Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (42 page)

That was a tough statement by the Boss, and related directly to Thurman’s demand that his salary should be equal to whoever came along as the highest-paid player on the club. No doubt the reality of paying over a million dollars in his remaining salary to Diana was kicking in.

If you could overlook his seemingly endless war with the media, you had in Thurman Munson a guy who came from a troubled childhood, but was still the most regular guy in school, in sports, and on into celebrity. A good relationship with the press might have let that come across better. But he never really “got it” when it came to the media, because in the end, he was a Canton boy from start to finish, and that part of New York, the celebrity part, just didn’t work for him. He would not have dealt well with the proliferation of media in the era that was to come, with sports talk radio, cable television, and the Internet. The “Information Age” was not for Thurman.

Maybe Gabe Paul was going to pull off a trade and bring Thurman to Cleveland for 1980. It was always difficult for Yankee fans to view their man as a hometown hero and know that he seemingly had no problem with going to the Indians. It was one of those things the fans tried their best to ignore.

Diana was convinced that Thurman was going to sell the plane; that he’d either seen its dangers or no longer felt he needed it. “He was coming around, I know he was,” she told Wayne Coffey of New York’s
Daily News
, during a lengthy twenty-fifth anniversary interview. On the twentieth anniversary, she did a long interview with Michael
Paterniti for
Esquire
. She has appeared in most of the documentaries produced on Thurman, including the much-played “Yankeeography” on the Yankee-owned YES Network.

Diana is a wonderful figure throughout this story and remained one after Thurman’s death. Little known to Yankee fans, her courage shined in the days after his death, and she wisely limited her public appearances so as not to become overexposed or accentuate her role as the sympathetic Yankee widow.

She made a visit to the crash site some months after the accident, to begin to fully embrace the healing process. She had the expected mood swings of loss, anger, questioning of her faith, and bitterness. But she carried herself with great dignity, as she became a single parent and took on the challenge of raising her three children, keeping them out of the media spotlight, displaying sensitivity and compassion to friends in need, and generally being a role model for anyone thrust into such a horrible position. As a grandmother, she loved attending Little League games and watching another generation—Thurman’s grandchildren—fall in love with baseball.

“If there was someone in our circle of friends who had a time of need, you knew Diana would be there at every step,” says her friend Joanne Murray.

She pleased many when she went to Old-Timers’ Day in New York on June 21, 1980, less than ten months after the accident, allowing the fans to cheer for Thurman as she was introduced.

“I wanted people to know that I’m okay,” she said.

She remained pretty and sweet and probably could have dated many men, but she chose to be a mom and to make a full-time job of it. She remained in the spectacular home they had built, answered letters from fans, and made occasional visits to Yankee Stadium for Old-Timers’ Days or ceremonial moments. It took more than twenty-five years for her to visit Thurman’s empty locker.

“Dating makes you feel more normal,” she told the
Repository
as
the twenty-fifth anniversary approached. “But there’s the whole Mrs. Thurman Munson thing. I think it gets too complicated. I’ve had people who thought they could get past it and couldn’t. At this age, I know Mr. Wonderful might still find me, but I hope he hurries up because I’m getting old and getting tired.”

Jerry Anderson kept in touch with Diana Munson for a time, “but eventually she probably said to herself, ‘I don’t want to sever the relationship, but I don’t want to be with him either.’ So we kinda lost touch. I was part of a terrible memory for her. Sometimes I’d run into her, maybe just bump into her on the street if I was back in Canton for some reason. We’d exchange pleasantries, but it was shallow. We don’t really have any relationship now.”

Ironically, with no connection to Munson as part of the equation, Anderson would become partners with Bucky Dent in his baseball school in Florida. He had met Bucky much by happenstance after moving to Boca Raton in 1982. Larry Hoskin had started the school, and he was the mutual acquaintance who introduced Anderson to Dent.

“In 1988 I got a call from Diana,” says Jerry. “She said that Michael was now thirteen, and was wondering if he could come down to attend the school. Well, of course he could. Thurman used to say to me, ‘That little guy, he’s a handful!’ I was happy to be able to accommodate this.”

With further irony, Jerry’s son Jeff played baseball and went to Ohio State on a scholarship. He went on to play ten seasons of Independent League baseball, including a year playing for Ron Guidry on an Independent League team in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1998, and then at Yogi Berra Stadium with the New Jersey Jackals in 1999. Then Jeff played in Somerset, New Jersey, under Sparky Lyle, where a teammate turned out to be future Yankee Cory Lidle’s twin brother.

Dave Hall became an air traffic controller, and eventually moved to Boston, where he worked at the Boston Flight Standards District Office. He politely declined an invitation to speak with ESPN for their 2004 feature, and has chosen to maintain a low profile with respect to his footnote to history. He and Anderson long ago lost touch.

In preparing this book, I asked if he wanted to see the chapter about the accident and to add any comments or correct any facts, but he said he preferred not to. He did confirm some additional facts used in this book and was pleasant and friendly on the phone. He had to check with his wife to recall that Diana had visited him during his hospital stay, saying he remembered nothing from those days. It was clear he had moved on from that tragic event.

How much money did Thurman’s death cost the family in baseball earnings? His potential earnings are intriguing to contemplate. His contract took him through 1981. If he had enjoyed continued success in business, continued to enjoy being home, and found his career hobbled by injuries that made his performance suffer, he might have retired.

On the other hand, if he’d enjoyed a new burst of excellence by moving to designated hitter or to outfield or first base, perhaps the lure of big dollars and the enjoyment he got from playing ball might have won out.

There was a long players’ strike in 1981, and then he could have declared free agency, and perhaps signed another three-year deal with another American League team (where he could occasionally DH). But here is where it would have gotten interesting.

The Yankees signed Dave Winfield to a ten-year, $23 million deal beginning in 1981, which even included annual cost-of-living increases. Munson, had he decided to stay, would have insisted that he had an agreement which would keep him the highest-paid player
on the team. The Yankees might have argued that that agreement was part of his expiring contract and no longer in force. Or, had they felt it was in force, they might have had to think twice about signing Winfield. The contracts would have overlapped at least in Winfield’s first season, 1981, a year the Yankees went to the World Series.

It all makes for intrigue as to what might have been. It could have changed Yankee history.

Thurman’s death did change things in the future—sometimes in positive ways. A year after his death, representatives from the Association for the Help of Retarded Children in New York visited me at my office at WPIX. I was by then the PR director for the Yankees’ home TV station, and would later become producer of their telecasts.

As I’d coauthored Thurman’s autobiography, they thought I could help with a special project: holding a dinner in his name as a fund-raiser. Gene Michael would be another of the early organizers.

Thurman had no connection to disabled children, but that didn’t matter to those who were visiting me that day. They thought that if they could sell thirty tables and present some awards, they would have honored his name and helped their charity.

Diana liked the idea, and the dinner worked. Thurman’s name attracted far more people than they expected, and they decided to make an annual event of it. Not all the honorees were from sports. In the second or third year, James Cagney made one of his final public appearances to receive a “Thurman Award.”

The routine always seemed to start in my office, tossing around names of prospective honorees, and working with the local team PR people to secure them. The selection criteria were generally a combination of “Are they good citizens?” and “Are they available the night of the dinner?” Diana, and then sometimes her children, would attend almost every year. I think a snowstorm may have prevented them from coming one year.

She always read a short speech from the dais, and the audience loved her sweetness, her sincerity, and her ability to make everyone remember Thurman with fondness. When I was more actively involved, I had a video produced showing his career highlights, which the audience loved. On into the 2000s, the dinner continued, uninterrupted, with no loss of table sales despite the distant memory that Thurman was becoming for some. Millions of dollars had been raised. Management of the dinner changed, and Gene Michael and I became lost in the shuffle, but it would always be nice to attend the event and catch up with Diana, who was always the focus of everyone’s attention.

Tracy and husband Chris Evans had a daughter and two sons. Tracy became a teacher at a Montessori school. Kelly and her husband, Tony Parson, had two daughters and one son. The son, Anthony Thurman Parson, is the one who carries Thurman’s name, along with the birth name of his beloved father-in-law and best friend, Anthony “Tote” Dominick. Kelly designs houses, and retains Munson as her last name.

Michael proposed on one knee to his girlfriend, Michelle, in front of his dad’s plaque in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park in 2004 when the family returned for Old-Timers’ Day. She said yes. Their first child, a daughter, and the first grandchild to bear the name Munson in the family, was born in May 2008.

Michael, because he was only four when Munson died, grew up watching his father’s highlights on television having fewer personal memories than his sisters. He grew to be a large man, five feet ten and 240 pounds, much of it from weightlifting. He went to Glen Oak High School and then to Kent State, and in 1995 was signed to a Yankee contract through the good graces of Gene Michael, by then the team’s general manager. A catcher, he batted .300 in nineteen games for Tampa in 1996, but he wasn’t cut out to be a big leaguer like his dad, and his minor league career would be fleeting.
He wound up briefly playing Independent League ball in the park named for his dad in Canton.

Every bit the Canton guy like his dad, he opened Munson’s Home Plate Sports Pub on Dressler Road NW in January 2008. At the finale of old Yankee Stadium in 2008, he represented his dad on the field in pregame ceremonies, receiving a tremendous ovation.

September 16, 1979, was Catfish Hunter Day, as the great Yankee pitcher was preparing for retirement. The team was in free fall after Thurman’s death and there were few joyous moments for the fans as the season wound down. Hunter himself was going 2-9 in his final campaign. He told the crowd on his day, “There’s three men shoulda been here today. One’s my pa”—the crowd burst into cheers—“one’s the scout who signed me”—bigger cheers—“and the third one … is Thurman Munson.” A great ovation rose from the stands. It wouldn’t stop. The fans so longed to cheer for Thurman, and this was the first time they could since the days after he died.

After that season, the Yankees would run video on their scoreboard before the games showing great Yankee moments, and one recurring scene would show Thurman, his knees beaten, struggling to rise and continue to play. It was very heroic. And it never failed to increase the crowd’s cheering, as though their man had just popped out of the dugout as he had done in the rookie summer of 1970, ready to pinch-hit.

Corky Simpson tracked down Darrell Munson for the interview that ran in the
Tucson Citizen
on October 4, 1979 (and was quoted earlier in this book). In retirement, twenty-nine years later, Simpson remembered it well.

“In nearly fifty years of sportswriting I must have done thousands of interviews and let me tell you, this was not only the strangest, but the most uncomfortable,” says Simpson. “Darrell Munson was working in a tiny, corrugated metal shed at the entrance to a parking lot near the University of Arizona. That’s one of my most vivid memories—that
the father of a magnificent athlete would be working in such a small, telephone-booth-sized structure, collecting change from people parking their cars.

“Mr. Munson was a most unpleasant man who seemed to be angry at the world. That anger and some deep hurt from some unknown cause could be seen in his eyes. He sure as hell was one angry man. It was pretty obvious that Darrell resented Thurman’s enormous success. I have heard men say that the toughest relationship of their lives was with their sons—but this was borderline hostility. Over the years, I have asked myself many times if I shouldn’t have simply folded up my notebook and walked away from this one. But if I had, maybe an important shred of evidence in a wonderful baseball player’s life and times, including his struggle to be great, would have been lost.”

Graig Nettles, who would be named the next Yankee captain in 1982, told biographer Peter Golenbock, “For a long time we didn’t even bring up his name. Now, when we see a fat guy on the street, someone will say, ‘Hey look at Thurman.’ Jokes are a way to ease the pain. For a while it was tough to concentrate on playing. When his plane crashed, so did our season. We didn’t feel much like playing the rest of the year.”

Darla Munson would write a poem, an interest she shared with her brother Thurman, who had written poems many years before to a young Diane Dominick: