Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  “You SOB, this is the quiet place you talked about?” Billy asked a laughing Mantle.

  Billy, the Mantles, and Ferraro headed inside and began drinking. Three guys in cowboy hats across the bar who had apparently been at that night’s game recognized Billy and playfully tossed some insults at the Yankees manager about his ejection.

  “People in Lace saw and heard that, and later they thought those guys were the problem, but my dad told me that it was all in fun and that the guys had sent drinks over and weren’t any problem,” said Billy Joe Martin, who still kicks himself for not being at Lace that night.

  Billy Joe wished he had been there because he considered himself something of a lucky charm to his father when it came to bars.

  “He never got in any trouble when I was around,” Billy Joe said. “I had seen guys drop out of the clouds to taunt him so many times I had a sixth sense about it and could defuse it. I’d say, ‘Dude, that’s my father, leave us alone.’ Or something stronger. Or more profane.”

  What happened inside Lace is something of a mystery despite multiple investigations later. Billy Joe faults a Lace bouncer, who felt insulted by Billy during an exchange at the bar, for instigating things. Eddie Sapir conducted an inquiry, and his report fingered two motorcycle gang–like individuals who targeted Billy, perhaps because Billy had said something to one of their girlfriends. The police said there were two assailants but they never identified them.

  What is certain is that Ferraro escorted the Mantles home, which may have been Billy’s idea. But Billy was not supposed to be left alone. Over the years, it is hard to think of a late-night episode when he was alone. Except inside Lace.

  The other certainty is that at some time just after 1:30 a.m., Billy went to the men’s room. Standing at a urinal next to another Lace patron at an adjacent urinal, Billy said something he often said in this setting: “Mine’s bigger.”

  “You had to know him, he was that guy who would break the tension at the urinal,” Billy Joe said. “He thought that was funny.

  “Anyway, he told me that the guy next to him zipped up and left. And without any warning, two guys came into the men’s room and whacked him on the head with some kind of blackjack or hard object.

  “My dad said he was knocked to the ground and remembers being punched and kicked and thrown out a side or back door to the place. He said to me, ‘I’ve never been jumped like that before. I was still standing there peeing. I had my deal still out.’”

  The police, Sapir, and the doctors who attended to Billy agree that someone hit him in the head with a blunt instrument. Everyone agrees that Billy was pushed out a back door where he was shoved into the raised stucco exterior of the building and the side of his head was dragged along the rough, serrated wall. The stucco outside Lace was a pattern of jagged, pointed pieces of concrete, and they tore into Billy’s left ear. The ear was all but sheared off, and it bled profusely onto Billy’s shirt.

  Billy ended up in a taxi. His plan, he later said, was to sneak into the hotel unseen since the hotel bar had long since closed and most everyone had gone to bed. Billy would go directly to trainer Gene Monahan’s room, where he figured Monahan could stitch him up or get him the help he needed.

  Unbeknownst to Billy, at about the time he was losing his second straight barroom fracas, there had been a minor, smoky electrical blaze near the hotel’s sauna. A fire alarm had sounded, and while fire department officials arrived to quickly extinguish the small flame, every guest in the Hilton had been herded out the entrance to the hotel with the fire alarm. A few hundred people, including the players, coaches, and reporters, were standing on a lawn and a grand circular drive in front of the hotel. So was George Steinbrenner, who had made the trip with the team. George had wrapped himself in a silk robe.

  That’s when an Arlington taxi pulled up. From the back seat of the vehicle emerged Billy, his shirt covered in blood. He was using a light jacket to hold his torn, battered ear to the side of his head. It was an almost incomprehensible sight.

  Billy looked around and admitted he had one thought: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Steinbrenner, his robe straining against his legs as he ran, rushed over to Billy, who was brought into the hotel manager’s office off the lobby. Monahan and another trainer, Steve Donahue, dashed in behind him. Guests were soon told they could return to their rooms, but the reporters remained to see what had happened. Steinbrenner was giving orders to various personnel and waving his arms.

  Soon Billy was taken to Arlington Hospital.

  “Billy was saying he was jumped and that he didn’t know exactly what happened,” said Monahan, who accompanied Billy to the hospital but until 2013 had never described the events as he saw them. “He was mostly upset that it might affect the season. He said to me, ‘Geno, we don’t need this. We’re in first place.’ And he kept saying, ‘You know, I can’t go anywhere anymore.’”

  At the hospital, doctors prepared to use about fifty stitches to mend Billy’s ear. Billy, who was ten days from his sixtieth birthday, had a swollen eye, a gash on his cheek, and big, ugly bruises on his right shoulder and left knee as well as a lumpy contusion on the back of his skull.

  “We’re in the emergency room and the doctor starts working on Billy’s ear,” Monahan said. “A nurse is there filling out a form for Billy. She’s asking him all the usual questions—name, age, address, medications taken. And she says, ‘Are you allergic to anything?’

  “And Billy says, ‘Yeah, people. P-E-O-P-L-E.’ The doctor started laughing so hard he had to stop doing the stitches in his ear.”

  Word got back to Jill in Manhattan. In the middle of the night, she tried calling Gene Monahan at the Arlington Hilton. She instead was connected to the room of New Jersey sportswriter Kevin Manahan.

  “Gene, this is Jill, how is Billy?” Manahan heard a voice say.

  Manahan tried to explain who he was.

  “But Gene, how is he?” Jill persisted.

  “I don’t know,” Manahan answered and hung up.

  Steinbrenner visited Billy in Arlington Hospital and was driven to and from the hospital by an old high school classmate of Billy Joe Martin’s.

  “My high school buddy told me that when George came out of the hospital he was as white as a sheet,” Billy Joe said. “He was terrified of the condition Billy was in. My friend told me George looked really shaken, nervous, and sweating.”

  Billy arrived at the ballpark the next day looking far worse than he did after the Whitson fight. This time there were no wise-guy cracks about hurting himself bowling.

  “I just feel embarrassed because I got caught off guard; I didn’t think I’d get hit in the head in the toilet,” Billy said. “I’m like a western cowboy who’s noted for something. People want to go after me. I never got a punch in.”

  The Arlington police said Billy had done nothing to provoke the fight and Steinbrenner’s reaction was succinct: “Billy was the victim. Case closed.”

  The players were somewhere between aghast and awestruck that Billy was in the dugout.

  “The way he looked and the way he was moving, I couldn’t believe he got himself to the ballpark at all,” said Mattingly.

  Added Randolph, “He was really messed up this time. There was blood caked in his ear and along the stitches. It was kind of scary.”

  During the game, the Yankees’ television broadcast channel, which had a cozy relationship with Yankees management since the team approved the selection of announcers, was asked not to show any close-ups of Billy in the dugout. The program directors obliged.

  Reporters flocked to Lace trying to get some insight from the club’s employees—there was little—and from the scene (Billy’s blood was still on the stucco wall).

  The Yankees lost the next two games in Texas. Before the last game in Arlington, Billy had breakfast with the Post’s Michael Kay, who had worked to gain Billy’s trust.

  “I’m not gonna fight anymore,” Billy told Kay. “I’m gonna wal
k away. I never did go looking for fights but it’s past that now. Things happen whether I want them to or not. I’m not afraid of getting killed in a fight someday but that’s what scares my wife. I’m gonna have to stop.”

  Lace, as far as anyone knows, was Billy’s last fight.

  Billy and the Yankees flew home from Texas the night of May 8. Tex Gernand picked Billy up from the airport. He, too, was shocked by Billy’s appearance.

  “Billy was a tough guy who could take a lot,” Gernand said. “But boy, when I saw him after Lace I knew he had really gotten the worst of it. He just laid down across the seat in the back of the car.”

  With an off day in the schedule, Gernand drove Billy and Jill to upstate New York. The day in the country was restful. They were also looking at farms to buy near the city of Binghamton, where they had made some friends after Billy spoke at a function there. There were horse farms in the area, and Jill, the former equestrian champion, was drawn to the area.

  When the Yankees resumed play at Yankee Stadium, the New York columnists, none of whom had been in Texas, got a look at Billy and they were close to horrified. The injuries were bad, and the fact that it happened in a strip club, to many, made it worse. Billy’s image, in decline for the past few years, now had a hint of immorality.

  But Jill thought that missed the point, and she went on the offensive. In a quote that made headlines, Jill said of the Lace incident, “I don’t care where my husband gets his appetite. I know where he comes to dinner.”

  Decades later, she remained as defiant.

  “What worried me was the fight, not the location of it,” she said. “You’re telling me that no else’s husband went to a topless bar? The real problem was that I didn’t want him in fights. He was getting older. The people coming after him were getting younger.”

  Steinbrenner was of the same mind, but in what was a bad sign for Billy, the Yankees’ owner also seemed to be less tolerant or willing to forget the episode than he had been initially.

  “He’s a 60-year-old man and when I saw him his ear was hanging,” George said. “He shouldn’t have been there. He has to use better judgment.”

  Steinbrenner was talking about hiring a full-time bodyguard for his manager until Jill came up with an alternative. She announced to reporters that she was going to accompany her husband on all road trips for the remainder of the season.

  The Yankees won five of their next six games and regained a solid lead in the AL East. But there were bad tidings everywhere. On May 28, Lou Piniella resigned as general manager, saying he would remain with the team as a scout. Piniella had been Billy’s buffer, his protector against Steinbrenner. But Piniella was fed up with a role that was maddening.

  Piniella’s replacement, Bob Quinn, was a former Cleveland scouting director who had never been a general manager and knew nothing of the crossfire between Billy and Steinbrenner. Whereas Piniella would visit Billy in the Yankee Stadium manager’s office, light a cigarette, and talk with Billy for twenty minutes about George’s crazy schemes or suggestions and how to handle them, Quinn had no experience in that realm.

  The day after Piniella resigned, the Yankees took their 32–15 record—the second best in baseball and good enough for a 2.5-game lead in their division—to Seattle. Then it was off to Oakland, where they were to play a Memorial Day afternoon game.

  It was a bright Monday afternoon and there was a crowd of more than forty-four thousand. A midday rain had kept the field damp, but the nationally televised game began on time. To lead off the third inning, Oakland shortstop Walt Weiss hit a soft, looping line drive toward Yankees second baseman Bobby Meacham, who was playing for an injured Willie Randolph. Meacham, replays showed, caught the ball on the fly. He made a backhand grab with his glove just above the ground.

  But second-base umpire Rick Reed, standing behind Meacham, was screened from the play. He could not see the ball and Meacham’s glove and ruled that the ball had bounced just before Meacham snagged it. He made the safe sign, which meant it was not an out. Meacham could have easily gotten Weiss with a throw to first base, but knowing that he had caught the ball and not seeing Reed’s safe signal, he turned and fired the ball to shortstop Rafael Santana. He was beginning the ritual of an out with no runners on—he was throwing it around the horn.

  Weiss ran to first, safe on what was ruled a single.

  Meacham, pitcher Richard Dotson, and Santana argued with Reed, who stood by his opinion that from what he could see the ball was trapped. Billy jogged onto the field, and as he did he turned to first-base umpire Dale Scott, who had a good view of the play.

  “The second-base umpire couldn’t see it,” Billy said to Scott. “You had the best view. You’ve got to help him with the call. Talk to him and get it right.”

  Billy then took his case to Reed, who was unmoved. He appealed to home plate umpire Rich Garcia, the crew chief. Garcia said Billy could ask Scott his opinion.

  The Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan was the color analyst on the broadcast. Said Morgan, “They’re going to make a mistake if they don’t reverse this. One of those umpires should get it right. Meacham caught it.”

  Scott did not get involved in the call, which sent Billy over the edge. Being screened from a play and missing a call was one thing, but for another umpire to let an error be perpetuated was worse than being wrong. Billy yelled something at Scott, who threw up his arm and ejected Billy from the game.

  Billy tried to kick dirt on Scott, but the infield was too wet and no dirt could be scraped forward by his cleats. The infield was almost muddy. Frustrated by the conditions, Billy reached down with both hands and tried scooping the infield dirt to fling at Scott’s legs. This may have worked a few miles away at West Berkeley’s Kenney Park, but the hard clay of a big-league ballpark’s infield is not easily displaced. Billy grasped what dirt and clay he could and shoveled it at Scott’s legs.

  There wasn’t much in Billy’s hands as he flung it, but that was not the point. It looked bad. Many a columnist would note that Billy looked like a brat in a child’s sandbox, irate and ill mannered.

  Said Morgan on the telecast, “This is unfortunate because Billy is right. If Randolph had been there, he probably would have thrown to first base anyway and this never happens.”

  Billy was calm a few seconds later, and he left the field with Garcia, talking to the umpire almost placidly. Years later, Garcia talked about how up-and-down and incongruous an infield squabble with Billy would be for an umpire.

  “He would blow up and then be composed in a matter of seconds,” Garcia said. “He could be wild-eyed furious and then completely reasonable in one ten-second period. And Billy always wore a religious cross in between the interlocking NY on his hat. So all the while he’s yelling at you, you’re looking at that cross on his hat.

  “It was a unique experience for an umpire.”

  After the game, which Oakland won, 3–2, when Jose Canseco—whom Billy had drafted as the A’s general manager in 1982—hit a home run, Billy said that Scott at first said he did not see the play well enough to make a call. But after conferring with the other umpires, Scott, Billy said, changed his mind and said that the ball had bounced.

  “I don’t mind errors or being screened from a call, but I can’t tolerate untruths—he changed his story,” Billy said.

  The New York Times contacted several sports psychologists, asking them to assess Billy’s behavior in Oakland.

  “Kicking dirt and throwing dirt are obvious simple displacements from kicking the person and hitting the person,” said Dr. Stanley Cheren, a Boston psychiatrist who works with athletes. “Dirt adds another quality—filth—ultimately meaning contempt. It’s an expression of contempt.”

  The Scott situation was an embarrassment, but Billy expected only a fine. Earlier in the year, he had paid $300 for kicking dirt on Tim Welke in Texas. But two days after the Scott dispute, Billy was at his desk in the visiting manager’s office in Oakland when the phone rang.

  T
he Yankees had won the previous day; he had visited his mother and hung out in the Danville Hotel the night before. He was in a good mood and he answered the phone with a wink at reporters.

  “Hello, Copacabana,” he said, a quip he frequently made, proving that the 1950s were never too far from his mind.

  It was American League president Dr. Bobby Brown, Billy’s 1950s teammate.

  “Yes, Bobby,” Billy said, then listened for a while.

  The grin on Billy’s face vanished.

  “OK, thanks for calling, Bobby,” Billy said, and hung up.

  He had been suspended for three games and fined $1,000.

  “There is no excuse sufficient enough to warrant dirt being kicked and thrown on an umpire,” Brown said in a statement. “I have warned Billy that this type of action must cease, and if repeated it could result in harsher penalties.”

  It got worse. The umpires were infuriated that the suspension was only three games. Richie Phillips, lawyer for the umpires’ union, issued a resolution condemning Billy after a conference call with the seven umpiring crew chiefs. Phillips said that Billy could no longer leave the dugout during games.

  “For Martin to stay in the game, he’s going to have to behave like an altar boy,” Phillips said. “He’s going to have to fold his hands, shut his mouth and that’s it. Otherwise, he’s going to be ejected, ejected, ejected, ejected. Every time for the next couple of weeks that he comes out of the dugout, he’ll be ejected. Then we’ll review the situation.”

  By mid-June, with the Yankees still in first place, Billy and the umpires had reached an uneasy truce. Billy was allowed on the field. But it was understood that he had a short leash. The bitterness of the umpires toward Billy troubled Steinbrenner, and he did not see a resolution.

  “They’re not letting him do his job and I don’t know how that’s going to work,” he said.

  On Monday, June 20, the Yankees headed to Detroit with a 40–25 record, the third best in baseball. The lead over Detroit was still half a game. Billy had recovered from his Lace injuries. Before the first game in Detroit, he was told that catcher Don Slaught, who had been on the disabled list with a groin injury, had been activated by Quinn. That was against Billy’s wishes because he believed that Slaught was not yet healed.