The next day Reggie and Billy had a two-and-a-half-hour meeting in the team’s hotel. It was not the last meeting of its kind, to say the least. But this time, Billy emerged happier for it.
“He’s the type of guy you have to explain things to,” Billy said. “Like he didn’t know I don’t allow players to tell the press about injuries.”
If things were smoothed over—a phrase Billy used repeatedly when speaking with Yankees beat writers in 1977—somebody forgot to tell Reggie. At his locker that day, Reggie said he was “just glad to be here.” He then brooded over answers to several follow-up questions.
Asked to describe his relationship with Billy, Reggie said, “I don’t know what’s between us.”
It was the understatement of the season.
In truth, Reggie and Billy were more alike than either knew. There were striking parallels in their backgrounds, beginning with the most formative years of childhood. Both had been abandoned by a parent at an early age.
In Reggie’s case, his mother, Clara, lined up the six children produced by an earlier marriage and her current marriage and abruptly left with half of them, leaving six-year-old Reggie and two of his much older siblings with his father.
As Reggie told many a reporter for years thereafter, he would not utter the word mom for decades.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “It disappeared from my vocabulary.”
Reggie’s father, Martinez Jackson, was a former professional baseball player. In a segregated America during the 1930s, Martinez Jackson was relegated to black barnstorming teams, principally the Newark Eagles of New Jersey, but he developed a deep understanding of the game and its nuances, which he later passed on to his son Reginald Martinez Jackson.
Like Billy, Reggie was raised by a strong, strict single parent, and he grew up poor, in Reggie’s case in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a northern suburb of Philadelphia.
Like Billy, Reggie was of mixed descent. Between his mother and father, he had African American, Spanish, Irish, and Native American blood. Like Billy’s, Reggie’s childhood neighborhood was an odd demographic mix—Reggie’s was mostly white Jewish families but also Italian, Irish, and WASP-ish households.
Reggie went to high school in an adjacent, more affluent town, Cheltenham, where Reggie’s old, worn clothes stood out. If there is some nefarious mystery about the employment background of Billy’s mother, there were undoubtedly skeletons in the closet of Reggie’s father, Martinez Jackson. He had been a runner for small-time crooks who had a gambling operation and perhaps helped with some bootlegging. By the time Reggie was in grade school, Martinez Jackson operated a dry cleaning and tailoring business—he and Reggie lived above the store—and in the basement Martinez had a corn liquor still that provided extra income (and eventually attracted attention from law authorities).
While Billy went to high school with mustard sandwiches, Reggie wrote in his autobiography, Reggie, that he never once had food to eat for breakfast. Reggie always had food for dinner, but he bummed food from friends for lunch. He recalled that there was never food in the refrigerator or cupboards.
There was discipline in the Jackson household. Reggie was required to speak properly and grammatically correctly. In school, English had been Martinez Jackson’s favorite subject, and he stressed to his son at a young age that as a black man in twentieth-century America it was vital that he speak without using slang or dialect. Reggie addressed adults visiting the dry cleaning shop as “sir” and “ma’am.”
Years later, Reggie used to laugh and joke that reporters liked to describe him as “articulate,” knowing well that the term was rarely used to portray white players. It was code. No jive from Reggie. And years later, Reggie would say that his father had seen the future.
“He made sure I was marketable,” Reggie said.
Reggie had only one pair of shoes per school year. He was allowed to buy two pairs of slacks a year and borrowed from relatives frequently. Athletics was Reggie’s path to acceptance at Cheltenham High School, where he was a football and baseball star.
When Reggie was a junior in high school, police confiscated the corn liquor still in the basement and sent his father to prison for thirteen months. Reggie lived with his older brother Slug, who was usually working and not home. No family member attended Reggie’s high school graduation, and no one saw him off in 1964 when he packed two suitcases and a gym bag and left for Arizona State, where he had earned a full football scholarship.
Reggie might have been a good college football player had he not been a great college baseball player. By 1966, he was drafted with the second overall pick by the Kansas City Athletics, soon to be the Oakland A’s. The New York Mets had the first pick but were reluctant to take Reggie because their scouts reported that his college girlfriend was white (she was actually Mexican).
Reggie was sent to the A’s minor league team in Birmingham, Alabama, where Reggie had trouble getting adequate lodging because he was African American. But within eighteen months, he was liberated from the indignities he faced in the minors and handed the starting right fielder’s job with the A’s. He was a shining star, but his teammates noticed that he was easily insulted, something that will surface quickly in the insular, biting culture of a Major League clubhouse.
“He was very insecure and sensitive,” said teammate Gene Tenace.
Said another teammate, Rick Monday, of Reggie, “Likable but paranoid.”
As if he could hear someone give him the finger.
But Reggie was a tremendous baseball player even at twenty-one years old, and within three years of his Major League debut, he was tangling with Billy’s 1969 Minnesota Twins for a spot in the playoffs.
They were adversaries from first glance. They sparred in the press, calling each other names, then yelled at each other on the field. Reggie hit long home runs against Billy’s teams and stood at home plate admiring the ball’s flight before slowly circling the bases—a rare show of theater in the 1960s and early 1970s. Adding to the self-exaltation, Reggie would crow about those home runs to the press afterward. The next day, Billy’s pitchers invariably threw at Reggie in the batter’s box.
The confrontations continued until everyone wondered if there was a deeper source of the acrimony.
Most obviously and notably, Billy was white and Reggie was African American, and in a second autobiography, Becoming Mr. October, released in 2013, Reggie wrote he was told that Billy and some of his Yankees teammates made anti-Semitic references to the Jewish pitcher Ken Holtzman and that he felt sure that Billy and other players also told racial jokes.
Reggie did not write that he heard the jokes being told, and he did not describe the anti-Semitic references. Reggie wrote that these were things he had heard from others. In 2013 interviews, Reggie was very careful about how he phrased his accusations about Billy. The book was strident about Billy’s biases, but when asked by multiple interviewers how he came to those opinions about Billy, Reggie said very little.
“When I looked back at it and from what I’ve heard and what I can surmise, these are things that I think were happening,” he said.
Reggie had raised these issues before. In 2011, he had very briefly made similar comments to broadcaster Bob Costas in an interview, saying that he saw a racial bias in the way Billy treated another black player, Elliott Maddox.
Asked about the Costas interview two years later, Reggie clarified his accusations, although he continued to speak in generalities.
“It was the climate of the times, first of all,” he said. “You had to know what it was like to be a prominent black man in the 1970s in New York City. It was in the air wherever you went. And it was in the air in Yankee Stadium.
“That was the sense I had. And it included Billy. I never figured out why he and I didn’t get along but I’ll tell you what, we sure didn’t.
“I would almost want to say that I never had a relationship with him. I don’t know what it was. Looking back, I think he never liked me. But at
the time, I had no idea. I thought he would like me. He was from the Bay Area and I had played there. He was a scrappy guy and I always played hard-nosed baseball. Where was the problem?”
In Becoming Mr. October, Reggie also wrote that he was disappointed that all but one of the black players on the Yankees, Willie Randolph, sided with Billy. As a group, he wrote, the black players were unwelcoming to him.
Reggie’s comments to Costas and his written words in Becoming Mr. October sparked a torrent of criticism from former teammates.
“Reggie is a friend,” Rickey Henderson said in an interview weeks after Becoming Mr. October was released. “But that’s the most wrong thing he has ever said.”
Reggie’s allegations are not, on their face, an outlandish suggestion, especially given the times, although the anti-Semitic portion of Reggie’s accusation is hard to place, given the many close friends and business associates of Jewish heritage who surrounded Billy throughout his life. His widow, Jill, was part Jewish.
But there were certainly millions of white men born in 1928 in America who held racial biases the rest of their lives. It’s not inconceivable that Billy told off-color or racist jokes sometime in his life, or tolerated them in his presence, although it is worth mentioning that there is no established historical evidence of it occurring. And there have been millions of words written about Billy in magazines, newspapers, and books from 1950 to the present. A couple of New York–based sportswriters from the 1970s, interviewed in retirement decades later, said they thought race was a factor in the Billy-Reggie feud and cast Billy as the bigot. Other writers disagreed.
During the 1977 season, beat writers repeatedly pressed black players on the Yankees on the subject of race. None would criticize Billy. Most were unsympathetic to Reggie’s mostly latent cries of racism.
In Jonathan’s Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, a seminal account of the roiling 1977 summer in New York City, Mahler wrote that Chris Chambliss, the Yankees’ black first baseman, was listening to Reggie complain in a hotel bar one night and finally confronted his teammate.
“Reggie, you know what you’d be if you were white?” Chambliss said. “Just another damn white boy. Be glad you’re black and getting all the publicity you do, getting away with all the shit you do.”
Mahler also noted that in the summer of 1977, while the Reggie-Billy strife was front-page news in the New York tabloids, the Amsterdam News, the city’s only black newspaper, conspicuously sided with Billy. To the Amsterdam News, Reggie was not a “people’s hero,” à la Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, or Ray Robinson.
Reggie’s 2013 book revived the issue. When contacted about Reggie’s book that year, Maddox, who played for Billy briefly in Texas and with the Yankees, said he agreed with Reggie. On the other side of the issue, multiple players rose to Billy’s defense.
“It’s not something I saw from Billy,” said Randolph, whom Reggie described as his only black friend on the 1977 team. “Reggie went through a lot and I respect him so much, but I don’t know about that.”
“Billy? A racist?” Roy White said, repeating a question. White is African American. “There are plenty of words I would use for Billy. That isn’t one.”
Maybe Reggie saw something in Billy that he had seen before and attributed it to racism. But there is little proof of racial prejudice in Billy’s life. There were plenty of people he didn’t like, white, black, Latin, and Asian. He had plenty of enemies, too. He also had a host of African American players from Rod Carew to Henderson who viewed him as a benevolent father figure and essential to their maturation. More than five of his Latin-born players named one of their children Billy in their mentor’s honor. On every one of his coaching staffs from 1976 to 1989, he had black assistant coaches.
He had major, public shouting matches and confrontations with players, executives, reporters, and umpires—as well as several celebrated barroom fistfights—in an adult life spent entirely illuminated by the media spotlight. There is no preponderance of trouble with men or women of color.
“You could call my dad a lot of things,” his son, Billy, said, sitting in a Texas bar in 2013. “In a place like this you could see it all on the wrong night. He might drink too much, he might hit on somebody’s girlfriend, and he might take offense at something someone said and want to punch him. He made lots of mistakes. But nobody ever called him a racist.
“Reggie needs to look in the mirror. My dad was a lot of things but racist wasn’t one of them.”
Racism can exhibit itself in multiple ways or be revealed in one instructive act or by one person who perceives an otherwise latent prejudice. Reggie Jackson, raised in an era when examples of discrimination were not hard to find, is convinced Billy was a racist.
His comments made prominent news in 2013, especially after Reggie appeared on CNN, HBO, and dozens of other media outlets promoting the book. But his revelations did not bring him allies.
Carew, whose daughter had Billy as a godfather, played with Reggie on the California Angels in the early 1980s. When Reggie’s race comments were mentioned to him in 2013, Carew just shook his head ruefully.
“Reggie knows better,” Carew said. “I don’t know why he would say that. And it’s interesting that no one rushed to agree with Reggie. I never met a manager in all my decades in baseball—then or since—who got along better with the guys of color than Billy. So that’s just not something I ever saw and I was around the guy for twenty-five years and knew most of the players that played for him in those twenty-five years.”
Carew’s tone went from dismayed to amused. He laughed.
“We know the truth,” Carew said, snickering. “There was just something between those two guys. Reggie and Billy didn’t get along. We all have people like that—someone who you just can’t seem to get on the same page with. I never talked to Reggie or Billy about it. But I never had to. It was there.”
Mickey Morabito, the Yankees’ public relations director from 1976 to 1980 whose job it was to spend every day with the team from February to November, summed up the relationship similarly.
“There were days when they loved each other and there were days they hated each other,” Morabito said. “Something about Reggie irked Billy. Something about Billy irked Reggie.”
“I don’t know what’s going on between us,” Reggie said on April 9, 1977.
It was only the beginning.
By April 20, the Yankees had lost six of their last eight games, were five games under .500, and were in last place, which was so offensive to George Steinbrenner he called a meeting with Billy, the press, and the players before the next game.
Then the Yankees went out and lost again.
George’s message to Billy and the press was that Billy had better get the ship righted, and soon. The writers eagerly wrote that Billy, reigning AL Manager of the Year, was on the hot seat 11 games into the season when the Yankees were 5 games out of first place with 151 to play.
Murray Chass, the Yankees beat writer for the New York Times, wrote a piece the next day in which he quoted an unnamed player who said, “George better stay off his back. One thing Billy has going for him is that he has more players on his side than the owner has.”
Another player was more emphatic.
“The more we lose,” he told Chass, “the more often Steinbrenner will fly in to our games. And the more he flies, the better the chance there will be of a plane crash.”
The next day, Billy made up his batting order by having Reggie pick names out of a hat. The Yankees won 7–5 and went on to win the next five games in a row.
By mid-May, the Yankees were four games over .500 and neck-and-neck with Boston and Baltimore at the top of the AL East standings. That lowered the point size of the headlines in the New York tabloids, but things were still simmering beneath the surface. Everyone knew Sport magazine was coming out with a cover story on Reggie. The magazine had hinted the story contained inflammatory comments from Reggie about a teammate.
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nbsp; Billy stewed largely in silence. This was precisely what he had feared. He drove home to the Hasbrouck Heights Sheraton after games and drank at the Bottom of the Barrel and Steve’s Sizzling Steaks. A fairly regular girlfriend, Patty Stark, whom Billy had met in Kansas City, occasionally visited. Gretchen and Billy Joe largely remained in Texas.
“He called often,” said Gretchen. “He was tense. I’m not sure he was eating well. He would have good days and bad days. It always seemed like on Sunday mornings, after he went to church, he would be in a good mood.
“He almost always called on Sundays. For the rest of his life, we would hear from him on Sunday.”
The June issue of Sport hit newsstands on Monday, May 23. In the article, titled “Reggie in No-Man’s Land,” the Yankees’ new right fielder says he was brought to the Yankees because they lacked the right kind of leadership.
“I’m the straw that stirs the drink,” the magazine quoted Reggie as saying. “Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.”
The article was filled with quotes from Reggie praising himself and predicting how he could help the imperfect Yankees.
The interview with the Sport magazine writer Robert Ward had taken place inside the Banana Boat Bar on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. According to the story, minutes into the interview, Billy, Mickey Mantle, and Whitey Ford walked into the bar and started playing backgammon in another section of the bar. Reggie bought the trio of ex-Yankees drinks. Of Billy, he said, “He’s no dummy. He’s smart. He knows I can help this team. Billy is a winner. We won’t have any problems and I’ll make it easier for him.”
But Reggie added that he had to lead the team, not Munson, whom he called insecure and jealous.
The reaction in the Yankees’ clubhouse when the article came out was predictable. Reggie might as well as have called Lou Gehrig a phony and Joe DiMaggio a choke.
Reggie claimed he was misquoted.
Munson had a response when he was told that Reggie insisted he was misquoted: “For three thousand fucking words?”
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