“It was right in my kitchen,” Scott would say.
“Did you cook it?” Reggie would ask.
“Smoked it … really smoked it.”
Jackson’s face would break into a smile. He would soon be touching Scott’s bat and rubbing the handle and inspecting the grains of finely crafted wood.
“Me,” he would say, “I gotta go hunt for them. No one throws Reggie one in his kitchen.”
One of Reggie’s favorite rhetorical devices was the weather metaphor, with all its biblical overtones. “I am like a storm when I hit,” he once told Herb Michelson, a writer for The Sacramento Bee. “First there’s sleet. Slow, sharp sleet out of dark skies. Then comes a mass of clouds and a howling wind. And thunder. Very noisy, very frightening thunder. The wind now grows in intensity. Leaves are blowing everywhere off trees of every description. Limbs and boughs are snapping off and falling. There is a great noise. There is a heavy, heavy downpour all around.” He was also like a storm when he missed. “Hurricanes ain’t nothing but soft winds when Reggie starts missin’ when he goes for the downs,” he said.
Reporters began huddling around Reggie’s corner locker as though it were a free buffet table. “In triumph or tragedy, there is something about the Athletics’ Reggie Jackson that attracts attention,” The Sporting News wrote in 1971. Reggie described what that something was in a Q & A with Black Sports magazine: “I want to be the dominating force. I want to control the situation. I want to control the ballpark. I’ve come out there to get everyone on my side, to draw the attention to me so I can beat you.”
There was, naturally, plenty of envy in the A’s clubhouse and no shortage of snickering behind Jackson’s , back. But for the most part, his teammates learned to take Reggie in stride. When he paraded around the locker room in a towel—a Baby Ruth in one hand, an Oh! Henry in the other—asking everyone what his candy would be called, he was greeted with helpful suggestions: “How about the Shithead bar?”
Reggie’s teammates knew that his personality took the heat off them, and they could see that he thrived on the melodrama. Sal Bando, the team captain and a schoolmate of Jackson’s at Arizona State, remembers making an error that cost the A’s a game in 1973. He left the clubhouse early and went to bed dreading the morning headlines. He knew too that he’d have plenty of time to stew over them; the team was flying off on a road trip the following day. “So I get up in the morning and pick up the paper, and the headline is REGGIE RIPS COACHES AND MANAGER,” Bando laughs. “And at the very bottom of the article is ‘Bando’s error lets in winning run.’” On the plane that afternoon, A’s manager Dick Williams stood up to say something to Jackson as he strode down the aisle. The slugger just brushed right by him. “The next thing you know,” says Bando, “Reggie goes on a tear and carries the club for a week.”
Reggie let his Afro grow; Black Was Beautiful, particularly in Oakland, the cradle of the Black Panthers. But it was more a fashion choice than a political one. In this era of rising black militancy, Reggie was fiercely color-blind. He started a real estate company with a friend from college—they called it United Development because Reggie was black and his partner was white—and on the road he roomed with Chuck Dobson, a white pitcher. “There are 200 million people in this country and 180 million of them are white,” Reggie told a reporter for Time in ’74. “It’s only natural that most of my friends are white.”
The women with whom he disported after his divorce in ‘73, a large group that included several of the A’s hot pants-clad ball girls, were almost always white. (This preference became the subject of jokes among his teammates. He was once sitting with Yankees’ third baseman Graig Nettles in a bar at O’Hare Airport when a good-looking, well-dressed black woman approached them. She told Reggie how much she admired him, gave him her business card, and invited him to call next time he was in Chicago. Cracked Nettles: “Do you have a blond wig?”)
Out in Oakland, tensions occasionally arose between Jackson and his black teammates. Baseball had been integrated many years earlier, but social segregation was still the custom in most clubhouses. The A’s Billy North, now a stockbroker in Seattle, once confronted Reggie, telling him that a number of the team’s black ballplayers didn’t feel they could count on him. A couple of months later the two men were swapping punches—with Reggie in the buff—on the locker room floor.
North and Jackson had a complicated relationship, one that North later described as love-hate. Jackson had taken the A’s new center fielder under his wing when he first arrived in Oakland, but by the following summer they were barely speaking. This was Reggie’s way. He could be compassionate and sympathetic in one instant and cold and vicious the next. “There was a schizo part of Reggie that he could control and a schizo part that he couldn’t control,” says Marty Noble, who got to know Reggie covering the Yankees for Newsday in the late seventies. “That made him like four different people.”
Peter Gethers, the editor of Jackson’s 1984 autobiography, got to see them all. He remembers working with Reggie one afternoon in his hotel suite in Arizona, where Jackson’s last team, the California Angels, trained. After weeks of frustration they had finally made some progress, and Reggie was buoyant. He told Gethers what a great job he was doing and invited him to meet him downstairs for dinner in a couple of hours, when he’d be finishing up an interview. Gethers went downstairs at the appointed time and found Reggie at a table with the reporter. “I start to sit down, and he looks at me as if he’d never seen me before,” recalls Gethers. “He just glared at me and said, ‘Can’t you see I’m being interviewed?’” Gethers apologized and went off to McDonald’s. “If I hadn’t been such a young editor at the time, I would have told him to go fuck himself,” Gethers says. “Plus he was Reggie. As mean and genuinely horrible as he was, he was such a star and could be so charming that you really wanted him to like you, which only made the self-loathing that much worse.”
Reggie won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1973. The following June he landed on the cover of Time magazine. In July he received more All-Star votes than any player in the history of the game. A few months later Reggie was Sport magazine’s cover boy, only with a twist: He was dressed as General Patton and interviewed by George C. Scott, who had played the title role in the 1971 film Patton. It was a clever pairing: Both Jackson and Patton were mercurial egocentrists consumed by an abiding sense of destiny. For the photo shoot, Jackson gamely donned the four-star helmet, the leather holster with matching revolvers, and the high-powered binoculars. But when the World War II jeep was rolled into the studio, he balked. “Hey, man,” he said, “I don’t want to be that far removed from my peers.”
Of course he already was. Reggie was working on three books: an autobiography, an instructional guide to hitting, and a diary of the 1974 season that began, “My name is Reggie Jackson and I am the best in baseball.” As his fame grew, says Bando, his A’s teammates saw less and less of him.
In 1974 Reggie moved from a penthouse apartment in Oakland to a $85,000 condo in the Berkeley hills complete with a view of the San Francisco Bay. By now he was making more money in endorsements and on land development deals than he was playing right field. He hired a brunette secretary to handle his bills and fan mail. He took out a $1.8 million insurance policy on his life. Like his dad, who always had a fleet of beat-up, nowhere-near-roadworthy Chevies out back, Reggie started collecting automobiles: hot rods, muscle cars, antiques, even a souped-up drag strip racer. His favorite, a Porsche, was adorned with tags that read “MVP 73.” His ’39 Chevy, with a new Cadillac engine, was even more conspicuous: “REG-9.”
He even took up golf. When Vice President Ford heard this, he invited Reggie to join him for a round in Arizona. It was, Jackson joked, the first time he’d ever hung out with someone who was asked for more autographs than he was. Ford shot a 97, Reggie shot a 90, taking ten dollars off the future president.
He was part old-fashioned ballplayer—“an uninhibited colossus of a
man,” Harry Stein wrote in Esquire—and part newfangled black superstar in his designer jeans, snug-fitting turtlenecks, and Italian loafers, a male purse tucked under his bulging arm. Baseball is a game of nuances, of subtle rhythms, of almost invisible acts, but there was nothing nuanced, subtle, or invisible about the fast-talking, freewheeling Reggie Jackson and his thirty-five-inch, thirty-seven-ounce stick of fire-treated wood. He was the national pastime’s first made-for-TV celebrity. But he still wasn’t famous enough for his taste. After all, only one local paper had assigned a writer to cover the A’s on the road. “I want to be nationally known,” Reggie proclaimed after his team won its third straight World Series in 1974. “I’m not a household name yet.”
Reggie hit .289 that year, with 29 home runs, 93 RBIs, and 25 stolen bases. It was an impressive season, and Finley rewarded him with a $5,000 raise, bringing his salary up to $140,000. In ’75 Jackson hit a league-leading 36 home runs with 104 RBIs. When he and Finley were unable to agree on new terms for 1976, the A’s owner unilaterally renewed his contract with the maximum allowable pay cut of 20 percent.
This was permissible under baseball’s so-called reserve clause, a provision in the standard labor contract that yoked a player to his team for the duration of his career. The offending line, in paragraph 10-A, read: “[T]he Club shall have the right to renew this contract for the period of one year on the same terms …” Over the decades baseball owners had interpreted this to mean that each time the contract was renewed, the one-year option clause was renewed along with it. A player was, in other words, effectively “reserved” for life. The standard contract also gave the owner the right to reduce a player’s salary by up to 20 percent, precisely what Finley did to Jackson in advance of the ’76 season.
Today’s salary excesses notwithstanding, it was an unjust system, one that promoted monopolies like Finley’s and violated a player’s basic right to seek the highest available price for his services. In 1976 it was finally struck down. Thenceforth players who had played out their contracts plus a single option year would have the right to test their value on the open market. Finley had no intention of paying Reggie Jackson, or anyone else for that matter, what would soon be the going rate for top-tier talent, so he decided to unload him instead. On April 2, 1976, the A’s power-hitting right fielder was traded to Baltimore.
Reggie initially refused to go. Eventually he set a price for his services: $200,000. After weeks of haggling, Baltimore went as high as $190,000. Reggie conceded; he would play, but he wouldn’t sign a new contract. He wanted to finish out the option year of his contract with the A’s, so he would be a free agent at the end of the summer.
When Reggie showed up for a pregame press conference at the Baltimore clubhouse in pressed blue jeans and a black leather jacket on April 30, the 1976 season had already been under way for three weeks. His new teammates were seething. The Orioles had given up a fine hitter and a quality starting pitcher for Jackson. They didn’t begrudge him the right to fight for more money. They just didn’t see why he couldn’t have done it after reporting for duty, like the rest of the nine unsigned Orioles.
The fans weren’t much happier. When Reggie took batting practice after that night’s game, some five hundred of them stuck around to boo him. It was a time-honored baseball tradition; even the beloved Joe DiMaggio had been barraged with hate mail from Yankees’ fans when he held out for a raise at the start of the 1938 season. And Baltimore’s new cleanup hitter wasn’t just holding out; he was carpetbagging. He hadn’t even rented an apartment in Baltimore, opting for a room at the Cross Keys Inn instead.
Reggie got off to a slow start. He’d been working out in the Arizona State gym, but he hadn’t faced live pitching in months. He was pressing, overswinging, overstriding, hacking at bad pitches in an effort to cram four weeks of at bats into every trip to the plate. After such a high-profile holdout, the pressure to perform was intense. The value of his stock was plummeting by the day, and as it did, his decision not to sign a new multiyear contract with the Orioles was looking increasingly foolish. At the All-Star break Reggie was hitting an anemic .242.
Then, all of a sudden, he righted himself. Ballplayers tend to emerge from slumps gradually, with a well-placed ground ball, a handle hit, maybe a lucky flare. Not Reggie. “Something in him would get triggered, and he would literally burst,” recalls Marty Noble. Between July 11 and July 23, Reggie collected eight home runs and nineteen RBIs. “By next month,” Reggie told his manager, Earl Weaver, “I’m gonna take over this league.”
Baltimore joined the pennant race, and Reggie- was back to his old self. “Not enough papers here to carry my quotes,” he gleefully told Cleveland’s press corps on one road trip. His teammates were slowly warming to him. “You just have to understand that Reggie is Reggie,” said Orioles’ outfielder Paul Blair. “Once you understand what he is, it’s easy to get along with him. He’s just a different individual. He likes attention and he wants attention and that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad trait.” Jackson homered in the first game of an August 14 twin bill with the White Sox, then followed it up with a grand slam in the nightcap. Next time up, Chicago’s reliever, Clay Carroll, knocked him down with a chin-high fastball. Jackson threw his bat toward Carroll, and his Orioles teammates poured onto the field for a brawl.
Orioles’ fans were less understanding, particularly as the season wound down and Jackson’s departure became imminent. After going three for three against Angels’ ace Frank Tanana, Reggie struck out in his fourth trip to the plate and was hissed. It was the same story when he homered in six consecutive games but failed to go long against Nolan Ryan in the seventh. Fans started flinging hot dogs at him from the upper deck. Not that their resentment kept them away from the ballpark; attendance was up a hundred thousand in 1976. (In Jackson-less Oakland, it was down three hundred thousand.) Did he have any words for soon-to-be-jilted Orioles’ fans? “This is business,” he said. “I can’t worry about the fans.”
On August 30 Jackson turned up on the cover of Sports Illustrated—his fifth but by no means last SI cover–with a big grin, the gold frames of his glasses glittering in the sunlight. HITTING A MILLION: NO. 1 FREE AGENT REGGIE JACKSON, read the cover line. “I just want to be free,” Reggie told a reporter from Black Sports.
A few months later, on an unseasonably warm day in early November, Reggie Jackson flew into New York to have lunch at “21.” His lunch date, George Steinbrenner, met him at the airport in a blue blazer and gray slacks. Steinbrenner’s obedient salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed. His smooth face smelled of expensive after-shave.
The Yankees had already signed one free agent, Cincinnati’s Don Gullett, the stringy-haired Kentucky southpaw who had effortlessly shut them down in the first game of the 1976 World Series. Now they had their sights set on Jackson. Steinbrenner told his head of baseball operations, Gabe Paul, to take a vacation in Puerto Rico while he attended to the matter. By his own admission, Steinbrenner didn’t know much about baseball, but he had a feeling for personalities. (The story goes that when he first bought the team and paid an on-site visit to the ballpark, he saw a player wearing his cap backward. “Get that man’s name,” he told one of his aides. The player was the team’s catcher.)
Steinbrenner’s shipping business had occasionally brought him to New York, but it didn’t get him into “21.” Now that he owned the Yankees he was a regular. In an earlier era, ballplayers who needed a break from Toots Shor’s or the Stork had bellied up there, but these days it was the province of a more haute crowd—power mongers, plutocrats, movie stars, politicians, authors, agents. What better way to lure Reggie to New York?
Reggie wasn’t impressed, at least not initially. Checkered tablecloths and cheap-looking furniture? Tin jets dangling from the ceiling? The place looked more like a saloon than a fancy restaurant. Shit, it wasn’t even carpeted.
He and Steinbrenner were joined by a few of Steinbrenner’s friends, including William Fugazy of Fugazy Taxi and
Limousine, who introduced Reggie to some of the other swells. (Fugazy’s days as a highflier were numbered: His company went bankrupt in 1997, and Fugazy himself pleaded guilty to shifting assets to avoid paying off creditors, whom he owed on the order of seventy-five million dollars. He was ultimately pardoned by President Clinton.)
Reggie had a steak. After lunch he and Steinbrenner took a walk. They started up Fifth Avenue, passed the hansom cabs in front of the Plaza, and strolled alongside Central Park for a few blocks before moving over to Madison. They walked into a boutique with fur pelts in the window. When they emerged fifteen minutes later, Reggie was carrying an otter jacket. (He soon added a fifteen-thousand-dollar full-length nutria coat to his wardrobe as well, a gift from Ben Kahn Furs, prompting Reggie to joke that he was the first athlete to be endorsed by a furrier.)
Everywhere they went, people were calling out to Reggie. “I had been there before, but I really hadn’t been there before. It was as if I had seen New York across some crowded room, caught her eye, but never got the chance to talk to her,” Jackson remembered in his 1982 autobiography, co-authored by Mike Lupica. “Now I was talking to her, feeling her. Being seduced by her.”
Steinbrenner helped Reggie conjure a vision of his life in Manhattan: an apartment in a tony Upper East Side building with a sweeping view of Central Park (an easy drive to the ballyard) ; fine restaurants; beautiful, sophisticated women. “The way you can talk,” Steinbrenner added, “dealing with the media will be like eating ice cream.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 7
