Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (34 page)

George Steinbrenner was at his big round desk at Yankee Stadium late in the afternoon, meeting with two of his financial people. At the reception desk for the Yankee offices, not far removed, Doris Walden answered a call with her usual “Good afternoon, world champion Yankees.” The voice on the other end said, “George Steinbrenner, please.”

She put the call through to Gerry Murphy, the former batboy and traveling secretary who was now serving as Steinbrenner’s executive
assistant. The caller identified herself but withheld the full story, saying that she was calling from the Summit County sheriff’s office in Canton, Ohio, and she needed to put the sheriff through to George Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner had left strict orders not to be disturbed during his meeting, but Murphy sensed the urgency and went in just the same. He had put two and two together when “Canton” was mentioned, and he assumed something had gone wrong for Munson.

“Goddamn it, I told you not to disturb me,” said Steinbrenner, predictably.

“I really feel it’s urgent that you take this, Mr. Steinbrenner,” said Murphy.

George picked up the phone. Murphy watched as his face fell, and he repeated, “Oh no … oh no … oh no … oh no…”

Steinbrenner would recall that the caller was the airport manager, but perhaps that was a later call.

He told
The Sporting News
, “I get a call from Canton, the [Akron-] Canton Airport. The manager was an old friend of mine named Jack Doyle. And he said, ‘George, this is Jack.’ I said, ‘How are you? What the hell is going on? Where are you?’ He said, ‘I’m in Canton.’ He sounded terrible. He says, ‘I guess you can imagine why I’m calling.’ And then it dawned on me—Thurman. And [Doyle] said he died in a plane crash … at the airport. [Munson] had two instructors. They were in the plane. He was practicing landing and takeoffs, which is difficult in a jet because in a prop plane when you give it power, right away you get the power. In a jet, that isn’t the case. There is that little hesitation. When he saw that he was in trouble on his landing, he tried to get the power going again and it didn’t take. It wasn’t like the prop plane. And he was killed. That was one of the worst moments.”

Steinbrenner allowed himself the human emotions of grief and shock and anger, and no doubt some thoughts about allowing Munson
to fly in the first place. (“Can you imagine Dock Ellis saying that I’m responsible for Thurman Munson’s death because I let him fly that plane?” he later exclaimed. “I didn’t want him to fly that plane.”) Then he swung into action. And on that hot August afternoon, George Steinbrenner shined. He was truly “the Boss,” taking command. He was forty-nine years old, at the height of his power as a CEO, in his ultimate moment of guiding his club through its most awful tragedy.

He had Murphy round up his office team—Cedric Tallis the general manager, Bill Kane the traveling secretary, Mickey Morabito the PR man, Larry Wahl his assistant, Bobby Hofman, Jack Butterfield, and Bill Bergesh from player development, and others. (Butterfield, who was vice president for player development and scouting, would die in an auto accident on November 16, 1979, an event that further shook the mourning Yankee front office.)

In a clear and commanding voice, Steinbrenner informed his staff about the circumstances in Canton and the call he had received.

“He was composed, and at the top of his game,” said Wahl. “There was no grief in the room at that time because we were suddenly all in emergency mode.”

Within seconds he could shift from “helping the family” to “planning to go there” to “what are we going to do about another catcher?”

“He covered all the bases,” said Wahl. “It was amazing to watch. It was like he had this emergency rulebook in his head. He even talked about black stripes on the uniform sleeves in the first minutes. He talked about retiring his number, retiring his locker, having Cardinal Cooke at the stadium the next night, and what the scoreboard should show during the moment of silence. He was amazing to watch.”

Steinbrenner dispatched Wahl to go immediately to Canton to
do “whatever needed to be done.” Murphy, who had flown with Munson about half a dozen times and considered him a friend, asked if he could go as well, and he did. So the two left the meeting at once to go home and pack bags, and then to meet at LaGuardia for a flight to Canton. Murphy, the former traveling secretary and in fact a pilot himself, was a good man for this assignment.

“We landed later that night,” Wahl recalls, “but it was so late that we just found a motel and didn’t go to the house until Friday morning. I didn’t know Diana that well, so it was difficult for me to invade the home at such a time. But she welcomed us graciously and appreciated our being there. Later, I became a publicist for ABC Sports and would have dinner with her every year when we did the Hall of Fame football game. She’s a great lady.

“Our mission was to take care of the family and to work with the city and the county, handling whatever needs anyone had as best we could. Looking back, it was very smart of George to send us there. Diana had Yankee representation at her side the whole weekend. And it was important to her.

“We didn’t have a car, so the sheriff’s office arranged for us to have a car and driver all weekend. The sheriff was great and took charge of everything. He was the key, he provided security at the home and kept people out.”

It was quickly decided that a public viewing would be held on Sunday and a funeral on Monday at the Rossi Funeral Home, a plan that would have to change as the magnitude of the event became more clear.

“Back at the house,” says Murphy, “Diana would be periodically overcome, and would say things like, ‘What is to become of us?’ She had the three small children and I could understand her real-world anxieties. Would they lose the house? Thurman’s salary? She went from grief to her motherly duties, back and forth. It was good that she had her parents there. She was always gracious to us throughout the difficult weekend.”

Tote showed Murphy and Wahl Thurman’s office, with a model of the Citation on the desk. “There it is,” he said. “There’s the killer.”

Minutes after Steinbrenner received the devastating news, he wanted to call his players before they heard the news on the radio. He split the task with Tallis; he would call the veteran stars of the team, and Tallis the others. The key was to be brief and move on so that they could reach everyone. Of course, as they worked their way through the roster, the news was starting to break on the radio, and the players were calling one another.

Cedric Tallis, a baseball “lifer,” knew Thurman mostly as a ballplayer he had coveted while running the Kansas City Royals, and now grieved as the Yankees’ general manager. “He always ran the ball out, always slid, never avoided contact despite the troubles with his knees,” he would say. “In baseball, this is the measure of the man, the guts behind the glory. And even as an opponent who saw him a dozen times a year, you saw that quality in him.”

One of the first calls was to Catfish Hunter in Norwood, where Munson had once been a neighbor. Hunter was not used to getting calls from Steinbrenner.

“Did you hear about Thurman?” he asked. Told that he hadn’t, Steinbrenner said, “He’s dead. He got killed in the worst way, crashed his plane and burned up.”

Hunter told Armen Keteyian in his autobiography:

In Nettles’s book
Balls
, with Peter Golenbock, he says, “It took a few minutes to sink in. I just couldn’t believe it. It was the first real tragedy of my life. I broke down and cried like a baby.”

The calls went on. Steinbrenner called Guidry. “I knew there was something wrong,” Ron remembers, “because he just doesn’t call.” Disbelieving, Gator sat silently in his rocking chair long into the evening with his wife Bonnie and her parents.

It was not unusual for Steinbrenner to call Piniella. They would speak frequently, even to discuss the roster. The two Tampa residents respected each other. Piniella would tell Maury Allen:

Goose Gossage was another Yankee whom Steinbrenner called directly. He was getting ready to go to a concert when the phone rang in his bedroom with the news. “George who?” he said, not used to such a call.

“George Steinbrenner” was the response. “I have some terrible news. We lost Thurman today in a plane crash.”

“I was in total shock,” recalls Willie Randolph. “Stunned. You hear what people are saying to you, but you don’t believe it. No, there’s no way this happened. I was just with him the other night. We were sitting there joking, playing cards. It was a total shock. Disbelief. I broke down and cried.”

There had always been a special bond between Thurman and Willie. In his rookie year, Thurman’s MVP year, Willie had to battle a bit to get his swings in during batting practice. He thought he was being dissed. Thurman made sure he got to hit, and later gave him a T-shirt with
ROOK
printed on it. Willie has it to this day.

Chris Chambliss, one of the most sensitive men on the team, the son of a chaplain, said that he and his wife were in a car in New Jersey going for ice cream when they heard the news on the radio. “We just looked at each other and didn’t say a word for I don’t know how long. We were just stunned, quiet. We didn’t say anything to each other for a long, long time. We were both so shocked.”

Bucky Dent was having an early dinner at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center on the off day. As he was leaving, someone
said, “Aren’t you Bucky Dent?” When Dent said he was, the stranger said, “Isn’t it a shame what happened to Thurman?” Dent said, “What are you talking about?” And the stranger said, “He was killed in a plane crash!”

“It stunned me. I kind of fell back on the car. I said, ‘No, that’s not true.’ He said it was and I asked him, ‘Was there anybody with him?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, there were two other people in the plane.’

“My first reaction was I thought it was Bobby Murcer and his wife, because they walked out with Thurman in Chicago. I thought maybe Bobby and Kay were flying to Canton with him.”

Mickey Morabito phoned Billy Martin, knowing what an emotional call this would be to a very emotional man. Mickey and Billy were close, and Mickey would eventually go with Billy to Oakland, where he remains traveling secretary to this day.

“I was twelve, and I was out fishing with Dad and Nick Nicolosi, who owned the hotel where a lot of Yankees stayed,” says Billy Joe Martin. “Suddenly there were police on the shore with a bullhorn, paging Billy Martin.

“‘What did I do now, pard,’ he said.

“We came ashore and they said that he had an emergency phone call. He jumped into the first car and I was in the second. It was Mickey with the horrible news.

“Just a few days before, I had been working out at second base and Thurman was watching me take ground balls. He said to Dad, ‘I can’t wait till I can see myself and my son like you are with Billy Joe.’

“He used to get me when I would be at second base; it was a
ballplayer’s trick. He’d be shagging balls in the outfield, and then would throw them in on one bounce to hit me in the back of my knee. He was the best at it. I would drop like a tree falling.

“After the news, we went to our apartment, and Dad called Diana. He was just crushed. He said he wanted to go out, but I said, ‘Dad, don’t do it, somebody might say something about Thurman you don’t like …,’ and he said, ‘You’re right’ So we stayed home and watched two John Wayne movies. He must have cried five or six times during the movies. I fixed him a Chivas and soda, but he didn’t touch it.”

Martin issued a statement through Morabito: “For the people who never knew him and didn’t like him, I feel sorry for them. He was a great man. For his family and his friends and all the people who knew and loved him, my deepest sympathy. We not only lost a leader and a husband and a devoted family man, which is rare today. He was a dear friend. We would sit a lot and talk about our problems. I loved him.”

Sparky Lyle, Thurman’s fun-loving friend, was with the Texas Rangers, who were due into Cleveland for a weekend series. Sparky’s two sons had been visiting him and his wife, Mary, during their summer vacation and they were taking them home. So they flew into Pittsburgh to drop them off and then flew to Cleveland. They were in a cab going to the hotel when the taxi driver turned around and said, “Wasn’t that awful what happened today to Thurman Munson?” They had no idea what had happened, as they’d been on a plane all afternoon.