“But Reggie snapped. Reggie thought Billy was trying to embarrass him. I don’t know that I believe that because Billy liked to win more than anything else. But I know that’s what Reggie thought.”
Henry Hecht had his own theory.
“I thought that Billy was doing a Gaslight on Reggie,” Hecht told ESPN during its 2000 documentary on Billy, referring to the 1944 movie with actors Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Boyer’s psychological abuse was intended to drive Bergman insane.
Said Hecht, “Billy was Boyer, Reggie was Ingrid Bergman. Billy was trying, successfully, to drive Reggie crazy.”
Reggie went to California; the Yankees went to Minnesota, where they swept the Twins in two games. Then it was on to Chicago. Billy’s demeanor in Chicago was carefree and reporters noticed that he was relaxed.
“You could see his face just brighten,” Michael said. “We all went out to dinner. He was feeling good. George had taken his side against Reggie; to Billy that was like a reprieve. It was probably the happiest he had been all season.”
The Yankees had won four consecutive games. But everyone awaited Reggie’s return and the fireworks that would likely ensue.
On the team bus the night before Reggie was scheduled to return, Nettles yelled to Billy that he was calling in sick the next day.
“Me, too,” came a voice from the back of the bus.
“Me, too,” said another eight to ten voices.
A day earlier, Chambliss had told reporters, “Reggie can’t just come back and then things are rosy. His actions didn’t just hurt the manager. They hurt the team.”
Billy had addressed Reggie’s return earlier with the press.
“I don’t want any apologies,” he said. “I just want him to go to his locker, get dressed, go out in the field and he’ll be in the lineup.”
Reggie entered the visitors’ clubhouse at Chicago’s Comiskey Park for the July 23 afternoon game and saw a gaggle of reporters waiting at his locker. He had taken a cab to the ballpark, eschewing the team bus, which transported Billy, his coaches, and nineteen other players to Comiskey.
Comiskey Park was built in 1910, and its visitors’ clubhouse was tiny and cramped. Players were shoulder to shoulder and the coaches dressed in the same room. The manager had an office with no door. Everything Reggie said in a thirty-five-minute interview with about twenty-five reporters could be heard throughout the clubhouse and likely in the manager’s office as well.
After some opening small talk, Reggie was asked repeatedly if he felt he had done anything to deserve his suspension. Reggie was adamant. He had no regrets.
“I would do it again,” he said. “If I had known the consequences of all this, I would have swung away to avoid everything that’s happened, but I still don’t feel like I did anything wrong.
“In fact, I don’t know why I was suspended.”
This interchange with a reporter was caught on videotape and shown on New York television that evening:
REPORTER: “When you were away, when your mind dwelled on what had happened, what were the major thoughts that went through your head?”
REGGIE: “The magnitude of me. The magnitude of the instance. The magnitude of New York. It’s uncomfortable. It’s miserable.”
Reggie was not in Billy’s lineup that day after all. The Yankees won their fifth successive game and whittled Boston’s lead to ten games, the closest the Yankees had been in more than two weeks.
Billy was happy about the victory but incensed that Reggie was feeling guiltless and still defying him. Then Billy went to the Bards Room, a famed lounge at Comiskey Park where White Sox owner and raconteur Bill Veeck would entertain managers, coaches, and writers after games. The Bards Room was named for the collection of politicians, business magnates, and journalists whom the founding owner of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey, used to gather each year and take on an all-expenses-paid hunting trip to Wisconsin in the 1920s. To be included in the group, an individual had to be interested in both baseball and Shakespearean verse and capable of twisting the two interests into nonsensical poetry that would be recited over blazing campfires in a cabin in the woods. It also involved much consumption of alcohol. The Bards Room commemorated those convivial, raucous gatherings and was an appropriately loud and genial place with a long, tall bar, a mammoth fireplace in the middle of the room, and wild-game heads mounted on the polished wood-paneled walls.
Billy loved the Bards Room and was good friends with Veeck. But on this day, Veeck took Billy aside and told him that in June George Steinbrenner had proposed switching managers. Veeck would send Bob Lemon, a former Cleveland Indians pitching star and idol of Steinbrenner’s, to the Yankees and Billy would come to Chicago. Veeck said the deal had some legitimacy since American League president Lee MacPhail had been in on the talks.
Veeck ended up firing Lemon on June 29, but upon seeing Billy in his Bards Room in mid-July, Veeck thought he would tell his friend about the conversation because the trade could no longer happen—if it was ever feasible contractually.
Billy was at first dumbfounded, then furious. From what Veeck told him, the talks with Steinbrenner were at about the same time that George had issued a statement insisting that Billy would remain the manager throughout the season. Billy felt betrayed. He had already downed one or two drinks with Veeck when Jack Lang, a reporter for the New York Daily News, sidled up to the bar.
Billy, as he often did with reporters after games, asked Lang what he wrote about.
“Reggie’s pregame press conference,” Lang said.
“What did it say—what did he say?” Billy asked.
“Read it yourself,” Lang said.
Since reporters still typed stories on 8½ x 11 sheets of paper that were then transmitted via a faxlike machine to their distant offices, Lang’s story was in his briefcase. He yanked out the typed pages and handed them to Billy.
As Billy read about how Reggie absolved himself of wrongdoing and as he read about the “magnitude of me,” Billy sighed and said, “Yeech. That’s awful.”
Lang asked if that was a critique of his writing.
“It’s a critique of everything he said,” Billy said.
The Bards Room, with its hunting lodge motif stuffed within an old-time ballpark, almost always brought a smile to Billy’s face. But not this day.
He ordered a Scotch and water to go in a paper cup. He held it in his hand as he left the Bards Room and boarded the team bus for Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The Yankees had a flight to Kansas City to catch.
Sitting on the bus, the more Billy thought about George’s duplicity and Reggie’s audacity, the more agitated he got. As he rode the Kennedy Expressway to O’Hare’s suburban locale and as he downed the Scotch in his paper cup, Billy ruminated, and the perfect storm was building in his overburdened mind. Reggie’s insolence before the game infuriated him. Already, he missed the sense of relaxation he had felt in Reggie’s absence during the previous week. A win streak had ended just as Reggie once again turned the attention to himself. Then Billy had been blindsided by Veeck, astonished to hear that just weeks before, George had wanted to jettison him. Nothing angered Billy more than disloyalty. He could be patient and practice caution, but not necessarily on an empty stomach after a few hours of drinking. It was a classic recipe for a Billy outburst. He did not plan to explode. He felt pushed to it.
As the team bus neared O’Hare airport, Billy leaned toward Murray Chass and told him he wanted to talk to him when they arrived. Once inside the terminal, Billy made Reggie the target of a rant, with a less-than-amiable challenge aimed at Steinbrenner, too.
“Here’s what I’m saying, ‘Shut up, Reggie Jackson,’” Billy told Chass. “We don’t need none of your shit. We’re winning without you. We’ve got a smooth running ship. We don’t need you coming in and making all these comments. If he doesn’t shut his mouth, he won’t play and I don’t care what George says. He can replace me right now if he doesn’t like it.”
Two oth
er newsmen had joined the conversation.
“Is this off the record?” they asked.
“No, sir, it’s all on the record,” Billy said.
When the Yankees got to the gate for their flight, they learned that it would not take off for another hour.
The writers dashed to pay phones to update their stories with Billy’s comments. Billy and most of the players headed for a bar near the gate. Reggie and Fran Healy, who had retired to become a Yankees broadcaster, went for milk shakes at a deli kiosk.
Billy had a few more drinks. About forty-five minutes later, as the team and the writers were heading toward the jetway, Billy turned toward Chass, who had been joined by Henry Hecht.
“Did you get all that in the paper?” Billy asked.
“Sure did, Billy,” Chass replied.
Billy grinned.
As the three men walked to the gate, Billy referred to Reggie as “a born liar” for saying that he had no idea what his suspension was for.
“It’s like a guy getting out of jail and saying he’s innocent when everyone saw what he did,” Billy continued.
Billy was walking. The reporters were taking notes.
“The two of them deserve each other,” Billy said. “One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted.”
Billy had not mentioned George by name, but he did not have to. Steinbrenner’s guilty pleas to a felony charge and for making illegal presidential campaign contributions had been only four years earlier. The convictions were far from a joking matter to George Steinbrenner. He was deeply humiliated.
None of that was on Billy’s mind at the time. Seconds after uttering the most famous words that ever came from his lips, Billy went to his seat in first class and smiled at his longtime friend Yogi Berra.
With fourteen words—“The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted”—Billy had delivered the most withering, lethal blow in the poisonous, volatile Billy-Reggie-George relationship, which was perhaps twentieth-century America’s best-known love/hate sports triangle.
The triumvirate had always been unstable and erratic—Billy had challenged Reggie to a fight, Reggie had dared George to throw him out of his office—but walking toward a jetway in a Chicago airport, Billy had landed the first true knockout blow.
By all accounts, Billy at the moment felt relieved, even heroic. He had stood up to what he saw as the evil, corrupt forces in his life. He was noble and valiant, only seeking righteousness and rectitude.
But like all heroes in Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, the protagonist was flawed, and his cause, while honorable in his mind, was diminished by his methods. Because his strengths always also revealed his weaknesses, he might win a moral victory in the end, but the struggle was one that would defeat him.
As Billy settled contentedly in his seat, Chass and Hecht clambered onto the Yankees’ flight to Kansas City. The duo dutifully wrote down the fourteen words that forever altered Billy’s life (it was before reporters used portable tape recorders). They made sure they had the same two sentences, the same apostrophes in the same places, and all the grammar in sync. They looked at each other and knew they had the baseball story of the season, maybe of the decade. But for the next two hours or so, they had to wait with no way to communicate what they knew.
Billy sat at the front of the plane laughing and joking.
Before arriving at the team hotel, Chass and Hecht did have time to approach Reggie, read him the comments, and ask for his reaction.
Reggie raised an eyebrow as the words were read to him. He appeared surprised but unruffled.
“I don’t have any comment,” he said, then added, “It’s just unfortunate.”
Who was Gaslighting whom now?
Chass and Hecht finally charged into their hotel rooms and called Steinbrenner at his home in Tampa. Billy’s comments were read to him.
The words left Steinbrenner, then an energetic, exuberant forty-seven-year-old shipbuilding titan, something he almost never was: speechless.
He stammered into the phone, asking that Billy’s comments be repeated to him. He wondered if Billy was drinking.
Finally, George said, “I have no comment right now. I can’t comment and I won’t dignify it. I am stunned. I just don’t know what to say.”
After hanging up the phone, George called Rosen, yelling into the phone, “Did you hear what Billy said? He wins a few games and goes crazy.”
Rosen arranged to be on the earliest flight from New York to Kansas City the next morning and started packing. Before he went to bed, just after 1:00 a.m. eastern time, he called his old teammate from the Indians, Bob Lemon, who was at home in Southern California. Rosen wanted to know if Lemon would be willing to manage the Yankees should Billy be fired. Lemon was flabbergasted; hadn’t the Yankees won five straight?
Told what Billy had said, Lemon blurted, “Oh, Jesus.”
33
“WHAT HAVE I DONE?” Billy said to Sapir, his devoted confidant.
“Did you say it?” Sapir asked.
“No,” Billy replied. “Well, yes, but not like it has come out. But yes.”
Sapir knew precisely what was in Billy’s contract. There was a clause that prohibited Billy from criticizing George or Yankees management. There was also a clause that forbade Billy from embarrassing the team or being outwardly, publicly insubordinate.
Sapir did not have to think what to do. He told Billy to resign immediately, citing health reasons. It was early the next morning.
Said Billy, “Why would I do that?”
Answered Sapir, “Because you’re going to get fired as fast as possible. But if you resign for health reasons, he’ll have to pay you. If he fires you it’s for just cause and you get nothing. If you resign for health reasons and say you’re doing it in the best interests of the team, you haven’t violated your contract.”
Sapir knew the principles, and the principals, all too well. A lower-level judge in New Orleans and longtime member of the city council there, Judge Eddie Sapir had negotiated a lot of entertainment and sports contracts for New Orleans. He had dealt with many men of wealth and power, and like Steinbrenner, he enjoyed the dodge, parry, and concession of an artful compromise.
Sapir knew that Steinbrenner would be angry, but he also sensed that Steinbrenner would be afraid of the backlash that Billy’s departure was going to spawn among Yankees fans. And Sapir believed that Steinbrenner had genuine affection and admiration for Billy.
“If Billy did not challenge George at that moment, I was sure the two would someday work together again,” Sapir said. “So I told Billy, ‘This is bad and you’re going to have to leave that job. But make it your idea.’”
Billy wanted to hear none of it. This was his dream job, even if the incessant pressure was making him sick, even if he wondered if he was having a nervous breakdown. Again.
Billy’s New York–based business agent, Doug Newton, who handled Billy’s endorsements and other commercial enterprises, was soon on the phone as well. Billy told him he was considering resigning before Rosen arrived in Kansas City. It sounded like the best course of action.
Billy had few other people to turn to at the time. Gretchen and he were at odds over the ongoing details of their impending divorce.
Billy called his mother in Berkeley.
“Bill was crying into the phone,” his sister Pat recalled.
Eventually, Billy summoned the Yankees’ public relations director, Mickey Morabito, to his room at the Crown Center Hotel. The men were associates, colleagues, and friends, having closed many a bar together.
“He wasn’t in any shape to do anything,” Morabito said. “He was shaking and crying. But he had written out a resignation speech on six small pieces of Crown Center stationery. The writing was in pencil.”
Morabito took Billy’s handwritten resignation—six pages that Morabito kept and still has more than three decades later—and went to his room to get a portable typewriter he traveled with. Billy acc
ompanied Morabito, sitting on his bed as the publicist typed up Billy’s resignation speech so it would be easier to read. Then Morabito and Billy went to visit Rosen, who had just checked into the room next to Morabito’s. Told of the decision to resign, Rosen did not try to talk Billy out of it.
“Keep in touch,” Rosen said. When Billy left the room, Rosen called Steinbrenner in Tampa to tell him the news.
Billy took the elevator down toward the hotel’s lobby. The Crown Center had an expansive atrium lobby with two-story escalators that led to a glass balcony that overlooked the lobby floor.
Morabito had been downstairs in the hotel earlier. He knew that a horde of newspaper reporters and local television camera crews had assembled in the lobby, hoping to catch a glimpse of Billy. To keep the lobby passable for hotel guests, hotel security had herded the media onto the balcony floor.
Billy emerged from the elevator onto the mezzanine wearing dark sunglasses with a light sweater draped over his shoulders. He held an unlit cigar in his left hand and his speech in his right hand. In front of an antiques shop along one wall, Billy stood and waited for the reporters and cameras to congregate around him. He announced he would not take questions, “because I am a Yankee and Yankees do not talk or throw rocks.”
Then, Billy read from the paper in his hand: “I don’t want to hurt this team’s chances for the pennant. The team has a shot at the pennant and I hope they win it. I owe it to my health and my mental well-being to resign. At this time, I’m also sorry about these things that were written about George Steinbrenner. He does not deserve them, nor did I say them.”
Billy paused to adjust the sunglasses with his left hand. The diamonds on his 1977 World Series championship ring sparkled in the TV camera floodlights.
“I want to thank,” he said, his voice cracking, “the Yankee management, the press, the news media, my coaches and my players . . .”
Billy Martin Page 39
