Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (19 page)

In wrapping up work on the book, by now in the spring of 1978, Thurman happened to mention to me how he had discovered flying as a great means of spending more time at home in Canton with his family, and of purchasing a twin-engine, six-seater Beechcraft Duke. It was how I first learned he had been flying his own plane. Almost as an afterthought for the book, we inserted it into a single paragraph.

The Reggie-Thurman issue still hung in the air in the Yankee clubhouse as the 1977 season progressed. It was not an easy one to put to rest. Two high-profile guys, two former MVPs, and it was all creating a terrible distraction to the business at hand.

Of course, Billy and Reggie weren’t getting along either. Billy resented having to take “Steinbrenner’s boy” onto his roster, and for most of the season refused to bat him cleanup. Things all came to a head in Boston in June, when he pulled Reggie out of right field in
the middle of an inning for loafing on a base hit. On national TV, the two of them went at each other in the dugout, nearly coming to blows.

There were talks of a suspension for Jackson, and certainly a lot of talk about firing Martin for “losing it” as he did in public. The team lost five straight before escaping Detroit with a 12-11 win on June 22, finding themselves in second place, four and a half games behind Boston.

At this point, as the story continued to have traction, Steinbrenner went to Munson and said, essentially: “You better start getting along with Reggie, or Martin’s going to be in trouble!”

That put Thurman in what he saw as an impossible position.

“I was suddenly put in the middle and made responsible for Billy’s job!” he said. “I wish I hadn’t gone along with Steinbrenner, but I got Fran Healy to bring Jackson to me for a talk to try and patch things up.”

The three of them went to dinner in Detroit. It was tense. Munson challenged Jackson to name one thing he had that Thurman would want. According to Thurman, Reggie didn’t answer.

“After that talk,” he said for the autobiography project, “we were able to at least say hello to each other. We even had some conversations. But I think he felt very uncomfortable and self-conscious about our relationship. I think when I confronted him with the reality of life—that baseball may be a great ego trip, but there’s a lot more to this world than baseball—he found himself unable to deal with it. For the sake of the team, we did no more interviews on each other. But we didn’t become the best of friends, either.”

During the dinner, Munson, direct as always, said to Jackson, “Did you get a Rolls Royce when you signed?”

Jackson said he did.

Healy said to himself,
Oh boy, here’s a problem
.

And the next time Healy saw Steinbrenner, he said to him, “Mr. Steinbrenner, guess what—you owe Thurman a Rolls-Royce.”

He never got one.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox were coming to town.

This is when the great Yankee-Boston rivalry was really kicking in, and 55,000 fans turned out for the first game of the series, giving Martin a tremendous ovation as he took the lineups to home plate. Billy could really work a crowd, could really get them behind him.

A game-tying, two-run homer by Roy White, perhaps the team’s most important hit of the year, helped to send the Yanks to a 6-5 win, with Reggie getting the game-winning single in the eleventh. This was where the season began to take fire.

The Yanks swept that series to move just two games back, continued to enjoy a strong July, and stayed in first or second with the Red Sox for much of the summer. Baltimore got into it as well, and it was a terrific pennant race.

It was a summer of discontent for Billy Martin, of course, with the threat of being fired constantly upon him. He would have been gone had not third base coach Dick Howser said no to an offer to replace him.

In Baltimore on July 11, Munson turned to a rare use of the newspapers to advance a cause, telling Murray Chass and
Newsday’s
Steve Jacobson, “George is calling the shots from upstairs and dictating the lineup to Billy.” He said to attribute it to “a prominent Yankee.”

“George tells him who to play,” he said. “He doesn’t want competition, he wants a slaughter. To win, you need nine good players, plus some capable utility players and a pitching staff. George wants twenty-five superstars. George doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings. To him, we’re not professionals, we’re all employees. He treats everybody like that. Everybody on the club has experienced it. He’s done something to everybody. He’s destroyed Billy. He’s made him nothing. Not a single guy on the club is happy except Willie [Randolph].”

Things were getting so heated that Steinbrenner made a rare
road trip to meet up with the team in Milwaukee on July 12. This was almost a month after the Fenway Park meltdown, but the Boss was still after Billy for embarrassing the Yankees.

The pressure on Billy was weighing down the whole club, which at the time was still just one and a half games out of first.

In Milwaukee, after a night game, Piniella and Munson went to Sally’s, a popular ballplayer gathering spot, to have some drinks and talk about the team’s situation. To them, it felt unlikely that they could win another pennant with this cloud hanging over them. They decided to go to the Pfister Hotel and confront Steinbrenner in his room—telling him to either fire Martin or get off his back.

Steinbrenner opened the door in his pajamas. For two hours, the three men sat and talked. As bizarre as the incident appeared, it was a sign of leadership that these two respected players—one the team captain, the other a future manager of great success—would decide to take this fight on.

Martin’s suite was on the same floor. Arriving back at the hotel well past the start of the secret meeting, he heard voices and knocked. Piniella and Munson, trapped like lovers when the husband returns from a business trip a day early, dove into the shower and pulled the curtain closed. They didn’t want Martin to see that they had gone over his head to solve the team’s problems.

Martin knew he had heard voices and helped himself to a tour. He found them.

It was a ridiculous moment at two o’clock in the morning. And it didn’t really clear the air, or if it did, it cleared it for a few days, at best.

Meanwhile, the story with quotes from the “prominent Yankee” ran in all the New York papers. Seemingly wishing to make the story go away, as though insignificant, Steinbrenner decided that the prominent Yankee was Carlos May, who played sixty-five games that year for the team, mostly as a designated hitter. (I liked Carlos because
a year earlier, Steinbrenner had actually sought out my opinion on whether to get him, and I said he was a good gap hitter.)

If the use of May’s name was a ruse to get the real player to reveal himself, it worked. Munson went to Steinbrenner and told him that it was he who was the “prominent Yankee” quoted in the story. But he didn’t apologize for it. He just wanted him to know it wasn’t May.

At the Sheraton Royal Hotel in Kansas City the next day, Steinbrenner called a team meeting—most unusual for an owner—and delivered a pep talk to pump up the team for the second half of the season. It wasn’t a lovefest. He cajoled the players to live up to their high salaries, and then jumped on anonymous players who leaked things to the press.

“The one funny note in it,” recalled Fran Healy, “was that Ted Turner had recently worn a uniform and taken over as manager of the Braves for a day. Steinbrenner threatened that he would do the same thing if necessary. The thought of that was pretty funny.”

The reference to players who leak to the press really angered Thurman, who had let his teammates know that it was he, and that he had told Steinbrenner it was he. But the Boss’s comments made Munson look like a liar—that he had said he had taken responsibility but in fact hadn’t.

“So as the All-Star Game arrived,” he said for our book, “I was in a bad frame of mind. Jackson’s magazine story bugged me, I felt deceived over my contract, and I felt I’d been made to look like a fool in Kansas City.”

The All-Star Game was played in Yankee Stadium. Fisk outpolled Munson again to be the starting catcher, another embarrassment for Thurman for the game in his own home ballpark. He was getting grumpier by the day.

And then there came “the beard episode.”

Steinbrenner’s no-beard policy was to be enforced, of course, by Martin. Munson happened to be a guy who liked growing a beard
and often did so in the off-season. Now, on top of all that was going on around them, Munson decided not to shave for eleven days, starting in late July.

“Let this walrus off at Sea World,” said Piniella to the team’s bus driver. It was funny, but everyone knew it was actually growing into a political issue. Would Martin order it shaved? Would Steinbrenner order Martin to order Munson? Or would he just explode on Billy for having lost control of the team?

The drama, as well as the beard, was growing. Never mind how uncomfortable it must have been to wear a catcher’s mask with the beard. Now it was the George-Billy-Thurman Show.

When Murray Chass called Steinbrenner to ask him point-blank about Munson’s beard, Steinbrenner said, “Beard? What beard? I didn’t even know about it. What do you mean, Thurman’s beard? Does he have a beard?”

With the press now fueling the “crisis,” Thurman quietly shaved it off before an exhibition game in Syracuse on August 8. The Yankees were there to play their Triple-A farm team, and Don Ross, a well-liked restaurateur and friend to many players who had played for the Chiefs, went to Munson’s room at the Sheraton armed with a pizza, a razor, and cream, and stood by for the “historic” shave.

Apparently Martin had quietly spoken with Munson the day before. Diana had cried on the phone over stories of Thurman creating tension between Martin and Steinbrenner.

It became a nonissue in the bathroom of Munson’s hotel room around 1:15 in the afternoon. Another crisis passed. But the very act of his shaving was a huge story in New York and even made the national wires. The Yankees were now giving papers all over the country game stories and off-the-field stories, and journalists were jumping over one another to be the first with the latest.

“I was more determined than ever to get out of New York,” he said for the book. “The problems at the ballpark made me feel
closer to Diane and the children, and seek more gratification from my business interests. It all added up to my wanting to go home, where I could play ball in peace and attend to the things in life that matter to me.”

Distractions aside, there was a pennant race to be fought. On August 23 in Chicago, Mike Torrez beat Wilbur Wood and the Yanks went into first place to stay. They wound up with one hundred wins, three more than in 1976, and won by two and a half games. It took a lot out of everybody.

Coming off his MVP season, Munson had another big year at the plate, hitting .308 with 18 homers and 100 RBIs. He was seventh in the MVP voting.

Again facing the Royals, Billy Martin defied conventional wisdom by benching Jackson in the fifth and deciding game; one last effort to show the Boss who was boss, even if it meant he was managing his last game.

In the eighth inning, Jackson pinch-hit a run-scoring single, the Yanks went on to take the lead, and Sparky Lyle, who would win the Cy Young Award, nailed it down to give the Yanks another pennant. In the clubhouse, Martin poured champagne over Steinbrenner’s head and said, “That’s for trying to fire me.”

Thurman hit .286 in the Championship Series with a home run, and then .320 in the World Series against the Dodgers with a home run in the fifth game. As Munson rounded the bases after the homer, Dodger pitcher Don Sutton shouted, “Is that as hard as you can hit it?” Thurman laughed.

Between games two and three of the Series, Munson broke his silence with the press and let out a lot of frustration. “I’ve been in the middle of controversy all year that I didn’t cause,” he told the assembled press corps. “There was the magazine article where Reggie put me down. Then I’m told by Steinbrenner if I don’t get along with Reggie they’re going to fire the manager … You’ll never read
an article that I haven’t stuck up for Billy. I’ve got five more games at the most to put up with this crap. All year I’ve been trying to live down the image I was jealous of somebody making more money. Somebody asked me, ‘Did you bury your pride?’ No, I postponed it.

“We have a chance to win a Series ring, and a guy is second-guessing the manager. If I was hitting .111 I wouldn’t be second-guessing the goddamned manager. And I’m going to stop talking because the more I talk the madder I get.”

The .111 remark was directed at Jackson, who was fuming over Billy sitting him down against Kansas City. And with sarcasm, Thurman inadvertently coined a name that would live on for decades, would appear on Reggie’s Hall of Fame plaque, and would be copyrighted by Jackson for marketing purposes. Said Munson: “Billy probably just doesn’t realize Reggie is Mr. October.”

A nickname born out of sarcasm. It’s even part of Reggie’s e-mail address today.

That is the Series that is best remembered for Jackson’s remarkable game six, in which he hit home runs on three consecutive pitches, putting his name in the record books with five homers in a World Series and three in one game. He thrived in the big spotlight, and he proved that he was indeed the missing link, the cure for what had been the Yanks’ failings the year before.

After the third home run, Thurman had a huge smile on his face, visible to all watching TV or seeing still photos. The smile said it all:
Big guy, you may have been a pain in the ass to have around, but you gave us what we needed, and I tip my hat to you. You are a money ballplayer
.

This was it, this was the dream fulfilled. Tuesday night, October 18, 1977, Yankee Stadium. The Yankees beat their historic rivals and won their twenty-first World Series. In his eighth full season in the major leagues, Thurman Munson was the captain of a world championship club. He had played every day of every year as though that was the goal, and now it was realized. He was exhausted, exhilarated, and energized all at once.