Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  The breakfast was, not surprisingly, a bizarre meeting. Paul tried to get both men to admit they had overreacted. Neither would, and the notion especially annoyed Billy, who expected Paul, as part of management, to support the manager. Reggie spoke to Paul as if Billy weren’t in the room, accusing him of trying to embarrass him. Reggie insisted he did nothing wrong, that he had hustled after Rice’s looping fly ball.

  Billy, Reggie said, was just looking for an excuse to blame him for something.

  Billy jumped up from the breakfast table.

  “Get up, boy, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you,” Billy yelled.

  Reggie turned to Gabe Paul.

  “You heard it, you heard him call me ‘boy,’” Reggie said. “Gabe, you’re Jewish, you understand the comment. How do you think I feel when he says that to me?”

  Billy was unyielding.

  “It’s just an expression,” he said. “We all called each other boy where I grew up.”

  Paul ordered Billy to sit down and soon realized his pacifying breakfast was going nowhere.

  At Fenway Park later that day, Billy insisted the meeting had brought a resolution to the dispute.

  “We went over everything and everything turned out fine,” Billy said. “There is no problem. Yesterday is history.”

  Reggie played in the Yankees’ 11–1 loss that followed and was 0-for-4, ending a fourteen-game hitting streak. It was an uneasy team that flew from Boston to Detroit Sunday night. The New York writers had been talking to Steinbrenner on the telephone, and soon there were stories in the papers quoting anonymous team sources—George routinely talked off the record—that put Billy’s job in jeopardy.

  Steinbrenner was flying to Detroit to meet his second-place team.

  The next twenty-four hours played out like the 1960s Cuban Missile Crisis. The explosive device in this case was Steinbrenner, who arrived in Detroit convinced he should fire Billy for failing to get the best out of Reggie.

  Enter Fran Healy, the backup catcher and Reggie confidant. By the time the Yankees left Detroit three days later, Healy was being called by a new nickname: “Kissinger.”

  On Monday, Healy met Reggie for lunch in the lobby of the team’s hotel—the Pontchartrain, which had been Billy’s temporary home when he was the Tigers’ manager. Healy explained that the two had to work together to keep George from firing Billy. Healy’s reasoning was twofold: one, it would probably not be the best thing for the team; and two, if Billy was fired, his legion of fans would mercilessly blame Reggie.

  And so would most of the rest of the team. Reggie’s life would go from complicated to untenable.

  When Reggie agreed, Healy and Reggie went to see George in his hotel room. Reggie pleaded with George not to fire Billy because it would look as if Reggie were running the team.

  George agreed to spare Billy but only if he and Reggie called some truce in their festering feud.

  Billy knew his job was on the line, but instead of staying at the hotel, he allowed Rizzuto to persuade him to play golf in the morning. When Billy returned to the Pontchartrain, Healy was waiting for him. The backup catcher explained what had already transpired that day.

  “Billy was pretty shaken,” Healy said. “But he started to realize he had to do something right away, so he called George.”

  It was 5:00 p.m. and the Yankees were to play at Tiger Stadium at 8:15. Billy went to George’s room where George laid down some new ground rules for his manager—principally, he wanted Billy to be civil to Reggie at all times.

  As a first show of unity, Billy called Reggie and the two agreed to drive to Tiger Stadium together. At 6:00 p.m., with Billy at the wheel of a rental car, the manager and player who two days earlier had nearly slugged it out at Fenway Park drove to the ballpark. Imagine being a Detroit-area baseball fan driving home from work and pulling up to a stoplight and seeing Billy Martin driving Reggie Jackson to the ballpark.

  Who would have believed that story?

  Billy and Reggie arrived at Tiger Stadium uneventfully and walked into the clubhouse together.

  With Steinbrenner seated in an upstairs suite for the game, Billy brought the lineup card to the umpires at home plate just before the first pitch. The Tiger Stadium fans, who like baseball fans everywhere were well aware of the Boston confrontation, rose to their feet, giving Billy a standing ovation. Billy waved his cap.

  When Reggie took his place in right field, he was roundly booed. He, too, waved his cap.

  During the game, the Yankees issued a statement: “There will not be a change in our organization . . . We don’t feel there’s a better manager than Billy Martin and we want the Yankees to have the best.”

  After the game, which the Yankees lost, Billy looked worn and drained. Asked about his golf game that morning, Billy said, “I couldn’t concentrate at all. I must have shot 212.”

  Healy, in his last act of Detroit diplomacy, got Reggie and Munson to go to dinner with him that night after the game.

  It did not settle much—Munson was still spitting mad—but the team’s two best players were at least on speaking terms.

  The Yankees lost their third consecutive game the next night. But Billy was at least smiling again.

  “Yesterday, I felt like I had a 600-pound weight around my neck,” he told reporters. “Today, it only feels like a 300-pound weight.”

  When the Yankees finally returned to New York, they swept a three-game series with the Red Sox. By July 2, they were back in first place.

  With school out for the summer, Gretchen and Billy Joe had moved into the New Jersey hotel suite. Gretchen would not stay the entire summer. For the most part, Billy Joe remained with his father.

  “It was uncomfortable,” Gretchen Martin said. “I knew what was going on with Billy when I wasn’t around. It was as I expected when he went to New York. I knew it was ending; it was coming apart.”

  Billy Joe went to all the home games with his father and often went on the road with the Yankees. It was an enjoyable time for him, running around in Yankee Stadium wearing a miniature replica of his father’s number 1 jersey and spending days and nights with a father he had not seen regularly since Billy took the Yankees job in 1975.

  A postgame routine developed, win or lose.

  “After games, we would usually go to a restaurant with the coaches,” Billy Joe said. “We’d get a big table but my dad would go off to the bar by himself. He would sit there kind of nursing his drink with this intense look and you could see the wheels turning in his head. He was replaying the game.

  “You could almost see him going over situations—should I have hit for this guy? Did I take that pitcher out too late? Should we have bunted here? If it was a tough game, or a loss, then he might stay there for two drinks. But most times, just from his body language you could see when he was wrapping up his thoughts on the game. He had put it away.

  “Then he would get up and come over to the table and say, ‘Hey, pard, how was your day? What are you going to get for dinner?’ Then he could rejoin the crowd. But he had to replay the game first. It was like a ritual.”

  Billy Joe, who was thirteen years old at the time, said his time at the ballpark was spent with the children of other players, and often with Reggie.

  “Reggie went out of his way to be nice with me,” Billy Joe said. “He played catch with me almost every day. He probably did it for obvious reasons but the fact is, he did it. And I think my dad appreciated that.

  “They did have a relationship. They did clown around and talk to each other. They weren’t always at odds. Those peaceful times just always seem to have had an expiration date.”

  There seemed to be a yin and yang element to everything about the 1977 season.

  “Stressful but fun,” Billy Joe said. “I did notice on some of the worst days my dad would not eat, or not much. And that worried me.”

  As a young teen, he was not privy to all things in his father’s world. Years later, he was told about the different girlfriend
s Billy was juggling during the 1977 season.

  “He hid all that from me then,” Billy Joe said. “It was just the two of us. I never saw any women when I was there.”

  Billy Joe knew better later in life.

  “There were things that were harder to deal with as I got older and wiser,” Billy Joe said. “I knew better. But remember, he and my mom were together nearly twenty years. My dad never wanted to do anything to disrespect my mom. And certainly not in front of me.”

  While Billy and most of the rest of the Yankees were in New Jersey, Reggie, one of the few players to live east of the Hudson River, was leading a far different life in New York.

  The East Side of Manhattan was not a bad place to be young, single, famous, and a millionaire. Reggie lived on Fifth Avenue, not far from the trendy restaurant/bars on Third Avenue, where he mingled with Ford Agency models. After a night game he would grab a quick meal at Oren and Aretsky’s or McMullen’s on 76th Street and Third Avenue. When he was done eating, with or without companionship, he would drive the roughly twenty blocks to Studio 54. He did not wait in the hours-long lines to gain entrance into what was perhaps New York’s best-known party place in the twentieth century.

  “I would park my Rolls-Royce at the curb just outside the Studio 54 doorway, flip my keys to the cop standing there, and walk in,” Reggie said in 2013. “Never had a problem. It would be waiting for me when I came out.”

  But all was not always well. In both of his autobiographies, Reggie wrote that he sometimes felt like he was having a nervous breakdown in 1977. On some days he dreaded going to the ballpark.

  “It was a great summer and it was a terrible summer,” he said.

  Near the halfway point of the season, the Royals swept the Yankees in Kansas City, and during that series Reggie made an error one night and then another in the next game. The second came when he butchered a ball in right field with Lyle on the mound. What should have been a double became an inside-the-park home run when Reggie dropped the ball at his feet three times.

  After the inning, Lyle, in front of the rest of the team, told Reggie in the dugout to “get his head out of his ass.”

  Reggie said nothing to Lyle, although he told writers about it afterward, which further incensed Lyle. Billy stayed out of that dispute, too.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. “I know we didn’t hit enough to win the game.”

  The season continued with its never-ending circuslike atmosphere. The combative 1977 Yankees were just part of the disorder in a deadly, dysfunctional New York that summer. The Son of Sam murders were terrorizing the city, several union workers’ strikes had crippled municipal services, and a divisive mayoral election between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo had imbued the political scene with a rancorous edge.

  Billy, George, and Reggie, the Yankees’ messy love/hate triangle, fit in perfectly.

  On July 13, the Yankees lost 9–8 in Milwaukee and now trailed the Red Sox by 1.5 games. Reggie was still batting fifth or sixth, and he revived his complaints about batting cleanup. He was convinced he would hit better in the fourth spot and kept saying so in the newspapers.

  The team stayed at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, an Old World tower downtown near several German restaurants, which Billy liked to frequent after games. Piniella and Munson headed for the Pfister bar after the Yankees loss.

  “Why is it so damn important to Reggie to bat fourth?” Munson asked Piniella.

  “Who the hell knows?” Piniella said. “Who can figure that guy?”

  “But it is, isn’t it?”

  “It sure as hell is.”

  As Piniella tells the story, the pair had a few more drinks. They knew Steinbrenner was on the trip with the team, and Munson suggested they go up to the owner’s room and talk about the team. Piniella didn’t want to go.

  “Lou, George likes you,” Munson said. “If you come with me, he’ll listen. We can help the ball club. Everyone is pissed off. Let’s go talk to George.”

  They had another drink. It was nearly midnight.

  “Now, we were getting some courage,” Piniella said years later, laughing. “So we got George’s room number from Killer Kane and went up there. We knocked on the door and George came to the door in silk pajamas. He put on a bathrobe and he sat down and listened.

  “We both wanted Reggie to bat fourth.”

  George had always requested that his hotel suite have a fully stocked bar—George enjoyed a drink back then, too; he just rarely did so in public. They made drinks and George went to a blackboard—another thing he always requested for his suite.

  George was writing names on the blackboard: Rivers, Randolph, Piniella, Jackson . . .

  The players said they would back the move if George stayed off Billy’s back and if George talked to Reggie about keeping his mouth shut. He would get to bat fourth, but he had to end the public feud. Piniella and Munson volunteered to help George convince Billy of the wisdom of the move, too.

  It was now almost 2:00 a.m., and the occupant of the suite next to George’s had come back from his German dinner, which included a few post-meal brandies.

  Billy heard familiar voices through the Pfister walls and was soon pounding his fist on the door to George’s suite.

  “I know you’re in there plotting against me, goddamn it,” Billy shouted.

  George hustled Piniella and Munson into his bathroom.

  “Be quiet, there might be trouble,” George told the players.

  Then he let Billy into the room.

  “Take your job and shove it, George,” Billy said.

  “Billy, just calm down.”

  “Who’s in here, George? Where are they?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Billy.”

  But Billy stormed toward the bathroom and flung open the door.

  “Two traitors,” Billy screamed.

  Piniella and Munson were two of Billy’s favorites on the team.

  “Come on, Billy, we’re just trying to help,” Munson said.

  “I don’t need any of your goddamn help,” Billy said, before walking toward the suite’s sitting area and sinking down into one of George’s couches.

  Piniella and Munson sat on either side of him. They started talking about the team and why Reggie should bat fourth. The conversation went on for more than an hour with Billy insisting he wouldn’t be told what to do.

  “What’s wrong with at least trying Reggie at fourth?” Piniella asked. “We need to do something. We’re the best team in baseball and we’re not playing like it.”

  The group talked about the other provisos discussed—no more tampering from George (the first of dozens of times that would be promised) and getting Reggie to muzzle himself.

  In a soft voice, Billy said he would bat Reggie fourth if that’s what everybody wanted. The quartet shook hands and went to bed. The next day, George told the writers that he was stepping into the background and declared that Billy was the manager for the rest of the year no matter the team’s record.

  It sounded like big news, except virtually no one in New York read about it. On the night of July 13, while the Yankees were losing to Milwaukee, two lightning strikes at upstate New York generator substations caused a blockage of the electricity being transmitted to New York City. A series of missteps and bad luck, coupled with a stifling heat wave, taxed the city’s electrical grid beyond capacity, and just after 9:30 p.m., the five boroughs of New York went dark.

  A menacing mood enveloped New York in the blackout, especially in its poorest neighborhoods. Looting and vandalism were widespread, and thirty-five blocks in Brooklyn were soon on fire. Hundreds of cars were stolen from car dealers and stores gutted of their goods. More than 550 police officers would be injured, about 4,500 people arrested, and nearly 1,600 stores damaged.

  By the time the electricity was restored the next night, even the Brooks Brothers store on Manhattan’s posh Madison Avenue had been looted.

  The Yankees heard the news in Milwauk
ee. Since few of them lived in New York, their families were safe (there was power in New Jersey). But the players were shaken nonetheless.

  “I remember thinking, ‘What else is going to happen during this season?’” said Roy White.

  Despite the late-night, or early-morning, covenant in George’s suite, Billy did not bat Reggie fourth the next day. Or the day after that. Or the week after that. Billy’s obstinacy held sway. Reggie occasionally batted fourth, but only for one day, then he was back to fifth or sixth. In a bar in Seattle on August 7, Piniella and Munson cornered Billy and asked, “What about our deal?” The Yankees were five games behind Boston.

  Three days later, on August 10, Reggie batted fourth. In his first at-bat as the new cleanup hitter, Reggie drove in a run off Vida Blue. The Yankees won at home, 6–3, the first of four successive victories. Reggie remained the cleanup hitter for the rest of the season.

  At roughly the same time the game was ending on August 10, about ten miles due north of Yankee Stadium, police were waiting outside the apartment building at 35 Pine Street in Yonkers, New York. When a pudgy postal clerk named David Berkowitz got into his car, Detective John Falotico approached, wary of what Berkowitz had in a brown paper bag.

  “You got me,” Berkowitz said when Falotico pulled his gun and placed it at Berkowitz’s temple.

  “Who are you?”

  “You know me.”

  “I don’t; you tell me.”

  “I’m the Son of Sam.”

  Berkowitz’s .44 caliber Charter Arms handgun was in the paper bag.

  Later that night, as Berkowitz was in a Bronx station house confessing to the shooting of thirteen people, Reggie was holding court at his locker.

  “I’m just more comfortable in that part of the batting order,” Reggie said. “It lets me be me.”

  There was no arguing with the statistics that would follow.

  Reggie would get hits in 7 of his next 14 at-bats, with 7 RBIs and 2 home runs. Reggie drove in 20 runs in the next 23 games, when the Yankees were victorious 19 times.