Munson

by Marty Appel

  The umpires lined up by the third base fungo circle. Still photographers gathered behind home plate.

  Home plate stood empty. It was for many the single most memorable thing about the evening. The empty home plate. Jerry Narron, who would catch that night, stood between Yogi Berra and Art Fowler at the top of the dugout steps in his shin guards and black chest protector. (He wouldn’t wear Munson’s orange protector.) For many, it was a visual moment that evoked memories of the riderless horse in the funeral procession of President Kennedy sixteen years earlier.

  Bob Sheppard, the already legendary PA announcer, commanded the crowd to “direct your attention to the microphone behind home plate, where Terance Cardinal Cooke will address us.”

  And the formal program began.

  “O mighty Lord and father of us all, we pause to pray for Thurman Munson,” the cardinal began. “Our brother and your faithful son. He was a good family man first and foremost, and you blessed this captain of the Yankees with skills and talent and a great dedication to the game of baseball and the many fans he touched because of it. We offer a moment of silent prayer in his memory. Strengthen and console his loved ones and give him light and joy in heaven with you forever and ever.”

  Robert Merrill, who had been standing a few feet away, walked to the microphone and sang “America the Beautiful” with his eyes closed.

  The scoreboard, with some bulbs out, carried the image of Thurman’s face, alternating with a message written by Steinbrenner that said, “Our captain and leader has not left us—today, tomorrow, this year, next. Our endeavors will reflect our love and admiration for him.”

  “I never really felt as close or as one with the team as I did at that particular moment,” remembers Willie Randolph. “The feeling of togetherness. Knowing that here we are at a tough time, but we’ve got to go out tonight and play, and play for the man because when we looked up at the scoreboard and we saw that picture of Thurman, we knew that he was on the field with us. And in essence, he was.”

  Over the PA system, Sheppard said, “Thank you for your complete cooperation.”

  No one knew what to expect at this point. The ceremony had lasted for six minutes. Was that enough? Was it over? Do we now play ball without our captain?

  The silence turned to applause and cheering.

  Great cheering.

  And then came a chant of “Thurman, Thurman, Thurman.” And on it went, and louder it got.

  And it was to be a moment that would refuse to be just a moment. It needed to be the last great cheer for this immortal Yankee, this hard-playing, hard-driving presence who took this team on his back and restored the Yankees to greatness. How could this possibly end in six minutes? On went the cheers, the fans calling his name, crying, yelling, being the way fans are supposed to be at a ballpark in the Bronx. Anything but silent.

  The image of Thurman on the scoreboard would alternate with the “Our captain” message. Whenever the image would return, the applause and cheering would increase.

  And then, finally, finally, nine more minutes later, the voice of Bob Sheppard rang out again.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your wonderful response.”

  This time, it felt right. The Yankee fans—a full house—had made themselves part of this moment, part of the ceremony. They had taken command of the event.

  Narron, number 38 on his back, moved to the catcher’s position at last to start taking Tiant’s warm-up tosses.

  “All year long Thurman helped me out,” Narron had told reporters. “He told me I would have to do most of the catching this year, and that if he did come back next season, he would probably play a different position, and definitely not catch as many games as he had.”

  On TV, Bill White said, “A great tribute for Thurman Munson, a great amount of respect and love.”

  Added Messer, “You can’t describe what just went on here.”

  On radio, Rizzuto said, “I can’t ever remember when I’ve ever been so emotionally touched by the way these fans reacted.”

  Healy said, “This is amazing. Two days ago we were in Chicago talking about how much easier it was to play the outfield or first base … two days ago.”

  Among the mournful fans in the ballpark that evening was Juliet Papa. Just embarking on a career with local radio station WINS (the Yankees’ station), she was here not as a reporter, but as a lifelong fan. She grew up in an Italian family in the Bronx that lived and died by the Yankees. Now, with her brother at her side, she felt she needed to be there that night. It would be her way of paying respect, of being in the company of fellow fans, who had come to say goodbye in this unusual setting. She was one of more than fifty thousand in the house that night, but she well represented the overwhelming feelings they all shared.

  “There was that ovation,” she recalls. “Oh my God. As a fast-learning newsperson, I looked at my watch. It had to be a good ten minutes that the packed house stood and applauded in a continuum that to this day sends a chill up my spine and puts a tear in my eye. It reverberated through the air and through the soul. It was perhaps all you could do, but the best thing to do. The people just didn’t want to sit down.”

  The Yankees lost the game 1-0 to Scott McGregor and Tippy Martinez, two former friends and battery mates of Thurman’s. Reggie said, “I wanted to hit a home run, but I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of him every time I came to the plate. I’ll do something for him and it doesn’t have to be on the baseball field. I’d like to do something for his family, his son.”

  The announced attendance was 51,151. George Steinbrenner decided what the attendance figure would be and told Mickey Morabito to announce it in the press box. It was not uncommon for a team to cheat a little bit with an attendance figure if they could make it up the next day with the same team—no harm, no foul. It gave them the ability to turn a 19,000 crowd into a 20,000 crowd, and it looked better. The Boss took artistic license with this one. Good for him.

  The Yankees lost 5-4 on Saturday and won 3-2 on Sunday before full stadiums as well. The signs didn’t go away. In Cooperstown on Sunday, flags were at half-staff on what should have been a more joyous New York event: the induction of Willie Mays into the Hall of Fame. Instead, 466 miles away, people were filing past Thurman’s casket at the Canton Civic Center. Thurman’s death had diverted the attention of baseball fans.

  Thurman Munson was all that was on everyone’s mind all weekend at Yankee Stadium. If there were games going on down there, it was the players going through the motions. It was almost too painful to see Narron and Brad Gulden catching.

  “Toughest games I ever had to broadcast,” said Rizzuto.

  21

  And so the baseball world descended upon the football town of Canton to grieve and mourn the local hero who never moved away.

  The Pro Football Hall of Fame ceremonies and exhibition game in Canton had been held on Saturday, July 28, and the town had returned to normal. Now there was this.

  Canton had not seen an event like this since President William McKinley’s memorial service in September 1901. McKinley had been assassinated in Buffalo, and the funeral service was held there. Then, after the body was taken to Washington, he was brought home to Canton, where a memorial service was held prior to his burial. If there were any people who attended that one, seventy-eight years earlier, and who filed past Thurman’s coffin on Sunday, it went undiscovered.

  The Thurman Munson funeral, in fact, would be held in the McKinley Room of the Canton Memorial Civic Center. It was scheduled for 9:30 on that Monday morning, August 6. The original plans called for it to be at the Rossi Funeral Home, but when the size of it became clear—with the entire Yankee team coming—it was moved. The Yankees were scheduled to play the fourth game of their four-game series with Baltimore that night in Yankee Stadium and would return to New York after the service.

  Rossi nevertheless handled the arrangements in cooperation with Diana. “When you have a burn victim, that’s a horrible thing,” recall
s Marion Rossi. “But Thurman’s body was recognizable. His face was virtually unharmed. Diana was on top of all the details; very composed, despite the enormous tragedy that hit her. The arrangements like the music to be played, the order of speakers: that was all her planning.”

  On Sunday, starting at two p.m., about three thousand people filed past Thurman’s bier paying last respects at the Civic Center. Piping and drapes had been set up to create a walkway entering and then exiting the casket area. In between were scores of floral displays. Youngsters wore their Little League uniforms. Diana, Tracy, and Kelly visited in the afternoon. Diana kept up with New York newspaper coverage, as visitors from New York had brought the papers to her.

  In New York, a larger-than-usual number of players attended Sunday morning chapel service in Yankee Stadium, conducted by Tom Skinner. “We should remember the privilege of knowing a man like Thurman Munson,” he told the Yankee and Oriole players. He also talked about not carrying grudges. Reggie Jackson, who had not been speaking to Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger, then went to Klein and said, “Are you going to the funeral?” When Klein said he was, Jackson said, “That’s good; I’m glad,” and their feud was over.

  Marty Noble of the Bergen Record was not as impressed. “I liked Reggie, perhaps more than most newspaper guys,” he said. “But not that weekend. I didn’t like him wiping his eyes on Friday night while everyone else was standing at attention, and I didn’t like the oversized Bible he carried with him to the funeral, with gold fringes. He just had this need to call attention to himself.”

  Friends and family, filing into the spectacular two-year-old Munson home, had kept Diana going, along with her motherly responsibilities. On Saturday, she allowed a photographer from the Repository into the house to take a picture of her looking at Thurman’s MVP plaque on the wall. Flowers, cards, and telegrams were pouring into the home, some just addressed to “Mrs. Thurman Munson, Canton, OH.” The curious simply drove by the house slowly. Police were outside keeping the sightseers from stopping and controlling access to the home.

  “She’s not ready to talk to the press,” said her closest friend, Joanne Fulz. “The family is holding up, but they’re still not ready to discuss it. The kids are doing well. They’ll go through periods of questioning what happened and times of sadness, but you know kids, they bounce back.”

  Canton was always more of a football town, in the pocket of the nation where Friday night high school football, like McKinley versus Massillon, felt as big as the Super Bowl. But on this day, Canton, population 93,000, turned its attention to its favorite baseball son.

  I flew out on Sunday night, landing at Cleveland and renting a Lincoln Town Car because I was to pick up Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, American League president Lee MacPhail, and my old boss Bob Fishel (now the league’s PR director) early Monday at Akron-Canton Airport, in order to take them to the funeral. For MacPhail, of course, it was full circle. As Yankee general manager, he was in the Munson home the day Thurman had signed his Yankee contract eleven years earlier.

  Kuhn had weighed whether it was his place to be there. I was part of that discussion in his office on Friday afternoon. It was a question of whether a commissioner should be attending a player’s funeral because he was a star player. He had not, after all, attended Lymon Bostock’s funeral the year before when the Angels outfielder had been shot to death. He didn’t want to do the wrong thing by the Munson family, or by his office, or to send the wrong message, particularly along racial lines, as Bostock was black. Kuhn was often the subject of ridicule for his stuffed-shirt appearance and seemingly endless string of losses to the Players Association, but I found him to be a decent man with a great love for baseball and a keen intelligence. (I later coauthored his memoir with him, putting him into a small club with Munson.)

  I was straightforward about it. “He was the captain of the reigning world champions,” I said, painful as it was now to use the word “was.” “You presented the World Series trophy to him in the clubhouse ten months ago. I think the commissioner should be there.”

  When I landed in Cleveland, I ran into the Piniellas and the Murcers, who had flown out after the Sunday game to be with Diana. I offered them a ride; Bobby, Lou, and Anita sat in the back, with Kay in the front along with Mike Heath, who now played for Oakland and happened to run into us. Heath was one of a number of former teammates who had come in at their own expense for this. Murcer navigated the route to the Munson house, and he and Lou talked in the backseat about what each would say at the funeral. Diana had asked them to be the two eulogists. It was raining, and in the dark it was hard to find the house, but Bobby had managed to remember the turn off Market Avenue.

  Heath was uncomfortable going to the house, not really knowing the family, but Murcer had told him he would absolutely be welcome. Mike had been a Yankee catcher behind Thurman in 1978 and had flown in from Seattle.

  I had little idea what to say to Diana, because “I’m so sorry” seemed so insignificant. But she gave me a warm hug and she took the lead.

  “I want you to know how much that book you did with Thurman means to us all now,” she said to me. “We will always have that.”

  I said what I hoped were a few appropriate words, and remember ending with “I’ll always be proud of being linked with Thurman.”

  I was so amazed by her presence. She was thirty-one years old and about to become a very public figure. In 1979, many of us were still judging “funeral behavior” by the example set by Jacqueline Kennedy sixteen years before. No one who lived through that would ever forget her dignity. What many had forgotten, or never stopped to contemplate, was that Jackie Kennedy was only thirty-four at the time of her husband’s death.

  I told Diana that I would be bringing the commissioner to the funeral in the morning. She seemed pleased.

  And then she asked about my upcoming fatherhood. I couldn’t believe she could think of that or ask it at that moment. What a lady she was to have asked at a time like this.

  Tracy and Kelly, nine and seven, were such sad figures for those of us in attendance. Gene Michael, Thurman’s fellow Kent State alum and Yankee teammate, and now manager at Columbus, remarked to me that they must be in such shock they couldn’t possibly understand all of this. Michael Munson, four, was scampering around the house. Diana’s mother, Pauline, was helping with him. Ruth Munson, Thurman’s mother, sat quietly by herself, visited every few moments by one of her daughters. There was talk at the house about whether Darrell Munson would have heard the news, whether he was even alive, where he lived, and whether he might attend the funeral. It was all quite mysterious. The Munsons and the Dominicks were not getting along well at this time and this event failed to bring them closer.

  This was my first time in this house, a fourteen-room mansion set back about 250 feet from the street, behind a circular driveway and a big lawn. White pillars marked the front entrance. It was magnificent, drawn from a similar plan that had been used in constructing the home in Norwood where I had worked with Thurman on his book. It was light brown, two and a half stories high. Stone from as far away as Alaska and Hawaii had been hauled in, as Thurman supervised the construction down to the smallest detail.

  Thurman’s office, through double mahogany doors, included the model of the Citation on his desk and the 1976 MVP award on the wall. And there was the framed photo of the four great Yankee catchers together: Dickey, Berra, Howard, and Thurm, which I had set up with tough cooperation from Munson himself.

  I left to go back to my hotel around eleven p.m. The next morning, after a five a.m. wake-up call, I headed for the airport to pick up Kuhn, MacPhail, and Fishel.

  Back in the Bronx, traveling secretary Bill Kane had arranged for three Carey buses to take players, their wives, and front office people to Newark Airport for the charter flight that was to depart at 8:15 a.m. For most of those who would make the trip, the day also began around 5 a.m., with the players and wives instructed to be at Yankee Stadium by 6:45. There was a flig
ht delay and the Delta 727 arrived about a half hour late, touching down at Akron-Canton at 9:27. The last-minute charter cost about $20,000 to book.

  Fortunately, the wreckage had been removed to a remote hangar by the day of the funeral, but no one in a window seat could avoid looking down during the landing and feeling heightened emotion at being so close to the spot where Thurman had died. There were a few floral wreaths at the site of the accident on Greenburg Road, and it was reported that some scavengers had been by to remove scrap metal, perhaps as souvenirs.

  “Landing at that airport was one of the worst parts of that terrible day,” said Gene Monahan.

  The Yankee players and wives boarded three buses leased from A&M Transit Lines and sped down I-77 under police escort. They got off the highway and headed down Market Street, passing construction workers who stopped to watch the buses pass.

  Inside the Civic Center, some seven hundred people were gathering for the private funeral, sitting there staring at the American flag-draped coffin, with some two hundred floral wreaths around it, with an oil painting of Thurman in his Yankee uniform, framed in gold, hanging above it. The music of Neil Diamond played softly. Outside, a local color guard was assembled to form a path for arriving dignitaries.

  “I had no idea that Neil Diamond was Thurman’s favorite,” says his sister Darla. “I had once heard a tape and asked what it was and was told, ‘That’s Hot August Night by Neil Diamond,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I love that so, I have to get it.’ So it was my favorite album, and there I was sitting in the Civic Center, and they’re playing it, and someone says to me, ‘Neil Diamond was his favorite.’ We had that in common and I didn’t even know it. And of course, a hot August night was when he crashed.”

  Besides Diana and her three children, besides Piniella and Murcer, besides Duane and Janice and Darla and their mother, Ruth, plus so many friends and neighbors from the Worley School and Lehman, were the mayor of Canton, Stanley Cmich; the young Cleveland mayor, Dennis Kucinich; Gabe Paul, now back as the Indians’ president; Phil Seghi, his general manager; and Bob Lemon, so recently deposed as Yankee manager, attending another funeral nine months after he buried his son. Herb Score, the Indians’ broadcaster, was there, as was Al Rosen, who had just recently resigned as president of the Yankees. Sports agent Bob Wolff was also there.