Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Trainer Gene Monahan heard from Steinbrenner.

  “I remembered the number of times Billy told me he loved me,” Monahan said. “I remembered his compassion. And I thought, ‘He really was like an old Wild West gunfighter to the end.’ Those guys always leave us one night without warning. It figured that Billy would go like that—just poof and he’s gone.”

  Willie Randolph answered the phone when Steinbrenner called. But he did not stay on the line long.

  “I was too upset to talk to anyone,” Randolph, renowned for his stolid countenance, said. “I put my wife on the phone. I couldn’t control my emotions.”

  When reporters called the reliably accessible Randolph shortly thereafter, his wife took the calls and explained that her husband could not come to the phone. Try again tomorrow, she said.

  Lou Piniella, who was skiing in Vermont, got the call, too.

  “There was a snowstorm the next day, so going to New York right then wasn’t possible,” Piniella said. “We went to the local Catholic church and paid the priest to say a Mass for Billy. And my whole family sat there remembering Billy.”

  Don Mattingly heard the news at his sister’s house in Indiana.

  “I started telling people about how alive Billy became just before the first pitch of every game,” Mattingly said. “That was his moment—pacing up and down in the dugout with his hands in his back pockets. It put a charge in everyone on the team. That was him at his best.

  “But I also thought about the demons that went with him after the game. I thought about the alcohol and all the dangers that go with it. He was so brilliant, but there was a piece of him that was so tragic.”

  Earl Weaver was home when he got the news.

  “I felt like part of me had died, too,” Weaver said. “It hit me like that. It hit me harder than I thought it would. And I felt bad for baseball.”

  Bobby Richardson, who had played alongside Billy with the Yankees and become his successor at second base, received a call from a local reporter.

  “I flashed back to the 1950s and how Billy willed those Yankees teams to victory,” Richardson said. “I remembered the things people didn’t know about Billy—like how many times we took a cab on a Sunday morning to church.

  “And I realized that now Billy was with Casey again.”

  For some of Billy’s friends, the unusual circumstances of his death only added to the shock and dismay. Battlin’ Billy Martin died on a country road?

  “It added kind of a heartbreaking element,” said Steve Vucinich, the Oakland A’s clubhouse manager and Billy’s longtime confidant. “It made it feel so avoidable.”

  “An auto accident?” Rizzuto said, incredulously. “No, none of us saw that coming.”

  But others found meaning in the setting of the accident.

  “Maybe it was finally a place for him to be at peace,” said Rod Carew, who saw Billy as a father figure and became the star of the first team Billy managed in 1969. “It was his own quiet time.

  “Instead of it being in a big city with noise, bright lights, and hoopla, it was somewhere serene and away from all that. I found comfort in that. I like that he left us in a peaceful place.”

  Jill returned to the house on Potter Hill Road on Christmas night, where housekeeper Mary Lynch was waiting for her.

  “I made a stiff drink and started planning to leave for New York,” she said. “George said he would have the funeral there and I was relieved he was taking care of that. He was wonderful.

  “People were calling from around the country, from around the world in fact. They were getting ready to fly to New York from wherever they were. I left a few hours later. I didn’t even remember to pack clothes.”

  Lynch stayed behind for a while to tidy up. The table had been set for dinner, so she put all the dishes, utensils, and glassware back in the cabinets. She removed the Christmas turkey from the oven. She put water at the base of the twenty-foot Christmas tree. She fed the animals in the barn and checked the quail brooder, which was still warm.

  Then, before locking the doors and returning home, she took pictures of the farmhouse’s first-floor walls, which were lined with memorabilia from Billy’s career.

  “Jill wanted me to do that to remember what it looked like that night,” Lynch said. “But I took extra pictures because that was the stuff that Billy wanted to remember about his life.

  “I figured if that’s what he wanted to remember then maybe it was a good way for me to remember him.”

  There were pictures of Billy and Casey Stengel in the Yankees’ dugout and a photograph of the 1953 world champion Yankees alongside a photo of the World Series–winning 1977 Yankees. There was a shot of Billy sitting with his mother in her kitchen at 1632 7th Street in West Berkeley. Billy had his arm around Jenny. They were singing.

  There were pictures of teams from each of his managerial stops—Minnesota, Detroit, Texas, New York, and Oakland. There were pictures of Billy in an army uniform, Billy as a minor leaguer in Arizona, and Billy pouring champagne over the head of George Steinbrenner. There were pictures of his children and pictures of Billy hunting with Mickey Mantle and fishing with Whitey Ford. There were pictures of Billy at dinner with Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra.

  There were pictures of Billy at spring training, Billy arguing with an umpire, and Billy doffing his cap for the crowd during his stunning resurrection in 1978 at Old Timers’ Day.

  There was an ink portrait of Billy that had become the 1981 cover of Timemagazine and framed copies of the half-dozen times Billy graced the cover of Sports Illustrated—from April 1956 when he was identified as SPARKPLUG OF THE YANKEES, to May 1985 when the headline proclaimed, BILLY’S BACK.

  Lynch took pictures until she ran out of film in her camera. Then she turned out the last light, closed the door, and drove toward the front gate, her tires crunching in the new snow. When she reached the end of the driveway, she saw broken glass and crumpled pieces of chrome. A sheriff sat in his cruiser at the crest of Potter Hill Road.

  The multicolored Christmas lights in the evergreen trees bobbed in a gusty wind.

  49

  THE DAY AFTER BILLY’S death, Dr. Bobby Brown, Billy’s former Yankees teammate, went to his mailbox and saw a letter with a return address he did not recognize: Potter Hill Road, Fenton, New York.

  Inside, there was a Christmas card from Billy.

  Brown was an established star when Billy arrived in the Yankees’ clubhouse in 1950. He had watched Billy develop into a persevering player and inspiration to five championship teams, and he had witnessed Billy’s managerial ascent in five American cities. Somewhat unhappily, when Brown was the American League president, he was frequently forced to spar with Billy. Brown disciplined him, fined him, and suspended him multiple times.

  But on this day, December 26, 1989, he was holding a Christmas card from Billy’s upstate New York home.

  “Billy included a handwritten note,” Brown said. “Billy was like that. He would write you something.”

  The newspaper on Brown’s doorstep that day had a series of articles about the startling death of Billy Martin. Brown looked at the card in his hand.

  “He wrote that he hoped we could get together for dinner after the holiday.”

  It was signed, “Your teammate, Billy.”

  In another part of the city that morning, Jill was having a late breakfast with Mickey Morabito, who had been visiting his mother on Staten Island for the holidays until he heard the news about Billy.

  “Jill was pretty shaken up but she was composed, and she had to be because a lot was going on already,” Morabito said.

  The IRS that day had attached a lien on Billy’s estate for unpaid back taxes in the amount of $86,137. Billy’s family in Berkeley was furious that the funeral and burial were taking place in New York, and even more irritated that they had not been consulted about that decision. And while Billy’s body had already been sent to New York City, there was some controversy about that,
too—and Jill was in the middle of the dispute.

  The county coroner had initially not requested an autopsy of Billy’s body. Bill Reedy had said he was the driver. The coroner considered Billy a victim of the accident as opposed to part of its cause, so he saw no reason to further examine Billy.

  But now Reedy had changed his story. In light of Reedy’s retraction, an autopsy on Billy’s body might help prove who the driver was. A full autopsy would never be performed. Over the next couple of years, there were all kinds of theories as to how and why that came to be. There were reports that Jill had told doctors at the hospital that she was Jewish and that her religion forbade an autopsy. Other people have said that Steinbrenner interceded and used his influence with state authorities to get Billy’s body whisked that night to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

  At the heart of the matter, at no time did the upstate authorities ever seem eager to keep Billy’s body. In 2013, Jill said she never brought up her religion.

  “My father was of a Jewish heritage but my mother wasn’t Jewish and we never practiced Judaism,” she said. “It’s just heritage. I don’t know how Billy got to Campbell’s funeral home. I just know that he did.”

  Before the funeral, however, a compromise was made and Billy’s body was subjected to what was called a “visual autopsy” conducted by a noted New York City medical examiner and pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden. Baden agreed with the cause of death determined by the Binghamton-area coroner and concluded that Billy was the passenger, adding that Billy would have lived if he had worn a seat belt.

  That was the behind-the-scenes drama. In the New York media, Billy’s death remained a major story and dominated the headlines and newscasts throughout the final week of 1989. There were three well-attended and highly publicized wakes for Billy at the Campbell Funeral Home. Two were mostly private, with Howard Cosell as the principal speaker at the first one. Reporters did attend the wakes, quoting many of the attending celebrities.

  “I think I still don’t believe it,” Mickey Mantle said during the second wake. “I keep thinking Billy will pop up and say, ‘How ya’ doing, pard?’ Like this is all a big joke.”

  On Thursday, December 28, the public was invited to view Billy’s body inside the funeral home. The line of fans who showed up stretched down Madison Avenue for two blocks. Police estimated the daylong crowd at about 2,500 people.

  The Campbell Funeral Home had been hosting the wakes of prominent New Yorkers since 1898, and its rooms had seen overflowing crowds that arrived in tribute to everyone from Jimmy Cagney to Ed Sullivan to John Lennon. The throng that turned out for Billy was as big as any the funeral home had seen.

  Billy was laid out in a chapel within the building, his Yankees jersey and Yankees cap nearby. He wore a dark blue suit, pink shirt, and multicolored tie. The casket was enveloped in flowers, including one arrangement in the shape of a number 1.

  Bob Pecario came from his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.

  “Like a lot of people, I was a fan of Billy’s all my life,” he said. “He stood up for the little guy. He was one of us. That’s why we’re all here.”

  The waiting crowd was old and young, white, black, and Latino. There were laborers and white-collar workers who stepped away from nearby office buildings.

  Yankees fan William Brady drove down from Niagara Falls.

  “I had to come down and see him today,” Brady said. “He meant too much to me. I had to be here.”

  Mike Moran took a train from his home in Secaucus, New Jersey.

  “I’m not naive and I know Billy had his faults,” Moran said. “But there was more to him than that. He was a good guy caught in some tough spots. I think everyone knew that and understood his passion. We loved his passion. We forgave him the rest.”

  Although a Mets fan, Ramon Fontanez parked his cab a couple of blocks from the funeral home so he could pay his respects. Fontanez did so, he said, because he respected Billy’s accomplishments and because he thought Billy made New York a better place.

  Tony Inniss, a forty-year-old from Round Lake, New York, was first in line for the viewing, wearing a wool ski cap as he stood on the Madison Avenue sidewalk at 7:00 a.m. Temperatures were in the twenties. The doors did not open until 10:00 a.m.

  “I’m here because Billy was a true Yankee and a man that I loved,” Inniss told the New York Post. “He was brash but a real person with a soft spot. And for a lot of us he was the true embodiment of the New York Yankees.”

  In line about ten persons behind Inniss, Kevin Dumont, a Yankees fan from Staten Island, had arrived at 8:00 a.m.

  “I was home when one of my friends called me on Christmas to say it was too bad about Billy Martin and I thought he was joking,” Dumont said. “When I found out it was true, I went into my room and just started crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. I didn’t stop crying for about two hours.”

  Dumont said that he met Billy once outside Yankee Stadium when he and two friends had called out to Billy as he made his way to his car.

  “He came over and after we got an autograph he said he wanted to buy us a drink,” Dumont said. “He gave us $20 and told us to go have a beer for him. And we did. For $20, we had two or three beers.”

  The morning after the public viewing of Billy’s body, Cardinal John O’Connor officiated at a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was Friday, December 29, and the cathedral’s seats were full with rows of people standing five deep in the back and beside the pews. Alcoves, side altars, and vestibules at the cathedral’s supplementary entrances were jammed. Officials from the Archdiocese of New York estimated that 3,000 people were inside the cathedral, which has a listed capacity of 2,400.

  Morabito, Randolph, Mantle, Ford, Art Fowler, and Steinbrenner were pallbearers. Scores of other past and present Yankees were in attendance, as were executives and players from several other teams and dozens of New York dignitaries.

  Jill sat in a front pew with Billy Joe, Kelly Ann, Mantle, Steinbrenner, and former president Richard M. Nixon, who in the 1980s lived in New Jersey and was a frequent visitor to Yankee Stadium.

  “I looked around and in the crowd I saw all kinds of people I knew,” Morabito said. “There were about five umpires at the funeral. It felt like half of Major League Baseball was there. Three of Billy’s wives were there. Lois was the only one who couldn’t make it, but then Kelly Ann was there for her.”

  Ron Perranoski, Billy’s bullpen closer with the Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers, flew up from Florida.

  “After he died I was so upset I was pacing around my house,” Perranoski said. “My wife said, ‘You should go to the funeral; you’ll feel better.’

  “I’m glad I came but I don’t know that I feel better. I’m so sad.”

  The service lasted seventy minutes. Rev. Edwin Broderick opened his eulogy with a line that drew laughter from the crowd.

  “At first blush, this cathedral is undoubtedly the last place you’d expect to find Billy,” Broderick said.

  When the quip was later repeated to Billy’s sisters, who did not attend the funeral in protest over its location, they were incensed.

  “Bill always went to church,” Pat Irvine said. “That wasn’t the right thing to say.”

  But inside the cathedral, it seemed to break the ice.

  “Billy gave us thrills and spills, ups and downs, but his was an interesting show with exciting and different endings,” Broderick said. “Despite all his bravado and bravura, Billy was a warm, sentimental, kind person, generous with his time and money.”

  Broderick continued: “Billy always wore his St. Christopher’s medal and carried a rumpled prayer card to St. Jude in his pocket. We pray that his is a safe slide into home plate. It seems a coincidence that Billy went home to God on Christmas Day.”

  The crowd, many of whom were wearing Yankees jackets and other apparel of the team, burst into applause when Broderick concluded, “Billy is with all the other Yanke
e greats now. They are together in an eternal World Series.”

  Billy’s casket, draped in a white cloth, was carried out of the church with his family walking a few steps behind.

  “As we got close to the door, I was convulsing in sobs,” Billy Joe said. “I felt a little weak and unsteady. At that moment, I felt someone grab my arm. It was Richard Nixon. He said to me, ‘I want you to see all the people that loved your father.’

  “And he led me outside so I could look at the sea of people in the streets. It was a mass of thousands. President Nixon said, ‘Those are all the people your father touched.’” Police had set up barricades along Fifth Avenue and 50th Street. A crowd of about five thousand stood behind the barriers ten deep. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built in the 1870s of stone and marble, takes up a city block. Billy’s mourners had enveloped the entire cathedral block. More people were waiting on other side streets and north of the cathedral.

  “I had never seen a New York crowd like that for anything other than a major parade,” said Randolph, who grew up in Brooklyn. “The last time I saw a crowd like that was our ticker-tape parade after the 1977 championship.”

  Billy Joe stood with Richard Nixon on the steps of the cathedral.

  “I’ll never forget that sight,” he said twenty-five years later. “It was a sorrowful day but it is a wonderful memory.”

  The crowd, most wearing scarves with their collars pulled up to their ears, waited despite the bitter cold. Reporters conducting interviews outside the cathedral found people who had come from as far away as California, Texas, and Minnesota. It was a reverent gathering, quiet and solemn, as Billy’s casket descended the steps leading to a long black hearse.

  Rudy Stallone of Long Island, who was standing across from the cathedral on Fifth Avenue, had his son, Paul, on his shoulders.

  “He’s three years old so he might not remember this,” Stallone said. “But I want to tell him one day that he was here. My father is a Yankees fan and a Billy fan. I’m a Yankees fan and a Billy fan. Hopefully, one day my son will be a Yankees fan and a Billy fan.”