Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. The Pickup

  2. Roots

  3. The Late Show

  4. Perfection

  5. Campers

  6. Shared Values

  7. Total Recall

  8. It Takes a Clubhouse

  9. Ron’s Rule

  10. Frog Legs and Friends

  11. Swish Hitting

  12. A Yankee’s Calling

  13. Concessions

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright © 2012 by Harvey Araton

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Araton, Harvey.

  Driving Mr. Yogi : Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and baseball’s greatest gift / Harvey Araton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-74672-2 (hardback)

  1. Berra, Yogi, date. 2. Guidry, Ron, date. 3. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 4. New York Yankees (Baseball team) I. Title.

  GV865.B4A78 2012

  796.3570922—dc23

  [B] 2011052544

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the memory of Gilbert Araton, my father, and Morris Finkelstein, my uncle, who both took me to see Yogi Berra and the Yankees play for the first time in 1962.

  Prologue

  The one thing Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry have most in common and is obvious to everyone is that they are so unaffected by fame that you have to wonder if they even know that they were great players.

  —GOOSE GOSSAGE

  Morning in Florida usually put Yogi Berra in the best of moods, but Ron Guidry could see right away that his old friend was cranky, not his usual sprightly self.

  Normally Berra would be waiting for Guidry in front of his hotel, smiling and waving at the many well-wishers and fans until his ride to the park pulled up to the curb. But not this day. Not this time. As Guidry approached, Berra was pacing, and Guidry could hear him through the open passenger side window mumbling under his breath: “Goddamn, son of a . . .”

  Guidry checked his watch to see if he was late—which was one of the few things that always made Berra grumpy—but, no, he was actually a few minutes early. He leaned across the seat and pushed open the door.

  As Berra climbed into the truck, Guidry said, “Yogi, what’s the problem?”

  “Ah, I just found that I got to fly to LA Friday morning,” Berra said.

  “LA?” Guidry said. “What the hell for?”

  Guidry pulled away from the hotel, out into traffic, on the way to the Yankees’ spring training complex.

  Berra complained, “I got to make an affliction commercial.”

  Guidry looked at him with bemusement, thinking, Is he doing something with some kind of hospital?

  “You know,” Berra said, “with that goddamn duck.”

  And then it struck Guidry what Berra was talking about.

  “You mean the Aflac commercial?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Berra growled, “that damn duck.”

  Guidry burst out laughing, couldn’t stop, to the point where he had to pull over to the side of the road. He sat there for a minute, practically doubled over, reddened face against the wheel.

  And then, out of the corner of his eye, he looked over at Berra, who was laughing at himself, suddenly in on his own joke.

  Guidry shook his head and thought, Anytime you can share a laugh like this with this man, it’s a great moment.

  1. The Pickup

  Ron Guidry steered his white Ford F-150 pickup with the NEW YORK YANKEES plates to the curb of the Continental Airlines arrivals area at Tampa International Airport. He pushed open the driver’s side door, stood up, and looked around for the airport traffic attendant. He hoped it would be the same sympathetic fellow he had encountered the previous year.

  “Can I help you?” the guy had said when he’d noticed Guidry looking around uneasily.

  “Yeah, I’m waiting for a highly valued package,” Guidry had replied. “Are you a baseball fan?”

  The attendant had said no, not really. But when Guidry had told him who he had come to pick up—“I’m waiting for a little dude by the name of Berra”—he had gotten the thoroughly predictable response.

  The attendant’s eyes had widened. Of course he had heard of Berra. “Yogi’s coming?” he had said. “Why don’t you go inside and wait for him? I’ll watch your truck.”

  Unfortunately, a year had passed, and now all Guidry saw was a uniformed female employee who eyed him suspiciously as he edged a few steps from the truck in the direction of the terminal. Guidry decided not to risk it, because the only thing worse than not being where Berra expected him to be would be having the truck towed and having no ride at all.

  So Guidry stood like a sentry in his white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt, which hung just below the belt line of his dark slacks. At age sixty, he was starting to turn gray, his combed-back hair barely clinging to its natural dark glint. Otherwise, the man celebrated by Yankees fans as “Louisiana Lightning” remained trim and tanned enough to be mistaken at a glance for a player in his prime.

  It was late on the afternoon of February 22, 2011. Being in Tampa at this time of year was a ritual of late winter for Guidry, a foreshadowing of the calendar spring. After his retirement from the Yankees in 1989, he had returned every year as a special camp instructor, with the exception of the two years he had served as the team’s pitching coach, 2006 and 2007, and the strike year, 1995, when baseball had tried to ram replacement players down the public’s throat during spring training. There was no way he was showing up for that.

  He never flew to Tampa, preferring instead to load his truck for the eleven-hour drive from his handsome gated home on about seventy rustic acres outside Lafayette, Louisiana, a straight shot on Interstate 10 across Mississippi, Alabama, and on into northern Florida’s western flank. From there, Guidry would head south on Interstate 75, the final leg into the Yankees’ training base, directly across Dale Mabry Highway from Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

  By this breezy Tuesday afternoon, he had already been in camp for about a week, having timed his arrival, as always, to pitchers and catchers. It never took long—a workout or two—for Guidry to get his head back in the game. But his heart beat to a different rhythm, to a conviction that no spring training could really begin until the most famous catcher of all had arrived.

  That would be Lawrence Peter Berra, the American icon with the most endearing nickname known to man, bestowed on him by a childhood friend because of the yoga-like position he assumed while waiting for his turn to bat during neighborhood sandlot games on benchless St. Louis ball fields. Guidry was at the airport to pick up the eighty-five-year-old “package,” his dear friend—“my best friend,” he would say, as a matter of fact—coming for his annual stay of several weeks.

  “It’s like I’m the valet,” Guidry said. “Actually, I am the valet.”

  And when Berra hit town, there could be no excuse for failing to be there on time to meet him. Everyone who knew the old man understood the one essential requirement to maintaining a relationship with him: he did not accept lateness, most of all in himself. Guidry knew it as well as anyone in Berra’s immediate family: “Yogi is never late.”

  So there was little chance, Guidry reasoned
, that flight 518 from the notoriously congested Newark Liberty International Airport would dare fail to touch down at its appointed time. Not with Berra—a man who inspired people earthbound and airborne alike to please him—on board.

  The punctual side of Yogi Berra was never plainer—and more painful—to those closest to him than the previous summer, after he took a fateful step just outside the front door of his home in Montclair, New Jersey, on a Friday afternoon, July 16, 2010.

  It was an emotional time for Berra, reeling from the deaths of the most famous of all Yankees voices, the longtime public-address announcer Bob Sheppard on July 11 and “the Boss” himself, George Steinbrenner, two days later. It was also the day before Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium—the Yankees being the team that originated the concept and the last to continue it, primarily because they continued to churn out players to celebrate, decade after decade. Not that anyone had planned it this way, but the timing of the deaths was another clear illustration that no organization in sports did pomp and pathos quite like the Yankees.

  Given the magnitude of the occasion, Berra decided it might be a good idea to tidy up his appearance. He normally had his hair cut at a local barbershop. But out of respect for Old-Timers’ Day and the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cooperstown, New York, eight days later, he made an appointment at the Classic Look, his wife Carmen’s favorite salon on Bloomfield Avenue, just across the town border in Verona. In anticipation of having to sign a fair number of autographs, Yogi Berra, metrosexual, whose thick, gnarly fingers had borne the brunt of nineteen years behind the plate, also opted for a manicure.

  Checking his watch, anxious to get into his car for the short drive, he forgot about the cracked cement on the front step. He caught his foot and went down fast, face first. Soon blood was everywhere, in a quickly widening pool on the ground, all over his face and clothes.

  Having celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday two months earlier, on May 12, he was considered in excellent health for a man his age, but he had been taking the blood thinner Coumadin since being diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in his seventies.

  So here is what Berra, a man of his word and of unalterable routine, chose to do next: he slowly and achingly got up, staggered back inside the house to change his shirt and locate a towel in a largely futile attempt to stanch the bleeding from his nose—which had taken the worst of the fall—and drove himself to the salon with one hand on the wheel.

  There Denise Duke, the stylist, was already wondering what the heck was going on. Berra was late, and that had never happened before when he’d had an appointment with her. He was, in fact, usually a half-hour early. But when he arrived, bleeding profusely and looking as white as a ghost, she became nearly hysterical.

  An attractive blond in her midforties, Duke had known the Berras for some time, and as a loyal Yankees fan, she loved doting on Yogi, whom she liked to call “my boyfriend,” especially when Carmen was around. But in all seriousness, she marveled at how unassuming Berra was for a major celebrity and how well he handled the salon patrons, who could never resist getting into his space and telling him what big fans they were as a prelude to asking for an autograph. He almost never refused.

  Once, Duke introduced her nephew—a gangly high school baseball player who happened to be a catcher—to her famous friend. Berra signed the boy’s mitt and several weeks later inquired as to how he was doing. Not so well, she said; he had torn up a knee and was going to need it rebuilt.

  “He’s broken already?” Berra asked.

  What did he mean by “broken”? Then she realized this was just Berra-speak—“nothing fancy, plain English,” and part of why so many people related to him so well.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t relating to her when she begged him to forget about the manicure and get to the hospital immediately. “I’m fine; it’ll stop,” he said of the bleeding. That didn’t seem likely to Duke, who was aware that Berra was on Coumadin—as her father had been—and knew how things could quickly get out of control.

  Berra was also breathing heavily and appeared to be trembling. She feared he might be in serious trouble, so she summoned a young police officer who just happened to be standing outside the shop in the small strip mall. He was of no help: Berra charmed the starstruck officer into agreeing with him that he was OK.

  While her colleagues tended furiously to Berra’s facial cuts, Duke rushed through the manicure and haircut and told him she would drive him home. No, he said, he’d drive himself home, and besides, she couldn’t possibly drive his car.

  “What are you saying, that I can’t drive a Jaguar?” she said.

  That’s right, he insisted; only he could drive the Jaguar. But he offered her a compromise: she could ride with him, if that would make her happy.

  Anxious to get him home however she could, where hopefully Carmen could talk some sense into him, Duke agreed to the terms. She asked her shampoo girl to follow them so that she would have a ride back to the shop, but she regretted this arrangement as soon as Berra pulled onto Bloomfield Avenue, a crowded roadway, and began drifting from one lane to the other.

  “Yogi, be careful,” she said.

  “It’s OK,” he said, assuring her that other cars always had a habit of avoiding his.

  How, exactly, was that? she asked skeptically. He shrugged. That apparently was just how it was.

  When they reached Berra’s quiet street, Duke asked if Carmen was at home. He said he didn’t know. Then the bleeding octogenarian with a crimson paper towel stuck to his nose turned to her and snapped, “I hope she isn’t, because if she sees me bringing you home with me, you’ll be bleeding worse than me.”

  Under the circumstances, Duke didn’t know whether to crack up or cry. But when she saw the bloodstains on the front walk, she began to believe that this most unusual man must indeed have an angel guiding him.

  It was an absolute miracle, she thought, that he had even made it to the shop. And come to think of it, his determination to keep his appointment was probably a blessing. Lord knows what would have happened had he gone back inside the house and stayed there.

  Now she argued with Berra about what to do next. He wanted to take a shower. She implored him to call Carmen, who was not home, and to get to the hospital. Remembering she had clients waiting for her at the salon, Duke finally decided to leave. On the ride back to the shop, she came up with a number for Larry Berra, the oldest of Yogi’s three sons, and told him to contact Carmen immediately and get someone to the house.

  Larry reached Carmen on her cell phone, in her car, which at the moment was plugged into a pump at the gas station. “Well,” she said, “I can’t pull out just yet.”

  When she finally got home, she, too, was shocked and frightened by the sight of the blood outside and even more so when she saw her husband—a well-groomed sight—sitting in his favorite blue leather chair in the den, holding a compress to his face, watching TV.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” she said.

  “I’m going to Old-Timers’ Day,” he said.

  Within a couple of hours, Carmen Berra, no slouch in the face of her husband’s legendary stubbornness, finally coaxed him to go to a nearby emergency room. Doctors attended to the cuts and, strangely, sent him home, where blood continued to ooze. The following morning, Carmen convinced him to return, and this time—noticing that Berra was walking stiffly and fearing he had suffered a fracture—the doctors decided to admit him.

  Sadly, he was forced to watch Old-Timers’ Day on television, fielding get-well calls from a lineup of heavy hitters: Joe Girardi, the manager and former Yankees catcher; Derek Jeter, the beloved captain; Nick Swisher, the congenitally cheerful right fielder. On it went, the lines burning up from the South Bronx, where the collection of former heroes trotted out from the dugout for the first time in eleven years without the greatest of all living Yankees.

  Berra wound up stuck in the hospital for almost two excruciating weeks, hating every minute of it. Except fo
r the day Ron Guidry came to visit.

  What Guidry initially saw when he knocked on the door and walked inside—Carmen sitting on the edge of the bed, with an expressionless Yogi slumped in a chair, his chin sinking into his chest—was sobering.

  “Hey, buddy, how you doing?” Guidry said.

  “Gator!” Berra replied, sitting up straighter, calling Guidry by the nickname that always made perfect sense to Yogi, who believed that his friend lived “in the swamps” along with the real gators. His eyes crinkled, and his craggy face broke into an illuminating smile.

  Guidry kissed him on the top of his head, and they proceeded to talk for a while about Old-Timers’ Day and the coming Hall of Fame weekend, which Guidry was still planning to attend, though less happily now that Berra wasn’t going.

  “So, Yogi, really, how’re you feeling?” Guidry asked.

  “All right,” he said. “But I can’t have no vodka.”

  More than most, Guidry understood the calamity of the situation. He knew how much Berra relished the few daily ounces—three was the current allowance—that his doctors permitted him to have.

  “Not good at all, dude,” Guidry said.

  Soon a physician arrived to say that the battery of tests they had run on Berra had checked out well. There were just a few minor concerns—residual issues from the fall—that would require him to remain in the hospital for a few more days of therapy and observation.

  “Any questions?” the doctor asked.

  Guidry decided yes, matter of fact, he did have one.

  “And you are?” the doctor asked.

  “That’s Gator,” Berra said, making the informal introduction.

  “What about the vodka?” Guidry asked.

  “Are you asking if Mr. Berra can have vodka?” she said.

  Guidry nodded.

  The doctor thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Sure, I don’t see why not.” When she left the room, Guidry pulled a flask from his pocket. Inside were a few ounces of Ketel One, the Dutch brand Berra insisted on.