by Madden, Bill
Bob Sudyk, who would go on to have a long, checkered relationship with Steinbrenner as a sports reporter for the Cleveland Press, remembers vividly one of the first Lockbourne baseball games under Coach Steinbrenner that spring.
“I was a freshman on the jayvee Ohio State baseball team,” Sudyk said, “and we had driven over to Lockbourne for the game when our bus pulled up in the parking lot and we were confronted by this guy standing there waving his arms wildly and screaming at us. It was Steinbrenner. It seemed he thought he was playing the varsity and he was yelling at our coach for us to stay on the bus. He wasn’t going to play us! Finally, our coach prevailed and we wound up playing them—and winning—which got George even more upset. He was yelling at the umpires the whole game, storming up and down, waving a rule book.”
When he wasn’t coaching baseball and overseeing the basketball and football teams at Lockbourne, Steinbrenner ran hurdles for the track team and even set an Air Force record for the 440-yard low hurdles. In a reincarnation of his boyhood poultry venture, he also demonstrated his budding business acumen by establishing his own coffee cart franchise, in which he used a half dozen Air Force pickup trucks to peddle coffee and doughnuts around the base.
UPON BEING DISCHARGED from the Air Force in 1954, Steinbrenner decided to stay in Columbus and enroll at Ohio State, where he studied for a master’s degree in physical education. Ohio State, under the legendary coach Woody Hayes, was a football powerhouse, its 10-0 ’54 team ranked first in the nation after beating Southern Cal, 20-7, in the Rose Bowl. The star of that team was Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, a speedy, 5-10, 177-pound junior running back. The following year, Ohio State dropped to number six in the country at 7-2, but Cassady was awarded the Heisman Trophy as the outstanding football player in the nation.
It was only natural that Steinbrenner would get caught up in the aura of big-time college football, and, in addition to attending every OSU home game, he would frequently be seen hanging around the practice sessions during the week, looking to pick up plays and strategies he could bring back with him to St. Thomas Aquinas High School, in Columbus, where he had become an assistant football and basketball coach. He got to know Cassady, with whom he also shared a couple of phys-ed classes. One day, Cassady remembered, Steinbrenner approached him after a class to inquire about a certain tall, slender, blond co-ed five years his junior named Elizabeth Joan Zieg, whose father, Harold, a prominent real estate developer in Columbus, was a wealthy Ohio State football booster.
“I was friends with the Zieg family and knew her dad especially,” said Cassady. “At the time, she had been dating another player on the football named Doug Goodsell. George asked me if I would introduce him to her, and they started dating right away.”
Steinbrenner courted Joan for over a year, frequently double-dating with Cassady, who later was asked to be part of their wedding party.
Steinbrenner and Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) Zieg were married on May 12, 1956. The union, according to friends, was a stormy one almost from the beginning, with Steinbrenner’s controlling and demanding persona quickly wearing thin with Joan, as well as his absences from the home because of all his other activities. Besides the Kinsman business and all his civic work with Group 66, his side venture into pro basketball further strained the marriage. On July 7, 1962, Joan filed for divorce in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. Two months later, however, she dropped the suit and it was reported by her attorney that the two had reconciled. If anything, they remained “reconciled” to each other as Joan, according to friends, developed just as much of a public temper as George and learned to give it as much as she had to take it. That’s why, after Cassady had worked for the Yankees for nearly 40 years in various capacities, first as the team’s first strength-and-conditioning coordinator and a scout and then a coach with the team’s Triple-A farm team in Columbus, the joke among the front office underlings was that “George gave Hoppy a lifetime job so he could torture him for having introduced him to Joan.”
Although they would go on to have four children, Hank, Hal, Jessica and Jennifer, and celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at a gala event at the Tampa Yacht Club in June 2006, Steinbrenner’s closest friends attest it was anything but 50 years of marital bliss. More like a 50-year War of the Roses as George and Joan’s public fights at parties and in restaurants were the talk of the Cleveland and Tampa social circuits. It was not uncommon for Joan to make an idle comment about something at dinner with friends, only to have George cut her short with a terse “Shut the fuck up, Joan” as everyone around them squirmed silently and uneasily in their chairs.
Steinbrenner’s old friend Tom Evans remembered one such dinner confrontation vividly.
“My wife, Lois, and I were visiting George and Joan at the farm in Ocala,” Evans related. “This was right after George and our group had bought the Yankees and the deal was just being announced. The year before, there had been rumors going around that, in order to raise money to buy a piece of the Chicago Bulls, George had sold Joan’s stamp collection, which I guess must have been pretty valuable.”
(Apparently, after Steinbrenner’s losing venture as owner of the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, which had contributed to the strain on their marriage, he’d promised Joan he would never get involved in basketball again. However, when offered a share of ownership of the NBA Bulls in 1972, he couldn’t resist, but may have figured that if he’d become a minority owner, Joan would never know.)
“Anyway, Lois and Joan were watching TV when suddenly the news report came on that the Yankees had been sold to guys who had interests in the Chicago Bulls. This came as a great surprise to Joan, and when George and I walked into the room, she lit into him with both barrels with some of the saltiest and most colorful language I’ve ever heard from a woman.”
Steinbrenner steadfastly avoided appearing in public as a couple with Joan, especially in New York. Gabe Paul found himself in the middle of the Steinbrenners’ ongoing domestic hostilities when Joan called him to complain about being banned from the private Yankee Club dining room upstairs at Yankee Stadium.
“I can’t for the life of me understand why he won’t let Joan eat in the dining room,” Paul said at the time, in one of the first entries into the tape-recorded diary he kept during his years with the Yankees and Steinbrenner. “He’s showing off with all his friends and cronies up there, but he won’t let her up there and I’ve got to try to explain to her why. For all I know, he’s got a broad up there.”
As a matter of fact, on numerous occasions, that was the case—the “broad” in question being Barbara Walters, the celebrated TV journalist who was one of the few females in the Boss’s inner circle of friends who attended big occasions at Yankee Stadium. Steinbrenner first met Walters in Cuba in 1977. She was there to interview Cuban premier Fidel Castro, and he was there with Yankee pitching great Whitey Ford on a top-secret mission to scout Cuban baseball players. As Walters related numerous times, Steinbrenner was furious when he spotted her and her camera crew in the hotel where they were staying, mistakenly thinking she was there to report on him. Over cocktails later that day, she explained that she was actually in Cuba to interview Castro, and that Steinbrenner’s secret was safe with her.
Steinbrenner and Walters were often seen together around and about in New York, and Steinbrenner was fond of telling intimates how he and Walters would be walking down Fifth Avenue together and would make bets as to which one of them would be recognized first. And throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Walters was a frequent guest in Steinbrenner’s private box at Yankee Stadium and in the Yankee Club.
Steinbrenner and Walters always insisted they were nothing more than good friends. But some members of Steinbrenner’s inner circle of confidants back in the ’80s suspected they might be something more. Joan Steinbrenner may have had her suspicions, too.
“They used to refer to each other as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn,” said a Steinbrenner pal. It was common k
nowledge that the screen legends carried on an affair that endured until Tracy’s death, in spite of the fact that he was married.
But Walters was always quick to dismiss suggestions that her relationship with Steinbrenner was romantic, and years later, in her 2009 memoir, she barely mentioned him.
As for Steinbrenner’s secret mission in Cuba, he wasn’t able to get himself any of Castro’s players. Ford recalled how the two of them were sitting together at a game in Havana’s stadium when one of Castro’s uniformed emissaries approached them. Pointing to the premier sitting in his private box a few rows behind them, the emissary announced: “Premier Castro requests the pleasure of your company in his box.”
But as Steinbrenner stood up, the guard put his hand on his chest.
“Not you,” he said to Steinbrenner. “This man here,” and he nodded at Ford.
“I felt bad for George,” Ford said. “I sat up there for three or four innings talking baseball with Castro and I could see George was really pissed.”
STEINBRENNER SPENT ONE year studying at Ohio State, where his involvement with OSU football and his coaching gigs at St. Thomas Aquinas had inspired him to continue working in sports. Instead of going home to Cleveland, he took a job as an assistant coach under Lou Saban at Northwestern University.
The 1955 Northwestern football team went 0-9, resulting in the dismissal of Saban and his entire coaching staff. Steinbrenner would remain friends with Saban, at one point hiring him as president of the Yankees, a position he held for barely a year before returning to football. The following year, now married to Joan, Steinbrenner moved on to Purdue University as the backfield coach under Jack Mollenkopf. The 1956 Purdue team fared better than Steinbrenner’s first venture into Big Ten football, going 3-4-2. The Boilermakers’ star quarterback, Len Dawson, would go on to become a member of the National Football League Hall of Fame.
“George wasn’t nearly the vocal, animated guy he became later,” Dawson told me in a 2008 interview, “but that may have been because Mollenkopf was about as vocal a coach as there was, and we didn’t need two of them.”
Although his time with Steinbrenner was limited to that 1955 season, Dawson recalled a conversation he had with his backfield coach midway through the year that had a profound impact on him. With the season fast becoming a lost cause, Dawson, who was a senior with an eye on the upcoming NFL draft, was dragging out a shoulder injury, sitting out practices.
One day, over lunch, Steinbrenner said not so subtly: “You know, Len, there are a lot of guys hurting on this team. How do you think the offensive linemen, who protect you, feel?”
“He made his point with me,” Dawson said, “and it was a lesson I never forgot.”
Much as Steinbrenner may have wanted to continue in his football-coaching career, by 1957 Henry Steinbrenner felt it was time his son began sowing the seeds of his expensive Culver and Williams education. The family shipping concern beckoned, and the old man regarded George’s football coaching as folly. He would feel the same way about George’s venture into pro basketball a few years later. “I raised you to be able to take over the family business,” Henry told him, “not to be coaching football.” Steinbrenner didn’t fight him because he knew he was never going to get rich coaching football and he dreamed of being a big man in Cleveland—which could come about only if he was running the family business. When he returned home, Henry made him treasurer of Kinsman Marine, and told him to go out and find business for the company’s five boats that serviced the Great Lakes with coal, iron and ore.
In his travels around the region, Steinbrenner made stops every other Tuesday in Buffalo. One day in 1957, after a luncheon at a private club down the block, Steinbrenner walked into a jazz club called the Royal Arms. After ordering an old-fashioned with extra sugar, Steinbrenner asked the bartender who owned the place. The bartender nodded at a man sorting checks at the end of the bar.
“After sending over a drink to me, we got to talking and George started going on about how he owned all these freighters out in the harbor,” Max Margulis recalled. “I didn’t believe him. I figured he was just a traveling salesman.”
Steinbrenner stayed at the Royal Arms for the rest of the day, and that night Margulis took him downtown to dinner at the Normandy Steakhouse.
“I picked up the check, and that was the last one I ever picked up for him,” Margulis said. “He said: ‘I’ll be back in two weeks to take you out. Bring your friends!’ ”
Two weeks later, Margulis was at the Royal Arms when Steinbrenner phoned and asked him to meet at the Normandy again for dinner.
“Bring your friends,” Steinbrenner said. “We’ll have some fun!”
It turned out Steinbrenner wanted to talk about getting into the restaurant business. Margulis warned him that it was “an awful business that you wind up being a slave to,” but Steinbrenner wasn’t deterred. Every time he’d come to Buffalo over the next few years, he’d pester Margulis about looking for a place they could buy. Margulis kept putting him off until finally, in 1964, the two of them, along with Max’s friend Jim Naples, went in with Steinbrenner (who secured the loan) on a place called the Chateau.
“Before we opened, we discussed policy and we decided to serve only sandwiches at the bar and hot dinners in the dining room,” Margulis said. “That was because the bar was four-deep from 4:30 to 8 o’clock. So who’s the first guy to try and order dinner in the bar? George and two friends! The waitress comes over to me and tells me this, and I go to George and say: ‘You know we can’t serve dinner in the lounge!’ ”
“It wasn’t long before George backed away from the restaurant,” said Naples’s son, Jim Jr., who, years later, went to work for Steinbrenner as the food-and-beverage manager at Yankee Stadium. “If he hadn’t, Max would have killed him.”
“George was George,” sighed Margulis. “He made it very difficult to operate, constantly calling with changes he wanted to make in the menu, the prices, the decor. The problem was, he didn’t have any understanding of the business.”
But even after selling out his share of the restaurant when he moved to Tampa in 1973, Steinbrenner remained a loyal friend and benefactor to Margulis.
In 1977, Buffalo suffered one of the worst blizzards in its history, forcing Margulis to close the Chateau for 11 days. For the first two days of the storm, some 30 to 40 people were stranded in the restaurant.
“George called every day to check in on us,” Margulis said. “I told him: ‘We’re okay. I just gotta get people back in the place.’ Most of our customers were suburbanites who had found places closer to home during the storm.”
“Don’t worry, Max,” said George. “I’ll bring ’em back!”
During the last week of January 1978, just before the opening of spring training, two chartered jets filled with Yankees legends landed in Buffalo.
“Billy Martin, Phil Rizzuto, Mickey Mantle, Gene Michael, Lou Piniella, Mel Allen, Willie Randolph—all of ’em—came over to the restaurant, where we sold tickets at $100 apiece for a three-to-four-hour open bar and buffet,” Margulis said. “Unfortunately, I made more enemies than friends, because we could only let 250 people in the place.”
IN THE LATE ’50s, Kinsman Marine Transit began to face formidable competition from the large steel companies’ own fleets, and found itself in severe financial difficulties. By 1963, Henry Steinbrenner, then 59, was ready to retire. George realized that in order to succeed his father as company president, he was going to have to buy up all his relatives’ shares. When Steinbrenner, with no capital of his own, was unable to obtain a loan for a down payment from any of the Cleveland banks, he went to New York, where he found a small bank that bought his argument about shipping on the Great Lakes still having a future and loaned him $25,000. After securing that sum, he was able to convince Union Commerce Bank in Cleveland to give him a more substantial loan in order to buy up the fleets of the other independent Great Lakes companies that were going out of business. He also bought four larger v
essels from U.S. Steel. With the expanded and upgraded fleet, Steinbrenner managed to restore Kinsman to strong financial health by 1964 by shifting its fleet’s shipping workload from the shrinking ore business to grain.
But consumed as Steinbrenner was with his work as Kinsman treasurer, he was never able to get past his yen for sports—a vocation effectively squashed by Henry’s insistence that he abandon football coaching and focus on the family business. In the spring of 1960, Steinbrenner and his pals had been sitting around table 14 at the Pewter Mug discussing the plight of the Cleveland Pipers, a semi-pro team in the National Industrial Basketball League. Ed Sweeny, a plumbing-company executive who owned the Pipers, was beset with financial troubles and had put the team up for sale. Seeing an opportunity to get involved again in sports, Steinbrenner assembled a group of 16 of his business and civic associates, including Pewter Mug owner Al Bernstein, and together they offered Sweeny $125,000 for the Pipers. Steinbrenner, the principal investor, reportedly raised $250,000 for his share, plus operating expenses, by selling his Kinsman Marine Transit stock.
The Pipers were one of nine company-sponsored teams in the NIBL, which was considered to be a high-level “minor” league to the established National Basketball Association. Their coach, John McLendon, was one of the first African-American coaches in pro basketball and had quite a record of achievement, having won three consecutive small-college national championships at Tennessee A&I, as well as both the AAU and NIBL titles in 1961. Despite that success, in his 2007 biography of McLendon, Breaking Through, author Milton S. Katz reported that Steinbrenner had wanted a bigger-name coach, but the Pipers partners, citing the 45-year-old McLendon’s popularity with the Cleveland fans, voted to keep him on. Several board members told Katz the vote was 15–1—with Steinbrenner the lone dissenting vote.