So, too, was a whole new supply of carefree, vacationing Canucks. In a general sense, most Canadians are wrongly characterized as being tediously conservative in their approach to almost every facet of life. Once again, the Surf Rider version of the Canuck carried a looseness of spirit and attitude that belied almost any trace of inhibition, and if nothing else, seemed well-tuned for the tone of the Seventies.
Now back for Rangers Camp III, I had established some seniority. In the previous two years I had been stuck across on the wrong side of Highway 1, between a canal and a shedlike structure that housed the Wednesday meetings of the Pompano Beach Volunteer Fire Department (I used to wander in there and bum some beers). Now I had secured a room at the Surf Rider from which I could step out a glass door, walk seven-and-one-half feet and sit down at the poolside bar. Charlie Pride, the country music singer who now was a regular at Rangers spring training, was living immediately next door.
The other next-door neighbor was the Rangers’ new centerfielder, Willie Davis, the famous ex-Dodger who had been picked up in an off-season trade with Montreal. Davis, who had come directly to spring training from a Los Angeles jail where he had been confined for a few days because of alleged nonpayment of spousal support, was now rooming with Dartagnon, a Doberman pinscher with fangs like Cujo. Each night I would drift off to sleep to the dulcet sounds of Willie Davis, now a confirmed yoga advocate, chanting his mantra—“aaahhhmmmm … aaaahhhmmm.” Davis at least looked the part of a yogi. His body-fat content registered zero. There was an absolute absence of muscle mass as well. In the lockerroom Davis was all skin and veins, the stylishly anorexic look that is so admired in the spiritual nudist retreats of northern California. Davis’ physique presented a sort of extraterrestrial quality. He was quickly dubbed the Strange Ranger.
My first actual workday of 1975 involved writing an in-depth feature about Jeff Burroughs, fresh from his 118 RBI season, and the interview was conducted at poolside. My operational plan for the spring was concentrated around avoidance of conventional baseball jive and allowing my readers to become acquainted with their new Ranger heroes on a more personal basis. So I decided to ask Burroughs questions that might be a little out of the ordinary, such as:
“Jeff, there was an article in the paper this morning that contained some comments from a professor at Nova College over in Fort Lauderdale. This professor predicted that, because of world hunger and the world energy crisis, a hundred years from now, through the miracle of genetic engineering, the average American male will be fourteen inches tall. How do you feel about that?”
Burroughs didn’t hesitate. “Huh. I guess they’ll have to shorten the foul lines and bring in the fences,” he said.
The Rangers camp officially opened with the highest degree of optimism. All of the key players had arrived, under contract and healthy, in Pompano Beach and most had even come down early. There was one exception: David Clyde.
Another Clyde, veteran lefthander Clyde Wright, had been added to the staff, and now David Clyde was a long shot to even make the twenty-five-man roster. Clyde was somewhere back in Texas, recuperating after having his tonsils removed, and there was some doubt that he would show up in Pompano Beach at all.
After the second workout, Martin sat in his office down by the rightfield fence. He was smoking a new pipe, one of those with the curved stem that Sherlock Holmes favored, and wearing a half-smile of contentment that told the baseball world “that everything is completely under control.” In Willie Davis, Martin said that he now had a centerfielder who “didn’t need to wear a whistle.” Pepi Tovar was relegated to utility status and replaced in centerfield by a swami.
And in Clyde Wright, Billy figured that he had secured the lefthander for his starting rotation who could throw his breaking pitches for strikes whenever he wanted to and was mature enough to withstand the psychological rigors of the long, long season.
Martin also had a promising lefthanded candidate for his bullpen, something the Rangers had done without in ’74. The pitcher was Mike Kekich, the man who had provoked all the headlines two years earlier with the Yankees when he and teammate Fritz Peterson announced that they were trading wives. Kekich might have been proficient as a pitcher but he was a flop as a general manager. In the biggest trade of his career, one of the “players” involved—Peterson’s wife—refused to report to her new team. “So I came up shorthanded,” Kekich told me. “And since the Yankees sized up Peterson and me after the ‘trade’ and quickly determined that I was the lesser of the two talents, I wound up pitching the 1974 season in Japan.”
Martin’s assessment: “I don’t care if he married a koala bear. As long as Kekich can still handle lefthanded batters he’s got a spot in my bullpen.” With these pieces now glued into place, all that remained was the process of completing the formalities of a 162 season and an American League pennant would fly in Arlington above the otherwise humble baseball facility on the prairie.
Fortified with assurances like those from The Man Himself, I began making plans to spend less time at the yard at Pompano Beach and devote more of my daytime hours to the more elegant competitions at Gulfstream Park. But the Black Cat Syndrome was close at hand and any illusions that this spring training visit would be a some-work-mostly-play agenda evaporated about six P.M. on Day Four, right after I had finished telecopying my stories to the paper.
Harold McKinney called me from Fort Worth. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “My divorce is final and I’ve got cancer.” McKinney was astonishingly upbeat as he described some dire findings from a biopsy. “Anyway, I’m starting these treatments, so tell all the Canucks I won’t be down there this year.” Three minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was Bob Lindley, the Star-Telegram sports editor, calling to inform me of the news that Harold McKinney himself had just delivered. “Who,” I asked Lindley, “will you send down to replace Harold?”
“Actually, since you’re already there and know the territory, it’s been decided that you’ll do the whole tour,” Lindley said—meaning, naturally, that in the finest American business tradition, one man would now be doing the work of what had previously been the responsibility of two. That night, I contacted a physician acquaintance and described the symptoms that McKinney had reported. “He won’t last the summer,” the doctor said. So, it was now confirmed that I was about to lose my partner in crime and I realized at once that for the long haul, I would not be able to hack it as a solo practitioner.
Two days after that, I awakened to discover that I couldn’t quite stand up. My left leg felt paralyzed. One of the Rangers team doctors checked me out and said something about a herniated disc. He also suggested hospitalization. Isn’t it funny how, when the mind is troubled, the body tends to follow? I’d always figured that a couple of my wires were crossed. Now it seemed like the whole damn transformer had blown. So I did what Harold McKinney would have wanted me to do. I drove back to the Surf Rider, iced down two six-packs of Lone Star and then drove directly to Gulfstream. Let me declare here that if you want hot numbers at the track, befriend an assistant golf pro. Because of such an acquaintance in Fort Lauderdale, I won eighty dollars on the fourth race at Gulfstream and used those proceeds to buy some prescription painkillers for my back. Now I knew what my then First Lady, Betty Ford, must have been going through.
That night in the Banyan, I experienced for the first time the little quirks that happen to the thought processes when pain pills are combined with scotch whiskey. On the plus side, Wayne Carmichael suddenly sounded sensational. But most of the Canucks seemed alarmed—disgusted might be a better word—that I was attempting to communicate with them in fluent Latvian. My pathetic efforts to charm these people seemed entirely consistent with the little notations in the Daily Racing Form that accompanied the recent outings of my favored horses: left in the gate; faded in the stretch; lost whip; never a factor; broke down.
In this condition a man might accidentally stumble into the wrong ho
tel room and come face-to-face with Willie Davis’ dog. In extreme physical agony, it was now evident that either the pills or the scotch would have to go. So I threw away the pills. But … if this was some kind of borderline or even full-blown psychiatric event, it was entirely consistent with some of the events that were beginning to take shape with the baseball team.
The first new celebrity to emerge at Pompano Stadium was not a baseball player but rather a skinny sixteen-year-old kid from Grand Prairie who had decided to quit school and run away from home and—faced with nothing that qualified as a reasonable destination—decided to hitchhike to Rangers spring training. Equipment manager Joe Macko discovered the kid and gave him a job scraping mud from cleats and shining shoes and allowed him to sleep on a cot in the clubhouse. The kid became known as Midnight (from the title song of the movie Midnight Cowboy, which contains lyrics relating to his attire) and soon was a personality worthy of media attention. Midnight’s living quarters were upgraded to the Surf Rider, he was welcomed at Billy Martin’s table at the Banyan Lounge, seen giving autographs to Canucks and reportedly was about to sell his life story to Warner Brothers.
Like many baseball rookie sensations in spring training, Midnight’s flash was quick to hit the pan. When Surf Rider management dispatched Midnight’s bar tab over to Joe Macko, an emergency fund was established to pay the tab and purchase a bus ticket for him back to Grand Prairie. As Midnight was leaving camp, David Clyde was just arriving, long enough to say hello. Clyde was considerably underweight after having the tonsils removed. His bank account was emaciated as well. The kid pitcher’s storybook marriage had ended in a quick divorce. “There was a lot of pressure and some problems came up that I initiated,” Clyde conceded. “I don’t want to say anything bad about marriage. But it’s just not for me.”
Clyde clearly didn’t want to talk at length to sportswriters about the divorce. “Ever since I came to the Rangers, everyone has written about how well I handled all that pressure,” Clyde told me. “But the truth is that in important areas, I didn’t handle things very well at all. When I signed that pro contract I was the all-American boy. Now I’m controversial, trying to prove that I can become the pitcher that I once was, and I’m not even twenty years old yet.” The next day, David Clyde left for the Rangers’ instructional league camp across the state in Plant City, where, it was now evident, he should have been dispatched out of high school.
David Clyde’s departure received scant media attention, though. Billy Martin’s Rangers juggernaut was now beginning exhibition play and everyone was eager to see the activation of this new machine that the Texas media was christening The Good Ship Conquest. Billy’s pre-season sales pitch was universally embraced and I had bought into the hype just as blindly as the rest.
The Rangers were drawing double their customary crowds for the games at Pompano Beach. The Expos came down from their camp at Daytona Beach and one of their coaches, the ex-Dodger centerfielder Duke Snider, marveled at the throng. “This is even a bigger crowd than the game we had yesterday against a team of Japanese all-stars,” said Snider, who was talking enthusiastically to Billy Martin. “And boy, you shoulda heard the recording of the Japanese ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ they played before the game. Bugles blaring and drums pounding. You could almost see the fighter planes zooming in over Pearl Harbor,” added Duke, who touched his thumbs together so that his two hands formed into a dive-bomber.
Montreal beat the Rangers and Jim Bibby 9-0 that afternoon. Afterward, Martin offered the customary spring explanation that Bibby was experimenting with a couple of new pitches and his performance was to be expected. For two seasons, Bibby had gotten by all too well with one pitch, the heater, and he was hardly the type to suddenly introduce finesse into his repertoire. I was beginning to have some reservations about this team, although I wasn’t expressing them yet in print.
The first actual problem surfaced when my next-door neighbor at the Surf Rider, along with his dog, disappeared. Willie Davis failed to show up for an exhibition game against the Orioles and was AWOL again the next day when the Rangers played the Dodgers. None of Davis’ new teammates had the slightest notion about the centerfielder’s whereabouts. Neither did Martin, although he denied being irked or in any way concerned.
Finally, Davis showed up, and he and Martin met, at which time Davis said he had earlier asked for and received two days off … and Martin had forgotten about that arrangement. “Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine,” Billy assured us. So Willie was right and Billy was wrong. That was a managerial first and last in Martin’s career. “Man … I’m happy here,” Willie Davis told me. “Everything is fine and when it’s not, I’ll let you know.”
I was phoning daily reports of the spring craziness back to Harold McKinney. These frequent communications were intended to serve as mutual catharsis. The conversations, sadly, were etched with self-pity. Mine, not McKinney’s. “Here I am about to die and all you can do is piss and moan about your goddamn sore back,” he finally said. “Jesus H. Christ.”
Harold McKinney had a point, though my back still hurt. In order to travel to exhibition games the rented station wagon had been converted into a customized ambulance. Since I couldn’t sit upright I would lie in the back with my feet propped on a beer cooler. Galloway was the driver. At a filling station on the outskirts of Vero Beach where the Dodgers trained, an old guy (anybody in Florida who isn’t very old or very young does not fit in) who checked the oil peered inside the wagon. Then I heard the filling station guy ask my ambulance driver Randy Galloway, “What’s with him?”
“Took too much dope in Vietnam,” Galloway said. “Now he keeps running off from the psych ward at the VA and I’m hauling him back again.” Said the filling station guy: “And he seems so young.” Galloway couldn’t stop cackling for two weeks. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, people from Grand Prairie maintain a low amusement quotient.
Will Rogers claimed that he never met a man he didn’t like. During my baseball travels, I never met a man who didn’t know Billy Martin.
Billy must have been on a first-name basis with probably 10,000 notable Americans. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the presidential peace candidate who had become chums with Billy when he managed the Twins, came to Pompano Beach and stayed a week. So too did entire squadrons of automobile dealers, tavern owners … backslappers and hucksters and hustlers, all wanting to say hello to the Little Dago. A district judge from New Orleans who had known Martin from God could only guess where arrived at Billy’s springtime cavalcade of thrills, claiming he was in town “looking for a little keister for Easter.”
The year before, the Rangers had witnessed what had amounted to a pseudo Little Dago who, privately uncertain and concerned about the nature of the Rangers’ talent-base he had inherited, was on the stage but underplaying his role. But Billy thought he saw some face cards in his hand for this season’s game and now his customary demeanor surfaced, marked by a territory bounded by cocky on one side and contentious on the other. If an actor were to be reasonably selected to play the role of Billy Martin in his prime years as a baseball manager, it sure as hell wouldn’t be Kevin Costner. Jimmy Cagney probably came closest to the portrayal in Public Enemy.
With little more than a week left in what had dragged on and on as a marathon spring, Martin would refuse to let camp close without at least one skirmish. His opportunity arose in paragraph form, buried in a meaningless and obscure spring-training feature article about Yankee outfielder Elliot Maddox that had run in the Fort Lauderdale paper. Maddox, the ex-Ranger, had not figured prominently in Martin’s plans at the conclusion of spring training, 1974. He dealt Maddox to the Yankees in a minor transaction and Maddox had surprised both teams with a strong season. Now, in the Fort Lauderdale paper, Maddox said that Billy might have written him off prematurely as a Ranger and was quoted as saying, “Martin has a habit of lying to his players.” Billy Martin is probably the only manager in the history of big-league ball who would choose n
ot to ignore a remark like that in a recreational environment like spring training, particularly in a publication that was not exactly distributed worldwide. Martin regarded the article as a call to arms.
Martin’s pressure valve was teetering over into the danger zone when I sat briefly across from him in a booth in the Banyan. “Elliot fucking Maddox.” Billy spat out the words. “I was doing him a favor when I traded him to the Yankees. He wanted to go to New York. Isn’t that something? I should have sent him to Spokane. Maddox has one good season and now he’s running off at the mouth,” Billy said, his voice rising with every syllable. “There’s a lesson there. Give a skunk a break and he’ll piss in your face every time.”
Naturally, the Rangers had a game scheduled against the Yankees at Fort Lauderdale the next afternoon. Elliot Maddox would probably lead off for the Yankees. Surely … Billy wouldn’t insist that his pitcher Jim Bibby dust off somebody’s skull in an exhibition game? But … as I reclined on the press-box roof at Fort Lauderdale, I gazed down and … was that a mirage or did Bibby hit Maddox on the shoulder on the first pitch?
Another Rangers pitcher, Stan Thomas, threw in the direction of Maddox’s head and missed on his next at-bat. So in the next inning the Yankee’s Mike Wallace plunked the Rangers’ Dave Nelson, and then both teams were out on the field. Burroughs was wrestling with the Yankee manager Bill Virdon. Meanwhile, Martin was attempting to fight his way around the familiar figure of Number 32, Yankee catcher Elston Howard, in an apparent effort to attach his hands to Maddox’s throat. Afterward, Jim Fregosi told me that “this had to be a spring training first. The games don’t count, but I guess the tempers are real.”
Seasons in Hell Page 20