Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Steinbrenner was taken to a local hospital, where he remained overnight and into Monday as doctors conducted more tests to determine what had happened. The day after he was released from the hospital, Howard Rubenstein issued another upbeat press release from New York: “George Steinbrenner is well and raising hell today.” Rubenstein went on to say that he’d spoken to Steinbrenner “several times on Monday and today, and he is okay. He’s dived back into planning next season and is quite feisty.” Rubenstein wrote off this latest Steinbrenner health scare as merely a product of the absence of air conditioning and the close quarters in the auditorium.

  In fact, Steinbrenner was anything but “well and raising hell,” and his close associates later conceded that it was after the North Carolina incident that they really began to notice a marked decline in his mental acuity and overall health. According to sources close to the family, the doctors in North Carolina explained to Steinbrenner’s wife and daughters that he had suffered a series of transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), in which a clot temporarily clogs an artery, preventing the brain from getting the blood it needs. The symptoms of such attacks are numbness and weakness in the face, arms and legs, sudden confusion, and trouble speaking and understanding, among others. Ensuing dementia could be slowed by drugs but not halted or reversed.

  The family discussed having Steinbrenner undergo further treatment in North Carolina, but he refused, insisting on returning home to Tampa under the care of his personal physician, Andrew Boyer. The North Carolina doctors also strongly advised the family that Steinbrenner should no longer drive and that he needed to have someone with him all the time. The family arranged to have nurses on duty 24 hours at the Steinbrenner home on Frankland Road, in the Palma Ceia section of south Tampa.

  In early February 2007, Lou Piniella and Malio Iavarone met Steinbrenner for lunch at the Palm Restaurant in Tampa. It was just a few days before Piniella was scheduled to go to Arizona for his first spring training with the Cubs, and this time Steinbrenner was accompanied by his older son, Hank, who in the mid-’80s had spent a couple of years working in the Yankees’ front office before returning to run the family horse farm in Ocala.

  Piniella and Iavarone were alarmed at how much Steinbrenner’s physical and mental health had declined in the previous year. He could barely get around on his bad knee, and his conversation during the lunch was limited. Where once he was the life of the party, asking Piniella’s opinions on all things baseball while offering plenty of his own, now there was a distinct disconnect. Mostly, he just sat there, offering little as the others talked and laughed. Afterward, a concerned Piniella took Hank Steinbrenner aside and said, “I can see what’s happened to him. You’ve got to step forward now and get involved with the team. He needs you now.”

  Seven months later, a writer for Condé Nast Portfolio, Franz Lidz, got one of Steinbrenner’s longtime pals, 84-year-old Tom McEwen, the former sports editor of the Tampa Tribune, to take him to the Steinbrenner home on Frankland Road, where they were granted entrance through the wrought-iron driveway gate as another car pulled out. They asked a gardener to announce their presence and waited about five minutes before Steinbrenner appeared at his front door, wearing silk pajamas, slippers and a terrycloth bathrobe. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  “His body is bloated; his jawline has slackened into a triple chin; his skin looks as if a dry-cleaner bag has been stretched over it,” Lidz wrote. “Steinbrenner’s face, pale and swollen, has a curiously undefined look. His features seem frozen in a permanent rictus of careworn disbelief.” But according to Lidz, the transformation of Steinbrenner’s mind was even more surprising. Steinbrenner seemed unable to comprehend anything the two asked him, instead repeating, “Great to see you, Tommy.” As they left, McEwen told Lidz, “I’m shocked. George doesn’t even seem the same person. I figured he might be in a bad way, but I never expected this.”

  Lidz’s piece drew outrage from Steinbrenner’s friends and even some of his enemies. “I always thought George was a bully and a blowhard,” one former major league owner told me, “but what that guy wrote about him was just cruel, an unfair invasion of his privacy.” The Steinbrenner family blamed McEwen for having facilitated the visit (even though he appeared to have been duped by Lidz) and refused to take his phone calls. From then on, he was persona non grata at Legends Field.

  Six weeks later, the Yankees were again knocked out of the postseason in the first round, this time by the Cleveland Indians. Steinbrenner’s high command was once again faced with a dilemma over what to do with Torre, whose contract had expired at the end of the season. For the first time since 1997, the Yankees had not won the AL East, earning a postseason berth as the wild card. And unlike the previous year, Torre no longer had Steve Swindal as his principal champion. On Valentine’s Day the previous spring, Swindal had been pulled over in his 2007 Mercedes for cutting off another car on Central Avenue and 31st Street in St. Petersburg shortly after two o’clock in the morning. He was charged with a DUI and jailed overnight.

  Over the course of the next few days, reports surfaced of domestic trouble between Swindal and Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal, who filed for divorce a month later, citing irreconcilable differences. Out of the family for Swindal meant out of the Yankees (like Joe Molloy, who in 1998 divorced himself out of the organization). This opened the door for Steinbrenner’s two sons, Hal and Hank, to take more active roles in the running of the ball club.

  It was the six-man group of Hal and Hank Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Lonn Trost, Brian Cashman and Steinbrenner’s son-in-law Felix Lopez (Jessica’s second husband), who huddled with Steinbrenner at his home in Tampa on October 17, 2008, to discuss the Torre situation. Steinbrenner offered no opinion other than to say he was tired of paying Torre $4 million per year more than any other manager in baseball based on past performance. The Steinbrenners and Levine did not want to bring him back, but Cashman convinced them that for public relations reasons alone, they needed at least to offer him a contract. The group decided to offer him a one-year contract with a $5 million base—keeping him the highest-paid manager in the game by $2 million—with a series of incentives that, if the Yankees just reached the World Series, would top out at $8 million and automatically vest at that same number in 2009.

  When Cashman called Torre to tell him of the offer, Torre did not commit either way. Rather, he said he wanted to come to Tampa and look Steinbrenner in the eye. Cashman, who was returning to New York that day, agreed to fly back to Tampa with Torre to meet with the Steinbrenners. The Yankees execs assumed that Torre, as he’d done in the past, merely wanted to get Steinbrenner’s personal assurance that he wanted him to continue managing the team.

  Shortly before 2 P.M. on October 18, Torre, accompanied by Cashman and Trost, walked into Steinbrenner’s office on the fourth floor of Legends Field. The Boss was sitting at his desk, flanked by Levine, Hal and Hank Steinbrenner and Lopez. Hal Steinbrenner began the meeting by reiterating to Torre the group’s wishes that he come back for another year, then asked Levine to go over the terms of the offer and to review Torre’s previous contracts. At that point, Steinbrenner said, “I’ve always been fair to you. We want you to come back. I hope you accept.”

  Torre looked at the group coldly.

  “I have to say I find this insulting,” he said. “I don’t believe I deserve a pay cut.”

  Then, looking straight at Steinbrenner, he said, “You know, George, the success of my teams allowed you to have the YES network and a new stadium, not to mention the record attendances and all the added advertising and marketing revenue. Is this fair? I can’t in good conscience face my players and take a deal like this.”

  As Torre spoke, Steinbrenner looked at him blankly, as if not fully comprehending what he was hearing. The others were stunned at Torre’s audacity. Was he delusional? Asserting that he was the one responsible for the Boss becoming wealthy beyond his wildest imagination, when in fact it was the other way around? Finally, after an unea
sy silence, Hal Steinbrenner spoke up again.

  “I’m sorry you feel this way, Joe,” he said, “but we’d all still like you to stay with the Yankees and work with the network.”

  Torre did not respond. Instead, he reached across the desk, shook Steinbrenner’s hand, thanked him, stood up and walked out the door. The next day, he held his own press conference in which he said the incentives in the contract were an insult and expressed dismay at there having been no negotiation. It was left to Hank Steinbrenner to return fire for his father in an October 20 interview with the New York Post.

  “Where was Joe’s career in ’95 when my dad hired him?” Hank asked. “My dad was crucified for hiring him. Let’s not forget what my dad did in giving him that opportunity—and the great team he was handed. You can’t take credit for the success when you’re going good and then not take at least some of the blame when things change.”

  That Cashman was given unfettered authority to hire Torre’s successor—and selected Joe Girardi, the former Yankee catcher who’d previously managed the Florida Marlins, rather than bench coach Don Mattingly, the icon who, it had seemed, was being groomed for the job—was further evidence that Steinbrenner had fully retired from the Yankees operations. This was confirmed at the major league owners’ meeting in New York in November 2008, when the Yankees announced that Hal Steinbrenner would become the new Yankees managing general partner. Why Hal and not his older brother, Hank? All agreed that Hal was the one with the business acumen and that Hank, despite his frequent public comments on the Yankees’ baseball dealings, had no interest in spending the necessary time in New York working with Levine and Trost on all the complicated stadium, network, marketing and concessions operations.

  Left unsaid was the fact that Hal’s ascension over Hank further solidified Cashman’s position as head of all baseball operations. Until then, it had been Hank who had acted as the team spokesman on player decisions, much to Cashman’s dismay. According to team sources, two months earlier, in his negotiations with Hal on a new three-year contract, Cashman had complained that Hank’s frequent public comments were creating confusion as to just who was in charge, and that he needed to be muzzled. Coincidence or not, when Hal became managing general partner, Hank changed his cell phone number—which just about every New York baseball reporter had—and was thereafter no longer available for comment on Yankee doings.

  In Girardi’s first season as manager, Steinbrenner’s only appearances at Yankee Stadium were on Opening Day and at the All-Star Game in July, a commemoration of the final season of the venerable and storied old ballpark. (By this time, he’d finally surrendered to the intolerable pain in his arthritic knee and grudgingly allowed himself to be consigned to a wheelchair.) What was supposed to be a fans’ tribute to Steinbrenner at the All-Star Game—a “victory tour” around the Stadium in a golf cart at the conclusion of the pregame ceremonies—was mostly lost on the capacity crowd, because the announcement of his entrance onto the field was made as part of the TV broadcast and not preceded by the familiar sound of Bob Sheppard saying, “Your attention, please, ladies and gentlemen.” As the white-haired, frail-looking Steinbrenner—wearing his familiar blue blazer, blue-and-white dotted tie and huge sunglasses, and accompanied by Hal, Jennifer and his son-in-law Felix Lopez—was driven around the park, the fans applauded sporadically, as if uncertain as to what was going on.

  The All-Star Game was the last time Steinbrenner would appear at the Stadium, as the Yankees, under Girardi, failed to make the postseason for the first time since 1993, leading to speculation that the new manager might well become a short-timer. But over the winter, Cashman, emulating Steinbrenner by going on a wild free agent spending spree, procured the three premium players on the market, pitchers C. C. Sabathia and A. J. Burnett and first baseman Mark Teixeira, for a whopping $423.5 million altogether. And just as with Steinbrenner’s ’70s signings of Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson and Goose Gossage, Cashman’s free agent foray paid off as the team handily won the AL East by eight games over the Red Sox, on their way to another Yankee championship. Sabathia tied for the league lead with 19 wins, Burnett chipped in with 13 (while also logging 209 innings) and Teixeira delivered an MVP-caliber season, hitting .292 with a league-leading 39 homers and 122 RBI while winning a Gold Glove at first base.

  Steinbrenner saw only three games of the Yankees’ 2009 season firsthand: Opening Day at the new Yankee Stadium, and twice from a private box at the Tropicana Dome, in St. Petersburg, when the team played the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in late summer. There had been considerable speculation as to whether he would be well enough to make the trip to New York for the opening of the new stadium, but, accompanied by the entire family, Dr. Boyer and his nurse, he flew up from Tampa on a charter plane and watched the game from his new suite, concealed from view. The only sighting of him by the media was after the game, when he was being spirited down the corridor in a golf cart on the clubhouse level beneath the stadium, surrounded by a phalanx of security guards. As he passed a group of reporters being restrained in a stairwell, one of them, Anthony McCarron of the Daily News, shouted at him, “George, what do you think of the new stadium?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Steinbrenner replied weakly as his handlers sped him away.

  ON JULY 2, 2009, Malio Iavarone, who had opened a new restaurant in Tampa, received a call from one of Steinbrenner’s secretaries at the Yankees’ complex there (which, in the spring, had been renamed from Legends Field to Steinbrenner Field). Phil McNiff, Steinbrenner’s longtime security chief in Tampa, was organizing a 79th birthday lunch for the Boss and was hoping that Malio would bring along some of Steinbrenner’s favorite Florida stone crabs. “I’m there!” Malio said, excited at the prospect of seeing his old friend, who had turned down repeated requests from his longtime pals who wanted to visit him at the Frankland Road house. It had already been a particularly bad year for Steinbrenner. On March 29, Lou Saban, who had hired him as a college football coach and later served as Yankees president, passed away after suffering a fall in his house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Then, on May 19, Max Margulis, who’d been with him since 1981, after closing up the restaurant in Buffalo, died of a heart attack at age 83 at his home in Palm Harbor, Florida. When Iavarone arrived at the fourth-floor offices, Steinbrenner was wheeled in to greet him.

  “Here’s Malio, Boss,” one of his secretaries said.

  “Oh, Malio,” said Steinbrenner. “I love Malio.”

  But as he said it, he seemed to be looking right through Iavarone, who could tell Steinbrenner didn’t recognize him. Malio hugged him and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “I love you, too, Boss,” he said, before excusing himself from the party and leaving the building in tears.

  “McNiff asked me to stay for the birthday cake, but I just had to get out of there,” Iavarone told me. “I just couldn’t play that game—that George knew everybody and that everything was just the same. It wasn’t.”

  BY SWEEPING THE Minnesota Twins in three games in the American League Division Series and getting past the Los Angeles Angels in six games in the ALCS, Girardi’s Yankees saw to it that Steinbrenner’s new Yankee Stadium would host the World Series in its maiden season—against the defending world champion Philadelphia Phillies. Despite rumors that his health had deteriorated to the point that he now rarely left his house, word out of Tampa during the Twins series was that Steinbrenner would definitely be there if the Yankees advanced to the Series. On the afternoon of October 27, Steinbrenner and his family, along with Dr. Boyer and his nurse, flew up to New York from Tampa for games one and two of the Series, which began the next night.

  Unlike all the previous World Series and Opening Days, the Steinbrenner private suite was empty of the usual celebrities and big-shot New York political figures. Instead, with Hal Steinbrenner now in charge, the suite was restricted to just the family, a few of Hal’s associates, Yogi Berra and only the Boss’s oldest friends, among them Dick Kraft, his Williams College roommat
e who’d worked for the Yankees in various capacities for over 30 years; Jim Fuchs, his partner in the Silver Shield Foundation; USA Today founder Al Neuharth; restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; and 87-year-old Jimmy Nederlander, his long-ago Broadway show compadre and original partner in the Yankees.

  Throughout the two games, the wheelchair-bound Steinbrenner remained stationed at the big round table in the middle of the room, content to watch the action on the high-definition flat-screen TV on the wall. Prior to game two, he seemed oblivious to the sounds coming from the field of rapper Jay-Z, clad in a purple jacket, thigh-high boots and a Yankee cap, performing his anthem “Empire State of Mind,” which includes the lyric “I made the Yankee hat more famous than any Yankee can.” It was a long way from Steinbrenner’s world of Frank Sinatra and Robert Merrill, and just another sad reminder to his old friends that he was no longer master of his own realm.

  At one point during game two, which the Yankees would win, 3–1, to tie the Series at one game apiece, Steinbrenner was joined at the big table by Jimmy Nederlander, who was also confined to a wheelchair.

  “You two guys look great!” said Elaine Kaufman. “This is like a reunion tour!”

  “How can I look great?” Nederlander chuckled. “I’m 90 years old!”

  Everyone else in the room, sensing the poignancy of the moment, gave them space—Steinbrenner and his oldest friend, the guy who told him, way back in the beginning when he bought the Yankees, “Never forget, New York is a city of stars. You gotta have stars!” They sat together in silence, and after a few minutes Nederlander turned to Steinbrenner and said, “This is a beautiful stadium, George, but you shoulda put a roof on it so we could have concerts and shows and things in the winter.”

  “It would have cost too much,” Steinbrenner said softly, before returning his gaze to the TV screen, “and it wouldn’t have been Yankee Stadium.”