Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Guidry prepared rabbit stew one last time for Steinbrenner during spring training 2010. He just didn’t know when he would get the opportunity to serve it, because Steinbrenner had pretty much stopped coming to the ballpark.

  But when Guidry went to the annual Boys & Girls Clubs fundraising luncheon the Yankees hold every spring, lo and behold, there Steinbrenner was, in his wheelchair, sounding weak but alert enough to badger Guidry one last time.

  “When are you bringing the stew?” he asked.

  “You’re never there,” Guidry said.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow night,” Steinbrenner said.

  Guidry delivered the stew the next night and thought about the time Steinbrenner had wandered over at Grambling, where his father had done the cooking. He choked up a bit on his way down to the field, thinking about how precious time was, how important it was to not waste it. He thought about Steinbrenner and Berra and all the traditions that went with being part of the Yankees extended family.

  Some traditions, he decided, are worth carrying on, no matter who is left to participate. The following year, the Yankees’ first spring training without George Steinbrenner in thirty-eight years, Guidry made another rabbit stew at his apartment, brought a bowl to the ballpark the next day, and headed straight for the executive office.

  There he found Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal, a Yankees general partner and vice chairperson. “Jenny, I used to make this for your dad,” he said. “I’d feel funny if I didn’t offer you some.”

  The Boss’s daughter was taken aback. Rabbit stew wasn’t exactly her choice cuisine. But she was so touched by Guidry’s sincerity that she took the bowl and later sat down to eat. “It was delicious,” she said. “The Cajun spices were amazing.”

  She later tracked down Guidry, told him she loved the stew, and asked if he would continue to make it for her for as long as he came to spring training. Her father would have liked that.

  On the day Steinbrenner died, the phones didn’t stop ringing at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center. The interview requests were countless, for obvious reasons. If anyone could speak to the paradoxical nature of the owner’s personality, it was Berra, who had experienced Steinbrenner at his worst and at his absolute best.

  “It was huge, oh my gosh,” Jessica Steinbrenner, the Boss’s other daughter, said, when asked how significant the apology to Berra was in her father’s life. The gesture, she said, was probably the most vulnerable the Boss had ever allowed himself to be as an adult.

  “There were times that Dad had been overwhelmed by emotion and reduced to tears, but making up with Yogi may have been the biggest, most emotional, and best thing he’d ever done,” she said. “For all his temper and lashing out, he was able to be reflective and come to a middle ground to remedy a terrible mistake.”

  It wasn’t long after Steinbrenner’s apology to Berra that he began to show symptoms of physical decline—unable to keep from crying in public during emotional moments, fainting in December 2003 at a funeral service for football legend Otto Graham in Florida, and moving noticeably more stiffly and slowly.

  The argument could be made that Steinbrenner had acted in the nick of time with Berra, before the window closed. He wrote one of the great story lines in Yankees history and created a narrative that may have benefited no one more than himself.

  “Think about how much that helped the way George was perceived as he got older,” said Rick Cerrone, the former media relations director, who was with Steinbrenner that night in January 1999. “Not only was Yogi around the Yankees—which in itself was a blessing—but it put a softer face on George. It helped people really see that there was a whole different side.”

  This was the side that Berra chose to remember when he met with reporters in the lobby of his museum hours after learning of Steinbrenner’s death. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a Yankees cap and was accompanied by his son Dale. Also present was Carmen, who chimed in that Steinbrenner would surprise people with acts of kindness—little things, like sending vendors to the section where the wives of players and coaches were sitting to bring them cotton candy during a World Series game.

  Berra pointed out that while people criticized Steinbrenner for buying the best free agents with enhanced Yankees revenue streams, he was the one who had created those streams. People had to admit that Steinbrenner was only playing by baseball’s modern rules and that he had adapted to them better than anyone else.

  Berra didn’t want to sound as though he was blind to Steinbrenner’s imperfections. For one thing, Berra wished that the Boss could have settled all his old scores. It bothered him that Joe Torre and Don Zimmer, in particular, had had messy divorces with Steinbrenner and the Yankees and would never get the chance to reconcile with the Boss.

  He could smile at the memory of how upset Steinbrenner had been on the October night in 1999 when Zimmer was struck in the face by a foul ball. Berra and the Boss had hustled from his box into the elevator and down to the clubhouse, where Zimmer thought he was seeing things when the cobwebs cleared and he saw their concerned faces hovering over him.

  Zimmer’s habit of speaking his mind, of not tolerating Steinbrenner’s antics, ultimately got him on the Boss’s bad side and led to his angry exit from the franchise in 2003. Zimmer further antagonized Steinbrenner in a tell-all book two years later.

  Torre’s situation was much different. Although he had his share of run-ins with Steinbrenner over his twelve years as manager, most of them were kept private—at least until the end of his tenure, in 2007, when the Yankees staged a public and tortured contract negotiation that led to his resignation. Torre knew there were others in the organization hankering for change and, more important, that the Boss was not well. Just the same, he later asked Berra, “How long did you stay away?”

  “Me? Fourteen years.”

  “I might be gone longer than that,” Torre said, admitting that the publication of his book, The Yankee Years, in 2009 had infuriated many in the organization and wasn’t about to land him on the guest list anytime soon.

  But by the fall of 2010, there was no point in either party perpetuating a feud that seemed unnecessarily petty in the aftermath of Steinbrenner’s death. Torre returned to the Bronx and stepped into the new stadium for the first time that September when the Yankees unveiled a monument to their fallen owner.

  No one could argue that the Boss didn’t deserve one, but everyone, Berra included, was struck by its size. It loomed over the ballpark like the visage of a Third-World dictator. Berra shrugged when someone noted that it was double the size of Babe Ruth’s and laughed when another Yankees insider joked that it was probably visible from outer space.

  But Berra would not personally engage in any Steinbrenner bashing, not a single word, and he wouldn’t take kindly to anyone else’s criticism that at least wasn’t laced with humor. That was something Guidry had noticed in the years since Berra had returned to the Yankees. “You can’t say anything bad about George around Yogi,” Guidry said. “If you do, he’ll give you a look. That’s just the way it is, just where Yogi was.”

  Berra was back inside the Steinbrenner circle and hoping to land in the winner’s circle after Jessica Steinbrenner, who handled the family’s thoroughbred operation in Ocala, Florida, named a promising colt Yogi Berra—just as she had named one Boss Yankee for her father.

  When she asked Berra’s permission, he was flattered. “Sure,” he said. But a few months later, when he ran into Jessica in the family box, Berra, not exactly enlightened on the developmental timeline of a thoroughbred, wanted to know if his namesake had won anything yet.

  “Yogi, we have to wait two years before we run him,” she said.

  He frowned and shook his head. “I hope I’m alive in two years,” he said, perhaps thinking of Jessica’s father.

  She squeezed his arm, flashed a warm smile, and said, “Something to look forward to.”

  13. Concessions

  Something weighed heavily on Yogi Berr
a as he arrived at spring training 2011. It was a subject he had broached with Carmen at home and Dave Kaplan at the museum before leaving New Jersey but now had to run past Ron Guidry, whose opinion would matter most.

  Mindful of the toll that his fall of the previous summer had taken and worried that he could no longer deal with the rigors of daily participation in the spring training routine, Berra posed the question to Guidry in the form of a childlike plea: “It’s OK I don’t wear the uniform, isn’t it?”

  The question surprised Guidry—though not because he hadn’t considered the possibility that Berra might not be spry enough to clomp around in cleats and a baseball suit anymore. It was more the innocence of the phrasing, the notion that Berra might actually need permission and that someone might disapprove of him hanging around the clubhouse without the familiar number 8 on his back.

  But Guidry soon came around to the realization that Berra wasn’t really asking as much as he was coming to grips with the uneasy transition in his own mind. Guidry had once been forced to pull off the road in a fit of convulsive laughter when Berra had told him he had to shoot an “affliction commercial.” Now Guidry seized up, grit his teeth, and gripped the wheel tightly. How difficult, he thought, it must have been for Berra to reach the conclusion that he could no longer dress the part of the forever Yankee, as he had for more than six decades—excluding his self-imposed exile, when his baseball wardrobe had been limited to the cap.

  The cap he had never stopped wearing.

  “It’s OK, Yogi,” Guidry said, nodding. “No one’s going to mind.”

  And one more thing, Berra said. He wouldn’t be in the dugout with Guidry anymore for the exhibition games. Even if that were allowed, under no circumstances would he let himself be down there dressed as a civilian.

  “You don’t need to be sitting in no dugout,” Guidry told him. “Go upstairs where it’s comfortable, it’s air-conditioned, where they got food.”

  The next day, Berra still insisted on arriving just after the birds began chirping. Wearing a blue Yankees windbreaker and cap, he made his way into Joe Girardi’s office before catching up with the regulars—trainers Gene Monahan and Steve Donohue, old hands Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, and of course his pal Nick Swisher.

  He also made sure to shake hands with the new starting catcher, Russell Martin, who remembered the time he looked up from his dressing stall in the Dodgers’ clubhouse at Shea Stadium and did a double take as Berra strolled by. “Holy shit,” he said to himself. “That’s Yogi Bleeping Berra.”

  On the afternoon of the first game, Berra took the elevator upstairs to one of the executive suites. He was accompanied by Lou Cucuzza Jr., whose father, Lou Cucuzza Sr., had preceded him as the clubhouse manager and many days could be heard bellowing in the corridor of Yankee Stadium, “Make way, Hall of Famer coming through,” as he transported Berra from one clubhouse to another by cart.

  Before going up, Berra told Guidry that he didn’t think he would want to stay for the whole game—another concession, damn it. “Fine, you don’t have to,” Guidry said, thinking fast. “I’ll take you back early.”

  Guidry asked Cucuzza to go back upstairs during the sixth inning and walk Berra back down to the clubhouse. Guidry would be waiting there for him. He would take a quick shower, get dressed, and pick up Berra’s bag, then off they would go, Berra to the hotel and Guidry to his apartment, until it was time for dinner.

  This quickly became the new normal, and Guidry couldn’t help but feel some sadness. The fact of the matter was that he still hadn’t quite adjusted to Berra’s inability to play golf beyond the few ceremonial tee shots at his own tournament.

  “That was hard for me, not being able to play with Yogi anymore,” he said. “We always had such a good time, so much fun, with the General. It didn’t feel the same without him.”

  Now it was Berra’s proximity to the game and the many hours they had shared on the bench that would be no more. Of course, no one had to spell out for Guidry that the bottom line was Berra’s comfort and safety. The man was almost eighty-six years old, and there had been times in recent years when Guidry would glance over his shoulder to see Berra’s chin drilling a hole in his chest.

  As Guidry had once been mindful of the television camera to make sure Carmen didn’t catch him slipping Yogi a tobacco stash, now he kept vigil for another reason. The last thing he was going to do was let the television audience get an up-close-and-personal look at Berra snoozing his way through the game.

  As soon as the camera turned into the dugout, Guidry would stick an elbow into Berra’s side and say, “Yogi, you see that?”

  Startled awake, Berra would look around and say, “Naw, I missed it. What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Guidry would say, potential embarrassment averted.

  Guidry had considered it part of the deal, and he had loved every minute of it. But now it was over. It was time for the next phase and to be grateful for the time they’d had. “No matter how much I’d like to have him down there with me, he’s better off up there now,” Guidry reasoned. “It’s better this way for his health.”

  And much better, he rationalized, than the inevitable alternative. “The important thing is that he’s here,” Guidry said, noting how Berra seemed more energized after a few days in Tampa than when he had arrived.

  The move upstairs did provide one residual benefit for Guidry—a new round of ammunition in the endless game of good-natured teasing.

  “Oh, you’re too damn big to sit with us,” he told Berra. “You’re with the big brass now.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Berra said with a smile.

  But watching from his perch upstairs, the suite that once fit George Steinbrenner like a throne, Berra in a sense had actually replaced the Boss—in spirit if not in style—as the looming patriarch of the Yankees.

  There were also concessions that Berra was stubbornly not ready to make. He had demonstrated as much a month before going to spring training when he insisted on flying to California to make his annual appearance at the Bob Hope Classic—even after organizers had failed to reach out to him, leaving Berra’s family to assume that they were reluctant to host an unsteady eighty-five-year-old who could no longer play golf.

  But Berra felt an obligation to attend, especially to Hope’s wife, Dolores (who would pass away months later at the age of 102). As long as he could walk, why wouldn’t he go? He could still handle the photo ops, schmooze with the players, and wave to the galleries. Nobody had the heart to tell him that the organizers had not requested his presence and might have decided to pursue younger celebrities.

  A couple of weeks before the event, the Hope people were informed that Berra still wanted to come. In the end, no one objected. He went without incident, one last time.

  Back at spring training, uniform or no uniform, Berra wasn’t about to confine himself to the executive suite or to the city of Tampa, for that matter. One of the most pleasurable aspects of being in Florida was the opportunity to move around with the team, catch up with friends on the Grapefruit League circuit.

  Berra didn’t make all the trips. Some of the road games were a haul, a couple of hours at least when factoring in traffic. When Cucuzza, the clubhouse manager, would ask if he planned to make one of the longer drives, Berra would occasionally stick out his tongue, which meant no. Whenever possible, Berra preferred sign language to express displeasure or sentiment that was contrary.

  As a manager, whenever he noticed his counterpart gesturing to him in disgust for a particular move, such as bringing in his closer early, Berra liked to put a thumb to his nose and wiggle his fingers, in nah-nah-nah-nah-nah fashion. Yogi being Yogi.

  Fortunately, there were several teams within an hour’s drive and people in those places Berra always looked forward to seeing when the opportunity presented itself. Kissimmee, where the Astros train, was one trip that Berra usually made, given his ties to the Houston organization dating back to his coaching days in the mid- to late 1980s.
Besides the former owner, John McMullen, who died in 2005, Berra was close to Craig Biggio, the Astros star who retired in 2007 with 3,060 career hits. Biggio, out of Long Island, had come up as a catcher and credited Berra’s mentoring for helping him to become an all-star behind the plate before making a shift to second base. Berra also made a point of checking in with Dennis Liborio, the team’s longtime clubhouse manager.

  Some of Berra’s baseball relationships went back decades. Others he had developed in the years since his return to the Yankees, just by being around, being himself, dropping by opposing clubhouses to introduce himself to people he admired from afar or whose fathers he had known back in the day. Jim Leyland, who had idolized Berra as a child, was one manager Berra liked very much. Another was Boston’s Terry Francona, who had always appreciated Berra reminiscing about his old man, Tito, in the 1950s.

  One day at Yankee Stadium, Francona brought Berra into the Boston clubhouse, announcing, “Fellas, I just want to introduce you to the guy my dad says is the greatest clutch hitter he ever saw.” Suddenly, Kevin Youkilis, David Ortiz, and the whole lot of them were giving the old Yankee a warm embrace, asking him to sign balls for them.

  In early March 2011, Berra hit the road with the Yankees as they headed to Port Charlotte to play the Rays. He wanted to see Don Zimmer, now the Rays’ senior adviser, and also Rays manager Joe Maddon, a fiftysomething hipster with whom Berra had formed a bond through Zimmer.

  “What the hell are you listening to?” Berra had asked Maddon one day, settling in on the couch as the manager blasted Led Zeppelin. Berra, of course, had heard similar earsplitting music at home, having raised three boys of roughly the same age and musical generation as Maddon.

  Maddon, born to an Italian father (whose name was shortened from Maddonini) and a Polish mother, grew up in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Hazleton and liked to get Berra talking about the Hill in St. Louis. Berra, in turn, would query Maddon on his bold strategies—the defensive shift he used on the Yankees’ Mark Teixeira, for instance—and especially liked to talk about the young Rays star Evan Longoria, who Berra had told a reporter reminded him of a young Joe DiMaggio.