Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (36 page)

Dennis D’Agostino, later a publicist for the Mets and the Knicks, was working the dayside shift at the Associated Press in New York. “Between the shift supervisor and the wire filer we had several printers,
including a ‘message’ printer in which other bureaus around the nation could instantly message us. In midafternoon, we got a few messages from the Akron bureau saying that the local FAA there was reporting that a plane had gone down and one of the victims may have been Thurman Munson. Not long after four p.m., Dick Joyce had me call the Yankees just to ask if they had heard anything.

“I got Mickey Morabito on the phone and said, ‘Mickey, I don’t want to alarm or scare you, but we’ve been getting a few messages about a plane that has gone down in Akron and that Thurm might have been on it.’ Mickey said, ‘We know. We’ve heard the reports too, and we’re checking them out.’ And that was it. A little while later, obviously, the word started getting out.”

At the city desk of the
Canton Repository
, the paper Thurman had delivered as a boy (with Diana in pursuit on her bicycle), city editor Jim Weber got the first call soon after the accident. “We didn’t know it was Munson’s plane with the first call, but we knew soon after,” he recalls. Reporter Diana Rossetti raced to the scene on her Yamaha motorcycle, knowing roads would be blocked. A second reporter, Jim Clark, headed out there from the newsroom. Bob Rossiter, a staff photographer, had trouble getting to the site, so he abandoned his car and walked a mile carrying his gear.

“You could smell it before you could see it,” says Rossiter. “My nostrils burned from the acrid odor of the fuel-fired blaze and the molten asphalt beneath it.”

Clark says, “What sticks with me is all the dumb stuff I did trying to get the story. I drove up to the airport and went to the terminal. I had no idea where it happened. I finally went to the north end of the airfield. The first fireman on the scene was the guy I wound up talking to. I didn’t even have change to call Weber and tell him what it was and what was happening. When I got back, everyone said, ‘What did the witnesses see?’ I didn’t have a clue.”

Sports editor Bob Stewart, who had covered Thurman’s scholastic
career, was clicking away at his typewriter. It was a night to remember for the small city newspaper, where “stop the presses” stories were few.

The first New York reporter on the scene was Dan Lauck of
Newsday
, who got there after sunset, and after the body had been removed. “I hadn’t been driving five minutes when I came up over a rise in the road and there it was,” he said. “A hulk of metal and plastic and rubber—a Cessna Citation—twisted, flattened, and still smoldering, smack in the middle of the road. I got out of the car as quietly as I could. Would have whispered if there had been anyone around. But there wasn’t. No security, no investigators, no celebrity ghouls, just me and one other soul. Thurman Munson’s. I found myself circling the wreckage, as you would a casket, though Munson’s body already had been pulled from the plane. It was the smell that struck me. I told myself I would never forget it. Maybe it was a combination of the rubber and plastic and paint, still cooking, that gave the scene its pungent scent.”

The
New York Times
jumped into action, typewriters clicking away, wire copy machines screaming with bells alerting the newsroom to a breaking bulletin out of Canton. Sports and metro needed to divide coverage. Jim Tuite called Murray Chass at home, and Chass volunteered to write the “Man in the News” feature. “My wife was in the hospital at the time,” he says. “I could do ‘Man in the News’ from memory. I’d covered his whole career. The news story would require a lot of phone calls to local authorities and to teammates for reaction. I was better suited that day for the bio.”

“We mobilized at once,” recalls Arthur Pincus, the Sunday sports editor. “I was on the fifth floor when we got word, working in the art department with Gary Honig, the photo editor, and Pat Flynn, the art director assigned to sports. We were starting to plan the Sunday paper. Joe Vecchione, our Sports Monday editor, called us, looking
for Gary, who said, ‘We gotta go; Thurman Munson’s been killed in a plane crash.’

“LeAnn Schreiber was our sports editor, about six months into the job, which was pretty historic—a woman sports editor at the
Times
. We had a conference with me, Vecchione, and Harold Claassen. Tuite captained the assignments. Jim Naughton wrote the main news story, and Dave Anderson did about four columns.”

The
Times
was used to crisis. “Aside from momentary disbelief, and an effort to make sure we had the facts right, we had things well in hand fairly soon after we heard the news,” says copy editor Paul Winfield. “His death occurred early enough for us to put together a complete package. And the circumstances turned the news piece into his obituary; there was no discrete obituary as a result.”

Art Toretzky is a talent agent in Hollywood who was still learning his craft and living in New York in 1979. He went to high school and college with me and I had given him a copy of the Munson autobiography. That night, the
New York Times
needed a copy of the book quickly, from which to run excerpts in their coverage. “I was living a few blocks from the
Times
on the West Side of Manhattan,” says Toretzky. “The
Times
had a messenger at my door within thirty minutes to pick up my copy of the book. So in my sadness over the story, I also felt that at least I was doing something, and when the book was quoted in the
Times
, I felt I played a small part. I was a big Yankee fan, and this was a big, big loss.”

“When I received the call that he was killed, I was stunned,” says Phil Pepe of the
Daily News
. “Before I could call my office, the phone rang and it was the office calling me, and we discussed what my role would be in covering the story. I was to call as many players as I could reach. I was the one who broke the news to Roy White because he hadn’t yet been called. He couldn’t speak after I told him what happened. He put his wife on the phone.”

Artist Bill Gallo drew a memorable drawing of Munson, looking
down from heaven at two sad youngsters who regularly appeared in his cartoons, with one saying, “
NAW, YUCHIE—I JUST DON’T FEEL LIKE PLAYIN’ BALL TODAY
…” He titled it “No Game Today.”

In his memoir
Drawing a Crowd
, Gallo wrote:

Rupert Murdoch had purchased the
New York Post
in 1976, and this was a story made for his tabloid style of journalism. Across page after page in the coming days, both in the news and in the sports sections, would appear a banner called
DEATH OF A YANKEE
, with a photo of Munson and sensational coverage. Reporter Bob Drury was rushed to the scene. It was a style that the paper would repeat a year later for John Lennon, and then again through the years whenever a celebrity died under tragic circumstances. In many ways, the Munson coverage helped to define the
Post
in its burgeoning tabloid war with its rival, the
Daily News
.

Sports Illustrated
made Munson’s death the lead item in its Score-card section a week later, but because so many days had passed, the editors looked at it as not current enough in their news cycle, and did not choose to provide a full story. A photo of Thurman’s empty locker accompanied the article.

At
WPIX
, the Yankees’ station since 1951 (and based in the same building as
UPI
and the
Daily News)
, the news was first reported on the 7:30
Action News
anchored by Tim Malloy and Christy Ferrer, featuring early film from Cleveland’s “Chopper 5” over the crash site and a report that two people had been killed. (Ferrer would later lose her husband on 9/11.) They threw to sportscaster Jerry Girard, who called Munson one of the greatest catchers of all time, who performed at his best when it really counted. “He had a passion to win and the ability to do it.”

The ten o’clock newscast was expanded to an hour, and Frank Messer and Bill White joined anchorman Steve Bosh and Girard. Jerry called him “the guy you wanted up there with the game on the line.”

While the media professionals were going about their business, hearts were breaking. The baseball community and its fans were in shock. The story hit hard with nonfans who just cared about the widow and her three young children.

On film,
WPIX
had teenage Latino fans seated at the Yankee office
entrance steps because it was a place to gather. One was almost argumentative. “Everyone is saying he was the catcher, but he was the
captain”
he kept saying.

Girard played film of an interview he did with Munson, wearing a windbreaker, in March. He asked Thurman why he was now talking to the press, but hadn’t the previous year. “I was hurt a lot last year,” Munson said. “This year we’re just going to have fun. No rock stars this year.” Then he mentioned a reporter (Bouton, unnamed) whom he had refused to talk to three times. He said he liked “Mickey, and Ellie, and all.”

Said Messer: “I put Thurman Munson in the same class as Mickey Mantle and Johnny Unitas, whose games I broadcast. All three of them were superstars who played in pain.”

Added White: “We talked about Ohio a lot. I played for Warren Harding, he played for Canton. We were friendly rivals. An infielder or an outfielder can play with pain; a catcher can’t do that if the hinges don’t work.”

In response to a question about whether there could be any sort of positive effect on the Yankees for the season, White said, “I don’t think it can have any kind of a positive effect. This is all about thinking about Diane and his kids. The players aren’t going to say, ‘Let’s win one for Thurman.’ That’s not what this is about.”

Jerry asked Messer why there had always been such a barrier between Thurman and the media. Said Messer: “I think he felt he’d been misused by some members of the media. But he had a friendly, warm side. Just Tuesday when we did a radio interview, I was sitting by his locker, which was next to Reggie’s, and he teased Reggie to go on out to the field so the reporters would follow him and we could be alone. We talked about how barometric pressure could affect joints. I had knee replacement surgery a few years before, so we had knee pain in common.”

Steve Bosh talked about the side of Munson fans didn’t see. “A priest had called the station and asked if Thurman Munson could
visit a very sick eleven-year-old in the hospital. They played a film that Munson made, addressing the child, wishing him a quick recovery, telling him to come up to the stadium and visit the clubhouse and shake hands with the guys when he’s better.”

Added Girard: “I never got to know Munson well; there was always a barrier. I think it was a sense of insecurity on his part. He was so hurt at talk that Jackson was the real leader. He was hurt when a writer said that Rivers deserved the MVP award in 1976. And he wanted assurance from George Steinbrenner that he would always be the highest-paid Yankee. I never really knew him, but I miss him already.”

Over at WABC Channel 7, Roseanne Scamardella (yes, she whose name had been mocked on
Saturday Night Live)
said the city was in a state of shock, and she turned the report to Chee Chee Williams, who had gone to Norwood, New Jersey, where Thurman had lived, and visited the homes of Nettles and Hunter. Nettles spoke with her on his front porch, dressed in a T-shirt. He said, “He was like a kid with a new toy. I flew with him a couple of weeks ago, the same plane. I’m just in a state of shock.”

Hunter was on the couch in his living room. There were no baseball items on display; it had obviously been rented furnished. There was a floral pattern on the sofa, and a large painting of a bouquet of flowers on the wall. Hunter, in his final weeks as a player, was dressed in shorts and a Puma T-shirt. “He wanted people to like him for what he did, not just for being a ballplayer,” he said. “He didn’t want praise, he just wanted what was due to him, that’s all. If he did something good, put it in the paper, something bad, put it in the paper, and leave it at that. He was my best friend on the team.”

Said Chee Chee: “Even those of us who didn’t know him personally feel a sense of loss.”

She sent it back to anchorman Bill Beutel, who tossed it to sports-caster Warner Wolf. “The key word for Thurman was consistent,” he said. “He seldom gave you a bad game. If he wasn’t hitting that day,
he was still an excellent defensive catcher, and one of the best clutch hitters in baseball. He was the first Yankee to win Rookie of the Year and MVP, an All-American at Kent State, a .529 hitter in the World Series, and he batted over .300 in five of his nine years.”