“The Goats ran the school,” Billy said. “They were on the student council, got the good grades, and went to college. They were the social mainstream and we weren’t.”
Adding to his unease, Billy Martin at fourteen was far from a polished presence.
“We were all a little jagged and out of sorts then,” Mario DeGennaro said. “And Billy? Well, Billy was small, maybe 115 pounds. His teeth weren’t straight and he had a Roman nose as people used to say back then to be nice. What they meant was that he had a very big nose. He was respected in West Berkeley among the guys, and the girls, too, but at that big, vast high school, it was like, ‘Who’s this little runt? And what’s he wearing?’”
Billy’s hand-me-down clothes shouted West Berkeley poor and excluded him from the popular clubs and cliques within the school. Worse, and this was becoming increasingly important to Billy, his faded, unstylish wardrobe did not compare favorably with the meticulous and trendy clothes of the sons and daughters of Cal-Berkeley professors and administrators. That made him an undesirable suitor for most of the girls at Berkeley High.
The Goats had expensive jeans—and several pairs—and wore leather navy flight jackets. Billy and his friends had one pair of discounted jeans and wore cheap navy pea coats. Billy wrote that he had one pair of jeans that he ironed so often they developed a sheen that glistened, which was not the look he was going for.
The West Berkeley boys—in this setting and in every sense, it was said with a lowercase b—were not scorned. One has to be noticed to be scorned.
“No one gave a shit about us,” Howard Noble, another longtime friend of Billy’s, said. “We were meaningless.”
The West Berkeley boys—called “shop boys”—were even shunted to a detached wing at the school, the industrial arts annex. The rules of engagement were changing. This was not an environment where you could just fight your way out.
But even at Berkeley High there was one place where there was at least an attempt at equality. And that was in athletics. The Goats did not always like it, but they had to play with the flatlanders. They needed them for their teams. And a 115-pound Billy Martin proved that right away.
Billy’s first entrée to high school sports was on the junior varsity basketball team. His backcourt mate was Ruben de Alba.
“Billy wasn’t all that skilled at basketball,” de Alba said, recalling the winter of 1942–43. “I mean, he could dribble and shoot OK, but what really set him apart was that he played with such determined force. We won games because he would wear people out.
“Diving for balls, fighting for rebounds, just running up and down the court and pounding the ball toward the basket. He was unstoppable and tenacious on defense—just the kind of kid you never want to play against.”
Billy and de Alba, who had an indomitable spirit as well, were a persistent duo, especially as they grew and put on a few pounds. By their junior year they were varsity starters, and by his senior year Billy was an all-county guard.
A 1945 story in the Berkeley Gazette praises the aggressiveness of the “quick Billy Martin” who drove the Emeryville team to distraction with “steals and rapid moves to the basket.” The newspaper then used a word, sparkplug, that would appear in sentences with Billy Martin’s name for several decades to come.
“Bill was kind of the heart that drove the team,” Billy’s sister Pat Irvine said. “People would come to the games just to see what that Martin kid was going to do this time. He was always finding some way to win even if it was agitating some kid on the other team until the kid started making mistakes or fouling too much.”
Billy was five foot nine by his senior year, about an inch from his adult height, and more than big enough to be effective on the basketball court in an era when the average height of an American male was five foot seven and one-half inches. But as good a player as Billy was, that was not the complete story of his high school basketball career. There were off-the-court issues.
“With his style of play, he rubbed opponents the wrong way and they would challenge him,” de Alba said. “They would say, ‘I’ll get you after the game.’ And, of course, Billy wasn’t going to hide.”
Billy’s friends recall a couple of postgame donnybrooks when Billy pummeled a few foes, which twice led to his suspension from the team.
While there is obviously room for interpretation about who instigated what—as there was for the rest of his life—Billy’s take on things was clear. He was just doing whatever he could to win, which sometimes meant getting under an opponent’s skin. And if that meant he had to stand up for himself afterward, well, so be it. It’s all part of the contract, and that went for sports or life because it is important to remember the times. Did Jimmy Cagney’s characters ever back down? Did John Wayne, that young actor from California who was just beginning his career?
While Billy first made his name at Berkeley High playing basketball, it was still just a diversion. Billy’s real love was baseball, and he made the Berkeley High varsity baseball team as a freshman, the only one to do so. He played sparingly that first year as a third baseman, then moved to second base as a sophomore and hit .320. Eventually, he became the team’s shortstop and its most vocal leader. His coach, Elgin Erickson, was a soft-spoken teacher who watched Billy warily, but he also cut him loose on the field.
“Billy knew what everybody on the diamond should be doing and he had no problem telling us all about it with regularity,” de Alba said. “Not after the fact, but before a play. Billy would walk in from shortstop, point at us, and say, ‘Hey, if they bunt, here’s what you do, and here’s what you do, and here’s what you do. If they steal, then let’s do this.’ He was thinking ahead of every play even then. He was a coach on the field.”
Billy was voted an all-county player in baseball during his senior year when he hit .450. He did not hit with much power, but he was handy with the bat, slashing singles through the infield and line drives into the outfield that he fearlessly turned into doubles. He played with the same edginess he had brought to the basketball team. If an opposing player slid into him too hard, a common tactic in all levels of baseball in the 1940s, Billy doled out his own retribution. The next runner coming into the base would get tagged in the face.
“The Kenney Park baseball games were pretty rough—those guys took no crap from anybody,” Howard Noble said. “So Billy was schooled in an attitude of how to play the game and he took that to his high school games.”
Billy willed his high school team to victories and, to no one’s surprise, clashed with umpires. Rube de Alba, who played second base, was his accomplice in the quarrels with umpires. A primitive cartoon drawing in the 1945 Berkeley High yearbook shows Billy with a long beak for a nose, arguing face-to-face with an umpire. The umpire is saying, “Out—I sez he’s out.” Billy, who is wagging a baseball bat behind his back and wearing a baseball uniform, is answering, “Shaddap yez tramp, he was safe!”
The umpire is holding his hat behind his back. De Alba has surreptitiously put a large firecracker in the umpire’s hat and is in the process of lighting it. Under the cartoon there is a caption: “Never a dull moment with Martin and de Alba around.”
Billy has a presence elsewhere in the yearbook. His hands are clamped to a large sanding machine in a woodworking class, and he is among a group of students surrounding a drill in another shop class.
In Billy’s recollection, he did not take only shop, vocational, or technical arts classes. He insisted he took several years of history and got As for grades. And as an adult, Billy would sometimes lead long discussions of Civil War history, debating Robert E. Lee’s battle choices at Gettysburg—he did not support the aggressiveness of Pickett’s ill-fated charge, for example. At those moments, it was clear Billy still resented his place on the wrong end of the Berkeley High academic ladder.
His friends at the time, however, noticed that his studies were not his number-one, or his number-two, interest.
His principal preoccupation was basebal
l. But there was a prominent secondary fixation. Billy liked the company of young women, and he pursued their affection with the same unremitting passion he brought to athletics.
His dress was still not first-rate, but his sports celebrity in the school clothed him in a notoriety that worked for him in many circles of the sports-mad Berkeley High culture. He had also grown into his body a little, which made him appear less angular and rawboned. He had an engaging sense of humor, charisma, and boundless self-assurance (publicly at least), and he could be charming in almost any setting if he wanted to be.
But mostly, Billy would not let up if he had his eyes on a female classmate, or someone from an adjoining town who came to see a show at the sparkling Rivoli Theatre on San Pablo Avenue. He was rejected often—he was still a flatlander from West Berkeley and that disqualified him in many quarters—but that did not dissuade him much. Billy was a player, a Don Juan as they said in the 1940s, and dating and loving was another game he had figured out how to play better than most.
“He knew a lot of girls,” his cousin Mario said. “Geez, all of us would hang around him just to be around all the girls he knew. There were plenty of girls that would tell him to go to hell, but it sure seemed like an awful lot were intrigued by him—just kind of drawn to him.”
Billy’s sister Pat Irvine was three years behind Billy in school, but she had many older friends at Berkeley High, and classmates who asked her to fix them up with Billy.
“They kind of liked his bad-boy image,” Irvine said. “I’d say, ‘He’s my brother and I love him but he’ll only go out with you for a while. He’ll love you and leave you.’ But so many would go out with him anyway.
“They’d come around later and say, ‘You were right.’ And I’d be like, ‘He’s seventeen, what do you expect?’”
In his autobiography, Billy wrote that when he first made love to a girl he was naive and scared. “I didn’t know where to put my peter; I thought the place was higher up,” Billy wrote. “I was trying to put it in her belly button. After we finally did it, I felt so bad that I had sinned that I cried.”
Pat Irvine read that passage when Billy’s book came out in 1980.
“What a bunch of baloney—next time I saw him I said, ‘You might have felt bad but you certainly got over it,’” Pat said, smirking. “Where did he get these things he told to writers?”
But Billy insisted that he went to Father Moore after his first sexual encounter and confessed to adultery because he “had relations with a woman who was not my wife.”
Finally, something for Billy to actually confess to.
Father Moore set him straight. And sent him off after a penance of five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys.
As Billy’s high school career entered its final stages, he had much to look forward to. World War II had ended, eliminating the battlefield anxiety that had dogged his older classmates. Soldiers were coming back to Berkeley and jobs were aplenty. The economy was booming. Billy was one of the best high school baseball players in the East Bay area, and he was connected to the big leaguers from the region because of his Kenney Park ties. Billy felt sure he was on the cusp of greatness.
There was a plethora of minor league teams in California at the time, and then there was the Pacific Coast League with teams from San Diego to Vancouver. The Pacific Coast League was officially a Class AAA minor league, a notch below the vaunted Major Leagues, but no one on the West Coast treated it that way. Some local ballplayers might dream of playing in New York, Detroit, or St. Louis, but most aspired to play for the Oaks, or even better, the classy San Francisco Seals across the bay (Joe DiMaggio’s former team). The salaries were high in the PCL and the crowds were sizable.
Billy still longed to wear the Yankees uniform but he was not impractical. He knew he could use a steppingstone to his New York dream, and the Oaks, the best baseball team in the East Bay, were a big step up.
The Oakland Oaks had been sending scouts to Berkeley High games in 1945 and 1946, but the understanding was that they were there to look at Berkeley’s talented center fielder, Bill “Babe” Van Heuitt, who would eventually play professional minor league baseball. Still, the Oaks scouts could not help but notice the heart of the team, the doughty, unconquerable shortstop, Billy Martin.
He was viewed as a likely second baseman or third baseman, a pepper-pot infielder in an era when home runs were sparse in comparison to today’s baseball. The scouts reported that the Martin kid would be versatile. They said he would be a “sparkplug.” The Oaks had Billy on their radar. They were looking forward to seeing how he played in the postseason playoff games and the one or two high school all-star games that showcased the players from the area. They would wait for his high school graduation.
Then Berkeley played Hayward High School, whose top player was Pete Hernandez. Hernandez and Billy were jawing at each other early in the game and the tension mounted. When the game ended, Billy claimed Hernandez ran at him and missed with a wild punch, and Billy knocked him cold with three punches to the face. Billy was pulled off Hernandez. Then lots of other fights started on the field, some involving fans. Billy said he ran to the locker room.
But Mario DeGennaro and his brother, Nick, were at the game, and their recollections don’t match Billy’s. And as for nearly all the fights in Billy’s lifetime dossier, there is no film or video to document the truth. The DeGennaros do not recall fights all over the field. Mario, in particular, remembers that Billy had warned him there was going to be a fight with Hernandez.
“Everyone kind of knew it and came to the game to see it,” Mario said. “And it was a real good fight. I remember them trading punches for a while. The Hayward kid was a pretty good fighter, too.”
But the brothers agree that Billy won in the end.
“Dick Foster would have been proud,” said Nick. “Billy just cut him down, punch by punch, like a big tree.”
As is usually the case, what seemed like a premeditated fight had a predictable consequence. The Berkeley principal called Billy to his office and suspended him from the team for the rest of the year.
During an interview in 1971, twenty-five years later, Billy recounted the conversation with shock and sorrow in his voice.
“The principal said I wasn’t fit to represent the school,” Billy said. “He said I should learn to turn the other cheek. I told him that in my neighborhood I wouldn’t be alive if I turned the other cheek. He kicked me off the team as a disgrace to the school. The school was still going to be there, the buildings would be the same, but what about the boy, a boy baseball was everything to? If I’d been a different kind of kid, I might be a criminal today.”
Decades later, Billy called it the “most unfair thing that could have happened.”
Billy was certain his suspension from the Berkeley High team would affect his pro baseball prospects. He worried that he would be unable to impress scouts in the coming all-star games. He questioned, not for the last time, whether a reputation for trouble would complicate the gilded path he had begun to see laid out before him.
But as he would find out so many times in succeeding years, baseball does not fear the feisty. Or fisticuffs. Certainly not in the 1940s and not so much seventy years later either. The suspension was noted by pro teams. It was discussed. But it did not cause them to remove Billy from their list of potential recruits.
Martin graduated from Berkeley High. His picture is in the senior yearbook, Olla Podrida. Each of his family members vividly recalls attending the graduation ceremonies in June of 1946. But the rest of Billy’s high school records are mysteriously missing and have been absent for decades. There is no high school transcript for Alfred Manuel Martin within the files of the Berkeley school district, and there is no explanation for how it disappeared when it had been under lock and key along with the transcripts of thousands of others. In fact, other than short, bite-size newspaper stories detailing his basketball and baseball exploits in the Berkeley Gazette, a few yearbook and family pictures, and B
illy’s unremarkable birth certificate on file with Alameda County, there is not a wealth of documented evidence of Billy’s first eighteen years of life.
Lew Figone, Billy’s friend, keeps his company’s one-story offices lined with memorabilia and trinkets from Billy Martin’s life.
“He gave me all this stuff,” Figone said. “He said, ‘Lew, I don’t know what to do with this but somebody should be keeping it.’ Some of it I have saved myself since we were kids.”
On one wall in a large conference room in Figone’s office, Billy is posing with eight other West Berkeley kids.
“The St. Ambrose CYO basketball team,” Figone said, pointing at the picture. “They had a little party at the end of the season and took this picture. Cupcakes and soda. That’s maybe ninth grade.”
Billy is kneeling on the floor in the first row wearing a faded white shirt and over it the oddest, dark, patterned V-neck sweater. The sweater is a little too large for Billy’s shoulders, but more noticeable is the sweater design: uneven horizontal lines, almost Nordic in style. But across the chest are recurring primitive drawings of birds, like something you would see on a hieroglyphic wall. The horizontal lines and birds clash and the wool is threadbare. It is the kind of sweater you would not forget once you saw it.
Billy is smiling wanly in the picture, barely showing his irregular set of teeth (corrected with cosmetic dental surgery years later). His hair is mussed, the camera has caught his thick, bony nose in not the most favorable light, and his ears look too big for his head.
“Billy didn’t have it easy,” Figone said. “But it made him more determined. Life was hard, Billy got harder.”
As upset as Billy was about his suspension from the baseball team, he did get a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers were apparently not overly impressed. They said they might call but never did. Eight months earlier, the Dodgers had signed another middle infielder from California who would play many games as Billy’s rival, Jackie Robinson.
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