the matter.

  And that’s when Billy would erupt with an emotional, annoyed, and sometimes irrational outburst.

  But that was far from his usual mien. In countless profiles of Billy over the years, people wrote that Billy lived by the credo instilled by his mother: Don’t take shit from anybody. But Billy took a lot of shit from a lot of people. He just had a threshold. When the shit got too deep, Billy would snap.

  But at the beginning of the first full-blown Reggie crisis, Billy stayed calm, at least in public.

  The feud in the Yankees’ clubhouse continued for weeks. Reggie made peace with a few players and even had dinner with Munson and Healy. Resentment remained. For Reggie, the biggest issue was Billy’s refusal to bat him fourth in the order, the cleanup spot he preferred. Reggie usually batted fifth instead. Having Reggie hitting cleanup was also what George Steinbrenner wanted, something the owner brought up to his manager almost daily. Reggie belonged in the cleanup spot; it was where he had been most productive throughout his career. It was the natural move, one backed up by years of statistical evidence. Reggie was a classic number-four hitter, and having him elsewhere was costing the Yankees runs.

  But Billy was loyal to Chris Chambliss, the previous season’s fourth hitter. And Billy was capable of not making the switch just out of spite. Billy was diplomatic but he was also almost maniacally obstinate. George would not get his way even if it meant hurting the Yankees’ production—and distracting Reggie, too.

  30

  ON JUNE 16, THE rookie pitcher from Louisiana, Ron Guidry, shut out the Royals, pushing the Yankees into first place by a half-game in the AL East. Next up, a three-game weekend series in Boston against the second-place Red Sox.

  In the first game of the series on Friday night, Boston hit six home runs to win in a rout. The Saturday afternoon game the next day was NBC’s Game of the Week, a big deal when only two Major League games were broadcast nationally per week.

  Four years before ESPN made its largely unnoticed debut as the world’s first twenty-four-hour sports cable network—with a steady programming diet of Australian rules football games—the only way for American baseball fans to see games outside their local market was on Saturday afternoons (NBC) and Monday nights (ABC).

  These games were major events of the sports culture, and because there was so little competition in the pre-cable era of the late 1970s, the TV ratings for the games were exceptionally high—much higher than most baseball playoff games now draw.

  Every player knew when it was a nationally televised game and cared that it was, especially a player as transfixed with his national profile as Reggie Jackson.

  Billy did not mind the attention either. He always knew when the national cameras were poised at the end of his dugout as well. He admitted as much.

  As they did the night before, the Red Sox came out Saturday and immediately started slapping the Yankees around. By the bottom of the sixth inning, the Yankees were trailing 7–4 when Boston’s Fred Lynn singled and Jim Rice floated a looping fly ball in front of Reggie in right field.

  Reggie had no play on the fly ball, but he did not charge after the baseball as it lay in the grass. Rice, running hard from home plate, seized on Reggie’s slow approach and easily raced to second base.

  Billy came out to relieve Yankees starter Mike Torrez with Sparky Lyle. After Lyle reached the mound, Billy returned to the dugout, and that is when he sent Paul Blair to right field as a replacement for Reggie.

  Lyle, no fan of Reggie’s, was throwing his warm-up pitches but paused to watch.

  “Wow, this ought to be good,” he said to himself.

  Reggie was stunned to see Blair running at him, and he pointed at his own chest as if to say, “You’re here for me?”

  “What’s going on?” Reggie asked.

  “You’ve got to ask Billy,” Blair answered. “He told me I’m in for you.”

  Years later, Blair said he knew exactly what would happen next.

  “I was happy to be out in the outfield so I didn’t have to be near it,” he said, laughing.

  Reggie jogged in, and when he was a few feet from the dugout he turned his palms skyward, approaching Billy as if confused or puzzled.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  Billy leaped from the dugout bench and snarled, “You showed me up by not hustling so I’m going to show your ass up.”

  Reggie: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Billy: “You know what I’m talking about. You loafed after that ball. Anybody who doesn’t hustle isn’t going to play for me.”

  Reggie tugged off his glasses, not because he planned to fight, he later said, but because the glasses were fogging up in the he
at.

  “You’re not a man,” Reggie told Billy, to which Billy answered, “I ought to kick your ass.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to, old man?” Reggie yelled. “You showed me up on national TV.”

  A Yankees batboy had thrown a towel over the NBC camera at the edge of the dugout, but the center-field camera was able to capture everything in the tiny, low-ceilinged visitors’ dugout constructed in 1912.

  “They’re gonna confront each other right there in the dugout,” NBC’s Joe Garagiola howled in the broadcast booth.

  In the Yankees radio booth, Billy’s old teammate Phil Rizzuto watched the quarrel escalating and saw something he had seen many times before.

  “Oh, Billy’s really hot now,” Rizzuto said. “Watch out.”

  And indeed, Billy charged at Reggie. But Yogi Berra, who had known Billy since 1949—and like Rizzuto knew when an explosion was about to occur—had already positioned himself between Reggie and Billy. Elston Howard, another coach and former 1950s teammate of Billy’s, made it his assignment to corral Reggie. Unnoticed in the drama, the two men had maneuvered like trained bar bouncers accustomed to defusing confrontations. Watching the two former Yankees catchers move tactically and in tandem without saying a word was Ron Guidry, the young pitcher who was sitting on the dugout bench.

  As Guidry told author Harvey Araton, Berra and Howard both stood up as soon as Billy told Blair to get his glove.

  “They had the smarts to know that this doesn’t look good, something’s going to happen here,” Guidry told Araton. “Nobody else did, just them. Me, I’m just sitting there on my butt, never even thought about getting up.”

  Guidry actually had the thought that maybe it would be best if Billy and Reggie had the fight that many thought was inevitable right then—get it over with.

  “At that moment, if you asked me, I would’ve said that we should have just let the sons of bitches go,” Guidry said.

  Howard, the first black Yankee, had been around Billy for parts of three decades now. The two were never close and less than friendly later in life, but Howard did not much like the way Reggie conducted himself either. With several current and former Yankees listening one night in 1977, Howard was asked where Reggie would have fit in on the great Yankees teams of the 1950s and early 1960s.

  “Fifth outfielder,” Howard said.

  But now Howard knew that letting Billy and Reggie duke it out would be an epic embarrassment to the Yankees, and he and Berra had spent too much time behaving with class and dignity to allow a tiff over a fly ball tear the team’s image apart.

  Berra, fifty-two years old, was a bear of a man at the time, and he grabbed Billy by the belt and the crotch, which is an especially effective way to control someone.

  “Yogi had hands like vises,” Billy said later. “I wanted to get at Reggie in the worst way but Yogi had ahold of me.”

  Reggie, meanwhile, was not exactly straining to get at Billy, but he was close enough and agitated enough—until Howard moved him away.

  With the two combatants at least momentarily neutralized, Torrez told Reggie in Spanish to go to the clubhouse and cool off, and another teammate, Jimmy Wynn, helped push Reggie to the ramp to the locker room.

  “You’ve never liked me,” Reggie screamed as he left.

  It had been fewer than twelve furious seconds. Yet it left the dugout and a national audience spent.

  In homes across America, there was a collective gasp and gulp. It was as if baseball fans nationwide had inched toward their television screens to take in every millisecond of the dugout drama, then leaned back in their easy chairs and let out a tension-relieving exhale.

  What had just happened?

  Billy was the best-known manager in baseball. Reggie was one of the four or five best-known players in the game. On a beautiful Saturday in Boston, they had nearly had a toe-to-toe fistfight, and it was framed in the confines of an undersize bench area.

  Had there ever been a scene like it in a major American sport? The answer was probably yes, but it had never been broadcast on national television. You could feel the buzz created by the raw hostility of those few seconds wafting through the American sports community that summer afternoon.

  And soon after, people wanted to take sides.

  But not the Yankees.

  Watching a videotape of the game, it’s fascinating to see how quickly Billy and the rest of the Yankees try to pretend that nothing of consequence had occurred.

  There was complete calm in the Yankees’ dugout. Billy turned his attention to the field, mute and still but for a twitch in his eye. On the Yankees’ bench, the players stared straight ahead. Lyle threw a pitch to Yastrzemski, who grounded out. Fisk flied out. No runs scored. Now the whole team was in the dugout.

  A clubhouse boy ran over to Lou Piniella.

  “The kid said Reggie wanted to see me in the clubhouse,” Piniella said, retelling the story thirty-six years later. “All the players were sitting on the bench just going about their business. Nobody wanted any part of this.

  “But I went into the clubhouse and found Reggie standing there in a T-shirt and his uniform pants.”

  Reggie told Piniella he had left his baseball spikes on so he would have good footing on the clubhouse carpet during the fistfight he planned to have with Billy when the game was over.

  “I told Reggie to go get a beer, shower, and go back to the hotel,” Piniella said. “You can’t have a fight with the manager. That’s no good for you, no good for Billy or for the ball club.”

  Reggie, who had doubled and singled earlier in the game, responded by saying that Billy had humiliated him on national TV.

  Healy, Reggie’s best friend on the team, arrived in the clubhouse as well.

  Healy strongly advised Reggie to leave Fenway Park.

  Finally convinced, Reggie dressed and was escorted to a little-used Fenway Park exit in center field. He emerged into the sunlight of Landsdowne Street and then walked—unnoticed—to the Boston Sheraton a few blocks away.

  After the game, which the Yankees lost 10–4, Billy was irritated but certain he had done the right thing. The visiting manager’s office, beneath the Fenway grandstand, was the same one where Casey Stengel had once expounded on the virtues of Billy’s fight with Jimmy Piersall.

  Now Billy sat behind that manager’s desk, his back to a redbrick wall facing a throng of reporters from New York and Boston.

  “You can’t let any player think he’s bigger than the team and his teammates deserve maximum effort,” Billy said. “When a player shows up the team, I show up the player.”

  The question-and-answer period was brief and had a rat-a-tat-tat tempo.

  Reporter: “Did you think twice about pulling Reggie in a close game?”

  Billy: “We won last year without him, didn’t we?”

  “Did you consider a more conventional means of discipline?”

  “How do you fine a superstar, take away his Rolls-Royce?”

  “Was the incident bad for baseball since the game was on national television?”

  “What’s television got to do with the game? Did that help us win? I don’t care if it went out to the whole world.”

  The news conference ended and reporters scurried to find Reggie.

  That task took several hours because Reggie remained sequestered at the Sheraton. Eventually, after fielding multiple requests, Reggie invited a handful of his favorite New York writers to his hotel suite, where he was drinking a bottle of white wine with Torrez. Reggie walked around the suite shirtless and holding a Bible. He had just received a call from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

  “It makes me cry the way they treat me on this team,” Reggie said. “The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. But I’m just a black man to them who doesn’t fucking know how to be subservient. I’m a big black man with an IQ of 160 making $700,000 a year and they treat me like dirt. They’ve never had anyone on their team like me before.”

&nb
sp; Asked about George Steinbrenner, Reggie said, “I love that man, he treats me like I’m somebody. The rest of them treat me like dirt.”

  Billy, meanwhile, was easier to find than Reggie. About four blocks from the Sheraton on Boston’s Newbury Street was Daisy Buchanan’s, a bar populated by athletes, writers, tourists, and fans. Daisy’s was Billy’s kind of bar—below street level with a backroom where he could hunker down and drink.

  And this evening, knowing that baseball fans everywhere—and that included George Steinbrenner—were talking about the scene inside the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park, Billy was pounding Scotch.

  Moss Klein, the quiet, unassuming Yankees beat writer for the Newark Star-Ledger and a Billy favorite, found the Yankees manager at Daisy’s and started taking notes. It wasn’t much of an interview. Billy had only one message and he kept repeating it: “They’re gonna say this was my fault.”

  Morabito shepherded Billy back to the hotel.

  “He was really upset,” Morabito said. “You know, Billy always felt he had to stand up for himself or for the Yankee Way. He thought he might lose the respect of the team if he didn’t, but after it was over, he usually felt terrible. Not because he thought he was wrong but because he knew there would be trouble. For a guy who was in it a lot, he really didn’t like trouble.

  “There were a lot of nights like that in 1977 and 1978. He was Billy being Billy, but being Billy took a big toll on him. He’d be very upset and not know how to process all of it.”

  The photos of the dugout standoff were in all the newspapers Sunday morning, filling the front pages of the New York tabloids. Steinbrenner saw the photos and called Gabe Paul in Boston.

  “This is how my team is perceived around the country?” he yelled into the phone. “We look like lunatics and screaming maniacs. Get Reggie and Billy together and fix this.”

  Gretchen Martin got a call in Texas Sunday morning.

  “Billy said he was going to breakfast in Gabe Paul’s room with Reggie,” Gretchen said. “He promised me he would remain calm. He wanted to get it over with. But I was worried. I knew Billy didn’t think Reggie was a good teammate.”