This is an excerpt from the upcoming “The Bosses of the Bronx” by Post columnist Mike Vaccaro, covering the more than 50 years of Steinbrenner ownership of the Yankees. It releases March 24 from Harper Books. This is the first of three excerpts that will appear in The Post.
THIS WAS GEORGE Steinbrenner’s moment. This was his play. The morning after the Yankees were swept out of the 1976 World Series by the Reds he called a meeting at Yankee Stadium. He listened to his lieutenants’ thoughts. There would be 22 players taking part in the first class of free agency, a bonanza that would kick off in November.
Steinbrenner knew this was the time to flex the Yankees’ big-market muscle and didn’t plan on being bashful. His partners had already begun to bitch about how often they were asked for cash calls, frustrated at their modest dividends. Many had already thrown up their hands, sold their shares back to Steinbrenner.
If they were replaced, it was by investors of smaller measure, and quieter voice. It allowed Steinbrenner to consolidate his considerable powers. The Yankees were already making money, thanks to much-improved attendance and a favorable stadium lease that allowed a generous share of parking and concessions.
He had cash to spend. He intended to spend it.
Now it was about identifying the players to whom he would write those checks. Gabe Paul piped up first. In a few weeks he would be named baseball’s Executive of the Year for 1976 by UPI, the crowning achievement of his 50-year baseball life.
“Bobby Grich is the best player,” Paul said of the Orioles’ second baseman, who’d played out his option. “We’re good at second, but he’s got the range to play shortstop, and we desperately need a shortstop.”
Steinbrenner wrote down the name.
“I agree on Grich,” rasped Billy Martin, puffing a pipe, his voice a scratchy mess since he’d been ejected from Game 4 the night before, one more last-stand fight for one more lost cause. “And I also think Joe Rudi would be a perfect fit for us.”
Steinbrenner nodded.
A few more names were tossed out. Steinbrenner listened impatiently.
“What about Reggie?” Steinbrenner finally asked.
He wasn’t really asking. Paul knew he could explain why any of the other players would be better fits and the boss would respond as if he were talking in Japanese. Martin desperately wanted to recite the list of red flags he’d assembled on Jackson through the years, from his ego to the fact that he wasn’t near the fielder Rudi was. But Martin knew anything he said now he’d probably see on the back page of the Post in June Maybe sooner.
“Those guys are good,” Steinbrenner said. “But they aren’t stars.”
The men nodded.
“They don’t put fannies in the seats. Reggie Jackson will put fannies in the seats.”
The meeting adjourned.
The courtship commenced.
AFTER LUNCH AT 21 – Reggie was unimpressed; his steak had been overcooked – Steinbrenner bypassed the taxi line.
“Let’s take a walk, Reggie,” he said.
Here is where Steinbrenner allowed New York to do the recruiting. They walked past the Plaza Hotel; as if on cue, the drivers of the horse carriages started calling his name, exhorting him: “See ya in the Bronx, Reggie!”
As they walked along Central Park South, cabbies honked their horns.
“Sign him, George!” they crowed.
Pedestrians pleaded with him to make New York his new home, and a gaggle of schoolkids handed him scraps of paper from their spiral notebooks to sign.
“We were falling in love,” Jackson would say. “New York with me, me with New York.”
This lovely stroll out of a movie culminated at George Steinbrenner’s apartment on the tony Upper East Side, and that’s where reality splashed both men cold in the face.
“Reggie,” Steinbrenner said, “we’d like to offer you two million dollars over five years.”
Jackson’s thousand-watt smile dimmed. The Expos had offered Jackson $5 million if he’d be willing to take his talents north of the border. He wasn’t sure about playing in Canada, and he was less sure about switching leagues, and he really wasn’t crazy about the weather there.
Still, five mil was five mil.
“George,” Jackson said, “What I want is three million dollars. And a Rolls-Royce.”
The men agreed to meet at the O’Hare Hyatt in Chicago two days later. Steinbrenner felt confident as he walked into the hotel . . . until he saw a few of his fellow owners milling about the lobby and realized they weren’t in town to visit the observation deck of the Sears Tower.
He’d come hoping Jackson would agree to meet in the middle at $2.5 million and now realized he’d better lead with his best offer. He did: $2.9 million.
“What about the Rolls, George?”
Steinbrenner grabbed a cocktail napkin, wrote down the details. And the final official figure: $2.96 million, with the sixty grand added on to cover the car. Jackson took the napkin, scrawled, “I will not let you down. Reginald M. Jackson.
Steinbrenner kept that paper linen under glass in his office the rest of his days. He’d bagged his star—or, as Jackson himself preferred to be called, his “superduperstar.”
“HE HUSTLED ME, man,” Jackson would say a week later inside the Versailles Terrace Room of the Americana hotel. He wore a Yankees cap and a brass-buttoned three-piece suit of gray flannel as he was officially welcomed to the Yankees. He wore black alligator shoes, sported a bracelet with his name spelled in gold, and made sure to wear one of the championship rings he’d earned in Oakland.
“George Steinbrenner outhustled everyone else. He dealt with me as a man and as a person. I feel like I’m a friend of his. He’s like me. He’s a little crazy, and he’s a hustler.”
On the grandest day of his nearly four years owning the Yankees, with his entire plan falling into place just as he’d planned it, Steinbrenner opted for humility: “Anyone can sell New York. That’s really all I sold him.”
Thurman Munson, the captain, was there, as was Roy White, the longest-tenured
Yankee. Together they put the cap on Jackson’s head and helped him into a pinstriped Yankees jersey. It was all smiles and hugs, and in his prepared remarks everyone heard a Jackson who was humble, grateful, eager to fit in.
Later, as Jackson chatted up a smaller group of writers, Munson and White overheard—and then read—something else entirely: call it the first solo guitar riff of Jackson’s Yankees career.
“I didn’t come to New York to become a star. I brought my star with me.”
He delivered all 16 words with what one of the men around him, columnist Dave Anderson of The New York Times, would call “perfect notebook speed.”
White looked at Munson. Munson looked at White.
They rolled their eyes.
BILLY MARTIN WASN’T at the Americana. He wasn’t invited and didn’t much want to be there anyway. Living in the Sheraton Hotel across the river in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., Martin seethed, as a player he didn’t want began a platonic love affair with an owner he was beginning to mistrust.
“George was taking Reggie to 21 for lunch, going out to dinner, and I was sitting in my room and he never once called and asked me to come to lunch with him,” Martin fumed.
Before the Yankees could even make it to Fort Lauderdale for spring training Steinbrenner had to deal with a disillusioned Munson, who took to the offseason banquet circuit to lob grenades. Steinbrenner was treated to the first with his morning coffee one morning in February: “I wouldn’t mind being traded to Cleveland [near Munson’s home of Canton, Ohio], or buying out my contract so I can go to Cleveland.”
Steinbrenner summoned Munson to New York. They reached an agreement: Steinbrenner would add two years to his deal and would allow Munson to live in the offseason in Ohio. As a way to compromise his own feelings about spending so much time apart from his family, Munson began to ponder his options.
One day, walking out of Fort Lauderdale Stadium with Lou Piniella, he was struck by a Beechcraft Duke aircraft parked at the executive airport next door.
“I think I’m going to start taking flying lessons,” Munson said. “I can get home on off-days that way.”
Piniella figured his friend was kidding.
Coming tomorrow: The relationship of George with his final Yankee captain, Derek Jeter, and the transition to son Hank and then Hal as owner.
Mike Vaccaro’s book, “The Bosses of the Bronx,” detailing the Yankees’ five-plus decades under the House of Steinbrenner, will be released by Harper Books on March 24. You can pre-order at harpercollins.com.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
