Finally, much of the crowd from the Old-Timers bash had left, but Billy and Mickey Mantle were still at the bar, where I stopped to order Number Eleven before heading on to the Cave. When I mentioned my alcohol-reduction plans to Billy, he was not impressed. In fact, he referred to me in a well-known euphemism for the human reproductive system that does not appear in the male of the species.
Mantle overheard. “How old are you?” Mantle asked me. I told him that I was thirty-three. “Well,” said the Mick, “cuttin’ back is a mighty big decision for any man and I don’t think you’re mature enough to make that one yet.”
Chapter 23
Fort Worth, where there is one chance in three that the man driving the gravel truck who just ran you off the road is named Duane, is equipped with an official city motto. It reads: If you can’t get your job done before noon, then it’s too big for you. Later, the motto was actually enacted into an ordinance stating that anybody who left for lunch and then made the mistake of returning to work would be charged with a Class-A misdemeanor. As a result, initiatives such as reserving a tee-time in the early afternoon hours must be arranged months in advance. Bowling alleys are jammed. And the taverns … my God.
The Quick Draw Lounge of Camp Bowie was the primary hideaway. Right after “As the World Turns” signed off, I would head straight for the Quick Draw and remain there until time to drive to the ballpark. Inquiring minds from various disciplines and occupations always met at the Quick Draw to trade ideas, creating a collective mind-force that confirmed the theoretic laws concerning the substance of synergism.
An air force major, in uniform, who headed a B-52 flight crew at the nearby SAC (“Peace Is Our Profession”) installation called Carswell—at the time, the largest tactical bomber base in the world—once appeared at an adjoining stool at the Quick Draw and was talking about the missiles and gravity weapons that he carried on his aircraft. Gravity weapon? I didn’t know what he was talking about. The major grinned. “Well, lemme put it this way … if all the gravity weapons on my plane were employed simultaneously, then there probably wouldn’t be any more gravity. But the Soviets know we have the capacity to blow up the planet … so whenever they feel the urge to start something, then they look up the inventory of goodies I’ve got on my B-52 and say, ‘Not today, comrade. Not today.’” Followed by a deep pull on his drink and a hearty guffaw. The fellow put me in mind of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
That won the blue ribbon as the best conversational snippet I heard at the Quick Draw. First runner-up honors involved a chat with a staff psychiatrist at the John Peter Smith County Hospital. I don’t think the doctor believed me when I said I traveled around the country with the Texas Rangers baseball team. “Boy,” he said, “I’ll bet you encounter a lot of [P-word here] on a gig like that.”
“More than you could shake an inflatable penile implant at,” I said. At this point, I was not being truthful, but why split hairs and spoil a good conversation?
“In that case, for your benefit, I’d like to point out some extreme danger signs in women that might prove helpful in your travels,” the shrink said. “If you run across any of these, then steer clear, because they’re crazy.” Then he rattled off his list. “Nurses, stewardesses, owners of more than two pets, anybody with huge tits, excessive makeup, earrings larger than a fifty-cent piece, abdominal scar, painted toenails, poetry writer, prematurely dead father, Jesus freak, dyed or streaked hair.”
These were the women of the Seventies the psychiatrist was talking about, and not the men of the Nineties. “That’s been clinically and scientifically proven, time and again,” the psychiatrist stated. “And from personal findings, I think you can add Scorpios and anybody whose name starts with L to that list.”
Marvelous, isn’t it, how a characteristically sex-crazed and sociopathic species can discourse at length on the unstable aspects of the opposite gender? In that regard, during the summer months of 1975 any competent mental-health professional could have enjoyed several intriguing case studies on aberrant behavior within the Texas Rangers traveling party. While Willie Davis was apparently having out-of-body experiences in centerfield, the Little Dago seemed to be in training for a middleweight title bout. It seemed the Rangers’ manager had been scheduling sparring sessions at least once a week, when he would play his rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata” on the nearest available face. Somebody suggested that Billy might be on a cash retainer from the American Dental Association. I told Billy that he might consider changing his name to Sugar Ray. “Kinda has a nice ring to it at that,” he conceded.
One bout took place during a weekend of turmoil in Anaheim. In a restaurant the mixologist refused to pour another cocktail for one of Billy’s coaching staff, claiming that the gentleman already appeared over-served. Billy took umbrage. While Martin and the bartender were engaged in a loud and intense disagreement over (I’ll swear to God) an American’s constitutional right to get as plastered as he wants to, another customer entered the room.
After several minutes the customer—not realizing that he had stumbled into some distinguished company—yelled at the bartender, “As soon as you get through arguing with these shitheads, would you mind getting me a gin and tonic?” In seconds Billy had rendered the customer horizontal. The bartender called the cops. Given the notoriety of the winner of the first-round KO, no arrests were made but the gendarmes did confiscate the keys to Billy’s rental car.
In mid-June, following another loss in Kansas City, I was seated in the lounge at Royals Stadium sharing a beer and polite conversation with Burt Hawkins, who the night before had summoned me to his hotel room to meet his old friend David Eisenhower, son-in-law of the recently ex president. I was now telling Hawkins how Eisenhower, unlike his photographs, didn’t look anything like Howdy Doody in person, when somebody barged into the pressbox and announced that down in the Rangers’ clubhouse Billy Martin and Willie Davis were beating the crap out of each other. Hawkins smiled, then said, “Hmm. Hard to figure out who to root for in that one.”
The winner in the long run, probably, was Willie Davis. Not twenty minutes after the hostilities he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, who, unlike the Rangers, were involved in a pennant race. “I am gone like a cool breeze,” Willie told me.
Back in Texas, according to a Rangers pitcher who claimed to be an eyewitness, Billy’s winning streak turned down a dead-end street. At the County Line Bar in Grand Prairie, on the night before the team would leave on an extended road trip, Billy allegedly sucker-punched an off-duty ironworker. “Billy nailed him with his best shot … and the fucker didn’t even blink,” the pitcher said. “Then the guy grabbed Billy by the shirt and I saw something I thought I’d never see. He apologized to the guy. And then the big son of a bitch spat a mouthful of blood on the floor, looked at Billy and said, ‘Lissen … ’pologies ain’t enough.’ And then Billy said, ‘Look … I’m drunk and I didn’t know what I was doing,’ and the big guy said, ‘Then I’ll catch you when you’re sober.’ So Billy jumped in that big Lincoln and got his ass out of there.”
Toward the end of the road trip, in the horseshoe-shaped bar at the Executive House Hotel in Chicago, Billy appeared to have selected a sportswriter as an opponent in his next bout. From his side of the horseshoe Martin began shouting over to our side of it. James Walker of the Dallas Times Herald was now the object of Martin’s displeasure. “Walker … you are a [and here Billy used the same word that he used to describe me when I told him that I was considering moderating my drinking habits]. You are a double [same politically incorrect word of the Nineties]! Galloway! Don’t you think he’s a [I’ve heard men refer to their ex-wives using this word after they have passed through the denial phase of a divorce settlement].”
Galloway responded with what, for Galloway, was rare eloquence. “No!” he shouted at Billy, who, I thought, was now poised to wind up and throw a glass in our direction. The entire team was there to witness the exchange. I missed w
hatever happened next because I needed to return to my room upstairs. A particularly stimulating round-table discussion was scheduled on “The American Catholic Hour.” Also, if Billy punched James Walker, I didn’t want to be around to see that happen because then I would probably have to write a story about it. The next day Galloway told me that the mood around the horseshoe bar had remained turbulent but bloodless for the next two hours. “What it boiled down to was that I had to stand around and explain the theory of journalism to twenty-five drunk jocks,” he said.
Before the final game of the Chicago series I saw another interesting side to Billy Martin. He called two of his veteran players into his office when he overheard them reading aloud from what might be described as pornographic literature in the presence of a couple of batboys. “Don’t ever do stuff like that around kids,” he said. “To those kids you’re supposed to be big leaguers. So try to act like it.”
Fergie Jenkins had a bad outing that day and the Rangers lost to the Sox, completing a disastrous road swing. On the flight back to Dallas, Billy’s mood had become contagious. Cesar Tovar and Joe Lovitto exchanged punches in the aisle of the airplane. Martin himself raced back and broke up the fight. Then Billy made a speech: “You fuckers all make me sick,” he declared. “You’re a bunch of losers and you’re a bunch of quitters and what makes it worse is that it doesn’t bother you one goddamn bit.
“As soon as this plane lands you’ll all go home to your wives or your girlfriends or whoever and you’ll get laid. But I’m not going home because I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of myself for being associated with you fuckers.”
End of speech. In the seat immediately behind mine I heard Clyde Wright say, “The reason Billy ain’t going home is because he’s afraid that badass who pushed him around at the County Line Bar will be waiting for him on his front porch.”
A one-for-all and all-for-one spirit was not manifesting itself on this baseball team. What the Rangers needed was a good Ten-Cent Beer Night Riot to unify the troops. Unfortunately, happenings like that are somewhat rare in baseball. Billy Martin had clearly embarked on a pattern of activity that could be viewed only as self-destructive from a managerial standpoint. By now I suspected that Billy was attempting to get the hell out of this Texas deal. He was bored with Arlington, the convenient stepping-stone that would position him nicely for the ultimate step in his grand scheme. Billy Martin was a very shrewd man. A post-game interview with about five players after a game at Arlington Stadium proved enlightening. The interview was so prolonged—we were talking about the fact that I was actually being stalked by some woman who worked the front desk in the Sheraton Royal Hotel in Kansas City who was now following me all over the United States—that we found ourselves locked in the clubhouse. There was nothing else to do but drain the keg of Coors beer that was on hand for post-game use. When the keg was empty around sun-up we stacked some boxes, and climbed up and out of a window. But during the process of killing the keg, the players expressed their dissatisfaction with Billy Martin’s behavior. “When we win, Billy talks about how ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that’ and when we lose, it’s always ‘You guys fucked it up.’ It’s starting to get old,” one of them said.
The next road trip began in Minneapolis, where I finally located some relief for my disabled back. Instead of lying on the floor with a heating pad and a bottle of muscle relaxants and pain pills, I took a proactive measure that entailed venturing across the street from the Leamington Hotel to receive therapy at the Geisha Spa massage parlor. In less than a half-hour two Vietnamese girls accomplished what the leading orthopedic specialists in Texas could not. The pain went away and I could stand up straight again.
Now I was actually in shape to employ a can’t-miss tactic for alluring women that I had learned from baseball players. “It works every time,” I had been assured. “You draw a picture puzzle on a bar napkin and ask the woman to solve it” The picture puzzle involved drawing an angel, a fish, a glistening gem, two eyes peering through glasses and finally a small rabbit standing on the back of a huge cat. The punch line: “Holy mackerel, Sapphire! Look at the hare on that pussy!”
In four tries, the puzzle hadn’t worked yet, but when the team traveled on to New York and then Boston, I was still fresh and alert—once again the sharp-eyed newsman with keen instincts for the hot-breaking news item. Actually, for the first time in my entire career I stumbled across what might qualify as a scoop. In the pressbox bar at Fenway Park, I bumped into Brad Corbett, the fellow who owned the Rangers. “Come up to my suite for breakfast with Gunnie and me in the morning,” Brad said casually, “and I’ll give you a good story.”
“Such as?” I said.
“I’m going to fire Billy,” Brad said. Or, at least that is what I thought he said. So, under the circumstances, I thought it best to show up, as invited, for the breakfast gathering. Unlike the rest of the riffraff billeted at the Sheraton, Corbett’s digs were over at the Ritz-Carlton. I put on my best outfit, that being a white Mexican wedding shirt with fancy stitched embroidery on the cuffs and collar that I’d bought at Nieman Marcus, and wondered what kind of breakfast wine I should order. Brad was a true epicurean and I was worried about revealing myself to be the consumate hick. Gallo Hearty Burgundy would probably go well with the mango crêpes, I figured, having seen an ad in which Ernest and Julio said that the screw-top products of their vineyard went well with damn near anything, from Malt-O-Meal to Hormel chili.
Corbett met me at the door of his suite wearing boxer shorts. Again, the man could have been John Goodman’s double. Only he was married to Ingrid Bergman instead of Roseanne. After the breakfast that took about an hour and a half to finish (Scott Fitzgerald was right … the rich are different from us), Brad got down to business.
“Like I told you last night, I’m going to fire Bowie [Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball].” The owners would shortly vote on whether to renew Kuhn’s contract. Corbett said he had the swing vote and thought that baseball needed a new commissioner.
“Bowie?” I said. “I thought you said you were going to fire Billy.”
“Why would I want to fire Billy?” Corbett said.
“I dunno. Maybe you should talk to some of your players about that.”
In the glorious Saturday sunlight at a packed Fenway Park, where I would watch probably the best World Series of modern baseball in about ten more weeks, rookie outfielders Jim Rice and Fred Lynn swatted homeruns with men on base off Gaylord Perry, and Luis Tiant got the complete-game win for the Red Sox. Afterward Burt Hawkins approached me in the pressbox. “What did you tell Corbett this morning?” he said.
“I didn’t tell him nuthin’. Why?”
“Well, he said you had some interesting things to say and now he wants me to go to dinner with him tonight, along with four of the players—Hargrove, Harrah, Sundburg and somebody else—to talk about Billy.”
The next afternoon at Fenway Park, I asked Burt if anything eventful had taken place at the dinner session. “I was really proud of those players,” Hawkins said. “They were uneasy at first. But then Corbett got ’em good and drunk and they unloaded on Billy pretty good.
“I believe,” Hawkins said, “that Brad might actually get rid of him.” Great. I didn’t care who managed the Rangers, although, given a preference, it would have been nice to have had Whitey Herzog back. But that same week Herzog had been hired to manage the Kansas City Royals, a job at which he functioned very nicely.
After the Red Sox won again, I blew off the Rangers charter flight and stayed an extra night in Boston. It was at Logan Airport the next morning that I literally bumped into Ted Kennedy. He was standing there looking bored while Sargent Shriver was transacting business at the ticket counter. What followed was (to me) a memorable interchange.
“Good morning, Senator,” I said.
“How ya’ doin’?” he said.
On the plane later, I mused that Ted Kennedy thought he was simply talking to some jerk wearing a Me
xican wedding shirt. Had Kennedy realized he was talking to somebody who would be blamed in some circles for getting Jimmy Piersall and Billy Martin fired, he might have asked for my autograph.
Back in Arlington, the Rangers won two straight over the Orioles. After Fergie Jenkins had shut out Baltimore for the second win, shortstop Toby Harrah expressed a peculiar reaction. “Goddamn it,” he said, “now we’ll probably start winning and save his fucking job.”
Toby was wrong. Corbett, unsuccessful in his effort to fire Bowie, fired Billy instead. Billy’s crew of loyal “lieutenants”—pitching coach Art Fowler, first-base coach Merrill Combs and bullpen coach Charlie Silvera—all left town along with Billy. Frank Lucchesi, the third-base coach, was hired as the manager on a permanent basis. Billy congratulated Frank, then cussed him as a traitor every day for the rest of his life.
On the night that the firing was announced Billy sat with a group of sportswriters in his office and, I’m told, wept. I am glad that I missed that scene. There is a term that describes Billy’s emotional state at that point. Crocodile tears, I believe they call it.
The next time I laid eyes on Billy Martin was in the Pontchartrain Hotel in Detroit. Billy was on television, appearing on the game of the week. He was wearing his proud Number 1 on the back of a uniform that had pinstripes. Not two weeks after his operatic farewell scene in Arlington, George Steinbrenner had ditched Bill Virdon for Billy Martin. The new field manager of the New York Yankees looked real happy.
Seasons in Hell Page 22