Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  “You have to give him a little more time,” she said, not necessarily pleading for another chance, merely the opportunity for her husband to make a more graceful exit. Her mother was visiting from St. Louis, and an immediate dismissal would have been embarrassing for him.

  Grant said he understood. He waited two weeks and called back to ask if it was a better time. “He was a gentleman about it,” Carmen said. “So in Yogi’s mind, that was OK.”

  Given the stubborn nature of the principals and the trenches Berra and Steinbrenner were dug into, Waldman wasn’t brimming with optimism when she called the Boss. In her years covering the Yankees as a radio reporter—before she would become part of their radio broadcast team with John Sterling—she had developed a close professional relationship with the Boss. An admitted chauvinist, Steinbrenner respected Waldman’s baseball knowledge and her passion for the game. He trusted her to the point that he granted her a live and uproarious interview on her show upon his return to baseball in 1993 following a two-year ban by Commissioner Fay Vincent for a sinister scheme to sully the reputation of his star outfielder, Dave Winfield.

  “I want to talk to you about Yogi,” Waldman said when Steinbrenner picked up.

  “What’s wrong?” he said with alarm.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just think it’s time you two got back together.”

  He was quiet for a few moments.

  “OK,” he said. “Maybe we’ll try to do something during spring training.”

  She told him that wasn’t what she had in mind, and on top of that, it would snow in Tampa before Berra would show up at the Yankees’ complex.

  At that point, Waldman was appealing to Steinbrenner without even knowing if Berra would agree. Like most people whose time around the Yankees began while Berra was in exile, she had no relationship with him, had never met him until Phil and Cora Rizzuto had introduced her to him at the funeral of Mel Allen, the former “Voice of the Yankees,” in 1996.

  But her conversation with Steinbrenner left her hopeful. While Steinbrenner groused about a December voyage to New Jersey—“What if it snows or there’s an ice storm?” he asked—there was one thing she knew from experience: if he wasn’t at all open to it, he would have said no and hung up. When he argued, that was a good sign.

  Maybe, she started to believe, the timing was right. After an eighteen-year absence from the top, the Yankees were well into a dynastic run—four World Series titles in five years beginning with the arrival of Torre and Derek Jeter in 1996. And Steinbrenner was pushing seventy, becoming more of a softie with each passing year. He had even considered selling the team to the Dolan family, owners of Cablevision and Madison Square Garden.

  The previous summer, he had buried the hatchet with another long-absent (though far less prominent) member of the Yankees family. After reading an emotional appeal by Jim Bouton’s son in the New York Times, Steinbrenner had invited the banished former pitcher—whose best-selling Ball Four had spilled baseball’s behavioral secrets and made him something of a pariah—for Old-Timers’ Day. The Boss also had sobbed on national television after the Yankees swept the San Diego Padres in the 1998 World Series, wrapping up a record 125-win season (playoffs included).

  Steinbrenner called it the perfect season except for one thing: “There was a missing piece,” he said, and that piece was Berra.

  While his storied franchise was bigger and financially more successful than ever, it was a difficult time for the extended Yankees family. Mel Allen’s death in June 1996 followed the excruciating passing of Mickey Mantle the year before. By the time Waldman called Steinbrenner about Berra, he knew that Joe DiMaggio was down to his final swings in his battle with lung cancer.

  After DiMaggio’s death in March 1999, or about three months after Steinbrenner’s journey to Jersey, a well-known podiatrist and close DiMaggio friend named Rock Positano told the New York Daily News that DiMaggio had been responsible for Steinbrenner’s willingness to go to Berra, hat in hand. According to Positano, during a forty-five-minute visit at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, DiMaggio had told Steinbrenner, “It shouldn’t be a personal thing. It should be first for the fans, then for the game, then for the Yankees.”

  This all sounded like another stirring chapter in Yankees history—a dying DiMaggio lecturing the inscrutable Steinbrenner. Except there was no reason to believe—and there was no acknowledgment from Steinbrenner—that DiMaggio’s lecture ever happened. More likely it was another attempt to mythologize Joe D., never known to be an advocate for the fans or, for that matter, the franchise.

  Most people chose to believe that Steinbrenner’s gesture proved once and for all that he had a big heart buried beneath the bluster; that he intuitively knew it was time to act on Berra and merely needed the right set of circumstances. Others wondered if it was more calculated, the Boss’s kinder, gentler side finding common ground with his business interests. If ever there was a time the Yankees brand needed a grand gesture, this was it.

  “Maybe it was because people were dying around him and he was getting older himself,” Waldman said. “I can’t really speak to that. But whatever people may or may not think, the Yogi thing bothered him, at least for as long as I had known him. That was one thing in his life that he was not happy about.”

  Still, even after agreeing to make the trip, there remained the vexing issue of how this was all going to unfold and what role Steinbrenner was supposed to play. “What exactly does he want me to do?” the Boss asked Waldman.

  “George, I don’t know,” she said. “You’re going to have to go there and find out.”

  After several telephone calls, he told her he would go, but only if there was no advance publicity for the show. The last thing he needed was every newspaper and television reporter in the New York metropolitan area camped outside the museum, ready to make a groveling spectacle of him.

  Sworn to secrecy at the risk of abrupt cancellation, Waldman reached out to Berra through his son Dale and Dave Kaplan at the museum. When told of Steinbrenner’s willingness to come, Berra reacted badly, seeing it as another gimmick. “The hell with it. He ain’t coming here,” he bristled.

  Over the years, Berra had become almost deaf to those clamoring for him to make up with Steinbrenner and more partial to the people who applauded him for his principled stand. In 1998, for example, as the museum was preparing for its grand opening, Kaplan had received a call from Sports Illustrated requesting a photo shoot with Berra for inclusion in a piece the magazine was doing on “the greatest things in sports.” Berra’s stand against Steinbrenner had made the cut. Berra adamantly refused, on the grounds that his absence from the stadium spoke for itself.

  He was also wary of the public nature of Waldman’s proposal: a live radio show had all the trappings of a typical Steinbrenner promotion. That would put the meeting more on Steinbrenner’s terms, even if on Berra’s turf.

  But Dale Berra was certain that on some level, his father always knew that the time had to come to stop refusing to so much as enunciate Steinbrenner’s name. The owner of the Yankees couldn’t forever be “that guy.”

  “Fourteen years is long enough, the most you can get out of it,” Dale said, reminding Yogi of how difficult it would be for Steinbrenner to repent in the way Waldman was proposing.

  Finally, when Dale sensed that his father was weakening, he played his ace, a personal plea from him and his brothers. “None of your grandchildren have ever seen you in the place you became so famous,” he said. “Why continue to deny them?”

  It wasn’t entirely true that none of Berra’s grandchildren had ever seen number 8 in pinstripes. Lindsay Berra, daughter of Larry, remembered Yogi in uniform in the early to middle 1980s, before the firing. Her grandmother would take her to the stadium, bringing along a basket of fried chicken because she knew how much Lindsay hated hot dogs.

  When Lindsay was in high school, a friend invited her to a Yankees game. A sports lover and Yankees fan, she desperatel
y wanted to go but felt she needed her father’s permission. Although she had seen her grandfather watching games in his den—seated in his blue leather chair, pulling for the Yankees—she worried about offending him.

  “Of course you can go,” her father said, reminding her that Yogi’s feud was with George, not the team. He still loved the Yankees; all the Berras did.

  But by late 1998, the younger grandchildren having come of age, Dale’s argument finally penetrated his father’s defenses. Berra loved the children, all nine of them at the time, and relished having them in the Montclair area. “The kids were pretty strong on this,” he said. “They said I had to give it a chance. I finally said OK, but I didn’t know what the heck to expect. All I know is, Carmen had to be there; that I insisted on. Whatever George had to say, he had to say it to her, too.”

  Through the years, Steinbrenner believed it was Carmen who had been the most committed to the boycott—a mischaracterization of her and an underestimation of her husband’s resolve. Yogi wanted Carmen with him because in his mind, they were a team. They both had suffered and sacrificed as partners in love and war. (Asked once by broadcaster Michael Kay which person he would most want to have in a foxhole with him, a question naturally aimed at getting him to reveal his most trusted teammate, Berra said, without hesitation, “Carmen.”)

  So the stage and the show were finally set, the big meeting to coincide with the December museum debut. And then, a couple of days before, Steinbrenner called Waldman to say he couldn’t come. Tragedy had struck the Florida governor’s mansion, where Lawton Chiles had collapsed during a workout and died of heart failure. As a well-known Florida businessman and owner of America’s most famous sports team, Steinbrenner said that he was obligated to attend the governor’s funeral, which unfortunately was scheduled for the day they had planned the show with Yogi. It would be impossible for him to reach New Jersey in time.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll call Yogi,” he promised.

  Waldman chuckled. Typical George, she thought. In his mind, he believed he had made things right merely by agreeing to do the show; he and Berra were already on amicable terms.

  “That’s all right,” she told him. “I’ll take care of it. We’ll reschedule.”

  She called WFAN with the news and then called Kaplan to postpone the big event. Her producer notified the handful of special guests she had lined up and booked them for the new date: January 5 of the brand-new year, a historic night that would reroute Berra’s storybook life and the off-field narrative of Steinbrenner’s Yankees.

  Waldman could feel her pulse racing and beads of sweat forming a mosaic on her forehead when the door to Kaplan’s office closed and a muffled but clearly raised voice came from inside. The men of the moment, the Boss and Yogi, had been ushered into the office after Steinbrenner had arrived at the museum.

  Now Waldman was overwhelmed with fear and regret: Berra wasn’t going to receive Steinbrenner graciously, or Steinbrenner wasn’t going to show proper remorse, and all hell was going to break loose. Steinbrenner’s humiliation would be blamed on her, and her countless hours of making herself an indispensable asset to WFAN would evaporate in the time it had once taken Mel Allen to marvel, on Yankees broadcasts, “How about that?”

  Then Carmen Berra marched into Kaplan’s office, while Waldman positioned herself behind a pole, unconsciously hiding in the event Steinbrenner stormed out. Bad as that would have been for her, she knew it would have been worse for him.

  “Everyone else was concerned for Yogi, but my loyalties were with George,” Waldman said. “The last thing that I wanted to see happen was for him to be embarrassed.”

  Twelve years after the fact, she recalled that the shouting had ceased with Carmen’s entry. Had Waldman only imagined the raised voice? Or had it merely been a result of Steinbrenner’s exuberance? Everyone could see he’d been a bundle of nerves.

  No one who was in the room—the Berras or Steinbrenner—would remember any harsh words. Carmen recalled that Steinbrenner held Yogi by the shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said, “I know I made a mistake by not letting you go personally. It’s the worst mistake I ever made in baseball.”

  Not given to long speeches, Berra replied, “I made a lot of mistakes in baseball, too.”

  They shook hands and emerged from the office. Carmen opened a bottle of champagne. They toasted new beginnings, and Berra proceeded to give Steinbrenner a tour of his new digs.

  Two reporters, one from the New York Times and the other from the Daily News—Montclair residents who had been tipped off about the event by Kaplan—quickly corralled Berra and Steinbrenner for quotes before rushing off to make deadline with the news that the long feud was over.

  Asked if his boycott of Yankee Stadium would end immediately, Berra was playfully noncommittal. “I told him what he needed to do,” Berra said. “He apologized. We’ll see.”

  For his part, Steinbrenner was deferential. “If I could get Yogi to come back,” he said, “I’d bring him over with a rickshaw across the George Washington Bridge.”

  During the museum tour, a videographer working for the museum cornered Steinbrenner and asked for his take on Berra. The Boss, relaxed now, laid it on with classic Steinbrenner hyperbole.

  “There have been great Yankees, and Yogi is right there at the top of that list,” he gushed. “But there’s probably never been a Yankee who heard more times, ‘You can’t do that; you can’t do that,’ and then just turned around and did it. Oh, he was a warrior, a warrior in every sense of the word, and you know how much I love that word. If I was in the trench, I’d want Yogi Berra with me.”

  If the feelings weren’t mutual—Berra having already chosen Carmen for his trench-mate—he clearly enjoyed himself as he led Steinbrenner around the museum. Warming to the occasion, he praised Joe Torre and the Yankees staff and told Steinbrenner not to interfere, or he definitely wouldn’t show up for another fourteen years.

  When they stopped in front of a blowup of Berra throwing away his catcher’s mask in front of home plate in a World Series game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, Berra explained to Steinbrenner the art of catching a knuckleball. By an old photo of the legendary Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, and Tommy Henrich, Steinbrenner told Berra how Henrich’s restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, had been turned into the first Wendy’s franchise.

  Near a display for Larry Doby, another Montclair resident and Hall of Famer, Steinbrenner told Berra how much he admired Doby, who broke the American League color line in Cleveland, Steinbrenner’s hometown.

  Soon they moved into the museum’s theater, with its replica scoreboard from the original Yankee Stadium and seating that looked like a section of the grandstand. Perched between Steinbrenner and Berra, Waldman began the show by announcing to her audience that something very special was about to happen.

  She introduced her guests with a flourish: “Mr. Steinbrenner, you know Mr. Berra; Mr. Berra, Mr. Steinbrenner.” There were smiles all around. Anxiety had given way to festivity.

  At the outset of the show, the theater was empty except for the few invited guests. But as it proceeded, with Waldman fielding calls from Joe Garagiola, Berra’s boyhood pal from St. Louis, and the great Ted Williams, word spread—something wonderful was happening at the museum—and people began arriving: men in their suits, fathers and sons, students from campus.

  Less than an hour into the show, Waldman looked up from her microphone and was amazed to see that the theater was full. “They heard us,” she said. “They heard that George Steinbrenner and Yogi Berra were making up, and they wanted to see it for themselves.”

  Berra especially got a kick out of Ted Williams’s call. “Teddy Ballgame”—now that was about as big as it got in baseball. Berra told Steinbrenner that he was going to be inducted into Williams’s museum in Hernando, Florida, the following month. Out of the blue, Berra asked Steinbrenner if he would attend the ceremony. Steinbrenner looked as if he might cry. The color had also returned to his face.

  W
hen the show was finished, the Boss gave Carmen a hug and told her, “He’s got to forgive me and come back.” She told Steinbrenner he had done the right thing by coming; she doubted there would be a problem anymore.

  As Steinbrenner and Cerrone made their way to the back door, accompanied by Carmen and Yogi, the Boss clutched a copy of Berra’s new book of original Yogi-isms and a museum T-shirt.

  “Thank you for inviting me, Yogi,” Steinbrenner said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  The door closed behind Berra. He turned back with a smile that could have lit a blacked-out city.

  “Fourteen years,” he said. “It’s over.”

  Cerrone had never seen Steinbrenner less restless, more at peace, than on the ride back to the city that night. “Like a cinder block had been lifted from his shoulders,” he said.

  Berra admitted that it had taken a brave man to come and apologize, especially when Steinbrenner knew that Berra “could be a rock head.”

  When Waldman called Steinbrenner that night to thank him, he was exhausted from the stress of the affair but said, “This was a very good day for the Yankees.” Seldom at a loss for what served the interests of the media, he teased Waldman: “And a pretty good day for you, too.”

  Having long used Steinbrenner and the Yankees to boost circulation, the New York newspapers had a hot story for the next morning. The nascent reconciliation was front-page news in the New York Times. Both the tabloid Post and Daily News also blared, somewhat predictably, “It’s Over.”

  The wit and wisdom of Yogi Berra was back in season.

  4. Perfection

  Ron Guidry was right where he had to be, in front of a television screen. It was early Sunday afternoon, July 18, 1999, the rare occasion when he wasn’t about to miss the beginning of a weekend ballgame.