Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Faced once with a difficult lie, he complained to a partner that his shot was likely to end up in the water. “Yogi, don’t think like that; think positively,” his partner said. “OK,” he decided. “I’m positive my shot is going into the water.”

  Out of thin air, he would coin a mathematical aphorism and instant Yogi-ism, declaring once, “Ninety percent of short putts don’t go in.”

  For Berra, golf represented a diversion from baseball, but somehow it had a way of intersecting with the game. He was on a New Jersey golf course after the 1954 season, waiting out a cloudburst, when he received the news that he had been named the American League’s most valuable player for the second time. He immediately got a champagne toast from his companions.

  He once negotiated a contract with Yankees owner Dan Topping over eighteen holes, cleverly asking Topping what he thought his star catcher was worth. Berra liked the answer and said, “You got a deal.” In the process, Berra circumvented the stubborn general manager, George Weiss, with whom he regularly had contract squabbles. Weiss was furious when he found out, barking at Topping, “You can sign them from now on.”

  The job news he received at the country club wasn’t always so uplifting, however. Berra was on the course the day after sending Mel Stottlemyre out to lose game seven of the 1964 World Series when he got word that the Yankees wanted to see him in the office the next day. He crossed the bridge into the Bronx, expecting a contract extension, and returned to New Jersey with his walking papers.

  In 1972, on the worst day of his long golfing life, Berra and the rest of Gil Hodges’s Mets coaching staff were playing eighteen holes near the end of spring training. Walking back to his hotel, Hodges collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. Berra was named manager days later in the saddest appointment of his career.

  On the whole, golf for Berra was eminently good because it connected him with people and allowed him to continue to feel vital long after his retirement from baseball. In 1991, he started his annual charity golf tournament to benefit special needs children, and eventually the event became the primary fundraiser for his museum’s educational programs.

  It was at his own tournament that Berra notched the only hole in one of his life. He didn’t count it, because by then he had taken to playing host by stationing himself at the eighth hole and hitting a couple of tee shots with each group as they passed through. “I hit enough balls,” he said, “and one went in.”

  One of his favorite days each year was when he got to stand in front of the Montclair Golf Club on the morning of check-in, welcoming Yankees past and present as they arrived, lugging their clubs through the parking lot and into the locker room. Many of the players lived in the area, but a few would fly in for the event, an all-day affair that concluded with an evening dinner.

  After his retirement, Mel Stottlemyre flew across the country several times from his home in Washington State to play in the tournament. Joe Torre usually made it his business to show up (and Berra reciprocated by playing in Torre’s tournament). But as his relationship with Guidry evolved, it was Guidry for whom he waited anxiously, badgering Dave Kaplan and others for news of his arrival from Louisiana.

  Guidry would arrange for an autograph show or two in the New York area around the time of the tournament and spend some time with his son. But he knew that Berra wanted him there. Across the decades, Berra had golfed with everyone from the rocker Alice Cooper to the legend Arnold Palmer to Presidents George Bush (squared), Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford. But Guidry had become his favorite partner in the years since time had taken its inevitable toll on his game. Putting became a challenge, and reaching the green could be a multistroke misadventure. Lamenting his lack of driving power, Berra said, “I hit a baseball farther than I do a golf ball now.”

  For a man long used to competing with pride and triumphing over doubts about his physical capabilities, golf had the potential to become the most humbling and embarrassing experience of all. But that never happened when Berra played a round of eighteen in Tampa after a day at the ballpark. Not on Ron Guidry’s watch, at least.

  Guidry was almost fifty years old when Berra returned to the Yankees in the spring of 2000. He had been golfing for ten years, having taken the game up after retiring from baseball. Good at every sport he ever tried, Guidry picked up this one without great difficulty, playing with a handicap as low as six when he was firing on all cylinders.

  “I’m always around eighty/eighty-one, but I can get it down to seventy-seven or seventy-eight when I’m really playing a lot,” he said. “There’s always that one hole on the course where I end up with a double bogey, triple bogey, but I’ll shoot eighty/eighty-one pretty normally.”

  Not that his score much mattered to him as the years passed. In the arena of athletic combat, Guidry was a man at peace, mostly with himself. Whatever he needed to achieve he had already done so throwing fastballs and sliders. He didn’t need the stress of trying to prove anything. On the golf course, the social and recreational benefits were all he was seeking to accrue.

  At home in Lafayette, Guidry had a regular game with a friend, another left-hander. They met every Tuesday morning at eight o’clock sharp for eighteen holes. In a couple of cathartic hours, riding around in a cart, they didn’t bother with pencils, scorecards, or the emotional baggage of blowing a hole.

  “Most of the time when I’m playing, that’s how it is,” he said. “I don’t worry about the score. Where am I going, to the senior tour? What’s a handicap going to do for me at this point? Golf is a great sport to play, but it’s just for enjoyment, for peace of mind. It’s great to just get on a course, whack the ball, and get your frustrations out.”

  That made Guidry the perfect partner for Berra, who was seventy-four when he returned to spring training in 2000 and was rarely able to break a hundred on the course. Oh, he could still hit the ball solidly and occasionally drive it a fair distance—enough to inspire Guidry to think, I hope I can hold a golf club in my hands and do that for as long as he has.

  But it didn’t take long for Guidry also to see that the golf course could become cruel to the elderly and that Berra—notwithstanding his athletic pedigree and excellent conditioning for a man his age—was no exception.

  “He gets to a par five that’s about six hundred yards long, and even though he’s hitting from the seniors’ tee, it’s going to take him at least five shots to even get close enough to the green, much less have a chance to make par,” Guidry said. “Now, on a par three, which might be only about three hundred fifty yards, he’s starting from the seniors’ tee, so now all he’s got to go is about three hundred ten. OK, he might smack two great shots, and then he’s right off the green. But he still has to get there and then get the ball to the hole.”

  Scorecard or no scorecard, Guidry could tell from the first time they played that Berra, still driving himself to compete, was increasingly frustrated by how long it took him to finish a hole. Guidry also knew that the courses weren’t getting any shorter and that Berra wasn’t getting any younger. Something had to give, because he knew for damn sure that stubborn ol’ Yogi wasn’t about to give up.

  ***

  Before going out to play eighteen holes, Guidry asked the General to step over to the side, out of Berra’s earshot. “I want you to know that I got only one rule on the golf course that I need you to play by,” he said.

  “OK, no problem, what is it?” the General said.

  “You’ll see when we get out on the course,” Guidry said.

  The General wondered what the heck Guidry could be talking about but figured he would find out soon enough.

  Most colleagues and friends knew Brigadier General Arthur F. Diehl III by his nickname, “Chip,” but to Guidry and Berra he was just “the General.” They had met him at Legends Field in Tampa (before it was renamed for George Steinbrenner) when Diehl had been invited by Steinbrenner to throw out the first pitch of a Yankees spring training game, with a coordinated military flyover.

>   Forever proud of making second lieutenant in the Air Force before an honorable discharge in 1954, Steinbrenner tended to celebrate all things military and especially its leaders. In the Boss’s mind, there was no bigger hero in the Tampa Bay area in the years after September 11, 2001, than Chip Diehl, commander of MacDill Air Force Base, four miles southwest of downtown Tampa.

  On 9/11, Diehl was working in Washington at the Pentagon when American Airlines flight 77 was hijacked out of Dulles International Airport by five al-Qaeda terrorists and flown into the western section of the building, killing all 64 people aboard and 125 people inside. His office was on the opposite side, near the river entrance. “You could feel the whole building shake,” he said.

  With the country knocked far off its foundation, Diehl was soon after assigned by General Tommy Franks at Central Command to mobilize the coalition of countries in support of the Bush administration’s global war on terror. To begin the operation, he was sent to MacDill, which meant going home: Diehl had been born on the base when his father, an Air Force pilot, was stationed there in the late fifties and on through the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

  On the day he threw out the first pitch at Legends Field, Diehl met Joe Torre and took the opportunity to mention the two golf courses on the base. He invited Torre and friends to come play when they had a chance.

  Torre took him up on the offer, calling later to ask if he could bring a group over. “Are you kidding? We’d love to have you,” Diehl said. The next day, Torre, Don Zimmer, Reggie Jackson, Don Mattingly, Berra, and Guidry rode over and made one request—that Diehl play with them. He joined a foursome with Guidry and Berra.

  The first hole was a straightaway par three, and right away Guidry gave the General a feel for how entertaining the afternoon would be.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Guidry said when Berra got out of the cart and began walking in the direction of the seniors’ tee.

  “To hit my shot,” Berra said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Guidry said. “You want one of us to whack you in the back of the head with our ball? You’re shooting last.”

  Diehl wondered, Could this be the rule that Guidry was talking about?

  It wasn’t. But he found out soon enough what it was after Berra put his tee shot straight down the middle of the fairway, hit a second shot that left him within striking distance of the green, and hit a third that plopped down on the edge, though still a considerable distance from the cup.

  “That’s good,” Guidry yelled. “That’s par.”

  He turned to Diehl and said, “If he gets on the green, he don’t putt. That’s my rule.”

  Diehl just watched as Berra obediently walked over to the ball, picked it up, and dropped it into his pocket.

  When Diehl or anyone else asked Guidry why Berra didn’t have to putt, he shook his head. “I don’t have to explain my ideas,” he said. “He just doesn’t have to.”

  Diehl, for one, didn’t need it spelled out for him. He understood perfectly what Guidry was doing. “He never wanted Yogi to feel embarrassed about how many shots he might need or anyone they played with to get frustrated with the pace,” Diehl said. “And he wasn’t going to talk about it because he didn’t want anyone to misunderstand why he was doing it. It wasn’t a function of limitation. It was purely out of respect and to make sure that this will be another day that Yogi goes out and has a good time.”

  Diehl is an observant man. His military background ensures that he pays close attention to detail. That first time he hosted the Yankees at MacDill, he noticed something about the group over lunch that he found familiarly heartening.

  Berra was seated to his right, though not at the head of the table. The rest of the Yankees all had their chairs turned in Berra’s direction. Diehl’s immediate observation was that it was not a coincidence.

  “I said [to myself], ‘Hmm, isn’t this interesting?’” he said. “And the next time they came out, Yogi wasn’t with them but Torre was, and it was the same thing. All the chairs were contoured toward Joe.”

  Diehl was enough of a baseball fan—he had family in Philadelphia and had rooted for the Phillies growing up, while paying proper homage to the Yankees of the early 1960s—to know that New York’s success was at least partly predicated on its vast financial resources. But there was something more about this team that he would not have known had he not seen it at close range.

  It was, Diehl said, a chain of command that was more than adhered to; it was expected and appreciated. He could see the effects of it at the dinner table or when he brought a friend to a game in Tampa and several players signed a ball for him, intuitively leaving the sweet spot vacant for manager Joe Girardi, who signed it there last.

  Most of all, he marveled at how attentive Guidry was to Berra, how enthusiastically he took on the responsibility, and how seriously he went about making sure Berra was comfortable and happy.

  “You grow up with beliefs about certain famous people,” Diehl said. “For me, Yogi Berra was more than a baseball icon. He represented the best of America, the values that say you can succeed no matter what your background is and no matter how many people say you can’t. When I saw how devoted Gator was to Yogi, how much he honored what Yogi had meant not only to him but everyone else, it affirmed those beliefs. I saw their relationship through a military aperture: You were there for me. I don’t care how old you are. I’m going to take care of you.”

  Guidry impressed Diehl as the ultimate teammate, the guy you’d want with you in a foxhole or flying alongside you into battle. Over time, they developed a friendship that was closer than any Diehl had with the other Yankees. It also went well beyond golf. He visited Guidry in Louisiana, staying at his home, meeting his parents, hitting the links around Lafayette.

  Back in Tampa, Guidry—often with Berra—became the most regular visitor to the base for a round with the General, who was only three years younger than Guidry. Although Guidry had served in the National Guard, it was Berra, a World War II veteran and part of the naval invasion of Normandy in June 1944, who had old war stories to share.

  “They got to be good friends, Yogi and the General,” Guidry said. “So there’d be a lot of times that we’d play that I’d get Yogi to ride with him. Yogi was tickled to death. I figured they were both in the military. Let them talk.”

  Berra filled Diehl in on his history. He was a gunner’s mate aboard the USS Bayfield, which was the flagship for the invasion force landing at Utah Beach. He wound up as one of a six-man crew on a thirty-six-foot-long rocket boat, going in first, running interference and targeting German bunkers on the bluffs in front of the first landing craft carrying the assault waves of troops.

  Berra was eighteen, curious, and somewhat oblivious. He told Diehl that as the sky lit up with explosions, he took a moment from helping loading the rocket launcher to admire the view, which reminded him of the Fourth of July. That got his officer’s attention. “You better get your head down if you want to keep it on,” he barked.

  Diehl said that Berra was more sheepish about another experience, three days before D-day, when he and his mates floated out in the rocket boat to watch for low-flying planes. When one appeared below the clouds, they followed orders and shot it down, forcing the pilot to eject. Unfortunately, the plane, which crashed in the water not far from the boat, was American.

  “Boy, that pilot was ticked,” Berra told Diehl. “But, you know, those were our orders.”

  “Sounds right,” said Diehl, who sensed that Berra wasn’t sure he was convinced that they had not been negligent.

  “Yogi, I believe you,” he said.

  “OK, good,” Berra said.

  Hearing Berra talk about his wartime experiences with such enthusiasm gave Diehl an idea. He arranged for a foursome—the three of them and another World War II veteran named Willie O’Donnell, who was a few years older than Berra and had flown B-52 bombers over Europe. “Every time we turned around, they were in the cart, telling their old war storie
s,” Diehl said. “We got such a kick out of it. And afterward, Willie says to me, ‘Yogi Berra. He was like every other regular guy I knew over there.’”

  In the months and years after the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, Guidry or Berra would occasionally shoot a question or two at Diehl about his work in the war on terror. Sometimes he would answer. Other times he would say, “Uh, let’s change the subject.” They knew not to press the issue or to be insulted when Diehl’s office would cancel a golf date at the last minute. “That’s when he was in command, and things were pretty heavy,” Guidry said.

  Diehl retired from the military in 2005, although he continued to make an occasional trip to Afghanistan or Iraq to consult or help with the ongoing operations. A couple of times, he brought back keepsakes for Guidry and Berra—foreign currency, a flag from one of the countries with forces in the area, a hat commonly worn in local culture. Guidry called the General “a jewel of a person, the kind of guy you love spending a few hours with on the golf course, because he could really appreciate all the little things.”

  One day Diehl brought a friend named Roger to fill out the foursome. Roger, a baseball fan, proceeded to wilt under the pressure of playing with the famous Berra and Guidry. It was a hacker’s nightmare, one hole after another. In the middle of the round, Roger hit a ball into the bunker and looked like he was going to cry.

  Diehl felt terrible for him and wanted to do something to cheer him up. “Roger,” he said, “it’s not so bad. Look over there.” In the distance, Berra was hard at work in the sand trap, smoothing it over for Roger to hit his way out.

  “Yogi, you don’t have to do that,” Roger yelled, mortified.

  “No,” Berra said, “that’s OK.”

  Diehl patted his friend on the back and told him, “Keep it in perspective. It’s not every day that you turn around and see Yogi Berra raking the sand trap for you, is it?”