The first four touch-and-go landings were uneventful. A fifth, on a different runway because of aircraft traffic, was more challenging. According to air traffic safety reports filed months later, Munson was distracted by a minor complication, did not follow the proper prelanding checklist, and failed to maintain the proper altitude. The jet clipped some treetops, lost a wing, and headed for the ground. Munson kept the jet level to the ground so that it landed with the nose up. The jet’s fuselage remained mostly intact as it burrowed through some brush on the ground. Then it struck a large tree stump in a violent high-speed collision, spun, and came to rest near a road six hundred feet short of the runway.
All three occupants were conscious, but Munson’s legs were trapped in the wreckage of the fuselage after the collision with the tree stump.
Munson yelled, “Are you guys all right?”
Fire began to engulf the jet’s cockpit as Hall and Anderson tried to wrestle Munson free. The duo could not move the Yankees catcher. Twisted steel held him in place. The main doors to the jet were also jammed.
“We just couldn’t get Thurman out of there,” Anderson later told the New York Daily News. “We tried, but we just couldn’t budge him. Smoke and flames shot in and it was so intense we didn’t have any choice but to get out of there.”
With Munson now unconscious, Hall and Anderson burst through an emergency exit and threw themselves to the ground. They would sustain multiple burns, be hospitalized, but survive. Firefighters were on the scene minutes later, but Munson, thirty-two years old, was pronounced dead from the effects of the blaze that consumed what remained of the Cessna. It was 4:02 p.m.
Expecting her husband to come home and barbecue the family dinner that evening, Diana Munson was surprised to hear the doorbell ring at the sprawling brick colonial she and Thurman had built not long before on a sweeping property with a rural view. Her three children, none older than nine, yelped, “Daddy’s home.”
It was instead officials from the airport who told Diana about the accident. “Thurman is gone,” one said. Diana fell to her knees on the front lawn.
“After a while, I got back up and went inside to tell the kids that God wanted more good people in heaven,” Diana said in an interview thirty-five years later.
George Steinbrenner got the news first and began calling the players, coaches, and manager individually. A calm Thursday in the New York sports world suddenly became a day forever remembered for the most jarring tragedy in the history of the city’s best-known sports franchise.
Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn called Munson’s death “an almost indescribable loss.”
Billy issued a statement: “For those who never knew him and didn’t like him, I feel sorry for them. He was a great man, for his family, friends and all the people who knew and loved him, my deepest sympathy. We not only lost a great competitor but a leader and a husband and devoted family man. I love him.”
Billy Joe, fourteen years old, was in New Jersey at his father’s suite at the Sheraton Hasbrouck Heights.
“Thurman was my dad’s favorite and he was just crying and a mess,” Billy Joe said. “Dad was alternately crying and angry that it happened and he said he needed to go out to dinner. And I said, ‘Dad, you can’t go out. You’ll drink and someone will say something, and even if they mean well, who knows how you’ll react.’
“He agreed with me. I ordered a steak from room service and put some videos in the TV. We stayed home. We watched two John Wayne movies with him crying from time to time. He nibbled at his steak. Before dinner, I made him a Chivas and soda and set it down right in front of him. He never touched it. He was in a lot of pain, just breaking up every once in a while. We just sat there.”
There was a ceremony at Yankee Stadium the next night, with home plate left empty for a moment of silence as the Yankees took the field to start the game. The Yankees lost, 1–0. They lost the next night as well. Munson’s funeral was to be held Monday, and Steinbrenner chartered a jet to take the team to Canton that morning. They had a nationally televised game back in the Bronx that evening.
The funeral was held at the Canton Civic Center to contain the large crowd wanting to attend, and the eulogies left the assembly weeping. At the gravesite, Billy sobbed loudly. During another moment of silence before that night’s game, Reggie Jackson convulsed in tears as he stood in right field. Murcer, the main speaker for the Yankees at the funeral, won the game by driving in all five runs in a 5–4 Yankees victory.
Munson’s corner locker in the Yankees’ locker room, near the trainer’s room so he could easily escape the press, was left largely as it would have been had he been playing that night—his catcher’s equipment hanging on hooks, his Yankees cap on a shelf, and his number 15 uniform on a hanger. A miserable Yankees season had become a nightmare.
“It started with Bob Lemon’s son before the season,” Roy White said many years later. “But after Thurman’s death, that really destroyed everything. People were numb.”
The Yankees, who would still win 89 games (in only 160 games played), stumbled to nowhere. In current times, the Yankees would have easily qualified for a wild card berth. But in 1979, they were just another non-playoff team.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the 1979 Yankees were 34–31 for Lemon (a .523 winning percentage) and had a 55–41 record under Billy (a .573 winning percentage). Only four American and National League teams had a better winning percentage in 1979. And the Yankees lost their captain and on-field leader just past mid-season.
The demise of the Yankees did not generate the attention it once would have. In the fall of 1979, the New York tabloids had moved on. Americans had more pressing things on their minds. The United States embassy in Iran had been seized by a mob incited by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Hostages had been taken. A pivotal presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was weeks away.
The two-time defending champion Yankees became something they rarely were in New York during the 1970s: small headline news on the less-observed inside pages of the newspapers.
All the New York sports teams were in the doldrums again. The 1979 New York Mets, under Joe Torre, lost 99 games. The 1979 New York Giants lost 10 NFL games, completing the entire decade without making the playoffs. Only two other NFL teams never made the playoffs in the 1970s—one of them was the New York Jets.
The Knicks would not make the postseason in the coming 1979–80 season. The Rangers would lose in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The New Jersey Nets were a last-place team. The New York Islanders were the lone bright spot, on their way to winning their first Stanley Cup in the spring of 1980.
In this lull, Billy appeared to be rebuilding his life in divergent and not necessarily restful ways. His divorce from Gretchen was final, and he had girlfriends in multiple cities, a rotation that troubled his family back in California—not that his wives had been popular either.
Then, attending a game at Yankee Stadium in 1979, his daughter, Kelly Ann, came upon two young women seated nearby, which meant they had been given the tickets from a Yankees player, coach, or manager. Throughout the game, based on what she overheard, Kelly Ann deduced that at least one of the women had been spending time with Billy. She thought the woman was young, perhaps still a teenager.
Another of Billy’s Berkeley relatives, Lucille Sabatini, told Billy biographer David Falkner that she also met a young woman at a 1979 Yankees home game. Her name was Heather. She was dating Billy, and Sabatini thought Heather was about sixteen years old.
Falkner, and other Billy biographers after him, wrote that Billy was dating a sixteen-year-old. Those accounts usually added that Steinbrenner was distressed that Billy might be arrested for having sexual relations with a minor.
Public records of the woman in question, Heather Elise Ervolino, seem to indicate that she turned twenty years old in August 1979. Others in Billy’s circle are convinced Heather was younger, but they do not know how much younger and have no proof of her
age. Heather, meanwhile, is elusive about her age—she declined to give her date of birth in a 2014 exchange—but in court proceedings and sworn affidavits filed in the 1980s, she listed the year of her birth as 1959.
What is known is that Heather was raised and lived in a scruffy South Bronx housing project with an extended family that included her grandmother.
“Heather was a nice young girl who never asked for much,” said Eddie Sapir. “If she had food to eat and clothes—and she did not need anything fancy—then she was happy. She came from very little but she was a lady. Very well mannered.
“And she was fascinated by Billy. She wanted to make him happy.”
Heather met Billy in 1978 or 1979. No one, including Heather, seems to be quite sure which of those two years it was. They met outside Yankee Stadium when she stood by a railing with her younger brother trying to get players’ autographs. She was young, and looked even younger, but she had everything Billy liked in a woman: she was curvaceous, buxom, and sexy.
Heather would become Billy’s third wife in November 1982. Late in 1979, she was at his side more often than not.
But Heather was far from worldly. She did not have her driver’s license. She had received only a rudimentary education navigating the rough-and-tumble school system in the South Bronx. She came from little money. And she was devoted to her family.
Seeing some of his own family struggles in Heather’s upbringing, Billy wanted to help all the Ervolinos. Soon Billy was treating Heather’s younger brother like a nephew or stepson. Heather’s mother and grandmother came to Yankees games and occasionally on road trips. Billy never purposely excluded the family, so long as he also had enough time to be alone with Heather.
Billy was happy to be done with the 1979 season. It had been a miserable year. But it was not done with him yet.
In late October, after a weeklong hunting trip with his Minnesota buddy and restaurateur Howard Wong, Billy and Wong returned to Minneapolis. Billy planned to catch a late flight to Dallas to do some more hunting with Mickey Mantle. But the flight from South Dakota was late and Billy missed his Dallas flight. He got a new one the next morning. Billy searched for a hotel, but his usual choices in the Minneapolis area were full. Wong suggested the Hotel de France not far from Wong’s restaurant.
Wong drove Billy to the Hotel de France and double-parked his car at the entrance. Billy checked in, put his bags in his hotel room, and the two men went to a bar in the hotel restaurant, the Café Colette, for a nightcap, which in Billy’s case usually meant at least two or three drinks.
As often happened, some of the bar patrons recognized Billy. Two traveling salesmen seated next to Billy and Wong struck up a conversation. One of the men, Joseph W. Cooper of Lincolnshire, Illinois, did most of the talking to Billy.
Billy was usually happy to talk to people in a bar, but he did not like being lectured about baseball. Cooper had helped finish a bottle of wine at dinner and had a few after-dinner drinks when he approached Billy, who probably had as much to drink. For whatever reason, Cooper decided to share some of his baseball opinions with Billy, and the subject was a poor choice given his audience.
Cooper wanted to discuss the recently named 1979 Managers of the Year, an award Billy had won twice. Cooper said he thought the winners, Dick Williams in Montreal and Baltimore’s Earl Weaver, deserved the award.
Cooper might as well have kicked Billy in the groin and jabbed a thumb in his eye. Because Steinbrenner was always threatening to replace Billy with Williams, Billy hated him.
Weaver and Billy were friendly but they were also archenemies. Billy thought Weaver got away with manic on-field histrionics that were no different from his own, and yet, Weaver still had the unqualified respect of baseball writers and administrators while Billy was called out of control and a troublemaker.
Late on a long day after a crappy season, Billy did not want to hear about what great seasons Dick Williams and Earl Weaver had.
“Dick Williams is an asshole,” Billy said to Cooper. “They both are and so are you for saying that.”
Cooper let the remark pass. The bar was busy with conventioneers and Billy was signing autographs.
“What do you do for a living?” Billy asked Cooper.
“I’m a salesman.”
“What do you sell?”
“Marshmallows.”
As Cooper told the story to the New York Times a week later, “He and Mr. Wong thought that was a big joke, as everybody does. They had a big laugh.”
Billy had another drink and chatted up some other people at the bar. Cooper remained in his seat alongside Billy.
Here the versions of the story differ—as usual—although the one Billy related and the one Cooper told remained fairly consistent over time. Wong told a wild tale to reporters afterward that had Billy hardly even present other than being introduced to Cooper. That is not a credible version.
In Billy’s telling of the next several minutes, Cooper was rude to him and kept bringing up the Yankees’ failed season. Cooper wanted to know what Billy was going to do to fix the mess the team was in. Cooper never mentioned those comments in his account.
One thing is certain: Billy at some point decided he had had enough of the marshmallow salesman. That was not unusual. Billy’s anger toward an antagonist—or a perceived antagonist—could intensify the longer that person hung around.
“Tell you what, Joe,” Billy finally said, laying five $100 bills on the bar. “I bet you $500 to your penny that I can knock you on your ass.”
Cooper, who was about three inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Billy, did not respond right away. But Billy did not take away the $500 and did not stop reminding Cooper about it. In Billy’s side of the story, he eventually picked up his money and left the bar. Cooper followed him and shoved him from behind, and when Billy turned to confront him, Cooper swung and missed. Billy then punched Cooper in the lip, and the marshmallow salesman collapsed with a thud to the marble floor of the hotel.
Billy went to his room. A hotel security guy found Cooper on the floor and helped him get to a hospital where fifteen stitches closed the gash in his face.
That’s not what happened, Cooper said. In his version, it was his own ego that got the best of him.
“Time comes when pride comes into focus,” Cooper said. “I put a penny on Billy’s $500 and said, ‘Let’s go.’”
The two men left the bar.
“Between the bar and the lobby is probably about 30 feet, and there’s an archway in between,” Cooper said. “He was ahead of me and I was behind. As we walked through the archway into the lobby, he abruptly turned and hit me in the mouth.”
Cooper gave that account a week after the fight. A married father of two, he wanted to forget about the incident, as he suspected Billy did. Both men checked out of the Hotel de France the next day.
But the hotel security guard, who did not witness the fight—there were no witnesses other than the combatants—did call the local police about the injured traveling salesman. Billy’s name naturally came up since he had been seen with Cooper for at least thirty minutes in the bar. Then someone in the Bloomington police alerted local newspaper reporters, who wrote about the incident two days after the event.
The first stories said only that a hotel guest who had been seen with Billy ended up lying on the lobby floor with a split lip. It did not take much of an imagination to run with the possibilities. Especially the likely possibilities. Eventually a police report surfaced, and in it Cooper said Billy hit him.
Billy denied it. His first response, delivered in a statement, was to say that Cooper slipped and fell and cut his lip. Or so Billy thought. He was on his way to his room. He wasn’t paying attention to Cooper.
An alarmed Steinbrenner did not believe Billy and said he was launching an investigation. Steinbrenner was also being pressured by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who announced that he might instigate his own investigation into Billy’s increasingly tumultuous off-the-field cond
uct.
George called Eddie Sapir in New Orleans.
“The first thing he says is, ‘Who the hell is Howard Wong?’” Sapir said. “‘And why is he always around for these fights?’”
It was a good question. Wong was a friend, and often in bars with Billy, but apparently not young enough or burly enough to prevent a fistfight when one was brewing.
Sapir suppressed a laugh and gave Steinbrenner a similar explanation. But the Yankees’ owner grew serious.
“Somebody is lying,” he told Sapir.
As Sapir listened, George continued: “Eddie, that guy in Minnesota fell and hit a marble floor. The manager of the New York Yankees probably put him there. The guy could have hit his head and been killed. What would we do then? I can’t keep going through this.”
Sapir thought for a minute.
“But I didn’t have a comeback for that; I couldn’t refute any of it,” Sapir said in 2013. “The fact was, Billy was in trouble again. And, you know, we couldn’t turn that one around.”
Steinbrenner never released the findings of his investigation. He did not have to. Five days after Billy popped the marshmallow salesman who said too much about Dick Williams and Earl Weaver, Billy was fired as Yankees manager.
When he got around to answering reporters’ queries, Joe Cooper asked, “Why would someone in his position jeopardize his career for something as foolish as this?”
In Reno, Nevada, the man at the cynosure of a similar ruckus the year before felt a measure of relief.
“The marshmallow salesman got me off the hook,” Hagar said.
Billy saw little humor or irony in the situation.
As he always did when he was fired, he called his mother in Berkeley. She suggested he fly to California to see his family. It had been a long time since he had been in the old neighborhood. Billy went home and visited with his old chums and saw his granddaughter, Evie, Kelly Ann’s child.
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