Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (17 page)

After the glory of the pennant just days before, this was one miserable night in the Bronx.

Three weeks later, Anderson sent a letter of apology to Munson, which was released to the press by the Reds. It said:

Thurman said he never got the letter. If it was sent through the PR office, I never got it either. It may still be sitting somewhere in the clubhouse.

The day before the 1976 American League MVP announcement would be made, Steinbrenner sent off a letter to Munson, addressed to his New Jersey home. This one reached him:

Munson felt he had earned the MVP award, but he wasn’t sure he’d get it, since he often didn’t speak to the media, and it was the writers who voted.

On November 16, Thurman was in New Jersey when his phone rang at three p.m. It was Jack Lang, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA). As a beat writer for the Mets, he was not well known by Munson, so the conversation was formal.

“You’ve been elected MVP in the American League,” said Lang. “Congratulations.”

Munson asked him about the voting. He had received eighteen of the twenty-four first-place votes for a huge margin of victory over George Brett, who had two. One each went to Rivers, Rod Carew, Amos Otis, and rookie pitching sensation Mark Fidrych. Thurman was the first Yankee to win the award since Elston Howard in 1963. He became the first catcher to win both the Rookie of the Year Award and the MVP in the American League.

A press conference would be held in a few hours at the Americana Hotel in New York (now the Sheraton Centre). Lang asked me to preside, claiming he had another commitment. It was rare for the BBWAA to pass on an opportunity like this, but of course I agreed.

The turnout on the short notice was small. Thurman, the king of polyester, wore a plaid sports jacket with a tie and sweater.

“I’m proud that I won,” he said of the MVP. “I know it wasn’t politics. I won this on my ability.”

Both Steinbrenner and Paul were in the room. It caught them by surprise when Thurman made mention of “a new contract.” With free agency looming, he was preparing for the Yankees’ signing some big free agents—maybe Don Gullett and Bobby Grich—and for his salary to be adjusted to meet theirs, and to include a World Series adjustment. At least that was what he believed.

I was asked about this the next day by the press and said, “I’m sure it is something that Mr. Steinbrenner and Thurman will talk through.” I was trying to diffuse what I thought would be a mild controversy that was interfering with the big news about the award.

Steinbrenner didn’t like my response at all. Even in the afterglow of the MVP award, he was ready to issue a statement putting Thurman in his place in terms of a possible renegotiation.

This would not be a quiet off-season. Those days were gone.

As Thurman’s—and the Yankees’—successes on the field grew, his relationship with the media kept getting worse. Those who covered him early in his career, like Vic Ziegel, remembered him as “always cooperative and friendly,” but now a darkness was forming over those relationships, leading many to wonder what had gone wrong.

After the 1976 season, Hillerich & Bradsby, the Louisville Slugger bat people, asked Thurman if he would contribute an essay on hitting to their
Famous Slugger Yearbook
annual. Thurman was fine with it and asked Murray Chass of the
Times
to help him.

“If I could draw a line between good Thurman and bad Thurman with the media, it would be around there,” recalls Chass, later inducted into the Writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I was sorry that I never had a long talk with him about the place of the media in the industry of baseball. It might have shown him a different side. Since the game had begun, baseball had enjoyed so much free publicity in the sports pages of newspapers and in the sports segments of TV and radio reports. That free advertising for the product was really the lifeblood of the game. Without it, the teams could never afford the kind of ad campaign that would give the fans all they needed to know and keep them coming to the games. Movies and TV shows get one review, and if they are really huge, maybe one additional feature story. And that’s it—the rest is up to their advertising departments. Baseball has that flow of daily coverage that simply makes the game work as a professional business. Players need to be told that.

Of course, baseball has helped to sell a lot of newspapers too. It’s a two-way street.

Maury Allen of the
New York Post
never warmed up to Thurman’s personality. “He was sour by nature,” says Maury. “There was no single incident that I can recall. When he first came up I walked over and introduced myself and congratulated him for becoming a member of the Yankees. He said, ‘What took them so long?’”

It was probably just Thurman’s attempt at humor, and some might have found it funny. His teammates always loved his needling sense of humor. He had said pretty much the same thing to Gene Michael when he came up for the Binghamton game in 1968.

Rick Gentile, later a sports executive for CBS, was a UPI reporter back then. “He was a very intimidating presence in the clubhouse for a young guy like me. My most vivid memory is of asking him about a game-winning double that he laced to right-center with two out and two on in the ninth. I asked him if he was looking for a particular pitch in that situation or just for something he could drive. His response: ‘Fuck you.’ I guess he was having a bad week with the press.”

“When I was a rookie reporter in spring training, he saw me waiting forlornly at the ballpark for a taxi,” says Marty Noble, then of the
Bergen Record
. “So he offered me a ride to my hotel, which was out of his way. He didn’t make a big deal of it. It didn’t matter that I was a writer. He had an inherently good side.”

The infectiously likable Phil Pepe of the
Daily News
was covering the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale when Thurman casually asked him, “How’s it going?” Pepe responded that he missed his family, but it was too costly to bring them all down, so it was just part of the spring training routine of a beat reporter.

Barely missing a beat, Thurman said, “I’ll pay for them to come down.” Pepe, in need of no charity, wouldn’t hear of it but was blown away by the gesture. And Thurman stuck to it—he wouldn’t let his ledger show that he’d made a generous offer and then got off the hook. He insisted.

“I know he never wanted me to tell anyone,” admitted Pepe. “It would have ruined his image. But he really made that offer and I did tell it to people over the years. He deserved to be seen as not always cranky and cantankerous.”

Pepe once asked Munson for his home number in Canton during the off-season in case something came up for which he needed comment. Most writers undertook this sort of exercise as September wound down. Few bothered to ask Munson. They wouldn’t have gotten it.

And sure enough, Munson wouldn’t give his number to Pepe. But he said to him, “Here, call Tote.” That would have been his father-in-law, Tony Dominick. “Tell him who you are and why you’re calling. He’ll call me and if I feel like calling you back, I will. If I don’t, I won’t.”

Fair enough.

And so one day, Pepe needed to call. He left his number at the
Daily News
with Tote, and said Thurman should call back, collect.

Collect calls were a big deal in the days before telephone deregulation, phone cards, and cell phones. People would go through a time-consuming process to follow the “collect” procedure to save a buck.

But Pepe’s phone rang and it was Thurman’s voice, not an operator asking if he’d accept a collect call.

“Why didn’t you call me collect?” asked Pepe.

“If I do that, I get some operator or someone in your office, I have to give my name, and then they know I’m calling a sportswriter and it would ruin my image!”

Of course, Thurman restored his image by not talking to Pepe for a year after Phil wrote about the secret clubhouse meeting in 1975.

Maybe Sparky Lyle had it down best. “Thurman’s not moody,” he laughed. “Moody means sometimes you’re nice.”

The Yankees signed former Reds pitcher Don Gullett as their first-ever free agent (apart from Hunter) the day after Munson’s MVP announcement, so with Munson still in town, he came to the press conference, again at the Americana, and helped welcome his new battery mate to the team. Then attention turned to signing Bobby Grich, who could play shortstop for them.

Reggie Jackson loomed large out there as the glamour star of the first free agent class. Some on the team wanted no part of him. “His ego was too large, he wasn’t a team player, he wasn’t that good in the field, and was no longer a great base runner,” ran the comments.

And although he could hit the ball a mile, even there he was inconsistent throughout his career. People are amazed to discover that in his twenty-one-year, 563-home run career, he never hit 30 homers two years in a row. There was good Reggie and bad Reggie, on and off the field.

Munson was an advocate for getting Jackson. He knew in his heart that the team could use a big bat in the middle of the lineup. At a winter sports banquet in Syracuse that year, he encouraged Steinbrenner to sign him. “Go get the big man,” he said to his absent boss. “The hell with what you hear about him. He’s the only guy in baseball who can carry a club for a month. He hustles every minute on the field.”

Perhaps spurred on by his captain’s words, Steinbrenner became obsessed with getting Jackson. He knew stars were important in New York. He knew Reggie put “asses in the seats.”

He seduced him with a big contract and talk of owning New York. And on the morning of November 29, 1976, he got Jackson to sign a five-year contract at the Americana, after which we all went to a press conference in the same room, the Versailles Terrace, that had served as the venue for Munson’s MVP announcement earlier in the month.

Munson flew in from Ohio for this press conference, having been told the day before that it was likely. For him, it was more than a
press conference; it was, he thought, a salary boost for himself. Roy White, the senior Yankee, was there, along with coach Elston Howard, the first African-American Yankee, and Yogi Berra, also a coach. Reggie’s father, Martinez Jackson, a tailor, was present, as well as his mother. His parents were divorced.

At the mike, Thurman said, “I felt we needed a left-handed power hitter and an outfielder who could throw. Jackson fits the bill. I’m thinking of the team.”

He was also thinking of his contract. At one point, Munson took Gabe Paul off to the side and said some alterations were needed. Not the kind Martinez Jackson could make in his tailor shop. He was under the impression that his contract would be rewritten if the team won the pennant. He also found himself unable to determine Reggie’s exact salary, because the contract hadn’t been filed with the league office. He called the Players Association office but couldn’t get an answer. It was also his belief that his salary would be adjusted to match or exceed any higher-paid new arrivals.

“Let’s put this into proper perspective,” Munson told Joe O’Day of the
Daily News
. “It’s business—business, that’s all. I have even renegotiated my contract, and with my verbal agreement with George Steinbrenner, I’ll still be the highest-paid player on the club. All this came about within the last three weeks and I was even consulted on the negotiating for him [Jackson].”