Gator

by Ron Guidry

  I don’t especially enjoy getting into everything that went on between the guys. For example, I respected the hell out of Reggie. And he respected me. At the end of the day, when we’re together, we’re the proud winners of two World Series titles for the New York Yankees. That’s something special. And it wouldn’t have happened without Reggie. So hashing through what went down that season, and the next, isn’t to pile on about how ego and temper threatened to tear a great team apart. The point is to guide you through the underpinnings of our pinstripe legacy and show why it was so flammable. More than that, it is to understand why the fire never burned us down. There aren’t a lot of teams that could’ve gone through what we went through and still end up winning the World Series. The 1977 New York Yankees did.

  * * *

  —

  If you looked at me and Reggie Jackson in our uniforms, you could be confused that these two people played the same sport. I wasn’t even six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds soaking wet. Nothing about me screamed that I was a freakish physical specimen. I looked like someone who could’ve spent the day riding a tractor or driving a truck. Because heck, I very well could’ve been had stuff played out differently. It’s one of the mysteries of baseball that a string bean like me can throw ninety-five miles per hour, an overweight guy can hit forty home runs, or a little guy with quick moves can steal fifty bases. There’s a place in the game for people you could pass on the street without batting an eye.

  Reggie Jackson wasn’t one of those people. He acted like a superstar and looked the part. He had those gold-framed sunglasses that looked like they came straight from a Hollywood movie set. His pearly, toothy grin was made for magazine covers. And then there was his physique. If you passed by Reggie Jackson on the street, you might not have guessed he played professional baseball. Football would’ve seemed more likely. While my uniform hung baggy and loose around me, Reggie’s muscles fought through the fibers, protruding and showing the world just how strong he was. His arms were the size of my legs.

  When George signed Reggie for more than $2 million, everyone knew what we were getting. First, there was the ballplayer, the one who hit thirty-plus homers per year, won the 1973 MVP, and mashed the A’s to three straight World Series wins. Then there was the other side. The outsize personality who loved to see his face on television and magazine covers. The one who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind in any situation. And when a player that talented, and that famous, says something—anything—it causes a media tidal wave. One of his more famous comments was that if he ever played in New York (this was when he played in Oakland), they’d name a candy bar after him. He’d be right up there with Babe Ruth and the Baby Ruth bar.

  “I didn’t come to New York to be a star,” Reggie proclaimed the day he was introduced as a New York Yankee. “I brought the star with me.” That was Reggie in a nutshell.

  And that is what George signed up for when he rolled out the red carpet for his newest, most expensive acquisition in November of 1976. It was about a month after we had been swept by the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series, and George saw Reggie as the bat we were lacking, and needed, to take that next step and win a championship. There was no question his power would help. His hitting ability would help any team in baseball. But almost immediately there were concerns about how his personality would play in a clubhouse full of strong personalities.

  In the clubhouse, Thurman Munson was our unquestioned leader. Not just in practice but in title: George had made him the first Yankees captain since Lou Gehrig was named captain in 1939. And Thurman rejected the very idea of a superstar on our team. We weren’t some floundering mess of misfits in need of reclamation! We had just been in the World Series—yes, we had lost, but we were already a damn good team. That team, with some minor exceptions, was built on the backs of blue-collar guys in the trenches. We had good players, and a few famous ones. But the biggest compliment to that team was that out of twenty-five guys, there weren’t many superstars. We had twenty-five good players. That’s how Thurman looked at it.

  Introducing somebody of Reggie’s fame and outspokenness, with a natural penchant for attention, was bound to upset the delicate balance in the clubhouse. Meanwhile, the balancing act between Billy and George was always shakier than a wheelbarrow rolling over cobblestones. We anticipated the turbulence that followed.

  The thing was, though, that the two Reggies—Reggie the All-Star and Reggie the Superstar—were inseparable. It’s why he came to New York. The stories of how George wooed him to New York are now famous: the walk along Fifth Avenue where George sold him on not just the Yankees but playing in front of Broadway and in the bright lights of the city. That’s why Reggie turned down more money to play elsewhere. Only New York could satisfy both Reggies. George embraced that, and that’s why Reggie embraced George.

  If Thurman was upset by this spectacle—and knowing him and how much he valued hard work over fleeting fame, I’d guess he was seething inside—he gritted his teeth at first and played nice. He and Roy White put the Yankees uniform on Reggie at his introductory press conference. Thurman could be confrontational, but he wasn’t going to create a problem out of the gates. Besides, those months after the World Series had already been a roller coaster for him. We lost the Series; he was named the American League MVP; he was publicly insulted by Sparky Anderson, the Cincinnati Reds manager; and now the Reggie parade and charade.

  Billy Martin wasn’t Thurman Munson, but they shared a great many values. They both believed in toughness. They both cared about playing the game right. The difference is that it’s easy to see why, as the Yankees manager, Billy would have immediately taken Reggie’s attitude as a personal affront. Billy was the leader of the team, not George. Billy was in charge, or so he thought. Bringing in somebody who had such clout with the owner, who wasn’t known for busting his ass or being a hard-nosed player, was a direct challenge to Billy. Reggie was a great talent, but he didn’t always play the game the way Billy expected his players to play it.

  So that was the inevitable tension: Billy loved good ballplayers, but on some level he hated what Reggie represented. They were polar opposites. Reggie was hulking; Billy was scrawny. Reggie was made for TV or Hollywood; Billy was a loner. Reggie overwhelmed; Billy grinded. More than anything, Billy wanted fighters who would battle the other team and battle him. The only way Billy knew how to play as a ballplayer was by getting dirty and fighting for every inch, every hit, every base, every grounder. It wasn’t pretty or flashy, but it’s what worked for him. Reggie Jackson was about the glamor. That didn’t fit Billy’s vision, and he wasn’t going to sit idly by and have that undermine his team. The fights between him and Reggie, him and George, were almost a foregone conclusion the second that contract was signed.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m the straw that stirs the drink….Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.”

  —REGGIE JACKSON, SPORT MAGAZINE, JUNE 1977

  Recounting each squabble that went on that season would serve no purpose. It was just too common an occurrence. And often it was the same stuff playing out over and over again. But there were a few key incidents that transcended the daily minutiae and became pivotal moments in terms of our survival as a team. That interview with Sport magazine was one of them, because it wasn’t George and Billy bad-mouthing each other to a bunch of reporters. It was Reggie calling out our captain, our team, for the entire world to read about.

  There had been constant battles about where Reggie should bat in the order. George wanted his star slugger hitting cleanup. Billy shuffled him around and usually had him hitting fifth or sixth. But as far as daily tension goes, that interview, printed for millions to see, brought it to a new level. It wasn’t conjecture or tabloid speculation. Or George or Billy rehashing their same old fight about who was making the decisions. This was a feud between two players.

 
; It’s important to note that Reggie has gone out of his way in the years since to explain that he didn’t mean it the way it came out in that article. That matters. But what mattered at the time was what it meant to us. And we interpreted it the same way everyone else who read it did. The message was clear: Now that Reggie was here, he was going to be the guy who leads the team. But we already had a good team and a good leader. We made the World Series. And Thurman wasn’t just some guy with the title of captain, he was a world-class ballplayer. It was Thurman, not Reggie, who was the reigning American League MVP.

  There’s no telling how much this pissed off Thurman. He was used to being slighted, and he used that to fuel him. No matter how well he played, there were always reporters saying Carlton Fisk, the Boston Red Sox catcher, was superior. After the ’76 World Series, Reds manager Sparky Anderson was asked about Thurman and his catcher Johnny Bench, who went on to the Hall of Fame. With Thurman next to him at the news conference, Sparky said: “Don’t never embarrass nobody by comparing them to Johnny Bench.” It was another thing Thurman and Billy had in common. They both fed off people doubting them.

  The result of Reggie’s comments about Thurman was mostly the growing discomfort on the team. But at the end of the day, their feud was strictly personal. It wasn’t something that affected our play on the field. And in any locker room of twenty-five grown men, not all twenty-five are going to get along. This was an extreme case of that. If Reggie was going to spout shit like that, we would talk about it while we had our coffee. There was no rule that we had to be friendly with him. And Reggie brought that on himself. In fact, I’m not so sure he was ever at ease after that incident. How could you be when most of the other guys don’t want to talk to you? But even if he felt bad about it, there was no taking what he said back. He knew that, and so did we. The only way to move on was to win.

  And Thurman, no matter how offended he was by something, was never going to let anything that would hurt the team’s chances at winning get in the way. Because that’s what Thurman cared about more than anything. If we won 161 games in a season, he would’ve asked why we didn’t win 162. So he didn’t issue ultimatums or make the circus crazier. His attitude, toward not just this incident but all the small things too, boiled down to a simple philosophy: You and I are going to play together, but that doesn’t mean you and I have to like each other. Most of us adopted that from him. If it was good enough for Thurman, it was good enough for a guy like me, fighting for a job.

  The team’s reaction to Reggie was strictly personal, in that even if it made bus rides and hanging out in the locker room unpleasant for him, again, it didn’t affect our on-field performance. Reggie still grabbed a bat and hit. Thurman still caught the games. They were doing what they could to win us ball games.

  A few weeks later, though, things took a more serious turn. Because our problems actually started to threaten our chance at winning the pennant.

  * * *

  —

  What happened on June 18—two days after my first complete game against Kansas City—is the moment people point to when they wonder, “How could a team dealing with that shit win the World Series?” The stakes were high. The drama out in the open for the entire world to see. And it centered on the two people you’d expect it to: Reggie and Billy.

  Except this wasn’t an instance of two people who just didn’t get along having their feelings boil over. It wasn’t clubhouse politics. Or some game of three-dimensional chess between Billy and George. In a very straightforward way, it was a matter of baseball.

  Every game felt big for our team, but this stretch of the season felt especially important. We had gone from playing Kansas City, our toughest competition in the American League, to Boston. Any game at Fenway Park between the Yankees and Red Sox is intense. But these weren’t just any games. The Red Sox were in first in the American League East, with us and the Orioles close behind. We had lost the previous day to them 9–4. So not only was it the biggest rivalry in sports, but these were the games that would go on to decide the playoffs. Sure, it was only June, but every single one mattered.

  All you need to know is what happened in the bottom of the sixth inning. I was sitting on the bench, watching. We were down 7–4 with Mike Torrez on the mound, slogging through a rough start and just trying to get through the inning. He got an out, then gave up a single to Fred Lynn. Next Jim Rice stepped to the plate and hit a double to right field. At least that’s how it would read in the box score. But this wasn’t a booming Jim Rice double. It was only a double because of a disgrace that played out right in front of my eyes.

  On the pitch from Torrez, Rice checked his swing. But his bat hit the ball anyway, and as luck would have it, it popped into shallow right field. Bad luck for us, but that stuff happens in baseball. The hardest-hit balls can be outs. Weak and accidental dinks can become hits. The problem wasn’t the hit. It was Reggie’s reaction to it. He dogged it. He leisurely moseyed over to it as if he were strolling across the front lawn to pick up the morning paper. He might as well have been wearing a robe and holding a cup of coffee. All the while, Rice’s bloop stretched from a single to a double.

  This had to do with baseball. It was an action with direct consequences that hurt the team. Bad outcomes are part of the game. I might throw a bad pitch, or Reggie might strike out. This was completely different. It was sheer laziness. Lack of effort. It straight up disrespected the twenty-four other guys who were busting their asses, scratching and clawing, to win every ball game. And if there’s one thing Billy Martin would not tolerate, it was somebody letting his teammates down and letting the team down by not giving it his all.

  As Billy went to the mound to take out Torrez, I saw Paul Blair, one of our backup outfielders, grab his mitt. That’s when I realized something was out of the ordinary. It didn’t take some sort of genius to put two and two together. Billy was replacing Reggie in right field. If any of this sounds obvious—on some level, sure, why wouldn’t you bench somebody who did that?—it was far from routine. Pitchers leave games in the middle of innings all the time. Position players don’t. Even if they are benched for one reason or another, it usually happens between innings. It’s subtler. This was a public humiliation.

  Here’s the thing: If anybody else had dogged it like Reggie did, I’m sure Billy would’ve done the same thing. But because it was Reggie, the incident was magnified. He was the most talked-about superstar in baseball. The fights—between Reggie and Billy, Billy and George, Reggie and Thurman—had been playing out on the back pages of the newspapers all season. And in front of more than thirty thousand jeering Boston fans, and the millions more watching on national TV, Reggie had to walk back to the dugout, humiliated. The television cameras and every eyeball in the park and in the dugout were glued to him every step of the way. Because we all knew it wasn’t over. Reggie and Billy didn’t have much in common, but those two men spoke their minds. And they were about to have words. Or worse.

  It didn’t take long to escalate in the dugout. Both hurled f-bombs a bunch. Billy demanded to know what the hell Reggie was thinking. Reggie didn’t see what was so egregious about it, and wanted to know what the heck Billy was thinking. Reggie had been embarrassed. But at the same time, to be truthful, I’d say Reggie embarrassed the entire team by behaving like that in the first place. If they had been alone in the dugout, I’m convinced they both would’ve left on stretchers. Reggie was as strong as any man I’ve ever met. Billy wasn’t big, but his inner fire and fury made up for his size and weight. Fortunately, we had guys in the dugout with some sense to break it up before they could get that far.

  But it got far enough for it to be a spectacle. What made this squabble different from any of the others of the season was how this played out publicly. This kind of crap played out behind closed doors all the time on the club. They even said crap about each other in the papers on a regular basis. But this was an image, a film clip, that
everybody could latch onto. And that picture is how everybody saw the New York Yankees. People thought we were a bunch of squabbling children instead of professional ballplayers.

  Two things stood out to me about all of this, though. The first was that even though we were a notorious circus, the twenty-five players in that clubhouse handled it like men. By the time the game was over and we were getting ready to leave Fenway Park that night, it was over. Billy had done what he had to, said what he had to say. Reggie had said what he had to say. He had tried to defend himself and say he wasn’t dogging it, but everybody had seen it. Still, we might have looked like children to everybody else, but we weren’t going to act like children with one another. We weren’t going to come to the park the next day and let that affect how we played. Tomorrow was a new day, a new game, a new opportunity to win.

  The second thing is that this was a lesson our entire team had to learn. Reggie had insulted the game of baseball. He had insulted his teammates. He had insulted the New York Yankees uniform. But my point, as crazy as it sounds, is that this wasn’t about Reggie. It was about what it takes to win a World Series. And no matter how talented we were—and we had a load of good ballplayers—we would never reach that goal if every person didn’t do every little thing during every single game. Good teams, even great teams, fall short all the time. So the infighting everybody else saw as dysfunction was actually hugely important. We had to confront our issues. It might’ve been easier to ignore them. It sure would’ve been less embarrassing. We would’ve had less explaining to do to reporters. But if we just let them fester, we would’ve never realized our potential.