Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  Now Murdoch illustrated the point. Ten days later he called Felker. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about,” Murdoch said, “and I’ve got some ideas for you. Why don’t you come by the office tomorrow?” When Felker arrived, eager to hear what his friend had in mind, Murdoch had another man with him. “This is Stan Shuman,” Murdoch said, “my investment banker.” Murdoch offered Felker five dollars a share for his stake in the company, twice the stock’s current trading value, but half the price at which the company had gone public eight years earlier. Felker was, in his words, “dumbfounded.” A couple of days later he called back to say no deal. Felker figured Murdoch would just drop it. Instead, he and Shuman drew up battle plans for a hostile takeover. They’d woo one big stockholder after another until they had commitments for 51 percent of the company.

  The key figure was Carter Burden, an ambitious young man from an enormously wealthy Manhattan family, who disliked Felker. (The feeling was mutual.) In the waning days of 1976 Murdoch flew out to Burden’s ski house in Sun Valley, Idaho, to present him with the offer; Burden was more than happy to accept. Felker tried to rustle up investors for a counteroffer and Katharine Graham was interested, but when their representative called Burden, they were told he was out on the slopes.

  Murdoch had soon locked up all the necessary shares. Felker sued to prevent the transfer, but he had no case. What he did have was a fiercely loyal staff, which threatened to walk out en masse. One New York writer, Ken Auletta, made a private appeal to Murdoch’s lawyer, Howard Squadron, who answered: “You are a very talented group and Mr. Murdoch would like you to stay. But if you do leave, he will get new furniture.”

  Months later Gail Sheehy, Felker’s girlfriend, charged in a lengthy article in Rolling Stone that Murdoch had cynically cultivated Felker’s friendship. A Murdoch biographer who knew the publisher socially, Thomas Kiernan, took a less conspiratorial view of the betrayal. He suggested that Murdoch had soured on Felker after watching him in action in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side, that he had found Felker’s “social pretensions irksome.” Both explanations sound overdetermined. Murdoch, a chronic deal maker, had probably given very little thought to Felker at all.

  As 1977 got under way, Rupert Murdoch took control of three major New York journalistic institutions, a feat that landed him on the cover of America’s two largest newsweeklies. Time dropped his head on King Kong’s body and pictured him lumbering across the Manhattan skyline: EXTRA!!! AUSSIE PRESS LORD TERRIFIES GOTHAM. “Not since Charles Foster Kane strode into the city room of the mythical New York Inquirer,” Newsweek’s story began, “has anyone caused such an uproar in the tight little world of New York journalism.”

  Arriving at his office in early January, New York’s new editor, James Brady, discovered a line of people outside his door waiting to quit. (One young woman handed him a box with a note inside: “Fuck you, Brady”) But Brady had more pressing concerns. The only cover story in the bank was a hatchet job on Murdoch. Eventually things settled down, and the magazine continued to follow Felker’s blueprint, though with a much lower-profile stable of writers.

  Murdoch tried to replace the editor of the left-wing Village Voice but then changed his mind in the face of a staff revolt and subsequently left it more or less alone. The paper was already making a handsome profit, and anyway, he had big changes in mind for the Post.

  9.

  REGGIE Jackson passed through the doors of the dressing room of the Yankees’ Fort Lauderdale spring training facility at a few minutes after 9:30 a.m. on March 1, 1977. The reporters were already waiting for him, their Bic Bananas poised.

  Reggie’s new uniform was also waiting for him. The only problem was that it didn’t fit. “Say, uh, sir,” he called over to the clubhouse manager, grasping unsuccessfully for his name, “my pants are too long.”

  Pete Sheehy, the veteran clubhouse manager who had given Babe Ruth his first Yankee double knits and had chosen No. 5 for Joe DiMaggio, fetched an extra pair from Fred Stanley, the Yankees’ shortstop, who was two inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than Reggie. “See,” Reggie cracked, as he pulled the pants over his bulging thighs, “I’m already too big for my britches.”

  Reggie reported to camp a little bit overweight. He almost always kept himself in good shape in the off-season, lifting weights—no one grunted louder on the bench press—and running around Lake Merritt in Oakland, but this winter he’d been busier than usual. There were the free agency negotiations and his crowded schedule for ABC, which included postseason color commentary alongside Howard Cosell (who complained that Reggie was trying to steal his thunder), a “Sports Legends” TV piece on Joe Frazier in Philly, a “Superteams” competition in Hawaii, and a “Superstars” competition in godforsaken Rotonda, Florida. (“I gotta take a Rotonda,” Reggie cracked, interrupting one interview there for a bathroom break.)

  As he stood bare-chested in front of his locker that first day as a Yankee, three gold pendants dangled from his neck: the word Inseparable , a gift from an old girlfriend; a dogtag that read “Good Luck Is When Hard Work Meets Opportunity”; and an Italian horn that was supposed to ward off evil spirits. Reggie layered on several T-shirts and a nonporous plastic jacket to help him boil off those extra pounds. He fiddled with his wristbands and pounded his fist into his glove a few times, before setting it down. “No sense fooling with this,” he said, “’cause they didn’t sign me for this.” In time Reggie laced up his spikes, clattered up the dugout steps, and joined the rest of the Yankees on the field.

  A little later in the day he had his first exchange with his new captain, Thurman Munson. Lucky for both of them, none of the reporters wrote it up at the time.

  “Hey, you have to run now,” Munson told Reggie, as the slugger made his way toward the batting cage to take his licks. “The way we do it here, you run before you hit.”

  “Yeah,” Reggie replied, “but if I run now, I’ll be too tired to hit later.”

  “Yeah, but if you don’t run now, it’ll make a bad impression on the other players.”

  Reggie looked over at one of the Yankees’ coaches, Dick Howser. “Should I run now or hit?”

  “The hell with running,” Howser answered. “Get in there and hit.”

  All winter the New York papers had been filled with speculation about how Reggie and Munson were going to get along. The forecast called for storms.

  Munson’s insecurities ran deep, but their source was easily located. His father, Darrell, had drilled hundreds of ground balls at young Thurman, refusing to stop even after a bad hop caught him on the mouth and blood was running down his chin. A truck driver, Darrell spent most of his time on the road. Once he surprised his son by showing up at a minor-league game. Munson went five for five with two home runs; his father told him he looked like shit behind the plate. When Munson made it to the big leagues, Darrell told reporters that he had gotten carried away with his self-importance.

  The scars never disappeared, though Munson did what he could to erase his father from his life, past, present, and future. In his posthumously published autobiography, Thurman Munson, he devoted exactly two paragraphs to Darrell, and he would have left him out altogether if his wife hadn’t intervened with the ghostwriter, Marty Appel. “When dad was around,” Munson wrote, “everyone in the house, including mom, was intimidated.”

  For most of the seventies, Munson had another nemesis, the Red Sox’s Carlton Fisk. The two men fought over the title of best catcher in the American League, and Munson was usually on the losing end, often despite the numbers. In ’73, Munson hit .301 to Fisk’s .246, yet Fisk was voted starting catcher for the All-Star Game. At one point during the following season Munson realized he was beating Fisk in every category except assists. He remedied the situation by dropping the third strike on seven straight strikeouts, each time picking up the ball and throwing out the runner at first, an assist in the scorebook.

  Those who knew Munson described him as moody. His friend Sparky Ly
le begged to differ. “When you’re moody,” Lyle joked, “you’re nice sometimes.” Not that Munson was the type to let anyone know how he was feeling. “He had this shell around him that was impenetrable,” recalls Appel. “He could be going through incredible inner turmoil, and he’d be singing a commercial jingle from the radio.” (One of his favorites was for Burger King: “America loves burgers, and we’re America’s Burger King.”)

  Munson was never able to relax around reporters. He hated the fact that every racial or genital crack he made in the clubhouse might turn up in the papers. “I don’t understand the press,” he once said, genuinely perplexed. “They write about what you say, not what you do.” Often when newspapermen trolled the clubhouse for quotes, he would simply retreat into the training room. Even for a catcher Munson suffered from an unnaturally long list of ailments—leg spasms, pulverized knees, blurred vision, debilitating headaches—but when he stretched out on the trainer’s table, what he was seeking most of all was refuge. If a reporter found the caustic catcher in front of his locker on a bad day, Munson might tell him to get out of his face. On a really bad day he might tell him to get the fuck out of his face. He was, in baseball clubhouse parlance, a red ass. “Munson was the classic chip-on-the-shoulder guy,” says former New York Post Yankees’ reporter Maury Allen, “only the chip was a safe.”

  Phil Pepe of the Daily News was a rare reporter who was close to Munson. One of the more senior of the Yankees’ beat writers in 1977, Pepe had grown up in Brooklyn in the forties, fantasizing, like every other boy in the neighborhood, about playing for the Dodgers. In the fifth grade, Pepe, who was small and unathletic, glimpsed a more realistic future. He wrote a composition about Abe Lincoln that his teacher assumed was plagiarized until his mother came into the school to vouch for him. “Thurman had this gruff exterior, but he really was a pussycat,” says Pepe.

  But it was the gruff exterior that New York so adored: the squat body, the turbo-charged waddle, the dirty uniform, the droopy mustache, the jaw bulging conspicuously with chaw, the way he stood in the on-deck circle in his shin guards, idly swinging a doughnut-heavy bat, occasionally releasing a gob of blackened spit. That, and the fire that burned in his Ruthian belly. The fact is Munson couldn’t be nasty enough. After making a costly error and then striking out in one game at the stadium, he was buried in boos. Walking back to the dugout, Munson lifted his right arm and gave the whole ballpark the finger. Next time up he was treated to a riotous, foot-stomping ovation.

  In the spring of ’77 Munson was coming off one of the best seasons—and worst off-seasons—of his career. The Yankees’ new captain, the team’s first since Lou Gehrig, had just hit .302 with 105 RBIs and caught an astonishing 155 games, a performance that earned him the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. Munson kept it up in the postseason too, batting over .500 in the Yankees’ losing effort against the Reds. Yet after going four for four in the fourth and final game of the World Series, Munson, his gray shirt darkened with sweat, walked into the interview room just in time to overhear Reds’ manager Sparky Anderson belittle him to the press corps. A reporter had asked the champagne-soaked Anderson to compare Munson to Cincinnati’s own backstop. “You don’t ever compare anybody to Johnny Bench,” Anderson matter-of-factly replied. “You don’t want to embarrass anybody.”

  A few months later Reggie Jackson inked his five-year deal with the Yankees. The front office wanted Munson at the signing. The Yankee captain gamely donned a plaid sports coat and slapped his new teammate on the back, but he was put off by the spectacle. “Naturally, the press conference for Reggie was a mob scene, with him calling all the writers by their first names, and asking the names and affiliations of those he didn’t know before responding,” Munson later recalled.

  Munson had another reason to be bitter. After news of the Reggie signing first broke, Munson reminded Steinbrenner that his contract stipulated he would always be the team’s highest-paid everyday player. Steinbrenner, who liked Munson—even though it drove him crazy when the catcher came up to talk after batting practice and left clumps of red clay all over his office—bumped his salary accordingly from $165,000 to $200,000. The matter seemed settled. Before long, however, Munson had learned that Reggie’s $200,000 didn’t include deferred income ($132,000), a cash signing bonus ($400,000), an interest-free loan ($1 million), or the Rolls ($93,000). “My promise,” Steinbrenner answered, “was that no Yankee regular would be paid more annually in his weekly checks than Thurman was.”

  The back-and-forth continued. The Yankee catcher threatened to try to buy out his contract; the Yankee owner skipped Munson’s MVP banquet. They eventually came to an agreement that entailed a new contract and more money, but Munson was hardly thrilled. He knew he was still earning a lot less than Reggie.

  10.

  IN all of Billy Martin’s years playing for Casey Stengel in the fifties, the Yankees had never put together a winning record in the Grapefruit League. Martin saw the logic inherent in this. The regular season was long enough. Taking exhibition games seriously wasn’t just a waste of time, it was downright counterproductive.

  March also represented Martin’s best shot at reaching some semblance of an emotional equilibrium. The baseball life was the only life he knew. (To be fair, Sports Illustrated, in a 1956 profile, had proposed two other career options for him: “Billy would have been perfectly at home among the hot-blooded bravoes of Cellini’s Italy, or among the unionists who organized Big Steel.”) The baseball-less winter was torture, and the summer simply held too many opportunities for failure.

  But for one fleeting month, March, Martin could spend his days stress-free on the ballfield and his nights stress-free at the bar. Better still, it was a Yankee tradition to invite the legends down to Fort Lauderdale to work with the younger players, meaning he could room with his old pal Mickey Mantle in a two-bedroom condo in Boca Raton. All Martin really wanted was to be left alone to lose in peace.

  It wasn’t to be. Not only did Steinbrenner expect his manager to win grapefruit games, but he didn’t like his living so far from the ballpark, nor did he approve of his driving to games instead of taking the team bus. As the losses mounted—even the University of Florida had the Yankees on the ropes until a ninth-inning rally—so too did Steinbrenner’s anger. “The man was driving me crazy,” Martin wrote in his 1980 memoir, Number One.

  In the late innings of a drubbing by the Mets—in a game televised back in New York no less—Steinbrenner ordered the team’s traveling secretary to let himself into the manager’s office and take away the keys to Martin’s rental car so he’d have no choice but to ride the bus back to Fort Lauderdale from St. Petersburg. After the game, Steinbrenner stormed into the locker room and lit into his manager, demanding to know why he hadn’t, as promised, played the starting team.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Martin shouted back. “I’m the manager of this team, and don’t you be coming into my clubhouse again for any reason.”

  “I ought to fire you right now,” Steinbrenner answered.

  “I don’t give a shit if you do fire me, but you’re not going to come in here and tell me what to do in front of my players.”

  The players quickly rallied to Martin’s defense. “We don’t need him [Steinbrenner] riding in here like the Lone Ranger,” said pitcher Dock Ellis, who was also feeling underappreciated by the Yankees’ owner. After a dismal ’75 with the Pirates, Ellis had gone 17-8 in New York in 1976. In contrast with his rabble-rousing days in Pittsburgh, where, among other things, he’d worn curlers to the ballpark and pitched a no-hitter on LSD, Ellis had also been a model of good behavior. Now he wanted $500,000 for three years. The Boss was offering him $100,000 for one.

  Steinbrenner took Martin out to breakfast the next morning, and the two negotiated a cease-fire. Steinbrenner apologized for berating Martin in front of the team; Martin agreed to take the bus.

  One starter who was getting plenty of playing time was Reggie Jackson. The slugger
’s name kept showing up on the roster for road games, an obvious sign of disrespect for an established veteran. Reggie complained about it off the record to a few writers. When they followed up with Martin, the manager insisted that Reggie was asking to make all the trips.

  “They were probably both half right,” says Pepe. “I have a feeling that Reggie would say something like ‘I’ll go anywhere. I’m here to play,’ and Billy was sticking it to him to rub it in, saying, ‘I’m the boss; you go where I tell you.’” That went for the lineup too. Reggie, for whom hitting cleanup was a birthright, was batting everywhere from second to seventh, depending, as Martin put it, “on what I was trying to accomplish that day.”

  Reggie’s new teammates weren’t treating him any better. Most of them couldn’t look at him without feeling that they were grossly underpaid. Unable to secure raises, seven returning Yankees remained unsigned for the better part of the spring. Like Munson, those who had signed felt even worse off. Graig Nettles, the Yankees’ gold glove third baseman, had agreed to a $100,000, multiyear deal midway through the ’76 season, before winning the American League home run crown. “When I signed my contract last year, I was one of the highest paid players on the club. Now I’m one of the lowest,” he complained to a couple of reporters. “I guess I’m partly to blame because I just don’t believe in blowing my own horn. It seems the guys who make money are the flamboyant, controversial guys. On this club at least.”