Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  At the time, the Yankees had not won a pennant since 1964, an eternity in Yankees years. A generation of New Yorkers was growing up thinking the Mets were the city’s winning team. Such were the club’s softening fortunes that when a Cleveland-based syndicate led by George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from the Columbia Broadcasting System in early 1973, it actually paid a few million less for the franchise than CBS had nine years earlier. At the time of the purchase, Steinbrenner had made it clear he had no intention of involving himself in the day-to-day affairs of the ball club. “We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned,” he told The New York Times. “We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”

  A different reality soon emerged. Even after Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball in the fall of 1974 for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s ‘72 presidential campaign, no one doubted that he was behind the team’s aggressive personnel moves. Most notably, in the run-up to the ’75 season, the Yankees traded Bobby Murcer for the quick and powerful Bobby Bonds and signed Catfish Hunter, one of the best control pitchers in the game, to a five-year three-million-dollar contract. Hopes soared; hopes sagged. With two months left to play in the 1975 season, the Yankees were ten games behind the Boston Red Sox. Steinbrenner decided it was time to sacrifice his manager, Bill Virdon.

  Tebbetts made Martin an offer that should have been easy to refuse: seventy-two thousand dollars a year, the same amount he had earned in Texas, plus a contract crammed full of onerous clauses. One prohibited him from criticizing the front office. Another stipulated that he could be fired, without pay, for failing to make himself available to management. He’d be on parole, and he hadn’t even been arrested. Steinbrenner was familiar with Martin’s gift for turning players and fans against a team’s management, but he was sure he could break him. He started by calling Martin to tell him this was a one-time offer. If he wanted to manage the Yankees, now was his chance. Martin signed.

  Steinbrenner quietly flew Martin and his wife, Gretchen, into New York and stashed them away in a midtown hotel under a fake name. For dramatic effect, he wanted the announcement made on Old Timers’ Day, which was still a couple of days away.

  On August 1, 1975, Bill Virdon managed his last game for the New York Yankees. The following day, a steamy one in New York, Billy Martin rode out to Shea Stadium, where the Yankees were subletting space while their own ballpark in the Bronx underwent extensive renovations. The faded pennants and championship flags of a bygone era had been dragged out of storage and draped over the outfield fences for the occasion.

  Martin hid out in the clubhouse and waited nervously for his name to be called as the rest of the old-timers—Mantle, Ford, DiMaggio—ambled out of the dugout, doffed their wool caps, and lined up along the first base line. Much to Martin’s chagrin, Steinbrenner had insisted that his new manager, a lifetime .250 hitter, be announced last, a position traditionally occupied by one of the true greats. Martin, by now dizzy with anticipation, finally trotted onto the field in his old uniform, No. 1. After eighteen years in the wilderness, Billy Martin was back in New York. He looked about the same at age forty-seven as he had in his twenties, only he was skinnier, a little more hunched, and he wore a mustache—“that mustache of recent vintage that gives him the look of a rather shopworn Mississippi riverboat gambler,” as the New York Post’s Jerry Tallmer described it a few days later.

  The crowd roared, but Martin was fixated on the smattering of boos; the quiet, steady man whom he was replacing was not unpopular. “They’re booing right now,” Martin said to himself, “but before I’m through everyone will be cheering.”

  Martin, who was neither quiet nor steady, decided to use the remainder of 1975 to take the measure of his men both on and off the field, to identify the crybabies and “alibi Ikes.” But first he needed to make his expectations clear, and he did after his second day at the helm: “If you play for me, you play the game like you play life. You play it to be successful, you play it with dignity, you play it with pride, and you play it aggressively. Life is a very serious thing, and baseball has been my life. What else has my life been? That’s why, when I lose a ball game, I can’t eat. Sometimes I can hardly sleep. If you’re in love with the game, you can’t turn it on and off like a light. It’s something that runs so deep it takes you over.”

  Over the following eight weeks Martin designated several players for trade, including Bonds, who’d spent the better part of the year fighting knee problems. A revered figure in San Francisco, Bonds had never felt at home in New York. With a few games to go, long after the Red Sox had clinched the pennant, he told Martin to scratch him from the lineup because his leg was bothering him. “No man’s going to tell a manager whether he’s going to play or not.” Martin quietly fumed. Bonds’s fate was sealed. At Martin’s urging, he was soon placed on the trading block. ‘Just wait ’til I get them for a full year,” Martin kept telling the team’s director of publicity, Marty Appel, as the ’75 season wound down.

  In April 1976 the Yankees came home to the South Bronx. It was, more or less, the same place that the team had left two years earlier, but it bore no resemblance to the South Bronx in which Martin had played twenty-three years before that. Back then the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, the Grand Concourse, had been known as New York’s Champs-Elysees (with Yankee Stadium as its Arc de Triomphe). Now metaphorists referenced Dresden, not Paris, when describing the area. The old Concourse Plaza Hotel, a stately building of red brick, had been shuttered after a brief and ignominious run as a welfare hotel. The South Bronx itself was losing ten square blocks, or five thousand housing units, a year to arson fires. Rows of private houses, apartment buildings, and small businesses had been gutted, leaving only blackened hulks in their wake. In the area surrounding the stadium, more than twelve hundred buildings had been abandoned. Empty lots were covered with shoulder-high weeds. Ten blocks from the ballpark, an unfinished five-million-dollar low-rise housing development, abandoned for lack of funds in 1972, was a thriving heroin den. When Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the first Harlem bureau chief of The New York Times, visited the Samuel Gompers Vocational-Technical High School in the South Bronx, she was confronted by charred classrooms and broken blackboards. Students passed around a bottle of wine during class. “It’s very difficult to generate enthusiasm,” one teacher told her, “when you feel everything is terminal.”

  Amid this wreckage was the newly renovated Yankee Stadium, not the blue and alabaster bauble of yore, but a concrete fortress, battleship gray, with an anachronistic ring of white wooden trim running across the top of its bleachers, a little touch of Norman Rockwell on this otherwise bleak canvas. Mayor Lindsay had sold the twenty-five-million-dollar renovation to taxpayers as “the centerpiece of another New York City neighborhood renaissance.” Six years and a hundred million–plus dollars later, it was instead a powerful symbol of misplaced priorities, an outsize admission of urban failure. “It was Lindsay,” explained one official in the comptroller’s office. “First he got us pregnant, and then an abortion would have cost too much money.” Mayor Beame, who had inherited the stadium fiasco from Lindsay, did what he could to distance himself from it; he was conspicuously absent from the grand reopening festivities. WAS THE STADIUM WORTH IT? New York magazine asked rhetorically in a photo essay on the debacle.

  At least the Yankees were finally winning. As his team dominated its division, Martin’s prediction came true: The fans were cheering him. During the golden fifties, the dynastic era in which Yankees didn’t strain—didn’t need to strain—a sweat-soaked Billy Martin had thrived despite his cockiness, scrappiness, and unseemly hunger to win. In the seventies, a very different time in the life of the ball club and its city, he flourished because of them. In September, Steinbrenner gave him a three-year contract extension. Beneath the surface, though, Martin’s inner demons continued to torment him. As the wins piled up, the stakes mounted, and the prospect of losin
g became that much more sickening. Martin, who was always skinny, was now more gaunt than ever. Over the course of the ’76 season, he shed 20 pounds from his six-foot frame, dropping to a mere 154. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, which had first appeared during his playing days, deepened.

  The 1976 American League play-offs, New York versus Kansas City, went the distance. The decisive game five was played on a chilly October night in the Bronx. The Royals jumped out to an early lead, but the Yankees came back and pulled ahead. Then, in the top half of the eighth, George Brett’s three-run home run knotted the game at six, where it remained until the bottom of the ninth. The Yankees’ first baseman, Chris Chambliss, was due to lead off the inning, the start of which was delayed for five minutes while the grounds crew cleared the field of the glass bottles that had been raining down from the stands for much of the game. Chambliss finally dug into the left-hand side of the batter’s box and sent the first pitch he saw, a waist-high fastball, over the fence in right-center.

  Now, bedlam. Before Chambliss arrived at first base, a torrent of fans had poured out onto the field. By the time he reached second, one had taken the bag out of the ground; Chambliss had to touch it with his hands. Weaving in and out of the growing crowd between second and third, he was knocked down repeatedly. One fan tried to take his helmet. Approaching third, Chambliss decided he’d had enough. He made a wide turn around the bag and headed for the dugout, which was already spilling over with fans, including Cary Grant, whom Steinbrenner had brought down from his box for the postgame celebration. The Yankee players pushed through the crowds to find teammates to hug. For his part, Martin was busy recruiting a detail of cops to escort Chambliss back onto the field so he could touch home plate.

  The brand-new ballpark was in tatters. Huge chunks of turf were uprooted, every base had been stolen, and the field was littered with garbage, from newspaper shreds to empty bottles of Hiram Walker brandy and Jack Daniel’s. The Yankees had won their first pennant in twelve years.

  The National League champions, the Cincinnati Reds, were favored to win the ’76 World Series. Martin was, at least outwardly, unfazed: “I don’t care what Pete the Greek says,” Martin remarked, referring to the prominent oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek. “I never met a Greek who was a smart baseball player.” But Martin’s run was over. The Yankees dropped the first two games in Cincinnati. After losing game three in the Bronx, Martin threatened to give one wisecracking reporter “a good asskicking.” He was coming unglued. By the time he exploded in the fourth and final game, few were surprised.

  The grotesque tableau was imprinted on Martin’s memory, and to make matters worse, he and his second wife, Gretchen, a former airline stewardess and the belle of her sorority at the University of Nebraska, split up shortly after the season ended. He spent the winter of ’76–’77 alone in the Hasbrouck Heights Sheraton in New Jersey. Most afternoons found him listening to Jim Croce or sitting curled over a drink in a dimly lit watering hole, idly running his finger around the rim of a glass of scotch. When he wasn’t replaying the World Series in his head or entertaining dark thoughts about what Steinbrenner was up to across the river, he was worrying about his teenage daughter from his first marriage, who’d been thrown in jail in Colombia after being accused of trying to smuggle cocaine out of the country in her panty hose. “I’d like to kill the sons of bitches who sent her down there,” thought Martin.

  5.

  WHEN news of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post first hit the Daily News and The New York Times—the sleepy Post had been scooped on its own sale—on November 20, 1976, the city’s response was a collective “Rupert who?”

  He’d materialized in New York overnight: a thick, sad-eyed, harried-looking fellow with an outsize head and furry eyebrows, more day laborer than press lord by the looks of him. The bottomless pockets said otherwise. So did a vast media empire, nearly two decades in the making, spanning both Australia and Britain.

  Murdoch’s father, Sir Keith, had been a legendary newspaperman himself, the proprietor of a chain of Down Under dailies that were meant to be his son Rupert’s inheritance. Only by the time of his death Sir Keith had been forced to sell off everything but a controlling interest in one, the Adelaide News. So, called back from an apprenticeship at London’s Daily Express at the tender age of twenty-two, young Rupert Murdoch set about reconstructing the empire that he had once been destined to inherit. Applying the lessons he’d learned on Fleet Street, he soon transformed a quiet, provincial afternoon paper into a thriving scandal sheet. A tabloid career was launched.

  Murdoch built on his success in Adelaide over the course of the sixties. The Australian newspaper world was a vicious one, and Murdoch fought his way through one circulation war after another, routing numerous opponents who were much better armed. His burlesque formula—some sex, some crime, some news, and plenty of hysterical headlines—proved an invaluable weapon. Murdoch had an undeniable gift for the so-called screamer (SEX OUTRAGE IN SCHOOL LUNCHBREAK topped a Sydney Daily Mirror leader in which he reprinted confessional excerpts from the diary of a teenage girl).

  Australia is a big country, but it didn’t take Murdoch long to outgrow it. In 1968 he set his sights on London, where The News of the World, a rare holdover from the Victorian era, was on the block. Robert Maxwell, a British Member of Parliament, had fixed his eyes on the same prize, but he was no match for Murdoch, who loosed his accountants on Maxwell’s books. Once The News of the World was his, Murdoch wasted no time smutting it up. He swallowed The Sun next, leading his first issue, in 1969, with a story about a trainer who drugged his horses (HORSE DOPE SENSATION). On page three was another sort of sensation, a photo of a topless sexpot. Private Eye, the British satire magazine, dubbed him “Rupert ‘Thanks for the Mammaries’ Murdoch.” On Fleet Street he was known simply as the Aussie tit-and-bum king.

  In 1973, Murdoch landed on American soil, snapping up a pair of broadsheets, the San Antonio News and its sister morning paper, the Express. Murdochization promptly ensued. KILLER BEES HEAD NORTH was the headline atop a story about a type of bee with a potentially fatal sting that had been spotted minding its own business somewhere in South America. “The visual clamor is so great that on some days less than twenty lines of body type—‘news’—can be found above the page-one fold,” wrote Griffin Smith, Jr., in a 1976 article in Texas Monthly magazine. “Serious world, national, state or even local stories are—well, they aren’t.” Circulation soared. Soon after, Murdoch launched an American supermarket tabloid, the National Star.

  His next target was nothing less than the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America, one of the last living links to the country’s founding fathers, the New York Post. The Killer Bee really was heading north.

  The Post’s own founding father, Alexander Hamilton, had himself never been one to underestimate the dark side of human nature, or what he preferred to call its “impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice and of other irregular and violent propensities.” Hamilton met a tragic fate that would have made for great tabloid copy (HAMMY SHOT, KILLED IN DUEL). The Post’s first editor, William Coleman, hadn’t fared much better. He was bludgeoned to death from behind by a political opponent.

  The Post overcame this inauspicious start and had a fine run through the middle of the 1800s under the editorship of William Cullen Bryant, who commissioned Civil War dispatches from fellow poet Walt Whitman. Things went downhill from there, though, and by 1935 the paper was running a distant third behind New York’s other afternoon dailies, the Journal-American and the World-Telegram.

  A gentleman named George Backer believed he had what it took to save the Post. Everything except for the money, that is. That was where his wife, Dorothy, came in. Dorothy Backer (nee Schiff), a slender, elegant woman with sparkling blue eyes, long fingers, and an aquiline nose, was the granddaughter of Jacob Schiff, the most successful of the German Jewish bankers who’d made their fortunes in New York in the late 1800s.

  Sch
iff reluctantly agreed to bankroll the Post. Backer, her second husband, called Dolly (as she was universally known) a “wonderful sport” for doing so. Schiff didn’t intend to involve herself in the paper’s affairs. She was, as she put it, “just a woman who had gotten sucked into another sort of monstrous country house.” Backer assured her that the repairs wouldn’t take more than a couple hundred thousand dollars. Soon he was hitting her up for another hundred thousand every month.

  For a while Schiff was content to play the Upper East Side matron, limiting her role at the evening broadsheet to signing the checks as the paper limped along under her husband’s uninspired hand. The late thirties were a great time for newspapering: There was a civil war in Spain, the rising specter of fascism in Europe, and the matter of Stalin’s regime, which, depending on whom you believed, was ushering in either a new world order or another Dark Age. Across America, ideologies were crashing into one another like angry atoms. In New York the Little Flower, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was ardently pursuing his utopian vision for the city. Yet Backer’s Post was bland, soporific, “a kind of gentleman’s product,” as one of his editors derisively put it.

  Schiff grew tired of her husband and annoyed with his dilettantish approach to the paper. She wanted the Post to be less tweedy and even proposed moving to a tabloid format. Backer disagreed. “George resisted the idea of popularizing the paper, which he saw as vulgarization,” wrote Jeffrey Potter in his 1976 biography of Schiff (a line worth remembering, foreshadowing as it did the debate over Murdoch’s subsequent Murdochery). The paper’s features editor, Ted Thackrey, agreed with Schiff and told her so. When Backer became sick with tuberculosis, his wife started spending more time at the paper with Thackrey, a dashing man brimming with ideas. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he and Schiff worked side by side on the Post’s early edition. She was falling in love, with both Thackrey and the newspaper life.