Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Wang won nineteen games both years under Guidry, but as Guidry said, “He never could understand his role as the ace because in the culture he was from, he was taught humility. It was hard for Wang to say, ‘I’m the best.’”

  For Guidry, losing the job was a case of easy come, easy go. Just as it was when the Yankees made it clear they thought his pitching days were over, no one had to twist his arm to go home to Louisiana. On the way, he turned down Torre’s offer to join him in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t putting on no Dodgers uniform,” he said.

  Implicit in that declaration was the fact that changing teams would have taken him away from his best friend, Yogi, during spring training. Instead, Guidry waited for the call to return to the Yankees as a camp instructor.

  Upon returning to that role, his first assignment was to prep Girardi for the arrival of Berra, just as he’d done with Torre. Guidry laid out the vodka arrangement, showing Girardi where Torre had kept it, and told him that the golf clubs would be arriving soon, too. Between juggling lineups and getting his team ready for the season, Girardi, who didn’t imbibe, stored the Ketel One and kept an eye out to make sure it didn’t run dry.

  Girardi had already bonded with Berra in 1999 over the perfect game, but now they would spend more time together. No matter who occupied the manager’s office, Berra would come in each morning with tidbits of commentary about the previous day’s game.

  “The big kid looked good last night,” he would say of the six-foot-ten pitching prospect Andrew Brackman.

  “Cano looks like he’s lunging at the ball,” he would say of the talented second baseman Robinson Cano.

  And because Berra was a man whose life had always been a scripture of routine, there would also have to be room in Girardi’s car going to away games.

  “He liked to take little catnaps in the car,” Girardi said. “But one day we’re driving to play the Astros, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes’ ride, and we’re like ten minutes away and he says, ‘You took the wrong way. There’s a shortcut. I know there’s a shortcut that Torre always took.’ So I say, ‘OK, I’ll get directions for the ride back.’ So we’re driving back, and it’s the exact same way, except we’re making all lefts instead of rights. And Yogi says, ‘I told you this way was shorter.’”

  Joe T. to Joe G. was a seamless transition for Berra. Heck, he thought, they were catchers and Italian—what wasn’t to like? Like Torre, Girardi never minded hearing Berra’s thoughts about the hardest throwers he had caught, the most challenging pitchers he had worked with, the technique and equipment he had used.

  “Yog, how did you catch a guy who threw real hard with that little glove?” Girardi asked.

  “I put falsies in there for extra padding,” Berra said.

  “Falsies? What are you talking about?” said Girardi, who wasn’t acquainted with the word.

  “You know, the padding from a bra,” Berra said, completely baffled that any red-blooded American male didn’t know what falsies were.

  Generationally, Berra reminded Girardi of his father, Gerald, who had raised five children after the death of his wife when Joe was thirteen. Working as a salesman, a bricklayer, and a bartender, Gerald would do whatever it took to get his kids into college—Northwestern for Joe, the baseball star.

  Girardi never for a moment forgot whose sacrifices had gotten him to where he was. After the Yankees won the 1996 World Series, he handed his first championship ring to his father, who wore it proudly as Alzheimer’s gradually pulled him into a distant, silent world by the time his son was named manager of the Yankees for the 2008 season. And while nobody replaces a father, having Berra around to plop down on the couch in the office every morning to ask about the kids and other mundane matters helped Girardi maintain a balance.

  Seeing Berra with Guidry affirmed Girardi’s belief in the power of the Yankees as family and team. “You watch that relationship and the way Gator is with Yogi, and you’re proud,” Girardi said. “Everybody appreciates having Yogi in spring training, but when you see those two together, the reverence and respect they have, you just get a sense of pride. It’s really just like watching a father and a son.”

  Guidry does not exactly appreciate or agree with the suggestion that he and Berra ever had a father-son relationship. “I mean, I love the old man, but my father’s still alive, so I got a father,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

  And yet Guidry’s voice softened when he reflected on his relationship with Berra, how each year it had grown closer, more special. He felt it deeply, he said, when Larry or Dale would fly into Tampa for a visit and offer to take their father out to dinner or to the ballpark when he had already made plans with Guidry. “That’s OK, Gator’s got it,” Berra would say.

  “And when I’d hear that, you don’t know how good I felt,” Guidry said. “That’s why I called him my best friend. The best friend is the guy that you look forward to seeing more than anybody else. And you don’t have to be from the same generation to have that. You can be years apart and from two different parts of the world.”

  For Berra, there was nothing unusual, much less poignant, about the friendship. Oh, he always liked Guidry well enough. But he was never the type to gush with emotion, declare his loyalty or love. Even as a young man, Yogi was no “Huggy Berra.”

  “Gator, he’s a good guy”—that’s about as much appreciation as he would express.

  It was only natural on Guidry’s part to wonder occasionally just what Berra might be thinking. “Sometimes you say to yourself, ‘How does he really feel about you?’ I catch myself thinking, Does he really want me doing that?”

  Those who knew Berra best understood the side of him that could come across as demanding and cranky, even self-absorbed. Someone might be doing him a favor, but if it wasn’t done the way he expected it to be done—or the way it had been done for him regularly by someone else—he had no problem making his unhappiness known.

  Berra once called Dave Kaplan to tell him he wanted to go to Yankee Stadium on a particular Thursday. When Kaplan said, thinking out loud, “Oh, that’s my anniversary,” Berra didn’t say, Oh, sure, forget it. He didn’t say anything. Kaplan reasoned that his wife, Naomi, would understand and they could celebrate the next day. Then again, it was her anniversary. And when Carmen Berra found out that Kaplan had spent his anniversary taking Yogi to the ballpark, she lit into her husband and immediately had an expensive bouquet of flowers sent to the Kaplans’ house.

  More than anyone, she knew where Yogi was coming from, what he wanted from those closest to him, and, most of all, how much he had given to others. She could recite chapter and verse the times he had opened his arms and his home to friends in need. She remembered especially how he looked after young Yankees such as Bobby Richardson, a shy South Carolinian who had difficulty adjusting to New York City. Yogi was willing to drive him all over town and go out of his way to make sure he was comfortable.

  In Berra’s playing and coaching days, his home was almost a bed and breakfast for players who needed a place to stay, a good meal, or a swim in the pool. In the late 1970s, the Berras welcomed Mike Ferraro, a journeyman player who had spent time with the Yankees and was hired as a coach. He was trying to save money so that he could keep his home in Fort Lauderdale. Where else to stay but at the Berra B & B?

  A decade later, when Berra heard that Ferraro’s father had died in Kingston, New York, he drove two hours north and served as a pallbearer at the funeral without Ferraro even asking. Looking back, all Ferraro could say was that he wished that his father, a lifelong Yankees fan, could have gone to his grave knowing that Yogi Berra was going to help carry the casket.

  All his life, Berra had done things without being asked and without wanting to be thanked. His intentions were typically rooted in the quest for everlasting camaraderie, normalcy, and simplicity—an escape from celebrity with those disinclined to fawn over him or ask him to autograph their bats.

  “The thing is, it’s not that hard to get in
side his inner circle,” said Larry Berra. “Basically, he loves everybody, as long as you are trustworthy and loyal—doesn’t matter whether you’re the garbage man or the president of the United States.”

  The person’s standing was inconsequential, as long as he or she could make Berra feel comfortable and relaxed and part of his routine. A card-playing buddy could walk by him in the locker room of the Montclair Golf Club and say, “Yogi, I promised myself I’d lose twenty pounds before you die,” to which Berra would respond, “Then you better hurry the fuck up.” (True story, courtesy of a member who overheard the exchange.)

  “People come in and out of Dad’s life all the time, but there’s not many he has a special trust or affinity for,” Dale Berra said. “He can’t express it, but you will know if he appreciates you.”

  His appreciation might come with a nod or a telephone call starting with the greeting, “Whattya doin’?” While those inside the circle seemed to give a lot more than they received, payback for devotion was often a patriarchal belief in them and his trust.

  One Father’s Day, when asked what he would be doing with the family, Berra said that of course he was going to Yankee Stadium for the game. “That’s my family,” he rationalized. Harsh as that may have sounded, his family understood.

  “Baseball was everything, all we did,” Larry Berra said. “That’s been his whole life, being around the team and the guys. You either fit in with that or you didn’t.”

  With the exception of his fourteen years away from the Yankees, going to the ballpark had just been part of Berra’s day, no more unusual than brushing his teeth. The Yankees were and always would be family, and that was why his sons took no offense to the brushoff they would occasionally get in Tampa: “Gator’s got it.”

  When Larry Berra bunked with his father at the hotel in Tampa, many mornings meant being awakened at the crack of dawn. “Gator’s coming to get me,” Yogi would say. “You have to get up if you want to come.”

  Larry would roll over and go back to sleep.

  “My attitude was always, You do what you have to do,” Larry said. “I got a car. I’ll fit in.” He paused for comic effect and added, “But then I’d tell Gator, ‘Don’t think you’re getting any of the inheritance. You still got to go through me for that.’”

  Larry knew Guidry before Yogi did, having played against him in the minor leagues. There was never envy, he said, or perceived threat. Inside the circle, they each knew their place.

  At age sixty, Larry moved back in with his parents after a divorce. His job was to make sure that Yogi had his morning papers—“by seven thirty or else,” he said—and to be home by eleven on weeknights so that they could watch reruns of Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond.

  “You’re late,” Berra would growl if Larry plopped down fifteen minutes after eleven.

  “Dad, what’s the big deal? They’ll be showing reruns for the next two hours!”

  Larry understood that there was nothing his father hated more than change and surprise. In Tampa, Yogi’s time with Guidry and the others was the core of his spring training regimen, and nothing short of an illness or an earthquake could interfere with it. Yes, at times Yogi could be difficult, but his truest and most trusted friends reserved the right to tell him that he was being a royal pain in the ass.

  “And if he wants, he can tell me, ‘Aw, go to hell,’” Guidry said. “But I think—I hope—it goes deeper than just needing someone to do something. I like to think that he wants me doing it, that he’s counting on it.”

  One day while they were on the golf course in Tampa, patiently waiting for the next hole to clear, making small talk about the wind and the way the course was playing, Guidry suddenly felt Berra’s meaty hand on his elbow, gripping it tight. Guidry took the gesture not as a way for Yogi to steady himself, but more as a show of affection, a sign of trust, a token of his appreciation.

  And the fact of the matter is, Guidry was absolutely right.

  9. Ron’s Rule

  Other than the ballpark, there was no place Yogi Berra preferred to be more during spring training than the golf course with his good friend Gator, two great Yankees left-handers riding around in a cart, cutting each other up.

  “Get your butt back over there,” Guidry would tell Berra when he strolled toward the seniors’ tee before Guidry could strike his ball. He sure as hell wasn’t going to risk having to explain to Carmen how her husband’s hard head got in the way of his drive.

  A longtime golfer, Berra would incessantly remind Guidry of all the shots he used to make before age began to weaken his game. Guidry would say, “Yeah, yeah,” but he knew that Berra had been pretty good. The man had been playing before Guidry was born.

  Not that their levels of competence much mattered when they tossed their clubs into the back of Guidry’s truck and slipped away for a round. “It was never about competition, only camaraderie,” Guidry said. “Golfing with Yogi was hilarious.”

  It always is when you get to make up the rules.

  If ever there was a game that was unsuited for Berra’s wide-ranging and downright unorthodox baseball swing, it should have been the one in which stationary dimpled balls are hit with a much skinnier stick and maddening precision. But Berra not only made golf a lifetime passion; he became pretty good at it, too. He had a ten handicap through middle age and an excellent short game, all while playing—though not putting—right-handed.

  The switch-golfing business came about one day back in the fifties when Berra, stuck behind a tree, realized he couldn’t advance the ball with his lefty club. He borrowed one from a right-handed partner, thrilled himself with a solid drive, and went with the flow from there in a demonstration of ambidexterity and athletic adaptability.

  “My father was pretty much good at any game he tried, just kind of a natural because of his hand-eye coordination,” Larry Berra said.

  Larry remembered Wiffle ball games in the yard with his brothers, and his father coming home and demanding a swing. The boys would scream that he was standing too close to the pitcher and that he’d never make contact. The next thing they knew, the ball would be gone, over the roof and lost in the bushes.

  “He was like that with golf, too,” Larry said. “He’d hit all these trick shots, and the one place you never wanted to be was one stroke ahead of him with two holes to go. He’d play around with you—‘Watch this. I’m gonna hit this ball within five feet of the hole.’ And then he would, no big deal.”

  Berra was no stage or zealous sports parent, but golf outings with his sons were destined to end up in a shouting match. “You’d miss a short putt, and he’d bark at you, ‘How the hell can you miss that?’” Larry said. “He just was born to compete, and he couldn’t keep quiet. But in the end, it was all for fun.”

  Berra took up golf early in his baseball career, before relocating to New Jersey year-round. He played in St. Louis with the likes of Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and his childhood idol, Joe Medwick. He loved to play during spring training when the Yankees were based in St. Petersburg, at least until Casey Stengel ordered the clubs put away by the start of the season.

  “Pack ’em up,” Stengel would say back in the days when managers could get away with such authoritarianism, “and if we catch you out there playing golf, it will cost you two hundred bucks.”

  As Berra noted, “Two hundred bucks was a lot of money back then.”

  Fellow catcher and Hall of Famer Al Lopez had recommended the game, telling him, “Play as long as you can. It’ll keep you young and healthy.” Lopez meant psychologically more than physically, although who’s to say how much the two are related?

  When Berra’s knee deteriorated in his midseventies, he cited golf as the main reason to go through the trauma of replacement and rehabilitation. By then the game had become too central to his life to let a little surgery get in the way.

  “Why wouldn’t you?” he reasoned. “I always liked to play. It’s a nice way to spend the day. You get exercise, fresh air
, competition.”

  Over the years, golf also gave him an excuse to travel. He played in charity events all over the country, doing old baseball buddies a favor in the process. Berra went all the way to North Dakota to appear in Roger Maris’s tournament, to Oklahoma City for the former Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry, and to Florida for Whitey Ford, to name just a few.

  He became a regular at the Bob Hope Classic, a main PGA Tour event in the Southern California desert. The comedian, who died at age one hundred in 2003, had gotten to know Berra when he had a stake in the Cleveland Indians and began inviting him to his January tour event in the midnineties—a good excuse for Berra to escape the New Jersey winter. Eventually, the organizers made him the classic’s first ambassador, and he continued to show up for the celebrity pro-am there years after Hope’s death.

  In an extension of his minimalist approach to batting practice, Berra took few, if any, practice shots while playing in the Hope Classic. “I know what I have to do,” he would say, always worried about cluttering his head with too much analysis of his swing.

  Rene Lagasi, a retired pharmaceutical manager and a New Jersey friend and neighbor, was his frequent golf companion and caddy in the Hope Classic. Lagasi had a home in the desert, where he would host Berra and accompany him to breakfast—Berra would go off diet to satisfy a craving for an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s—before heading off to the golf course.

  Berra often managed to say something that would help keep a good walk comical and unspoiled.

  One day while Berra was playing in a foursome that included Lagasi and Johnny Lujack, the former Notre Dame quarterback and 1947 Heisman Trophy winner, all four players hit their balls on the green not far apart. When they approached the green, Lujack asked, “Yogi, where are you?” Berra replied, “I’m right here.”