Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  The morning after the earthquake, with most of San Francisco without electricity or running water and some of the city still in flames, Vincent had done a national television interview. He was unshaven, his hair was untidy, and he did not wear a tie.

  “You looked like a bum,” Steinbrenner told Vincent over the phone. “Don’t do that again. You represent all of us in baseball.”

  Vincent was offended. He had been up all night. His hotel did not even have functioning toilets.

  So, entering the hearing on July 5, 1990, Vincent and Steinbrenner were not adversaries, but they were not chummy either. That became resoundingly evident early in the meeting, which would last about four hours and then continue into the next day. Almost from the outset, Vincent personally and pointedly interrogated Steinbrenner in great detail about his dealings with Howie Spira, who in March had been indicted by a federal grand jury on eight counts of trying to extort money from Steinbrenner and Dave Winfield. The two days of Steinbrenner’s testimony in the commissioner’s office would produce a 392-page transcript, which was leaked a few days later to the National Sports Daily, a new publication that would last only eighteen months.

  A day after the National printed excerpts of the transcript, Vincent’s office released the full document, although parts were redacted. The editing of Steinbrenner’s comments prompted one of several disputes between Vincent’s office and Steinbrenner’s lawyers.

  In the released transcript, Steinbrenner did not come off well. Twenty-five years later, his lawyers admitted that their client was not a convincing, robust or resilient witness in the face of Vincent’s grilling. Steinbrenner’s performance surprised the attorneys, but they had also not been able to prepare their client for Vincent’s likely line of attack, since the commissioner had refused to give Steinbrenner’s legal team a copy of John Dowd’s investigative report, which would have been required in a court of law.

  But this was not technically a legal proceeding.

  “It is a private proceeding,” Vincent wrote in his memoir, The Last Commissioner. As such, he continued, “the accused in a baseball hearing doesn’t have much in the way of civil rights . . . no different from a private men’s eating club kicking out a member for chewing gum in the dining room.”

  And in this proceeding, Steinbrenner, Vincent said, would not be allowed to call other witnesses to buttress his defense. He alone was left to expound on his bewildering contacts with Spira. He was not his own best witness.

  Steinbrenner’s explanation for giving Spira $40,000—and having him paid circuitously through two law firms—seemed mendacious, or at least wholly mystifying. George said he gave Spira the money for a variety of reasons: compassion for Spira’s financial plight (he had a sick mother and a gambling problem); fear that Spira might harm him or his family or reveal something embarrassing about their personal dealings; and worry that Spira would expose shameful lifestyle choices about, of all people, Lou Piniella, the ex–Yankees’ manager.

  What Steinbrenner did not do was admit to making the payment for what seemed the most obvious reason, which was also what Spira alleged: so that Spira would turn over damaging information on Winfield and his foundation.

  In the hearing, it did not appear that Vincent believed any of Steinbrenner’s justifications for the payment. At one point, Vincent incredulously asked George if there wasn’t an obvious, singular reason he gave Spira the money—that is, to get the dirt on Winfield.

  George wouldn’t bite.

  “This guy was a bad guy,” George said. “He scared me and he really scared my children . . . I wanted him to get away from me and get away from here . . . And then there was the Lou Piniella situation. He [Spira] said that he threatened to sell information, as I recall he told me, on Lou Piniella and his sports betting habits. I didn’t want to see baseball or Lou Piniella dragged through something the way it would have been sensationalized. We couldn’t take it.”

  Piniella’s only offense, if it was an offense, was that he liked to visit the horse-racing track occasionally, as he later testified to Vincent. He placed legal bets for between $20 and $50 and incurred no significant debts. Vincent later cleared Piniella of any wrongdoing.

  But some of the most damning testimony in Steinbrenner’s hearing with Vincent came as the result of an exchange about why George, if he feared Spira so much, did not immediately contact law enforcement authorities or the baseball commissioner’s office. To quote from a portion of the hearing transcript:

  VINCENT: This is really the guts of it, from where I’m sitting. I’m putting myself in your shoes . . . I’m sitting in Tampa and I’m talking to my advisers, as I assume you were. Indeed, you’ve testified that they told you—

  STEINBRENNER: Not do it.

  VINCENT: To not do it?

  STEINBRENNER: Absolutely.

  VINCENT: And you’re a smart fellow and have been around baseball. And here is a guy we know has been involved in some bad things. We know he’s a gambler or a former gambler. We know, to put it in your terms, that he may be involved in extorting money from you.

  STEINBRENNER: Threatening me.

  VINCENT: Yes. Why didn’t you behave differently? Why didn’t you call authorities? Why didn’t you surround yourself with people who could protect you, both physically and legally? You might have called me . . . If it were me, I certainly would have gone to baseball and said, “Look, I’m in a very tough spot.” Even if you wanted to make the payment over your advisers’ recommendation, why wouldn’t you have come to me to say I’m going to make a payment? You did quite the reverse. You made the payment in a way that wasn’t direct. You did it through a law firm with a bunch of steps—I’m being critical here—that were not straightforward.

  George’s response was that he didn’t know if anyone could protect him from Spira’s wrath. “I mean, they shot the President of the United States and they shot the Pope,” he told Vincent. “If somebody wants to shoot you, they are going to shoot you.”

  Later, Vincent wondered why Steinbrenner didn’t realize how much he was undermining his place in baseball if he gave money to a known gambler.

  VINCENT: Did anybody say to you: “George, suppose this guy takes the money and pays off gambling debts. You are now an owner in baseball financing a gambler?”

  STEINBRENNER: I didn’t—I never thought of that.

  But Vincent had most definitely thought of it. Moreover, he knew that George Steinbrenner might never have given Howie Spira the time of day—let alone met with him and instructed subordinates to talk with him—if Spira had not floated the notion that he could prove that Dave Winfield’s foundation was guilty of some malfeasance.

  The hearing in Vincent’s office ended. The commissioner said he would probably decide whether to discipline Steinbrenner within a few weeks.

  Seven days later, George’s lawyers said they were preparing to sue Vincent if he suspended their client, because the hearing had been biased and unfair. “We were prevented from presenting any case at all,” Paul Curran, a Steinbrenner lawyer and a former US attorney, told me in an interview in 2000. “It was one-sided. Looking back, George wasn’t given an equal chance.”

  Another week passed. Vincent was holed up at his summer home on Cape Cod, along with his deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg, who, like Vincent, was a Yale Law School grad. The duo, along with John Dowd, reviewed the many depositions that had been taken from scores of baseball figures, including Winfield and multiple Yankees employees.

  George didn’t like the quiet or the fact that the New York newspapers were speculating that he was soon going to be suspended for not one, but two years. So George decided to invite a gaggle of newspaper writers to his suite on the twelfth floor of the Regency Hotel on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. (For all his time in New York, Steinbrenner never bought a home or established a permanent residence in Manhattan, preferring to stay in various refined midtown hotels.)

  Meeting with reporters, Steinbrenner was a mix of defiant and vulnerable
as he talked for an hour and twenty minutes. He sat in a large, flower-embroidered chair and wore an open-collared dress shirt and slacks, without a tie or jacket, which was rare for him in public.

  At various times in the interview, he frowned and smiled at the same time.

  “There’s something to be concerned about,” George said. “It’s a worry when you’re in a situation where you’re sitting there and you want to stay active in baseball and somebody may come down and say no to you about that.

  “I’m worried. But I am very comfortable with the facts in this case . . . I believe there will be no suspension.”

  A minute later, he conceded a suspension might happen.

  “It would be very difficult,” he said. “Two years?”

  He had been suspended before, in 1974, by then baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn for illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign. Would this be a harder penalty to accept?

  “I was younger then,” Steinbrenner responded. “There’s less time. It’s tough; I’m sixty. That’s getting up there.”

  The next day, at a news conference, New York governor Mario Cuomo suggested that Steinbrenner might have to sell the Yankees. Cuomo said the state might be a bidder for the team. “I wish he would talk to us,” the governor said.

  Representatives of New York City’s legislative body read Cuomo’s comments and said the city would consider buying the team, too. After all, it already owned Yankee Stadium.

  Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner’s mood was not improving. “I’m not selling the Yankees,” he roared when approached after another Yankees loss.

  Vincent remained on Cape Cod, giving no exact timetable for when he might deliver his ruling on the matter.

  In late July, Steinbrenner’s lawyers requested that Vincent reopen the hearing. They wanted to call forty-eight witnesses in Steinbrenner’s defense. The list of potential witnesses included everyone from broadcaster Howard Cosell to Spira’s mailman in the Bronx.

  Vincent rejected the request. “No more witnesses,” he said, adding that Steinbrenner’s lawyers could submit to him any additional information or testimony in writing.

  Which Steinbrenner’s lawyers did. But all of the wrangling, public relations efforts and negotiations did not predict what would transpire on July 30, when Steinbrenner arrived at Vincent’s Park Avenue office at 9 a.m.

  Steinbrenner would not leave for eleven and one-half hours, and when he did, he was neither suspended nor told to sell the team. But he could have nothing to do with baseball or the day-to-day operations of the Yankees. For the rest of his life.

  He also agreed not to sue the baseball commissioner.

  And in the strangest twist of all, the penalty was Steinbrenner’s idea.

  Leaving the meeting, Steinbrenner said, “I will not comment on the decision.”

  Of course, he nonetheless commented on it. “I’m very happy it was resolved. I’m very satisfied with the resolution,” he said.

  The outcome of the meeting shocked the American sports community. And George’s reaction to it was astonishing.

  Vincent, in a statement and at a news conference, explained his decision on punishing Steinbrenner under baseball’s Rule 21(f), which allows the commissioner to act in the “best interests of baseball.” Vincent’s conclusions would be fairly obvious to anyone who had read the transcript of the interview, since Vincent was highly skeptical of Steinbrenner’s explanations for paying Spira.

  He chastised Steinbrenner for the payment and the private investigation into Winfield and his foundation based on Spira’s allegations. He insisted that no baseball owner was allowed to have a secret, working relationship with a known gambler.

  And then, as if he were talking about Watergate, Vincent talked about the cover-up. “I am able to discern an attempt to force explanations in hindsight onto discomforting facts,” Vincent wrote. “And I am able to evaluate a pattern of behavior that borders on the bizarre . . . He knew the payment, if exposed, would look bad and he knew, or at least should have known, that, if the payment were exposed, it would bring disrepute to him and therefore to baseball. As a result efforts were made to cover it up.”

  As for the claims made by Steinbrenner’s lawyers that the hearing was biased, Vincent said, “In my view, Mr. Steinbrenner’s dilemma is not with the procedures I have utilized, but with his inability to rewrite history.”

  Fay Vincent has had decades to review what happened in his office on July 30, 1990. In an interview at his Connecticut home in 2017, he sighed when recounting a long day of negotiating, but he remembered minute details as if they had occurred the previous day. He conceded that the back-and-forth might have remained fresh in his mind because it was so peculiar that Steinbrenner chose the terms of his own banishment.

  Vincent came to the July 30 meeting intending to suspend Steinbrenner for two years. He and his deputy Steve Greenberg had prepared an alternative punishment in the unlikely scenario that George wanted something other than the suspension. Nonetheless, Vincent was more or less dumbfounded when Steinbrenner actually asked for an alternative, which turned out to be a permanent prohibition from having any involvement in the management of the Yankees, except for certain business or financial decisions (but not player transactions, trades or free-agent signings).

  Steinbrenner had a couple of overarching goals. He was desperate not to be suspended again, which he felt—incorrectly—would be a worse stain on his legacy. He also worried that if he was suspended by baseball he would lose his coveted position as vice president of the United States Olympic Committee. Steinbrenner, the former college hurdler and the son of a top champion hurdler, prized his Olympic duties. At the July 30 meeting, Vincent quoted Steinbrenner as saying that the Olympic Committee position was “the most important thing to me in my life right now.”

  So George was insistent.

  “He had a conniption over one word in particular,” Vincent said in 2017. Steinbrenner did not want the commissioner in any way to use the word “suspended,” and Vincent did not.

  “But he was essentially bargaining a two-year suspension into a lifetime ban,” Vincent said. “And that was a silly deal. I tried to talk him out of it. I said, ‘You’ll go on the permanently ineligible list.’ But I don’t think he understood that it was actually a lifetime thing. It was a terrible mistake.

  “But George said the Olympic Committee wouldn’t let him in if I suspended him. He said, ‘I want to leave baseball. I’m fed up.’

  “I said, ‘George, you don’t realize what that means.’”

  George’s lawyers had used stronger words in private with their client at the July 30 meeting. “We begged him not to take the lifetime ban,” Curran said. “Everyone in the room took a run at convincing him. But we could not get him to see the gravity and terms. And he gave away his right to sue as well.”

  Why would George prefer an exile, which meant he could not set foot in the Yankees’ offices, clubhouse, press box or any other team property? Why would he make such a choice?

  In George’s mind at the time, and within a few months he had a change of heart, he could get around most of the ban. He would still be able to attend quarterly ownership meetings, and in those meetings he could express his opinions about how the Yankees should be run, including the free agents they should or should not sign, or who should be in the starting lineup, or who should be managing. Surreptitiously, he could probably communicate his wishes in other ways.

  “You have to put yourself in George’s position in 1990,” Vincent said in 2017. “I think at every step of his life to that point, he thought he was the smartest person in the room. And in many respects, he was right. He had been successful. He thought he could come out ahead again. He was also a little fed up with the day-to-day baseball business. He’s thinking, ‘Things aren’t going very well for us. We’re not doing very well. I’ll turn it over to my family. I can stay involved from afar.’”

  In fact, in time, weighing in on
team issues every three months would not prove to be effective—or satisfying to Steinbrenner. Moreover, Vincent imposed strict prohibitions on George’s direct contact with Yankee decision-makers, like the general manager, manager, scouting director and others. Those employees had to periodically sign affidavits stating they had not been in contact with Steinbrenner in any way.

  But even with those encumbrances, George figured he had another, easy way to get around the limitations of his ban. He would put his thirty-three-year-old son, Hank, in charge of the team. And his other son, Hal, then twenty-one, would soon come into the Yankees fold.

  “George felt he could cheat,” Vincent said. “His thinking was something like, ‘I’ll be able to have dinner with my boys and they’ll be running the team and I’ll tell them what I want. And they’ll do it.’”

  It would be as simple as that.

  Except it would not be that simple. While Steinbrenner’s lawyers said on July 30 that Hank Steinbrenner would take over the ownership duties of the Yankees, less than two weeks later, Hank decided he did not want to run the Yankees. He had been a team executive once before, traveling with the Yankees as a kind of special adviser in the mid-1980s. He saw what it was like to be under his father’s thumb then. Hank has never spoken at length about his decision not to succeed his father in 1990, but he has told others in the organization that he viewed the arrangement as a titanic, stressful travail.

  In the late eighties, Hank had stepped away from the Yankees to run the family’s 860-acre horse farm in central Florida. He preferred that job expressly because it was away from the limelight. Asked once why he liked being around horses instead of baseball players, he answered, “Because the horses don’t talk back.”