This is an excerpt from the upcoming “The Bosses of the Bronx” by Post columnist Mike Vaccaro, covering the more than 50 years of Steinbrenner ownership of the Yankees. It releases March 24 from Harper Books. This is the first of three excerpts that will appear in The Post.
GEORGE STEINBRENNER’S worst nightmares were realized in the summer of 1978. His team, the defending champions, was in shambles, two weeks behind the Red Sox. His franchise player, Reggie Jackson, was in what appeared to be a permanent stalemate with a hugely popular manager, Billy Martin.
Steinbrenner figured it couldn’t get any worse. Then, right around eight o’clock on the evening of July 23, his phone rang. He picked up. It was Henry Hecht, the Post’s Yankees beat writer.
“George,” Hecht began, “you’re not going to believe what Billy just said.”
A week earlier, a two-year triangular soap opera with Billy, Reggie and the Boss as the primary players had reached a boiling point. Martin ordered Reggie to bunt in extra innings of a game against Kansas City. Reggie did, badly, and Martin took the bunt off. Jackson bunted anyway, popped out, and the veins in Billy’s neck bulged and nearly burst.
He suspended Jackson for a week. Steinbrenner backed up the penalty. Now, wrapping up a weekend series in Chicago, Reggie was back. TV reporter Dick Schaap was there and he asked Reggie what was uppermost in his mind during his time away. Reggie smiled.
“The magnitude,” he said, “of me.”
Later, at a bar at O’Hare Airport, the traveling beat writers cornered Billy, well into his fourth gin and tonic. Reggie, he was told, wouldn’t apologize, said he didn’t do anything wrong.
Martin’s face darkened.
“Shut up, Reggie Jackson,” he said. “We don’t need more of your crap. We’re winning without you.” The writers scribbled furiously. One asked, “Are you sure you want this on the record?”
“Print it!” Martin said, ordering another round.
Not long after, the Yankees were summoned to the gate to board. Martin saw two of the writers, Murray Chass of the Times and Hecht of the Post, and asked if they’d printed what he said. They had. Martin was pleased. He also seemed, all things considered, reasonably sober despite having quaffed five or six drinks.
“I’ve seen him drunk enough times to know the difference,” Hecht would later say.
But Martin was still angry. Standing with the two reporters, he got angrier still. And out it came.
“The two of them deserve each other,” Martin said, and Hecht and Chass heard enough of these rants to know whom he was referring to. And then came the kicker:
“One’s a born liar,” he said, “the other’s convicted.”
HECHT WAS THE one who reached Steinbrenner first, and the Boss was so incensed his voice quivered. Steinbrenner served an 18-month suspension from 1974-75 for illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, a felony that Ronald Reagan would pardon 10 years later but for now still sent him into blind furies whenever it was referenced.
“It’s hard to believe he said those things,” Steinbrenner told Hecht when he calmed. “Was he drinking?”
Hecht assured him that while he was, he’d been completely lucid.
Steinbrenner had little choice. He dispatched GM Al Rosen to Kansas City to accept Billy’s resignation. But watching Billy publicly break down in a hotel lobby when he announced his axing to the assembled newsmen somehow pierced the Boss’ rage. Billy called and apologized; that helped.
There was also this: that day, the Post had asked its readers: who should go, Billy or George?
Ninety-nine percent voted for Steinbrenner to disappear.
The sports editor, Jerry Lisker, demanded a recount. And he was right; that number was off.
“It’s more like 99.3,” he was told.
Three days later, Billy Martin was brought back to Old-Timer’s Day to an enormous ovation and the announcement that he’d return as manager for the 1980 season. Jackson, crestfallen, asked Steinbrenner: “How could you do this to me? You know how I feel about the man.”
So did the writers. That’s why when they demanded a meeting with Martin that Steinbrenner initially refused. Finally, his PR chief, Mickey Morabito, convinced the Boss to let the writers talk to Billy at a Bronx restaurant before he headed off to a long fishing trip, extended R&R. There was one caveat.
“If anything goes wrong,” Steinbrenner told Morabito, “it’s your ass.”
Soon, Morabito knew he’d need to update his résumé. Billy was already two beers in when the writers arrived, and soon he was off.
“I probably made the comment about George,” he said. “I don’t know why, I say a lot of things just to be cute. But I was mad at [Reggie]. He set me off. He won’t admit he made a mistake.”
That was batting practice.
“When Reggie got his money I read the comments, ‘I got no problem, George and I are eye-to-eye.’ But he forgot one man. Billy Martin. If Reggie is here in 1980, he can expect to be treated like one of 25 players. If he abuses the privilege, he’ll have his hand spanked again. I never looked at him like he was a superstar because he never showed he was a superstar.”
Morabito, on the verge of passing out, hustled the lunch to a close. Back at the office, he knocked on Steinbrenner’s door.
“How’d it go?” the Boss asked.
“Not good,” Morabito said. He debriefed him. And wondered if he should duck.
“If this Reggie s— hits the papers tomorrow,” Steinbrenner said, “you’re fired.”
That night, wondering where he could get his hands on enough boxes to pack all his stuff, one of the writers called Morabito.
“See you when I see you,” the writer said. “We just went on strike.”
There would be no bloody back pages the next day, or any day until late October. By the grace of the newspaper guild, Morabito was spared.
EVERY DAY WITH Steinbrenner was a new adventure. Three years later, in the minutes after the Yankees lost Game 4 of the ALDS to Milwaukee, word reached the Yankees: Steinbrenner had grown unhinged as the game ended.
“The guy with the boars is coming!” Reggie Jackson announced.
Minutes later, in walked Steinbrenner, red-faced and spitting mad. As he blew through reporters in the corridor he carpet-bombed his team, specifically catcher Rick Cerone, who’d gotten picked off and struck out with men on base late in the 2-1 loss.
“There are guys here who are on trial, and Rick Cerone is one of them,” Steinbrenner fumed as he roared past the writers. “Stupid baserunning. Now we’ll see who some of these guys are and who deserves to be in the playoffs and if some of the guys here deserve to be Yankees.”
Once in front of his team, Steinbrenner revved his engine into overdrive.
“Tomorrow we will find out what kind of men you are,” he said. “Now you’ve got to show me.”
Most of the players simply sat with heads bowed, trying like hell not to laugh at Steinbrenner’s latest locker room screed. Manager Bob Lemon was so mad he worked his way through a cigarette in about three drags.
Cerone didn’t find any of this remotely funny. After a terrific 1980 in which he’d ably replaced the late Thurman Munson, Cerone struggled through an injury-plagued ’81, but Steinbrenner offered no quarter: “Cerone’s gotten a big head,” Steinbrenner said in September. “Suddenly he’s Mr. New York, the Italian Stallion. He’s going to disco joints. I have a way of bringing guys down to size, and I’ll bring him down.”
Now, in the Yankees’ clubhouse, Steinbrenner said, “You haven’t lost anything yet.”
And that was about all Cerone could take.
“F— you, George, you fat SOB” he snapped. “You never played the game. You don’t know what the f— you’re talking about.”
The room went instantly silent.
“Most of us wanted to give Rick a standing ovation,” one of the players in that room would recall years later.
Steinbrenner shot back.
“And you won’t be playing this game as a Yankee next year, either!” he snapped. And then stalked away.
And you know what’s funny? The next day, Cerone clinched the game and the series with a seventh-inning home run. Steinbrenner was the first man in the clubhouse to shake his hand.
“When people put fear in you,” Cerone said, “sometimes you play beyond yourself.”
Eight years later, by now in his third tour with the Yankees, Cerone was wearing a T-shirt with the word “BOSS” on it. That day George Steinbrenner was spending his last day in charge before beginning his second suspension from baseball. Cerone’s eyes were filmed with sadness.
“That man,” he said, “has been very good to me.”
(TOMORROW: The romancing and courtship of Mr. October)
Mike Vaccaro’s book, “The Bosses of the Bronx,” detailing the Yankees’ five-plus decades under the House of Steinbrenner, will be released by Harper Books on March 24. You can pre-order at harpercollins.com.
