Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (29 page)

I gave Martin a lot of credit, right out in front of everybody. I even invited Billy to the award ceremony when I was getting the car for being the World Series MVP. It was given out by
Sport
magazine, if you can believe that. I was just sorry Robert Ward wasn’t awarding it himself.

I told Billy, “They’re giving me the car Thursday, Skip”—we won the Series on a Tuesday night—“and I’d appreciate it if you’d be there.”

“I’ll be there,” Billy said—but then I realized how early the ceremony was, and I didn’t want to make it seem like an obligation.

“No, that’s all right, it’s too early in the morning,” I told him.

“Don’t worry about it, Big Guy. I’ll be there,” he said.

“No, you don’t have to come. It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” I told him. But he just kept insisting, “I’ll be there. I want to be there. I’ll be there, you can bet on it.”

He wasn’t there. We both lost the bet.

To be honest, I don’t think I even noticed. That whole week, I was walking on air.

After the game, about 12:30 or 1:00 a.m., when I finally got out of the locker room, I went over to Seventy-sixth and Third, to McMullen’s restaurant, my usual hangout. I was driving a blue Volkswagen Beetle they’d given me for doing a commercial for Volkswagen. Ended up giving it to my brother Joe, who just loved Beetles. During that summer, I could drive it back and forth to the ballpark and sort
of sneak around town in it because nobody expected to see me in a Volkswagen Beetle.

However, the night of the sixth game, there were so many people out I had to pull it up on the sidewalk when I arrived at McMullen’s. I remember seeing Matt Merola, who was my agent for everything outside my baseball contracts, and some of his friends there. After twenty, thirty minutes the place started to fill up. People kept coming by to say congratulations, and I finally had to leave. It was overwhelming. I went to Rusty Staub’s. He was playing for Detroit then but had just opened his first restaurant on Seventy-third and Third, and I went there.

Hugh Carey, who was governor, was there, and he stayed as long as I could remember. He was wonderful, great to hang out with. I saw him there, then I left and went back to McMullen’s. Then a message came from the governor at Rusty Staub’s: “Have Reggie come spend some more time with us.” I said, “No, no, have him come to
us
.” Everybody got a big kick out of that. He did eventually come down, a couple hours later. I stayed at McMullen’s until about five, five thirty in the morning. After that I went back home, to my apartment on Fifth Avenue, but didn’t go to sleep that night. I was supposed to be on the
Today
show that morning with Tom Brokaw. They sent a car over, and it was there to pick me up when I got home. I went in, changed, and went right over to do the show.

After that, I went to my Nectar Café, at Seventy-ninth and Madison, where I usually had breakfast. All the local people were there who I used to eat with, and they came in to say congratulations.

After breakfast, I went over to Seventy-first and York, over by the East River, where a friend of mine, Michael Schudroff, owned a dealership, and he specialized in Rolls and Ferraris. I had been driving my yellow Jeep CJ-5 and my little Volkswagen Beetle.

During that summer of 1977, I’d been hanging around Schudroff’s service department. I’d bought a Ferrari 275 GTB 4 Cam from him and two Rolls-Royces. (I bought that Ferrari for $15,000. Today, 2013, that same model has a value of $2 million plus. I sold mine after fifteen years. At one time, I had a collection of nine Ferraris.) When I went back there, the day after the three homers, Michael—he had this
very thick Brooklyn accent—said, “Boy, do I have the cah fuh you!” He kept insisting, “Come ovah heer. I’m not sellin’ this cah till you buy it!”

I looked at it—and it was to die for. A 1976 Corniche convertible. I couldn’t turn it down. It had a Yankee-navy convertible top, with two-tone silver and blue colors. Navy leather inside. It just looked like a Yankee.

“You need to get this cah. It belongs to you. It’s got yaw name on it,” Schudroff was going on. “Fuhgeddaboutit! You’re gonna make millions a dollars this wintah wit’ all the appearances you gonna make. It’s nothin’ to you, fuhgeddaboutit!”

It was $64,250. A lot of money in 1977. A lot of money even in terms of what I was making. I hung around there most of the day. Got in and out of the car all day long. We called in lunch, had corned beef and Swiss on rye. And we talked and talked and talked. I called a friend of mine out in the country. I called my attorney, Steven Kay. He asked me when I was coming home, and I said I would be home in a couple of days. I was calling all my friends, who were telling me it was okay to buy the car. If I thought they’d say don’t buy it, I didn’t call them!

That was all it took. I hung around for the ticker-tape parade. Hung around for
Sport
magazine to give me that MVP car. It was a 1977 Thunderbird, Yankee blue. Nice car. I signed it over to my sister Tina, who’d come up from Baltimore with her husband, Tony.

I went out and bought a Samsonite suitcase. I went out and bought a CB radio and an antenna you could attach with a magnet to the back of the car. Didn’t want to scar my “new girl.”

I went back to see Michael. And I bought the Corniche.

I threw a couple of jeans in the suitcase. Couple pairs of tennis shoes, couple sweatshirts, underwear. Took off for California and drove straight across the country in about forty-eight hours.

I just kept driving. I used the CB to avoid the highway patrol most of the way. My handle was Mr. October. Everybody was so nice. The truckers were nice. You know, if you got between two trucks, the term was “You’re in the rocking chair”—no police ahead, no police behind. That’s where I’d stay a lot of the time, sitting in the rocking chair.

I was rolling, eighty, ninety miles an hour almost the whole way.
I remember I did get stopped four or five times, in Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma. But each time, the police who stopped me said, “I heard you were on the highway. I just wanted to meet you.” No tickets. They just said, “I wanted to stop you and say hello. Congratulations on the World Series. Now go ahead, you got a clear shot.” I could hear them sometimes on the CB: “Is this the ballplayer? Where you at?”

I would say, “I’m coming up on you. I’m in a Rolls and sitting on ninety.” And that was okay. I could just sit and have fun with them, with everyone. It was so nice to get all that love, all across the country, after all the grief I’d been dealing with all year.

I’d stop and eat sometimes, but I never did any sleeping. I didn’t need any sleep. I was still high on the World Series. I just needed a Pepsi and a Snickers bar, and I was on my way. (They didn’t have a Reggie! bar yet.)

I was young and full of vinegar. Going, going, gone. I just wanted to get home. Home to family, home to my girlfriend. Home to my buddies. Sharing good times. I went across on Highway 80. Came down through Reno and Tahoe, cut across the mountains. And then there I was, back at 22 Yankee Hill Road, in the Berkeley Hills, if you can believe it. Boy, was I glad to see that house! Still own it. Still own the Corniche convertible. It was a beautiful car. Still is.

And I have to say that, thinking about it on that whole ride cross-country, thinking about coming to New York, all of it … I had to say, I thought it was all worthwhile.

That feeling would last until spring training.

I
LET MYSELF
enjoy the off-season. It felt good just to be back in California, good to be hanging around Berkeley and Oakland, all my old stomping grounds.

I had a place I went to all the time when I played with the A’s: Lois the Pie Queen, which is in Emeryville now, at Sixtieth and Adeline, but which in those days used to be just over the city line in Berkeley, on Sacramento Street. It was a legend then and still is for its soul food, ribs, biscuits, and homemade apple pie. All Mom’s cooking, made by Lois! They already had a Reggie Jackson special on the menu. Two pork chops, two scrambled eggs, grits, side of bacon, biscuits and butter, glass of milk and orange juice.

I can smell it and taste it now. It’s a lot of food. I tried to stop eating it a few years ago, except for times when I want a treat. But I had it again, last time I was there.

It was added motivation to work out. I would give myself a few weeks to unwind from the season, then start working out hard again right after Thanksgiving.

The winter was great. Lots of commercials, lots of appearances, and off-field revenue. Michael Schudroff was right: I made a lot of money, played with my cars, as I was in the process of starting a collection that I still have today.

I came into camp the next spring training in good shape, with a good mental attitude. My arm had stopped hurting.

I thought everything that had gone on the year before would have
to be water under the bridge. We were the champions of the world. I was the World Series MVP.

I mean, what could go wrong?

It
was
quieter that spring. There was a little ruckus when we went 10–13 in our exhibition games. I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. Your record doesn’t matter in the spring. You just want to leave healthy, ready, and in good shape. The fact that we had a losing record wasn’t a big deal to the players and the manager.

For the Boss, it
was
a big deal. By the end of April, he was already upset enough that he was telling Billy Martin it was time he started pulling this team together. Every time George was around, he was concerned that we weren’t playing well enough.

For me, at least, I didn’t have anything to prove. I proved it all—in the World Series. People weren’t asking so many questions about whether I could get along with Thurman or Billy Martin. People weren’t asking if I could play in New York. We’d been through all that—or so I thought.

I don’t know if I was really
happy
. As I’ve said, you know, growing up, I learned that life was not necessarily about being “happy” all the time. Because I was poor and a minority (black and Latino American), the thought was, “The next meal, heat in the house, food in the fridge,” as my dad said. The focus was on getting a good education, to be prepared for the life ahead. There wasn’t much discussion about college, because we couldn’t afford it, and the only way to get to college was on a scholarship. I knew in high school that an athletic scholarship was the only way to college for me.

But I felt good to be there in spring training. Glad to be playing, glad to be there working out. Between the injury to my arm, and the holding out, and getting traded, and when I first became a free agent, and all else that had gone on, it was the best I’d felt in the past three years.

What’s more, this time the spotlight wasn’t on me. Sparky Lyle had such a great year in 1977 he became the first relief pitcher to win
the Cy Young Award in the American League. But having one great closer wasn’t enough for the Boss. When Goose Gossage came on the free-agent market that off-season, George went right out and signed him. Then he went out and signed Rawly Eastwick, who’d been the closer for the Big Red Machine during the Reds’ World Series years.

I don’t know who was giving George direction, but he was picking up outstanding talent. Again, word was at that time that Gene Michael was very involved in the makeup and the talent of the Yankees. He helped build the organization, especially the major-league club. He’s been reputed to be the loudest voice that George would listen to when building a team.

Bam, just like that, we had three star closers. They said Eastwick was getting more than $200,000 a year, which was more than Sparky was making at a reported $135,000. Goose got close to the money I got, over $2.7 million, but for seven years, which shows you how fast free agency was changing everything. At the same time, major-league attendance in 1978 would finish up over two million from what it had been the year before. Over ten million from the year before that, 1976. Ticket prices were up, concession prices were up, TV ratings were up.

Teams were starting to put their games on cable television, constantly looking for new revenue streams.

Why shouldn’t the players share in it? Free agency was shaking things up, giving teams a chance to get better right away. Some fans loved it and some fans didn’t, I’d say fifty-fifty.

The truth is that free agency helped bring the top players to the marquee teams, and when the marquee teams are doing well, they can help a whole region. They help the whole league, the whole major-league brand. When the Cubs had a chance to make the World Series back in 2003, people were interested. When the Red Sox are doing well, when certain teams in every sport are doing well—the Packers, the Cowboys, the Patriots, the Redskins, or the 49ers, Montreal in hockey, the Lakers or the Bulls, Celtics, and others—the fans watch.

It’s not as important for Philadelphia or Arizona to be doing well. They don’t have the same impact.

The Yankees have more of that legacy effect than anyone. When they’re playing well, it changes the whole league, the television ratings.
The Yankees
are
ratings. The teams they had with all the great players, the big
names
in the late 1990s—they were always on Sunday night TV, they had a lot of getaway games late at night on the West Coast because of TV ratings, and it made it tough for the players to play like that, always going on short rest, after tough travel.

The name teams get those TV slots. You don’t see non-marquee teams on Sunday night games too much.

The big teams are revenue sources for the whole league. They’re it. Freakin’ Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson. They make you want to turn on the television set, sell potato chips and beer, and Pepsi. Watch those Cadillac commercials. That’s what it is, $.

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate this or that team, or this or that player. Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore someone like Alex Rodriguez. Guys will say, “Oh, I hate him,” or “Oh, I love him.” But either way, you’re gonna turn on the TV.