Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Although the NIBL was comprised of teams sponsored by some of the biggest and most respected companies in America—the Phillips 66 Oilers and the Akron Goodyears, to name two—Henry Steinbrenner was not impressed. He ordered his son to keep his new “hobby” separate from the Kinsman shipping business after Henry caught him talking Pipers business on the company phone and promptly cut the connection with a jab of his finger. George’s response to that was to have a separate phone installed, with a red light on it that blinked for incoming calls, which he hid in his desk drawer when he wasn’t in the office.

  Bob Sudyk, who had taken a job as a sports reporter for the Cleveland Press after graduating from Ohio State, recalled a visit he made to the Kinsman office in an attempt to interview Steinbrenner shortly after his purchase of the Pipers.

  “As I walked into the offices, Henry Steinbrenner immediately confronted me and demanded to know who I was and what I wanted,” Sudyk said. “When I told him I was there to interview his son about the Pipers, he screamed, ‘Get the hell out of here! This is a business!’ He really intimidated me. I can only imagine what he did to George.”

  By 1961, however, the NIBL, unable to lure the top college players, was losing attendance to the NBA, which had gradually become integrated through the ’50s and was now becoming dominated by prominent black players such as Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and Bill Russell, who had emerged as exciting gate attractions. Steinbrenner, above all, recognized the shortcomings of the NIBL and, in 1961, he jumped at the offer from Harlem Globetrotters founder Abe Saperstein to have the Pipers join his fledgling American Basketball League, which he’d launched to challenge the NBA.

  There were eight original franchises in the ABL, with Saperstein establishing himself as the owner of the Chicago team. A renowned promoter, Saperstein arranged for his Globetrotters to play exhibitions prior to the ABL games, and also invented the three-point field goal, which later became a staple of both the college and pro games.

  By all accounts, Steinbrenner, in his first venture as owner of a sports team, was exactly what New York Yankee fans would experience 20 years later—manic, fiercely competitive, and frequently guilty of outrageous behavior, charging down to courtside from the stands to vent at opposing players and officials. The Cleveland Press, citing his referee-baiting antics in the stands, called him “congenitally unsuited” to own a sports franchise. Sudyk, who became the Press’s beat man with the Pipers, recognized Steinbrenner as the same wild man he’d first encountered at Lockbourne Air Force base 10 years earlier. “He would sit in the stands right behind the Pipers bench and scream at the officials throughout the game,” said Sudyk, “and there were a couple of occasions when he’d charge right down onto the court and get in their faces.”

  More than anyone, it was the quiet, reserved McLendon who bore the brunt of Steinbrenner’s rants. When Steinbrenner wasn’t railing at the officials, he was openly criticizing McLendon’s coaching and creating morale problems on the team with frantic personnel changes. In an effort to boost low attendance at Pipers games, Steinbrenner signed “name” players such as former Kentucky seven-foot All-American Bill Spivey, a central figure in the 1950s college point-shaving scandal who had been banned from the NBA, and 6-8 center Bevo Francis, who’d achieved fame at tiny Rio Grande State, in Ohio, for having scored 113 points in one game. Neither Francis, Spivey nor Larry Siegfried, the former Ohio State All-American guard who was the most acclaimed college player to sign with the ABL, fit into McLendon’s fast-break system, and Steinbrenner bristled when the coach kept them on the bench.

  Steinbrenner’s most outrageous stunt occurred in the Pipers’ first game of the 1961–62 season, when he sold forward Grady McCollum at halftime to the opposing team, the Hawaii Chiefs. Before the game, Chiefs coach Red Rocha had asked Steinbrenner if he would be interested in selling McCollum to him. Seizing an opportunity to pick up some quick operating cash, Steinbrenner told Rocha as the teams were walking off the court at halftime that he had a deal, and then went into the Pipers’ dressing room and ordered McCollum to report immediately to the visitors’ locker room to suit up for them for the second half. Shocked at such callous treatment of one of his players, McLendon told McCollum he didn’t have to play against his teammates and to go sit up in the stands.

  The tension between Steinbrenner and McLendon reached a breaking point on Sunday, January 14, 1962, when the Pipers lost the first-half ABL championship, 120–104, to the Kansas City Steers before a sparse crowd of just 2,313 at Cleveland’s Public Hall. After the game, Steinbrenner stormed into the locker room, yelling that “heads will roll,” and then had their paychecks withheld the next day.

  Sudyk found out from two of the Piper players that no paychecks had been delivered to the team offices and, as a result, the team had voted not to go to Pittsburgh for that night’s game. When Sudyk’s story of the Pipers players’ boycott hit the streets at 10 o’clock the next morning, Steinbrenner flew into a fury and called McLendon to tell him the players would not be paid until they signed a letter denying Sudyk’s story. Then he called Sudyk.

  “This story is a pack of lies! I’ll see to it that you never work at a paper again!” Steinbrenner screamed.

  “After he got done yelling at me, he called my editor, Lou Seltzer, and tried to get me fired,” Sudyk said.

  The same morning, McLendon, disgusted over all that had just transpired, went to the Cleveland Press building and told Sudyk he was resigning.

  Steinbrenner’s fury shook Sudyk, but his phone call to Seltzer had the opposite effect: Sudyk actually received a raise.

  A month later he was walking down Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland when he heard someone behind him shouting, “Sudyk! Sudyk!” Turning around, he was stunned to see Steinbrenner and thought, “Oh, God, what do I do now?” But when he caught up with him, Steinbrenner put his arm around Sudyk and said, “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. Let’s go get some drinks.”

  “We went into this little place and he apologized for everything he’d said to me,” Sudyk said. “We talked all afternoon and then he took me to dinner with all his cronies. I have to say, he became a friend from that day on.”

  McLendon was similarly forgiving. In an October 2008 interview, his widow, Joanna, told me that McLendon never thought Steinbrenner was anti-black, just perhaps “anti-people,” she said with a chuckle. “John just wasn’t one to hold grudges or anything,” she said. “He didn’t like the way Steinbrenner treated him and the players, and that’s why he did what he did. But I never heard him say anything harsh about Steinbrenner other than the fact that he treated everyone the same—like dogs.”

  McLendon wasn’t the first Pipers employee that Steinbrenner drove from the job. Mike Cleary had been the Pipers’ general manager since 1958. At the beginning of the 1961 season, he was able to lure Dick Barnett, a star shooting guard, from the NBA’s Syracuse Nationals—a wonderful coup for the less established league that was made possible, in part, by Barnett’s having played for McLendon at Tennessee A&I. Steinbrenner had promised to give the Cleveland Press, which was the afternoon paper, the exclusive on Barnett’s signing if it would agree to run the story on page one, and Cleary sent out the press announcement with an embargo for 6 A.M. But that night, the local TV station broke the embargo on its 11 o’clock sports report, which, in turn, compelled the morning paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, to run the story as well—but in the back pages of its sports section. The next day, when Steinbrenner picked up the Press (which had lost its exclusive), he was enraged to find just a tiny two-inch story on the Barnett signing.

  “George called me and was berserk,” said Cleary, “and that was the day I became the first general manager to be fired by George Steinbrenner.”

  Cleary wasn’t out of work for long. A month after his firing, he was hired to be the general manager of the Kansas City Steers. Apparently, Steinbrenner felt that he didn’t need to pay Cleary for his final two weeks as Pipers GM. After calling Steinb
renner on numerous occasions about the outstanding pay and never getting a response, Cleary decided to take matters into his own hands.

  “When the Pipers came to Kansas City,” he said, “I took four weeks’ worth of pay out of the visiting team’s gate receipts and wrote George a letter in which I said: ‘You inadvertently forgot to give me my last two weeks’ pay, and knowing how magnanimous you are, I’m sure you’d want to give me that plus two weeks’ severance.’ He called me back and said: ‘Okay. You got me!’ ”

  Cleary, who remained friends with Steinbrenner, said he was actually more fearful of the Pipers owner’s father than he was of George.

  “Every so often Henry would call me up and ask about our payroll checks,” Cleary said. “He’d say: ‘What’s going on here? Why are you paying these salaries to these bums?’ I’d try to be respectful to him and he’d scream: ‘Don’t give me that Mr. Steinbrenner shit! You think he’s paying you that salary? That’s my money!’ ”

  With McLendon’s resignation, Steinbrenner was able to bring in the big-name coach he’d wanted all along, in the person of Bill Sharman, the Hall of Fame Boston Celtics forward who had been coaching the ABL’s Los Angeles Jets franchise until it folded at midseason.

  “The day after the team folded, I got a call from George offering me the Pipers job,” Sharman told me in 2007. “He said he’d promoted John [McLendon] to the front office, without giving a reason.”

  Under Sharman, the Pipers went on to win the overall 1961–62 ABL championship over the Kansas City Steers. Still, troubled by drooping attendance figures, Steinbrenner was becoming increasingly concerned about the league’s viability. In order to attract more fans—and with an eye to gaining admittance to the NBA—in the spring of 1962 Steinbrenner pulled off a stunning coup when he signed Ohio State’s 6-8 forward Jerry Lucas, the college basketball player of the year, to a unique player-management contract. By virtue of the NBA’s territorial draft rule, Lucas was already technically on the reserve list of the Cincinnati Royals, who had selected him out of high school in 1962 and were just waiting for him to finish his college career to give him a contract.

  After signing Lucas, Steinbrenner took the Pipers out of the ABL and entered into a secret deal with NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff in which the NBA would take in Lucas and the Pipers and merge them with the Kansas City Steers, which would effectively kill the ABL. George McKean, the owner of the San Francisco Saints during the first year of the ABL, was supposed to go partners with Steinbrenner on the merged Pipers-Steers team. A meeting in which the parties worked out the details of the Pipers-Steers admission to the NBA took place on Podoloff’s yacht on Long Island, and there was even a schedule printed for the 1963–64 season in which the Pipers were to open up against the New York Knicks.

  “It would have been a pretty darn good team, too, with our five best players, the Pipers’ best five players, plus Lucas!” said Cleary.

  But McKean turned out to be underfinanced, having expended much of his resources to keep the Saints afloat, and when he and Steinbrenner fell behind in their payment schedule with the NBA, Podoloff killed the deal. The ABL ended up folding halfway through the 1962–63 season, leaving Steinbrenner with Lucas on the payroll and nowhere for the team to play.

  “The NBA only wanted Cleveland because I was signed to a personal services contract with them,” Lucas told me. “I signed with George because he offered me $40,000, which was $10,000 more than the Royals had offered me. But in the end, I never got a nickel of the $40,000 because the league folded.”

  Lucas sat out the 1962–63 season, then joined the Cincinnati Royals in the NBA the following year—for $30,000.

  With the demise of the ABL, Steinbrenner faced over $125,000 in debts as well as personal losses of nearly $2 million.

  “When the league folded, I was devastated,” Steinbrenner told me in an interview I had with him on the occasion of his 25th anniversary as owner of the Yankees. “I didn’t want to walk around the streets of Cleveland. It was embarrassing. But I was determined not to leave anyone holding the bag. It was my team, my debts, my problem. The easy thing would have been to just declare bankruptcy and walk away from it all, but as a businessman with a reputation to uphold, I just couldn’t do that.”

  Over the next three years, Steinbrenner, using his Kinsman salary and the money derived from a separate company he formed to ship ore, paid off all of his partners and settled all of his debts. In 1984 he would counsel Ron Guidry to do the same when the star Yankee pitcher discovered that a series of bad investments by his agent had put him $400,000 in debt. “Essentially what George told me was, ‘If you can remedy it, remedy it. But don’t run away from it,’ ” Guidry told me.

  WITH STEINBRENNER’S FIRST venture into professional sports a crushing failure, he poured his energy into the shipping business. After having completed his majority-interest purchase of Kinsman from his father and the other stockholders, George implemented new measures—expanding fleets, shifting the emphasis from ore to grain—to return the company to profitability. Next, he turned to his Group 66 pal Thomas Roulston, who headed a prominent Cleveland brokerage firm, and put together a deal to purchase 470,000 out of an outstanding 1,197,250 shares of stock in the American Shipbuilding Company for the purpose of merging Kinsman into it. On October 11, 1967, in the face of a threatened proxy fight, the board of directors named Steinbrenner to succeed William H. Jory as president and chief executive officer of the company.

  It was in his new role as president of the largest shipping company on the Great Lakes that Steinbrenner began making frequent trips to Washington to lobby politicians to change the Merchant Marine Act, which had been in existence since 1936. “From the start, I knew the secret of American Ship was to get the Great Lakes included in the maritime act so they could get their share of assistance,” Steinbrenner once told me. “I saw the whole Great Lakes fleet had to be rebuilt and the only way this could be done was with help from the government.”

  It took three years of schmoozing, cajoling and arm-twisting with the Democratic-controlled Congress, but Steinbrenner’s lobbying effort to get the maritime act changed to include the Great Lakes finally proved successful. In the process, he developed close friendships with many of the leading Democrats, including Senators Ted Kennedy, Daniel Inouye and Vance Hartke and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. As chair of the annual Congressional Dinner in 1969 and 1970, Steinbrenner raised $803,000 the first year and over $1 million the second, setting new records for most money raised.

  Suddenly, Steinbrenner, who was also contributing thousands of dollars to the 1970 Senate Campaign Committee of new Democratic pals through donations from AmShip, was a very high-profile Democratic activist in Washington—a fact his friends warned him could lead to repercussions for AmShip with a Republican, Richard Nixon, in the White House. Those fears proved to be well founded. On February 11, 1972, Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans rejected AmShip’s bid to be compensated for its $5.4 million cost overrun on the construction of an oceanographic survey ship, Researcher. Stans left the Commerce post a couple of days later to head up Nixon’s campaign finance committee, but on May 2, 1972, his successor, Peter G. Peterson, determined that AmShip had to pay an additional $208,000 for late delivery of the vessel and another $22,000 in various construction penalties.

  It was largely because of his concerns about the Nixon administration that Steinbrenner sought out and hired as AmShip general counsel his old Williams College classmate Thomas W. Evans, who had been Nixon’s chief counsel in 1968 and was then deputy finance chairman of Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign.

  After the Stans and Peterson rulings, a distressed Steinbrenner went to Evans and asked for his advice as to what do about his Republican problem.

  “My impression was, he just wanted to be closely associated to presidential power,” Evans said. “He told me he wanted to donate to Nixon’s campaign and, in that regard, I introduced him to Herbert Kalmbach.”

  Kalmbach had repl
aced Evans as deputy finance chairman of Nixon’s reelection campaign. His boss, Maurice Stans, had left the Commerce Department to become campaign finance chairman two days after rendering the decision against AmShip. Unbeknownst to Evans, Kalmbach was already engaged in a series of illegal schemes to raise money for Nixon—the heart of the Watergate scandal that, in 1974, would bring down the Nixon presidency and result in dozens of felony convictions, among them that of George M. Steinbrenner III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, American Shipbuilding Co.

  Chapter 3

  “Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way”

  THOUGH HE HAD PROMISED to “stick to my shipbuilding business,” George Steinbrenner did not wait for the American League owners’ formal approval of his purchase of the Yankees to begin scrutinizing firsthand his new team and its on-field and off-field personnel.

  In later years, Steinbrenner had a motto, engraved on a wooden nameplate atop his desk at Yankee Stadium—LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY—which was in keeping with his “General George Patton” management style. And in the months leading up to his final approval by the AL owners at their June meeting, Steinbrenner had made it quite apparent he was going to be anything but the absentee owner he professed to be at the January 3 press conference. The Yankees front office staff could sense that their new boss was creating an environment far different from the benign ownership of CBS, with many of them quickly concluding it was probably best to just exercise the third option and stay out of his way.

  At the same time Mike Burke began plotting his exit, Howard Berk, the VP of administration, was deciding whether he’d be able to follow the new owner or if he should exercise the clause in his contract allowing him to return to CBS in the event the Yankees were sold. Steinbrenner’s stinging condemnation of Burke overheard by Berk’s wife by the pool at Schrafft’s had certainly been dire enough warning of what was to come, but, on Opening Day at the Stadium, Berk got his own initial firsthand indoctrination of this when Steinbrenner ordered him to move a VIP lunch of over 200 people from the stadium club upstairs to another dining room on the main level.