Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (29 page)

Munson that night would DH against Randy Scarbery, the White Sox starter, who was 1-5 going in. Murcer would be in center, Jerry Narron behind the plate, and Jim Spencer at first. The Spencer move was a good one: he hit a three-run homer in the sixth off Scarbery
to lead the Yanks to a 7-3 win, giving Guidry a win and Gossage a save. Neither had been pitching well of late; the win made Guidry only 9-7 a year after his 25-3 season, and Gossage’s save was only his sixth after 27 the year before.

It wasn’t a good game for the aching Munson. He went 0-5, with four groundouts and a fly to left.

It wasn’t a good day for the White Sox player-manager Don Kessinger, either. Kessinger, the last player-manager the American League would see (Pete Rose would hold both jobs in the NL from 1984 to 1986), would be out of a job by week’s end, with Tony LaRussa taking over on August 3 to begin an illustrious managerial career of his own.

Back at Murcer’s apartment, Bobby, Lou, and Thurman were talking baseball, drinking scotch, talking flying.

Back in Canton, Diana watched
A Star Is Born
with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson on TV and cried at the end when Kristofferson’s character, John Norman Howard, dies.

She called Thurman after the movie and told him she was scared of his flying. He reassured her that she was his best friend and he was privileged to share his life with her.

“I love you very much,” Murcer and Piniella heard him say.

Piniella would tell Maury Allen for his book
Sweet Lou
, “He didn’t need it, but you couldn’t argue with him about anything.

“That night, it was baseball, friendship, and our happiness to have Bobby back. It was very sentimental; Bobby was almost in tears.

“Then Bobby started saying to Munson, ‘What do you need that for?’ Thurman brushed it off. ‘I’m comfortable, I’m confident,’ he said.”

August began with a night game in Chicago to wrap up the series, a game televised back in New York on WPIX.

Piniella recalls, “After breakfast, Bobby drove us out to the airport. [Thurman] talked about the plane the whole time. We drove to the hangar area. We got into the plane. It looked like a rocket, long and sleek. We sat for a few minutes, and finally Bobby and I looked at each other. We shook our heads. ‘Let’s do it some other time,’ Bobby said. I unbuckled my seat belt, Thurman let the ladder down, and we got out.

“‘Ahh, hell,’ he said. ‘There’s no need to worry.’”

In the afternoon, Commissioner Kuhn finally approved the deal that sent Oscar Gamble to the Yankees, but Gamble would not join the team until Friday in New York.

Don Hood, who was 3-0, pitched seven strong innings for the Yanks, with Jim Kaat hurling the final two in an easy 9-1 Yankee win. Hood had been told he was starting only eight minutes before game time, when Luis Tiant complained of a stiff arm. Tiant was moved up to start Friday night in New York. The Yanks benefited from three homers, Reggie Jackson’s nineteenth, Lou Piniella’s tenth (both in the first inning), and Jerry Narron’s second. Narron caught and hit eighth. Thurman was at first base and hit third. It was the 1,423rd regular-season game of his career.

In the first inning, batting against left-hander Ken Kravec, Munson walked and scored on the Jackson homer. In the third, again facing Kravec, he struck out. In so doing, he strained his right knee, exchanged a nod with Billy Martin, and left the game, replaced by Spencer at first. He had made two putouts at first before departing.

When a Chicago reporter approached him afterward to ask about why he had left the game early, he cursed at him and sent him on his way. A normal day for Thurman and the press.

After the game, with most of the team preparing to fly back to Newark Airport, the Murcers drove Thurman to Palwaukee Airport north of Chicago, where his new Cessna was waiting. Piniella watched Munson throw a suit bag over his shoulder, tip the clubhouse
man, and walk out the door. “Take it easy, Thurman,” Piniella said. Munson didn’t hear him.

Thurman invited the Murcers to look into the cockpit, and they wound up sitting inside for about twenty minutes, listening to Thurman describe the features of the plane. Thurm borrowed some money from Bobby for fuel.

“Thurman had been after Lou and me to fly from Chicago to Canton with him after the game,” Murcer told Bill Madden for his book
Pride of October
. “I told him I couldn’t do that. I’d heard from Reggie and Nettles—who had both flown with him—about his plane and I just didn’t want to do it.”

The Murcers got out of the plane and Thurman asked them to go to the end of the runway and watch him take off.

“So we positioned ourselves at the end of the runway in our car in this tiny airport, and then he took off and I’m watching this big old powerful jet go roaring over our heads and I thought to myself, ‘I cannot believe Thurman is up there all by himself in that powerful machine, flying that crazy plane.’”

In a little more than an hour, he landed at Akron-Canton Airport in the middle of the night. He got home around three a.m., and then was up at seven to greet the kids. He hadn’t had much sleep, but he was where he wanted to be.

Cessna Citation cockpit. PHOTO COURTESY CESSNA AIRCRAFT COMPANY

It was eight and a half miles from Thurman’s home to Akron-Canton Airport. The drive took about fifteen minutes, with Ever-hard Road merging onto I-77, and then exit 113 taking you into the midsized airport at Lauby Road.

But first he stopped to see his father-in-law, Tote Dominick, at Prestwick Country Club. The club made for a really pleasant setting on a summer morning, except for running into a member of the
media, Gene Dillon, a WHBC radio sportscaster, whom he told that his knees were “fine.” Thurman could even blow off the hometown press when he wanted to.

Tote told Dillon how excited Thurman was about his new plane and what a great family man he was.

As difficult as Thurman’s relationship had been with his own father, that was how easy it had been with Tote. Tote had, like Diana, known Thurman since he was a boy, but now they were adults, friends even. And of course he was in many ways the father that Thurman never had.

Thurman drove to the airport in his Mercedes 450, the one he had gotten from Nat Tarnopol in New York. He was no doubt feeling prosperous with all the trappings: cigar in his mouth, sitting in the 450 Benz, on his way to see his new jet, real estate holdings, second-highest-paid player on the New York Yankees, terrific family…life was good! John Denver (who would die piloting a small plane in 1997) was singing away on his tape player as he pulled into the airport shortly before three. It was a beautiful seventy-six-degree day. He was not planning to fly at all that day, and in fact had a four o’clock meeting with Diana downtown to hear about plans to name a road in his honor. So his stay at the airport would be brief. He just wanted to check out a few things. He didn’t even lock his car. He just wanted to look at his possession one more time.

Naming a road in his honor was not the sort of thing that would have made Thurman rush to be on time. While generally reliable when it came to keeping a schedule—players, after all, are never late for a game—the whole idea of a road in his honor would have embarrassed Thurman.

Celebrity just didn’t fit him well. His friendship with Jerry Anderson, whom he called “Munchkin,” had nothing to do with celebrity. He was a guy his own age that he met at the YMCA and teamed up with to play handball. Just five feet seven and 155
pounds, Anderson was physically more diminutive than Munson, but he had a pilot’s license and growing skills in real estate, two areas that Thurman found interesting. Anderson himself was no great baseball fan, and didn’t seem to be swept away by Thurman’s fame, as Nat Tarnopol and others had been.

There would be no free Mercedes from Anderson. Even free real estate advice used to elicit a joking comment from Jerry about money owed for his time.

Celebrity is about being in the right milieu anyway. A soap star is only a celebrity to those who watch the show. Otherwise, meeting someone who is on
Days of Our Lives
would hardly cause a non-watcher to break into a sweat. Baseball players feel the trappings of hero worship in their daily lives, but they also meet a lot of people who are unimpressed. Anderson liked Munson for reasons other than his Yankee career.

“What a competitor he was at handball,” he remembers. “If the score was 20-20, you knew Thurman would not lose that twenty-first point. Impossible. He won every time.

“His interest in real estate was always very appealing to me. We spent hours talking about ‘where the market was going’ and which parcels would be in the path of progress. My visits to the Yankee locker room were full of conversations about real estate investing and how to earn a living once his playing days were gone. We seldom talked baseball. Our topics were always (1) real estate and how we would set up partnerships with his contacts, (2) airplanes, and (3) our next handball tournament. Some of the most pleasant days were spent flying over vacant land looking at growth patterns of roads and development. Most of that was done in his Duke or King Air around Canton and its suburbs. As a pilot it was easy for one of us to fly and the other to take notes and make sketches of what one day might be below us.”

At the airport, Thurman bumped into Anderson, and into David
Hall, a flight instructor of Anderson’s whom Thurman knew, but who was not otherwise a close friend. Hall, thirty-two, was Munson’s age; Anderson, a year younger.

Anderson, Hall, and Munson walked around the jet, stroking it, patting it, enjoying it as grown men enjoy their new toys. There was the N15NY painted on the tail, a curious selection for a guy who was always talking about getting traded to Cleveland. They peered inside, and perhaps the glance at the control panel reminded Thurman that he had wanted to test a few things, perhaps a check to see if things on the panel were working properly. He had had that curiously difficult flight with Jackson and Nettles a few weeks earlier, and then the flash of flame on the flight with Diane and Billy Martin.

So rather spontaneously, Thurman just said, “Let’s take it up.” And Hall and Anderson nodded at each other with a “Sure, let’s do it” look. It was unplanned, and seemingly forgotten was the four o’clock meeting.

Dave Hall took the copilot seat and Jerry Anderson sat behind him, facing the rear of the plane but keeping his lap belt loose enough so that he could easily turn around to observe. Hall had been Anderson’s instructor, and the priority that gave him the front seat went unspoken. And Anderson had, to that point, never been up in a private jet, despite many hours of experience in single-engine aircraft.

Thurman also put on his lap belt, but not the shoulder harness, which was affixed to the wall. At that point, Thurman had logged 516 hours of flying time, thirty-three of them in the new Citation.

Thurman gave no emergency instructions to his passengers, even though this was their first time in the plane and Anderson’s first time in any private jet. Although the men were friends, it is accepted practice to run through the safety procedures, even when the passengers are seasoned travelers. Without flight attendants aboard, it falls to the pilot to handle it.

Still, Hall and Anderson asked some questions as they looked around. They wanted to know what certain gauges meant on the control panel. They checked to see where and how the handle locked the entrance door, and to see where the emergency door was and that it worked.

The interior of the plane was beautiful. Thurman had selected “Yankee blue” as the interior color, and coupled with the designation of N15NY on the tail, it was hard to believe that he was serious about wanting to be traded to Cleveland anymore. If anything, the plane told the truth about that. The passengers spoke aloud of how taken they were by the beauty of the interior and the plush leather seats.

“Thurman was in a great mood that day,” Anderson told ESPN nearly a quarter of a century later. “He was having a good day. He was in Canton. He didn’t have to rush off to Yankee Stadium that night. He got to spend the night in town. He made a call to the tower and taxied out carefully. And on our way, I think he had his head on square that day.”

There was enough fuel in the tanks, about nine hundred pounds, to travel perhaps eight hundred miles without refueling.

There was not a lot of activity going on in the control tower. N15NY was in fact the only plane in activity mode, as George Ackley, the air traffic controller in the tower, looked down.

“Know who’s flying that N15NY?” asked another controller at his side.

Ackley didn’t know.

“It’s Thurman Munson,” he said.

“Thurman has a Citation? When did he get that?”

“Just last month.”

Ackley was unaware that Thurman was already on his third plane, and had no idea he had moved up to a jet.

“Let’s do a few touch-and-goes,” Thurman said to his passengers. Up to that moment, they had no idea what his flight intentions were.
Now it was clear that he was going to stay within range of the airport, just taking off and landing, then taking off again without stopping, a series of drills that could show off the plane’s power and give everyone a feel for the aircraft, while Thurman checked whatever it was with the control panel that was giving him pause.