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

by Jonathan Mahler

  “Thank you, God,” was all Ward could think as he scribbled furiously.

  Jackson finally came up for air. “Are you sure you want all of this printed?” Ward asked.

  “Yes,” Reggie said, smacking his hand on the bar for emphasis. “I want to see that in print.”

  It was the sort of scene that magazine writers fantasize about, and because Ward didn’t have to cover the ball club day in and day out, he didn’t have to worry about alienating anyone. He flew back up to New York and emptied his notepad. He added some memorable flourishes of his own—“God, he looks like some big baseball Othello as he smiles at the gaggle of reporters who rush toward him, their microphones thrust out”—and filed the story to Sport. The whole office could hear his editor, Barry Stainback, howling as he made his first pass through Ward’s copy. Stainback was soon walking up and down the halls, his face crinkled up into a big smile, as he read sections aloud to the staff.

  Sport scheduled the story—REGGIE JACKSON IN NO-MAN’S LAND—for its June issue. Schaap messengered the galleys over to Sy Presten, an old-fashioned publicist who had been in the game long enough to have peppered the Journal-American’s gossip maven Dorothy Kilgallen with items about the Copa. The “straw that stirs the drink” quote was buried inside the piece. Presten broke it out in the headline of his press release, which he promptly sent to every sports desk in town. Within hours Sport’s phone lines were lighting up like a pinball machine.

  Several years later, when Reggie published his autobiography—in vintage fashion, he dedicated the book to his biggest fan, God—he claimed that the whole conversation at the Banana Boat had been off the record, and that he had been misquoted to boot. Most sports heroes set out to “write” their life stories with mythmaking on their minds. The ’77 Yankees were more concerned with settling scores, and no one had more scores to settle than Reggie. (He settled fewer than his publisher was expecting. The book, for which Reggie was paid a then-whopping three hundred thousand dollars, was a best seller but still fell far short of expectations.)

  Reggie claimed that he had asked Ward if his story was going to be positive and that Ward had assured him that it was. “Bullshit,” says Ward. “I told him that I was going to set the record straight. He interpreted that as yes because he’s so egocentric.”

  “All in all,” Reggie wrote, “it was the worst screwing I ever got from the press. And I’ve had a few in my day.”

  15.

  THE first pitch was still hours away but the T-shirts were already on sale outside the stadium: “Boston Sux” and “Fisk Eats Rice,” as in Jim Rice, the Red Sox outfielder.

  Such was the state of the rivalry, reborn anew for every generation, between the Yanks and the Sox, on the afternoon of May 23, 1977. If a pair of outfielders, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, had personified the battle in the 1940s and 1950s, the teams’ warring catchers did that day: the tall, even-tempered, urbane Carlton Fisk and the stumpy, grumpy, caustic Thurman Munson. Boston versus New York in a nutshell.

  Fisk, who’d grown up in small-town New England, couldn’t stand playing in New York. “There are more people on that block than there are in Charlestown—and more rats and pollution on that block than in the whole state of New Hampshire,” he told one of the Boston reporters as the Red Sox team bus rumbled through Harlem on the way to the Bronx. His hatred for New York was matched only . by that of his battery mate, Bill Lee, who was slated to open the series. The prior season Lee had separated his shoulder in the bench-clearing melee that followed a collision at home plate. “George Steinbrenner’s Nazis,” as he called the Yankees, had caused him to miss almost all of ’76, and he was just now starting to regain his arm strength.

  Reggie, who was finally emerging from a one-for-twenty-six drought featuring ten strikeouts, had just started dressing when Munson padded by on his way to the trainer’s table. There was a rolled-up copy of the new issue of Sport sticking out of the back pocket of his baseball pants. A few minutes later Munson sent the assistant trainer into the clubhouse to fetch Fran Healy, the Yankees’ backup catcher and Reggie’s only friend on the team.

  At the age of thirty, Fran Healy was reaching the end of a brief and undistinguished career, a baseball lifetime spent warming pitchers and benches. In a year’s time he’d be on the other side of the microphone, hustling down to the locker room after the game to interview his ex–Yankee teammates for WPIX.

  The six-foot-six-inch Healy, who had a graduate degree in American studies, had taken an instant liking to Reggie during their first meeting a few years earlier. At the time Reggie was just barely holding off Healy’s Kansas City teammate John Mayberry for the American League home run title. “I think he’s gonna catch you,” Healy told Reggie. “The only way he’s gonna catch me is if he plays winter ball,” Reggie replied.

  In ’77, Healy didn’t bother renting a place in New York. If he didn’t want to make the three-hour drive home to Massachusetts after a game, he spent the night at Reggie’s. Now Healy walked into the training room to find Munson jabbing one of his bent-up fingers at the magazine.

  “Have you read this?” Munson asked, incredulously.

  “No,” said Healy.

  “He ripped me here, he ripped me there …” Munson read a few choice paragraphs out loud.

  Healy listened quietly until Munson stopped.

  “Gee, Thurm,” Healy finally ventured, breaking the awkward silence, “maybe it was taken out of context.”

  “For four fucking pages?”

  Batting practice followed an hour or so later. Reggie entered the cage last, shooing away a photographer as he did. Digging in, he noticed his teammates clearing out from behind the cage, leaving him to take his licks alone in the fading sunlight. It was a mild spring evening and a light breeze was blowing as Reggie silently drove one ball after another toward the right field bleachers.

  Martin bumped Reggie down to sixth in the lineup that night. Reggie responded with a run-scoring line drive double on his first trip to the plate. Through six innings, it remained the only Yankee run.

  Lee hadn’t looked this sharp since separating his shoulder, and the Sox were clinging to a 2-1 lead when Reggie came up in the bottom half of the seventh. Lee left a sinker over the outer half of the plate, and Reggie flattened it, knotting the game at two.

  Like a bouncer making sure that an ejected drunk had no designs on reentry, Reggie watched the ball complete its flight from the batter’s box, then circled the bases briskly. By the time he reached home, he had worked up a head of self-righteous steam. Reggie stepped on the plate and headed straight for the water cooler on the first base side of the dugout, ignoring his teammates and manager, who had gathered at home plate for the requisite posthomer handshakes. “They didn’t want me around? I was an outcast?” Reggie reflected later. “Fine, I at least wanted them all to know that I didn’t have to have a picture drawn for me anymore.”

  If only he could have left it at that. In the top half of the next inning, Reggie overran a ball down the right field line, turning a single into a double. The run came around to score, and the Red Sox went on to win.

  After the game Martin sat in an undershirt and pinstriped baseball pants fielding questions about the ten-week-old Sport interview. “Leadership is done by example, not by mouth,” he told the pack of reporters assembled in his blue cinder-block-wall office. As for the snub, he suggested they speak to Jackson. Martin took a long pull on his Miller Lite before finishing the thought. “And while you’re at it,” he added, “ask him about the ball that got away from him in the right field corner to start the eighth. He probably forgets about those things.”

  The reporters found Reggie hunched silently over the sandwich table, picking at the potato salad. “Hey, Reg, why didn’t you take the usual route back into the dugout, where your teammates were waiting to congratulate you?”

  “I had a bad hand,” Reggie said. That was about all he said, not counting the tongue flaying he gave Henry Hecht, whose paper, the
Post, had just published Reggie’s home address on Page Six.

  The mob migrated instinctively to Munson’s locker for a response. The Yankees’ catcher initially refused to speak. Then the writers repeated Reggie’s quote about his hand. “He said that?” Munson gasped. “Well, how about this for a quote: ‘He’s a fucking liar.’” And the article in Sport? “For a man to think Thurman Munson is jealous of anybody in this world he has to be ignorant or an imbecile. I’ll kiss your butt if the New York fans think anybody likes to play baseball more than I do.”

  At the ballpark the following night, the city made its bias clear. The day’s papers had been filled with stories about Reggie belittling and then snubbing the beloved Munson. Now, as Munson approached the batter’s box working a big wad of chaw, the crowd roared. Reggie strode toward the plate a few minutes later and was jeered. Their respective performances conveniently conformed to the consensus in the seats. Reggie went hitless; Munson drove home the winning run in the seventh. “That’s leadership,” concluded Dave Anderson in the next day’s Times.

  Reggie continued playing the silent star after the game, wordlessly rubbing a few dollops of Musk lotion into his brown skin. He pretended not to have heard the first couple of questions thrown at him. Then he decided to answer a few in Spanish. (“I think he just told us that the pen of his aunt was on the table of his uncle,” joked one reporter.)

  Later Healy tried to make peace, remarking to Munson that Reggie’s comments in Sport had been off the record. “So what?” Munson snarled. “He still said them, didn’t he?”

  The next time he crossed home plate, Munson ignored Reggie’s outstretched hand in the on deck circle. Reggie tried to shrug the incident off—“I don’t think he saw it,” he ventured unconvincingly—but the rising sense of rage and humiliation was taking its toll. In the clubhouse his teammates accidentally kicked his equipment bag. Two Yankees asked to have their lockers moved farther away from his. One afternoon Reggie found a note reading “Suck My Ass” taped to the hanger that held his freshly pressed uniform. Even the soft-spoken Willie Randolph stared blankly into his locker when Reggie asked him several times what time they were supposed to report for batting practice.

  Reggie asked Martin if he could call a team meeting to apologize. Martin refused, telling Reggie that if wanted to say he was sorry to his teammates, he should do so individually. Then Martin told the writers that Reggie had made the clubhouse rounds to ask forgiveness. To Newsday’s Steve Jacobson, it didn’t sound like the kind of thing Reggie would do, so he asked around. Jacobson’s hunch was correct: There had been no apologies.

  Reggie’s teammates continued to torment him. “Reggie fuckin’ Manuel Jackson,” Mickey Rivers said in early June, rising from his seat in the back of the team bus. “You got a white man’s first name, a Spanish man’s second name, and a black man’s last name. No wonder you’re all fucked up, man. You don’t know what the fuck you are.” For Reggie, the fact that Rivers had unintentionally mangled his middle name—confusing it with Billy Martin’s—didn’t lessen the sting any.

  A few days later in Milwaukee, as the Yankees’ bus made its way toward County Stadium, Reggie tried to even the score. “There goes Rivers in five years,” he said, pointing out the window at the driver of a passing truck.

  “Yeah,” Rivers replied, “but at least I’ll be happy driving a truck.”

  “Listen to me,” scoffed Reggie. “Arguing with a guy who can’t read and write.”

  “Better stop fuckin’ readin’ and writin’ and start fuckin’ hittin’,” said Rivers.

  Often Reggie found himself sitting next to the team’s clubhouse attendant, a nineteen-year-old ex–juvenile delinquent named Ray Negron. Over the course of the season, Negron became Reggie’s unofficial aide-de-camp, signing his name on baseballs, answering his fan mail, carting his gear to photo shoots.

  Half Puerto Rican and half Cuban, Negron had come to the attention of George Steinbrenner four years earlier, when the Yankees’ owner caught him and a few of his cousins spraying graffiti on the side of the stadium. The cousins got away, but Steinbrenner grabbed Negron by the collar and threatened to turn him over to the police. In tears, Negron had pleaded with Steinbrenner to let him go. Instead, the Yankees’ owner put him to work as a batboy and general clubhouse grunt.

  When he went to work for the Yankees in 1973, Negron was playing shortstop on his high school team and in a few city leagues. He had soft hands and a strong arm—not to mention the excellent tutoring that was a perk of his new job—and in 1975 the Pittsburgh Pirates signed him up, expecting big things. Negron reported to the Pirates’ training camp in Bradenton, Florida, in the spring of 1976. He had no problem fielding his position, but he couldn’t touch big-league pitching. He was released within a matter of weeks. He packed up and flew home to his mom’s apartment in Queens, too humiliated to tell anyone he was back.

  Word eventually got out, and Billy Martin called Negron to tell him to stop being such a crybaby and come out to the ballpark. Negron showed up, and Martin ordered him to pitch batting practice. Negron plunked the first batter he faced. When he nearly hit the second one, he got a bat thrown at him.

  The next day Martin called Negron into his office. Negron was sure he was about to get fired. Martin pointed at some unopened cardboard boxes. “There’s some video equipment in there, figure out how to use it,” Martin told him. Negron couldn’t hide his surprise. “I gotta think of something for you to do,” Martin continued, “because you sure as fuck can’t throw BP.”

  Negron had met Reggie once before he became a Yankee. Jackson was playing for Oakland at the time, and Negron went into the visitors’ clubhouse to introduce himself. “Hi Reggie, I’m Ray Negron, the bat boy,” Negron said. “Yeah, go get me some sanis, kid,” Reggie replied.

  Over the course of the ‘77 season, though, Reggie befriended Negron, and the two remained close for the duration of Jackson’s tenure with the Yankees. Negron’s favorite memories begin in 1978, after Reggie Jackson had won over New York. In Negron’s recollection, being with Reggie then was like entering into a fairy tale. “Reggie was the king of the city, and I was the prince because I was his sidekick,” he says. “Whenever we would walk out of his building, I could almost hear the whole fucking city saying, ‘Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!’ I would look at him sometimes, and I could almost think that he heard it too.”

  Reggie and Negron worked out at a gym near Reggie’s apartment—“spot me, motherfucker,” Reggie would command when he lowered himself onto the bench—and ran together in Central Park. Jogging one winter afternoon in the park, they came across a small school bus stuck in the snow. Reggie told all the kids to get off, then went around to the back and started pushing until the bus moved. “The kids are going crazy,” Negron says, “and Reggie tips his hat to the bus driver and runs off.”

  16.

  To the experts who study the psychology of sports in America, the Tom Seaver trade is much more than just a loss by the New York Mets. These sports psychologists view the trade as a serious loss to New York City …

  EDWARD EDELSON, DAILY NEWS, JUNE 19, 1977

  ON the morning of June 16, 1977, the city woke up to the news that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.

  A wholesome, handsome, smooth-skinned former marine and current spokesman for Sears, Roebuck & Company, Tom Seaver had never enjoyed Reggie Jackson’s national profile—clean-cut was a tough sell in the 1970s—but in New York anyway, he was a god. How could it be otherwise? After all, he had arrived in Queens in 1967 and in two years almost single-handedly transformed the hapless Mets from a comedy troupe into World Series champions.

  Sputtering, mutinous fans promptly lit up the switchboard at Shea Stadium. “Mets fan reaction was so outraged,” Paul Good wrote a few months later in Sport magazine, “that one might have imagined that Washington had traded Jimmy Carter for Idi Amin, even up.” The Mets were playing at home that night, and security forces were beefed up for the g
ame. Fans opted for an unofficial boycott instead; fewer than nine thousand turned out. Those who did show up came bearing Reds’ banners, and SEAVER LIVES and WHERE IS TOM? signs. (The protests continued through the summer, and the Mets ended up drawing fewer fans than they had since leaving the old Polo Grounds in 1963.)

  The loss of Seaver felt like the loss of hope, not for the Mets, who already were hopeless, but for the city itself. It was more than the man; it was the moment the man represented, that improbable pennant run during the glorious summer of 1969, when John Lindsay owned New York and the city still felt full of possibility. “For the years he [Seaver] worked among us, he was an ornament of New York,” Pete Hamill wrote on June 17 in the Daily News. “He leaves behind a diminished city. This is not simply a sports story. It is a New York story … A city struggling for survival can’t lose a single hero.”

  In a sense New York had lost two heroes, for there was a villain in the Tom Seaver story: the city’s preeminent baseball writer, Dick Young. For more than three decades Young had been manning the press box for America’s largest daily newspaper, the multimillion circulation Daily News. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Young covered the Dodgers, untold numbers of Brooklyn boys had teethed on his prose. He wrote audaciously, breezily, irreverently, and often badly, abusing puns, torturing metaphors, surrendering to hyperbole. But that hardly mattered. His copy had a street-wise, smart-ass New York feel to it. (Young on the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn: “Preliminary diagnosis indicates that the cause of death was an acute case of greed, followed by severe political implications.”) A few years after the Dodgers decamped, he moved over to the Mets’ beat, hyping these lovable losers as New York’s new people’s team, delighting in their comic failures much as he had reveled in Brooklyn’s tragic ones. Young was a social progressive too, one of the first men to knit the broader story of race into his sports coverage. In 1949, when Jackie Robinson won the Most Valuable Player award despite being unable to find lodging in numerous cities, Young wrote that he had “led the league in everything except hotel reservations.”