Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (18 page)

So he waited and pouted.

At the baseball banquet in Syracuse, Thurman said that he would be asking for a trade if he couldn’t count on Steinbrenner’s word about a salary adjustment. It didn’t get any media attention. And he was looking for some.

He tried it again in Canada a few days later and this time the Associated Press picked it up. When Munson got back to Canton, an angry Steinbrenner called him at home and insisted he come to New York to sign a press release denying the quotes.

“He was growing increasingly angry over this,” said Elliott Pollack,
a lawyer for Thurm’s friend Nat Tarnopol. “Once Nat went with him to see George, and Thurman was so mad that Nat had to restrain Thurman from hitting him. It was a good thing that he asked Nat to go with him.”

He didn’t come to New York, but the two came to an uneasy accommodation. Munson never believed he was getting the full story on the Jackson salary, believing instead that deferred payments were being hidden. And he remained convinced that he had Steinbrenner’s word that he would be the highest-salaried player on the team, except for Hunter. But he signed a new deal and decided to live with it. He thought any trust between boss and captain was gone.

There would never be an easy peace between Munson and Steinbrenner, although they would spend more time together than most players would ever spend with the team owner. Basically, Thurman never felt he could trust Steinbrenner. He did, however, admire his wealth and success. Being an aspiring tycoon himself, Munson enjoyed talking with Steinbrenner, learning from him, picking his brain, and getting away from conversations about upcoming pitchers—focusing instead on growth industries to invest in. Thurman routinely used to trek up to the Boss’s fourth-floor office in Yankee Stadium after batting practice to talk about the economy, investments, the business of baseball, and the state of the union.

He’d walk the long walk from the Yankee clubhouse to the press elevators that took him past the stadium lobby and the luxury suites and right to the doors leading to the Yankee offices with the help of elevator operators who knew how to bypass floors. Otherwise, of course, luxury box ticket holders would encounter the sight of a fully uniformed Munson riding the elevator with them.

Steinbrenner’s office was thirty feet by thirty feet, overlooked the field, and had a round wooden desk in one sector, three inches thick, no drawers, just plush chairs surrounding it, the one with the highest back for the Boss. Munson would enter and plop his feet on
the desk. As he was still wearing his spikes, clumps of Yankee Stadium clay would land on the desk. Thurman made no effort to remove the mess.

“Heh heh heh,” he told me. “Oh does that piss him off. You can see the lines in his neck turning red. But he never says a word.”

In spring training of 1977, Reggie Jackson held court each day with the media while his new teammates shook their heads and rolled their eyes, making fun of him behind his back. Or at least they thought it was behind his back. He knew it was going on.

Meanwhile, an effort by freelance reporter Robert Ward to do a major interview with Jackson for
Sport
magazine landed on my desk.

Sport
at the time was still an important publication, and the mention of it would get Reggie’s attention.

Ward asked me where I thought he might bring Reggie, and I suggested the Banana Boat, a popular spot among the players on Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.

I was in my final weeks with the Yankees. I had decided, along with Joe Garagiola Jr., the future general manager of the Diamondbacks and the son of the legendary broadcaster, to resign and form a representation business. (Joe was our in-house attorney.) But I was still at my desk, preparing for spring training as always, working frantically on the yearbook and the scorecard and the media guide to have them on schedule for publication. Mickey Morabito, my able assistant, would succeed me.

When Ward called I told him I couldn’t imagine Reggie
not
wanting to do an interview for
Sport
, and with Reggie’s agent Matt Merola, worked out a way for them to contact each other and set up the meeting at the Banana Boat.

Reggie had some trepidation, it happened; he did not always feel
Sport
had done right by him. That was news to me. I remember one
year that they had given him the World Series MVP award—a Corvette—when Bert Campaneris was more deserving. It was to many a gesture that would get more people to attend the awards luncheon.

Ward and Jackson met and an interview was conducted. Ward was not out to “get” Reggie—it was supposed to be a “welcome to New York” kind of story. But Reggie took over the conversation and moved away from Ward’s prepared questions.

On May 23, the magazine came out.

The original story did not particularly scream out with the “straw that stirs the drink” comment, but
Sport
publicist Sy Preston knew a big story when he saw one, sent out a press release highlighting that quote, and the story took off from there.

Thurman was in the training room with his copy and he asked Herman Schneider, the assistant trainer, to ask Fran Healy to come in.

“Did you see this?” he asked.

He began to read aloud from the
Sport
interview.

“‘You know, this team, it all flows from me,’” Jackson was quoted as saying. “‘I’ve got to keep it all going. I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson … but he really doesn’t enter into it.’”

“Can you fuckin’ believe this?” asked Munson, continuing to read: “‘[Thurman] is so insecure about the whole thing. I’ve overheard him talking about me … I’ll hear him telling some other writer that he wants it to be known that he’s the captain of the team, that he knows what’s best. Stuff like that. And when anybody knocks me, he laughs real loud so I can hear.’”

Asked by Ward about just talking to Munson about it, Jackson said, “He’s not ready for it yet. He doesn’t even know he feels that way … He’d try to cover up, but he ought to know he can’t cover up anything from me. Man, there’s no way. I can read these guys. No,
I’ll wait and eventually he’ll be whipped. There will come that moment when he really knows I won, and he’ll wait to hear everything’s all right, and then I’ll go to him and we will get it right.

“Munson’s tough too. He is a winner, but there is just nobody who can do for a club what I can do. There is nobody who can put meat in the seats the way I can. That’s just the way it is. Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.”

“Maybe he was quoted out of context,” suggested Healy the Healer.

“For three pages?” Munson replied.

This story has been quoted so many times over the years; one wonders why it wasn’t enough to keep
Sport
magazine in business. (The magazine died in 2000 but lost its impact much earlier.) “I’m the straw that stirs the drink”—where in the world that inspired line came from, Reggie never said. And in fairness, if in his early days of spring training, he had actually seen Munson laughing about him to writers, one could understand his own insecurity and confusion over not being better accepted by the team captain. The irony is it was the team captain who had told Steinbrenner to get him in the first place.

But Reggie was a very bright man and, at thirty-one, a very sophisticated student of the media. This was a really dumb thing to do on a new team, with new teammates, in a publication that would come out in the regular season as the pennant race was on.

Reggie’s published explanation came in his 1984 autobiography with Mike Lupica:

The severity of this personal “feud” would never reach a point where either Jackson or Munson had to be traded, but it was an enormous story in New York that wouldn’t die. With the tabloid war between the
Daily News
and the
Post
growing, this was made to order for them. Reggie was good copy; he sold a lot of newspapers. It was all Yankee fans could talk about, with few siding with Jackson. Munson was “their guy.”

But they were both pro athletes who put their heads down and played to win. It took a long time for them to be able to smile at each other or feel comfortable if they were alone together. But it did happen. They didn’t retain an enmity forever. They were just never going to be close friends.

I first had the idea for a book with Thurman just days after the MVP award was announced, but not until I left the Yankees in January
did I decide how much sense it made, particularly with my no longer being the in-house publicist for the team.

Thurman’s familiarity with my writing extended back to late 1976, when two cartons of galley proofs and original manuscript for my first book arrived at Yankee Stadium for proofreading. With good luck, I was leaving for the parking lot just as he was and he carried one of the cartons to my car for me. So he knew that my writing required heavy lifting.

The crazed events of 1977—when the Thurman-Billy-George-Reggie Show was beginning to take shape—were not on my mind when I approached him about the book.

I knew a Yankee winning an MVP award would spark book interest and I also knew he’d be reluctant to do one. Even if he did one, he really didn’t talk to any of the sportswriters who might collaborate with him. His silence toward the media was now a full part of his persona.

I phoned him at his home in Norwood, New Jersey, and suggested a book.

“I’m only twenty-nine,” he said. “No one does an autobiography at twenty-nine.”

I explained to him that twenty-nine wasn’t especially young in the celebrity world, and winning an MVP award with the Yankees almost guaranteed that
someone
would be pitching a book idea to a publisher.

“And if you don’t do it yourself, you’ll hate whatever is done without you—you won’t make any money, you’ll think it’s all wrong, and it will just aggravate you.”

“I’m not that interested in the money,” he said. “And I’d want it to be a paperback so kids could buy it.”

I talked him through the publishing cycle. If you start with a hardcover, you get library sales. Kids could read it for free. If it has some success, then there could be a paperback edition.

He still hesitated. This was really not something high on his “to do” list. But then he saw my argument that it was like an insurance policy against someone doing an unauthorized bio.

“Those are good arguments,” he said, laughing. “Let’s do it.”

And so during one phone conversation we agreed on the project. I then mailed off proposals to several publishers. I got a phone call from one, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, the day they received it. It was a decent offer and my inclination was to wait to see what else came back. So I bought some time, but after a few days they called again and said, “Look, we want to do this, it’s a fair offer, and you shouldn’t wait any longer; you should jump at this. We’ll have to pull it back next week and move on.”

I conferred with Thurman. We agreed on the process with which we’d do it, our own revenue split (on a handshake), and made the deal. (I have been offered a lot of money for the signed book contract, but I still have it.)

I loved having this deal in place. I was feeling withdrawal symptoms after nine seasons with the team, and this got me into a project with the team captain.

We would work throughout the 1977 season at his home in Norwood when the Yankees were at home. I was living in Tarrytown, New York, at the time and it would be an easy drive over there.

The process would involve my taping him, transcribing the tapes, creating the book, and his reading and reacting to it. During the tapings we would sit opposite each other on a sofa and a chair, or he would sit at his big mahogany desk with the nameplate T.
MUNSON
at the front. He’d be interrupted by calls about his real estate holdings. “Six percent on that sewer project?” he would say. “Let’s sell!”

Sometimes one of his children would come in, which automatically meant stopping the tape while he dangled them on his knee and asked what they were up to.

By the time we finished, the 1977 season had finished as well, with
a happy conclusion—the team’s first world championship since 1962. So the book was generally upbeat.

But there wasn’t much humor in it; Thurman’s stories didn’t translate into really funny tales. “Can you make it funnier?” he asked at one point. “Sure,” I said, “give me more funny stories.” But he didn’t have many, and he didn’t want to share much about his childhood. So what we had was a pretty traditional baseball bio.

Their home on Fifteenth Street in Norwood was magnificent, and I remember its greatest feature being not one but two spiral staircases to the second floor.

Still, I could see a loneliness there in Diana. When the team was on the road, she especially missed her family in Canton. Work was progressing on a great new home for them near Fifty-fifth Street NE and Market, and ultimately they decided that for everyone’s greater happiness, home would always be Canton.