by Marty Appel
Contractually, he was modestly content. His baseball salary, through the deal signed for four years—1978 through 1981—moved progressively from $317,500 to $417,500, and it grudgingly accepted his flying. Dick Moss, the former number two man to Marvin Miller at the Players Association, had negotiated the deal with the Yankees, managing to remove the standard clause in the contract that absolved the club of compliance with the agreement if the player dies while piloting a plane. Thurman, who had never used an agent, had reached out to Moss, a top-tier guy, when he knew he wanted to deal with the no-fly provision of the contact. But much bitterness had preceded the signing, and Thurman was never happy about the deal. “It was satisfactory the way it should have been before I was disgraced for two years,” he said. “In the respect that it satisfies me finally yes, but it doesn’t help my attitude. Are material things supposed to help a guy who’s had these things eating at him for two years?”
“Munson would have flown anyway,” says Moss. “He had two important things in his life at that time: playing baseball and flying his airplane. It was an easy deal to do, but there was the problem of that flying clause. It took George a couple of weeks to come around, but the provision was stricken.”
Spring training of 1979 had a great air of sadness over it. Bob Lemon, shortly after his great triumph in the World Series, had suffered the loss of his twenty-six-year-old son Jerry in a car crash in Arizona. Lem tried to give it his all but he was filled with grief. What should have been a glorious spring was one of melancholy.
“He was never the same after that,” said Joe Garagiola Sr., who had taken Lem’s phone call in Arizona and rushed to the hospital until Lemon could get there.
Thurman blew off Jim Bouton, who had sought an interview during spring training, evoking old memories of Ball Four and reminding people that Munson was old-school and not ready to forgive Bouton for breaking the clubhouse code of silence almost a decade earlier. Days later, Thurman did a rare interview with John Dockery of WNEW TV from New York. He always preferred TV or radio to print, feeling his words could not be edited.
MUNSON: Well, we’re having fun, there’s not as much excitement around here this year, problems with the manager and problems with everyone else, you know, we’re just trying to have some fun and get our work done. He’s running a very light camp right now and hey, we really know the guys who are going to be here and we’re getting in shape our own way.
DOCKERY: Does it take “nasty energy” for the club to win?
MUNSON: Nobody needs that stuff mentally, last year, a lot of that stuff, everyone says, well, maybe it helped us. Well, after it was over and we started playing ball around July it didn’t help us to win all the games we did, so I don’t believe anybody feeds on that kind of stuff, they might feed on, ya know, different aspects of the game, of course, failure and pride will do a lot of things for people, but I don’t think anybody feeds on that kind of crap.
DOCKERY:s there talk of this being a dynasty?
MUNSON: Well, I think with the addition of [Tommy] John and of course [Luis] Tiant, even though they’re older players, with quite a few of the younger people we have and the younger pitchers coming up, I think for the next four or five years we’ve got a super chance to win.
DOCKERY: What is your role as captain as you see it?
MUNSON: I just come out to the ballpark and play every day. If somebody needs help with something, we’ve got seven or eight guys on the club who try to help everybody they can, you really just let things take their course, that’s all.
DOCKERY: Sports is a big business now, what do you see as the media’s role?
MUNSON: Well, the media is sports, really—no one knows what we do unless they come to the ballpark, unless they read about it. The only bad part of the media, it’s like TV shows, too many things are elaborated on, you know, just for interest, which is great, but a lot of times a true story doesn’t get told, and it’s really one reason why a lot of times I don’t mind talking in front of cameras to the people, but you talk to newspapers and not the right thing is written.
DOCKERY: Has the media been fair to you?
MUNSON: Well I have to say this, New York itself in general, the fans, the press, and everybody my whole career have been great to me. I made a statement last year that I want to go home to play baseball because I love my family, I love my children and my wife, I do love to be home but it’s not because of New York, because they’ve been great to me.
DOCKERY: Are you reluctant to talk, do you have negative feelings towards me?
MUNSON: I don’t feel any negative feels towards anybody. I have too many nice things in life to have negative feelings. I think one thing we all have to do is just do what we want to do and, you know, and for me, it isn’t really going out and having a lot of small talk sometimes and I’m not saying what we’re doing now is small talk, but most things or a lot of things that people ask in the press, they’re all controversial and small talk!
DOCKERY: If you were doing this interview, what is the most relevant thing I could ask you?
MUNSON: Well, kind of what you did, what the Yankees are going to do, talk about the team in general, like yesterday, the first question I get is what about Jim Bouton. The next question I get is do I think it will be better this year now that Billy Martin’s not back. Those kind of things, you can’t win, guys come up to me and ask me about my arm, well, I’ve got a seven-or-eight-inch gash in my arm, they took part of my clavicle out, well, they ask the trainer something, they’re not going to coincide so I’m in trouble right away.
DOCKERY: Do you want to tell the other side of the Bouton incident?
MUNSON: The other side that I can tell you about Jim Bouton is Elston Howard’s my coach, Ralph Houk was my manager for five years and Mickey Mantle’s a good friend of mine. He wrote a book that ripped those people pretty well. I’m just not the type of person that can lose Ellie’s respect or Ralph’s or anyone else’s. So I told him very nice three times that I couldn’t do an autograph, or interview with him, and I meant it. I will never do a session with Jim Bouton because of my respect for those three people.
DOCKERY: The book was an invasion of your privacy?
MUNSON: It wasn’t an invasion of privacy to me, it had nothing to do with me. The invasion of privacy was what he said about Elston Howard, Ralph Houk, and Mantle.
DOCKERY: But it was a violation of the locker room?
MUNSON: I think what’s in the locker room should stay there, and besides Ball Four wasn’t written the right way anyway, it was the way it was so he could sell books, so he goes and says, “How long do I have to pay for something like that?”—as long as he’s associated with this game, or as long as I’m in it or a few other people are in it, he has to pay for it, that’s all.
DOCKER: Talk to you in October?
MUNSON: I hope we get a chance to talk in October, it’ll mean we’ll be in the Series. I think the Yankees will be in the Series this year. Boston has another fine team, but we’ve got a bunch of good people on this club and as long as we keep the trouble away like I think we’re going to, as long as things don’t get stirred up too bad, we could eliminate everybody.
The Yankees had a new assistant trainer in camp that year. Barry Weinberg had come up from the team’s Columbus farm club to begin a major league career that would see him serve Tony LaRussa as head trainer in both Oakland and St. Louis.
The rookie trainer introduced himself to Thurman. “I’m Barry Weinberg,” he said.
“Goldberg?” said Munson.
“Weinberg.”
“Okay, Goldberg, nice to meet you.” And he would continue to call him Goldberg.
One day Munson went into the training room for a rubdown. Gene Monahan was working on someone else, so Weinberg said he’d do it.
“Oh no, Goldberg,” said Thurman. “I’m a German and I can’t be rubbed down by a Jew” And he left.
That night, Weinberg and a friend were seated at a table in a restaurant,
when a waitress brought over a drink, saying, “It’s compliments of the gentleman at the bar.”
Weinberg looked up and Munson was sitting there with a big grin, giving him the finger.
“I wound up idolizing him,” said Weinberg. “He was one of the greatest guys I ever knew. That April, we played in the cold in Chicago and I only had a short-sleeve shirt with me. He came over and handed me a flannel parka. Only that night did I see that inside in Pete Sheehy’s printing it said MUNSON-15. It was his own parka. I still have it.”
In the spring of 1979, Thurman bought a Beechcraft King Air Model E-90, a twin-engine turboprop, and flew it to spring training. It was an upgrade on his Beechcraft Duke.
“One afternoon we flew out together to the Bahamas,” said Piniella to Maury Allen in his autobiography.
He was in complete control and secure in his skills. We flew together several more times and I was fascinated with the fun he was having and started to think about getting a plane myself. We talked about my taking flying lessons, but I never got around to it. Still, I understood.
Early in ’79 we played a game in Baltimore and after the game, Reggie and I flew back to New York with him. Thurman and Reggie were getting along okay by now. We hit bad weather over Pennsylvania, thunderstorms, but he just got a new flight plan from the control tower and went around the storm. [He showed] total confidence, total control. Very professional.
A few weeks later I flew with him from Teterboro [N.J.] to Canton to have dinner after a Sunday game. He buzzed his house to let his family know he was almost home. He got a kick out of that.
One night we were sitting in a hotel bar after a game, Bobby Murcer, Thurman and me. He was talking about flying and he said, “I’m buying a jet for a million and a half, a Cessna Citation, a real beauty.”
Bobby made a face and said, “What do you need such a big plane for?”
“It’ll be great. I’ll get home much faster. I’m getting it in a couple of weeks.”
Bobby and I, neither of us liked this at all. It was a whole different kind of plane. Plus it was very expensive to fly, with the fuel, repairs, insurance. “Now I’ll have to play three or four more years to pay it off,” he said.
Indeed, his friends and fellow aviators were astounded by the rapidity of his graduation to bigger planes. He had started with the Cessna 150 in spring training of 1978. By June of that year he was in a Beechcraft Duke twin-piston. By February 1979 it was on to a Beechcraft Duke Air Model E-90, a twin-engine turboprop. And now he had taken delivery of the jet on July 6, just five months later.
On the field, things weren’t going well for the Yankees, and some felt there was a pall over Bob Lemon, still mourning his son, that took some fire out of the team. (Not that Lem was particularly fiery, but it was a whispered theory.)
Some felt the year was doomed from the start, when Goose Gossage tore a ligament in his right thumb during a scuffle with Cliff Johnson in the clubhouse on April 19. With that, they lost their closer until July 12.
Winning a fourth straight pennant would indeed prove to be a challenge. The Yankees played .500 baseball, more or less, through Memorial Day, but Baltimore was hot and between June 1 and June 30, the Yanks fell from three games out to twelve. Steinbrenner fired poor Lemon on June 18 and replaced him with Billy Martin, yet again. Did they have another comeback in them like 1978?
Nobody was feeling it.
Seattle, Thursday, July 12
The Yankees played a weekend series in Oakland July 6-8, during which a Cessna pilot delivered Thurman’s new Citation to him. He was thrilled! With the Cessna pilot in control and Thurman in the copilot seat, he took it up that very weekend, joined by Bucky Dent and his old Cape Cod teammate John Frobose, who was now living in San Jose.
Thurman was loving his new jet, and was not shy about talking it up and inviting teammates to fly with him. Some just said, “Are you crazy?” and some said, “Yeah, I’ll do it sometime.” Like any cross section of society, ballplayers had varying senses of adventure when it came to flying in a small plane.
On Thursday night, July 12, after playing a game in Seattle, Graig Nettles and Reggie Jackson agreed to accompany Thurman in his Cessna on a trip to Anaheim, where the team would begin a three-game series the next evening. A flight instructor joined Munson in the cockpit.
Nettles told author Peter Golenbock:
Reggie and I were in the back, and his instructor was in the pilot’s seat next to Thurman … We had finished a night game in Seattle, and we were flying south, and all of a sudden I heard a big boom in the back of the plane. It sounded like someone had thrown something against the plane. Reggie was napping and he jerked awake and looked around. “What was that?” he said, as oxygen masks were dropping down. The pilot said, “You’re going to have to use the oxygen.” My mask worked, but Reggie’s didn’t. I told Reggie, “Thurman told me to make sure you sat in that seat.” Reggie laughed ’cause they were supposed to be feuding at that time, but they really weren’t. It turned out there was nothing wrong with the oxygen supply, and we didn’t need the masks after all.
Except for that one incident, the flight was spectacular. We flew over Washington, Oregon, and California, and it was a bright night and you could see the snow-capped mountains. I told Thurman how much fun I had and he told me that when he got back to New York he would be going to Teterboro to practice and that I could fly with him and bring my son.
Thurman took flying very seriously. After ballgames we would often sit around and have a few beers, but if he knew he was going to be flying, he would only have Coke or Pepsi. He wouldn’t even have one beer.
Two days later in Anaheim, Jackson made out a hundred-dollar check to Munson and wrote “Plane fare, Seattle to Cal” in the memo. Thurman never cashed it.
Anaheim, Saturday, July 14
The Saturday night game in Anaheim ended late. Phil Pepe was on the trip covering the team for the Daily News. “I was in the hotel gift shop and I was about to go to my room for the night, when I noticed Munson in there picking out some snacks, a bag of Doritos, a bag of potato chips, etc. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.
“‘I didn’t have dinner and I’m hungry,’ he said.
“‘Don’t eat that junk,’ I said. ‘There’s an all-night burger joint up the street, why don’t you go up there and get something nutritious?’
“‘I don’t like eating alone,’ he said.
“‘I’ll sit with you.’
“‘You will?’ he said. So we went and spent about two and a half hours, talking about life in general, no baseball, until about two a.m. At one point, Munson began to talk about flying, telling me how much he enjoyed the peace and serenity of being up in the air, alone with his thoughts. As if to convince me, he said, ‘I’ll take you up with me one day’
“‘No way’ I said. ‘I’m not going up there with you.’
“‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly safe. Look, I don’t care if you live or die, but I care if I live or die!’”
Anaheim, Sunday, July 15
After the Anaheim series concluded on Sunday, Thurman had the All-Star break off. (Darrell Porter, Brian Downing, and Jeff Newman were the A.L. catchers.) Billy Martin wanted to go fishing in Kansas City with his friend Howard Wong. He asked Thurman if he would fly him there on his way home to Canton. Munson was more than happy to accommodate him.
Diana was with Thurman, and this was her first experience in the jet. Thurman took his place in the copilot seat, with a Cessna instructor in the pilot’s seat, as Thurman was not yet licensed to fly without one. Billy and Diana were in the back midsection seated across from each other.
As Martin told Golenbock (who also cowrote his autobiography):
We were in the jet which Thurman had just bought, and he landed in Albuquerque to gas up, and coming out of Albuquerque we hit an ice storm. I was looking out the windows, facing the engines, and I saw a flash of flame hit one engine. I didn’t want to say anything
because Thurman’s wife, Diane, was sitting right across from me and I didn’t want to scare her, but when we landed in Kansas City, I took Thurman aside. I said, “You better check your engines. Did you see flames coming out of the right one?” He said, “Maybe that was when I switched on the deicer.” I said, “No way. I’ve never seen flames come out of an engine like that. You better check it out.” My car came and Howard and I got in, and two days later … Thurman came over and said, “You know we had to take another plane out of Kansas City after we dropped you off. We had to stay overnight and take a commercial jet out.” I said, “You’re kidding me.” He said, “The rotors of the right engine were all mashed in, bent. They must have put them in wrong when they built the plane.”
That scared me. Here was a million-and-a-quarter-dollar plane, and the engines weren’t working right. They had to put a brand-new engine on the plane.
I told Thurman I didn’t like him flying. I said, “Why are you flying this thing? Does George know you’re flying?” He said, “Yeah, he gave me permission.” I said, “You gotta be kidding me.” … I didn’t like it because here this guy could fly all over the country whenever he wanted, and I was yelling at other players that they had to be on the bus on time. He was being treated differently than the other guys, and it wasn’t right.
Indeed, Cessna had sent one of their pilots to fly the plane from Kansas City to Dallas, where repairs were made on the Citation at Cooper Industries. It had been flown back to Canton on July 31, while Munson was in Chicago, by Cessna pilot Morgan Lilly.