Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Three coaches from Joe Girardi’s staff—Mick Kelleher, Larry Rothschild, and Robby Thompson—showed up while Girardi tended to another commitment. But several Yankees who had said they would try to attend did not. Only Swisher dragged himself out of bed as he promised he would. “I know it was a tough turnaround, but frankly I was surprised there weren’t more guys there when, you know, it had been on the schedule for a month,” he said.

  At the dinner that evening, long after the day’s double and triple bogeys were forgiven and forgotten, Berra was handed the microphone to say a few words to his guests. As usual, he tried to say as little as he could get away with.

  “I want to especially thank the coaches and Swish,” he said. “These guys, they came from the West Coast last night, almost no sleep, just to be here. They . . . they . . . what they did for us . . .”

  That was it. He couldn’t continue. He wiped his eyes and handed the mike to someone else. But the emotion in his voice and his glistening eyes had said it all.

  12. A Yankee’s Calling

  Yogi Berra telephoned George Steinbrenner at his home in Tampa on the Boss’s eightieth birthday. “Only a few people have the number,” he said with pride, though he used it sparingly and judiciously, making sure to call Steinbrenner every Independence Day to wish him well.

  On this Sunday morning, July 4, 2010, Berra thought that the ailing Steinbrenner seemed more alert than in their previous conversation, a little perkier and more playful. “How’s my girlfriend?” he asked Berra, referring to Carmen.

  They spoke for a couple of minutes, and Steinbrenner told him, optimistically, “Maybe I’ll see you at Old-Timers’ Day.” That would be great, Berra said. He would look forward to it. He hung up the telephone feeling upbeat.

  Berra didn’t call many people on their birthdays, and he joked that the list was forever dwindling, a sad byproduct of fatal attrition. Yet even as Steinbrenner had deteriorated and virtually disappeared from public view, it never occurred to Berra that he might outlive the Boss. Even to a baseball man as iconic as Berra, Steinbrenner was an outsize personality, guaranteed to stir one’s emotions, one way or another. But Berra did not derive any satisfaction from the irony that he had become a far more visible presence around the new Yankee Stadium than the man who was responsible for his fourteen-year absence from the old one. The famous feud was ancient history as far as he was concerned.

  In the years following Berra’s return, he and Steinbrenner had become the oddest of amicable couples. They didn’t socialize but looked forward to seeing each other in spring training and at the stadium, the Boss clearly aware of the fact that Berra’s presence was proof of his good heart.

  And Berra, too, seemed pleased with his ability to have risen above his own resentment and rancor. When he went to a regular-season game, the first question he asked of the parking lot security guard was whether Steinbrenner was expected in the house that day. For reasons he couldn’t explain, Berra got a devilish kick out of knowing the commotion there would be if the Boss was coming, along with a few fairly interesting guests.

  He never knew who he might run into on his way up to Steinbrenner’s box. One day, while he was waiting for the elevator, it was Michael Jordan. Berra’s eyes widened, but it was Jordan who was awestruck. “Mr. B., Mr. B.,” he said, grabbing Berra’s hand.

  Although he chose to avoid sitting near Steinbrenner when he watched a game from the owner’s box, in order to steer clear of the Boss’s inevitable agitation, Berra was immune from his wrath, a made man. Steinbrenner had seen to that, making it clear to his people that Berra should get whatever he wanted.

  That wasn’t much, compared to other dignitaries, including some who qualified as Yankees royalty. Just the same, Steinbrenner would tug on Berra’s arm every now and then and say, “I have something you may want for your museum.”

  One day he handed over bronzed plaques of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle that had hung on the outfield fence of the old stadium before it was renovated during the midseventies. The gifts were accepted and brought across the river to New Jersey to adorn a wall of the museum. In another section of the museum, titled “Forgiving the Boss,” there is a blown-up photo of a smiling Berra and Steinbrenner on the night of their reconciliation.

  There was never any getting around the fact that Steinbrenner’s bluster and sometimes brutish tendencies were anathema to Berra. But he had come around to the belief that the man should ultimately be judged on results, for delivering on his vow to restore the franchise to championship prominence and beyond after buying it from CBS in 1973.

  “We went through some bad times, like everyone else,” Berra said. “But he was very generous, a good man. I wish I could have played for him.”

  Considering Steinbrenner’s unceremonious firing of Berra as manager, this sounded like quite a leap to everlasting loyalty. But after all was said and done, there was no denying that Steinbrenner loved the Yankees and had honored their winning tradition, however heavy-handedly. As far as Berra was concerned, that overrode everything, including his personal indignities.

  There was also no doubt how much Steinbrenner had wanted to make amends. He had spent the better part of a decade proving it. It was Steinbrenner who had persuaded Berra to accompany the Yankees to Japan for their season-opening series in 2004—a trip even the Boss didn’t make. Berra, it seemed, was part of every important team occasion in the 2000s. He was invited to press conferences introducing the latest free agent catch, led the championship parade, and stood front and center when the city broke ground for the new stadium in 2006.

  He was also honorary captain for the 2008 All-Star Game in the team’s last season at the old ballpark, when it finally hit home that a sobbing, sedentary Steinbrenner was a shell of his once formidable self. If that wasn’t sobering enough, Berra was one of a handful of guests invited by the Boss’s people to game two of the 2009 World Series, a strange and disorienting night.

  To begin with, the Yankees arranged for the New York–born rap star Jay-Z to perform his hit single “Empire State of Mind,” from the best-selling album The Blueprint 3, accompanied by Alicia Keys. The song had served as the soundtrack for Derek Jeter’s at bats during the regular season and had blasted in the clubhouse during the Yankees’ celebrations after winning the division and league championship series.

  An avid fan, Jay-Z had worn a Yankees cap in music videos, in magazine photos, and on album covers. He had been shown on the large center-field screen at Yankee Stadium during numerous home games throughout the regular season and the playoffs. And yet, one line from the song—“Shit, I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can”—would never have passed muster with a more attentive Steinbrenner.

  But the October 2009 version of the Boss was wheelchair-bound, sitting near a large round table, blankly watching the game on a flat-screen television with none of his trademark vigor. Elaine Kaufman, the owner of Elaine’s, the famous Upper East Side bar and restaurant, was there. So were Steinbrenner family members and a few minority owners.

  When Berra walked in, Steinbrenner looked up through eyes that had once burned with energy but were now fading embers. With a wan smile, he reached out for Berra, who bent over to give him a hug. “Yogi,” he said, barely audible. “Good to see you.”

  “Not one of the Boss’s better days,” someone whispered in Berra’s ear. Yogi walked away thinking it was a cruel injustice for Steinbrenner to have become such a shell of himself. He deserved to be the Boss until the end, for better or worse.

  At least there was baseball to occupy his mind. Berra settled in to watch the Yankees even the series behind the pitching of A. J. Burnett and home runs by Mark Teixeira and Hideki Matsui. But he couldn’t quite shake the image of Steinbrenner in the wheelchair. It was the last time the Boss was in the house that he had built and the last time Berra saw him alive.

  Nine days after he called Steinbrenner to wish him happy birthday and hung up thinking he might actually see him again on Old-Ti
mers’ Day, Berra was reading the morning papers in his Montclair home when the telephone rang. It was a Steinbrenner family aide, calling from Tampa, to say that the Boss had suffered a heart attack and been taken to the hospital.

  “No . . . no, I just talked to him,” Berra protested. “He sounded OK.”

  But he wasn’t, and a while later the second call that Berra was dreading came. It was the same family aide telling him that Steinbrenner was gone, the Boss was no more. Berra went into the other room to tell Carmen. He plopped down in his chair and sat there quietly, thinking back to that wonderful night in January 1999, ignoring all that had happened before. The inevitable tears rolled down his cheeks.

  Completely lost on Berra, at least for the moment, was that after all that had gone down between them—fourteen years of famously fascinating grudge holding on his part—somebody had apparently made sure that he was on the short list of people to call.

  When Ron Guidry got word of the news in steamy Louisiana, he was emotionally prepared. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that the Boss’s health was deteriorating. Having lost elders in his own family, including Bonnie’s parents, he had suspected for a while that Steinbrenner might not have long to go.

  Unlike Berra, Guidry heard of Steinbrenner’s death from the television. He and Bonnie shared a moment together, a hug, then went about their business for the day. Then Guidry, who would be leaving for New York within two days, thought about how emotional the weekend up there was going to be. Upset as he was by the news, he was also a pragmatist, able to focus on the positive. He could be sad yet thankful for what had been.

  In the case of Steinbrenner, he was struck by the realization that at least the Boss had lived long enough to see the new stadium open and the Yankees win another World Series, the seventh of his ownership and the franchise’s twenty-seventh overall. It was a remarkable story line, really, the Boss going out on top, the way he would have scripted it in one of the press releases that his New York–based PR heavyweight Howard Rubenstein had been knocking out on his behalf in the years since he’d dropped out of sight.

  Like Berra, Guidry had long made his peace with Steinbrenner, appreciative of the fact that the volatile man who was capable of egregious mistakes was also capable of not only admitting them but making up for them as well.

  Case in point: In 1978, Guidry’s 25–3 season for the ages, he was named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. The awards dinner just happened to be in Tampa. Steinbrenner attended the banquet and asked to say a few words about his star left-hander.

  He didn’t beg Guidry’s forgiveness, as he would with Berra twenty-one years later. But in this very public setting, he went out of his way to set the record straight.

  “I almost made a big mistake in 1976 by trading this young man,” he said. “I’m so glad I was talked out of it, because, as it turns out, we would never have accomplished what we did in the last couple of years if it wasn’t for him.”

  The fact that Steinbrenner told this to the audience as opposed to saying it in private meant everything to a proud man like Guidry. Love him or hate him, he had the ability to tell the world, in effect, I was a fool.

  “Like with Yogi, the biggest thing was that he flew from Tampa to New Jersey to apologize,” Guidry said. “He didn’t send a car and a plane and bring him to Tampa. He got on the damn plane himself. And if he had walked in that door and said, ‘Hey, Yogi, how’re you doing?’ Yogi would have gone to the ballpark the next day. He wouldn’t have had to say anything. But he did, because he knew it was the right thing to do. So regardless of how you felt about him as a player or as a coach—and it never was easy—you wind up realizing that he only was demanding the best and he wasn’t afraid to do that, to put himself out there and not give a damn what anyone thought.”

  In the end, Steinbrenner had won Guidry over, convinced him that he was much more than a rich man with some deep psychological need to control and belittle other men—what Guidry had originally believed. Knowing how it all turned out, Guidry could even smile now at the memories of Steinbrenner barging into the clubhouse, pointing fingers, making the winning and losing of a ballgame out to be life-and-death.

  When one of the young Yankees would casually remark how much he would have enjoyed playing for Steinbrenner in his autocratic prime, Guidry would smirk and say, “You have no idea.” It was impossible to know how anyone would react to such ribald harassment in the heat of a pennant race or an ego-deflating slump.

  “He would start in—‘You and you and you!’—and then he’d tell you that he’s got this multimillion-dollar business, the New York Yankees, and we’re supposed to be playing like New York Yankees,” Guidry said. “So he’s chewing your ass out, and if you put your tail between your legs and go hide, do you know what that looks like in his eyes? It looks like he doesn’t have anything.

  “But if he points his finger at you and you flip him off or you tell him exactly where he can go, he’s going to rant and rave and then walk outside that door and say, ‘Man, I’ve got somebody.’ He won’t tell you that to your face. But deep down inside, he knows it.”

  Steinbrenner, Guidry said, relished the role of the imperious patriarch, never minded being the bad guy. He cited the famous Sports Illustrated cover of the Boss on a horse in a Napoleon outfit.

  “Was Napoleon a good guy or a horrible guy?” Guidry said. “Trust me, George preferred it that way, but he actually had a heart of gold. That should be on his gravestone—no matter how he appeared on the outside, he was good on the inside.”

  Sitting next to her husband, Bonnie Guidry nodded, contemplating her own brushes with the Boss back in the day, or especially during her Ronnie’s best days, in 1978.

  On the final scheduled day of that regular season, the Yankees had come all the way back from a fourteen-game deficit to lead the Red Sox by one game with one to play. All they had to do was beat Cleveland, a team with ninety losses, to clinch the American League East. Instead, Catfish Hunter lasted only an inning and two-thirds; the Yankees got rocked 9–2 and fell into a tie with the victorious Sox, forcing the one-game playoff at Fenway Park the next afternoon.

  After the Cleveland loss, some of the Yankees’ wives got together and decided that while they didn’t ordinarily travel with the team, they had a right to be at Fenway the next day for what promised to be a historic game. Getting on the plane with their husbands was out of the question, but someone raised the possibility of asking the Yankees to charter a plane for them.

  The outspoken Bonnie was asked to present the request to Steinbrenner. Before she had a chance to think too much about marching into the Boss’s office after such a defeat—and to Cleveland, his native city, no less—she agreed. But just to be on the safe side, she asked Stormy Dent, Bucky’s wife at the time, to accompany her.

  Steinbrenner was in his office with the door closed when the two women presented themselves to his secretary—Doris, as Bonnie recalled—and asked if they could have a moment with the big man. Doris told them to have a seat; she would check in a couple of minutes.

  Just as they sat down, the telephone rang, and the door to Steinbrenner’s office opened.

  “World champion New York Yankees,” Doris said, answering the phone.

  Appearing in the doorway, Steinbrenner furiously blurted out, “World champions? They’re not world champions. They’re chumps! World chumps, the way they played today!”

  Bonnie looked at Stormy, thinking maybe this wasn’t a good time to bring up the charter. Too late: Steinbrenner had spotted them. They didn’t even get a chance to introduce themselves before he demanded, “And what do you two want?”

  He took a second look and pointed to Stormy Dent. “And you, your husband, he hasn’t had a damn hit in a week!”

  Steinbrenner was exaggerating only slightly. Bucky Dent had gone hitless in the Cleveland series and was one for his last thirteen.

  Bonnie was thankful—pleasantly surprised even—that the owner seemed to place
them with their husbands. She guessed that Steinbrenner at least knew of her because Ron had gone in one day at her urging to demand a telephone for the players’ family lounge. “Either you spend five minutes talking to me or you can talk to my wife for an hour,” Guidry had said.

  They got the phone. What the hell, Bonnie reasoned now; she might as well go for the plane.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner, we think we should be in Boston tomorrow,” she said. “We’re not asking to go with the team, but we think the Yankees should get a plane for the wives.”

  Steinbrenner ranted some more about the Yankees losing to Cleveland and having to go to Boston at all. But later that evening, the wives boarded a charter and joined their husbands in their Boston hotel.

  When Dent heard about Steinbrenner’s rant from his wife, he wasn’t too pleased. As fate would have it, on the Dents’ way out of the hotel for a bite to eat, the elevator door opened, and there was Steinbrenner, who apparently hadn’t forgotten what he’d said. He also intuitively knew it was time to make nice. “Your time will come,” he told his stone-faced shortstop.

  The next day, they all watched Dent crack the biggest hit of his life—a three-run homer in the seventh inning off Mike Torrez—to ignite the pennant-clinching victory.

  Was it a coincidence or another instance where Steinbrenner incited a Yankee to do something heroic? Depends what kind of spin you want to put on it.

  Before the playoff game, when Steinbrenner came into the clubhouse to fire up his troops, he especially wanted to have an audience with Guidry, his starting pitcher. Starting pitchers seldom want to talk to anyone before a game, and the last person Guidry wanted a pep talk from before this game was Steinbrenner. He hid under a table that was draped with a towel by the trainer, Gene Monahan. When the Boss asked where the heck Guidry was, he was told out in the bullpen, probably. Steinbrenner never found Guidry, who nonetheless appreciated the thought.