“They’re gonna confront each other right there in the dugout!” Game of the Week broadcaster Joe Garagiola narrated as NBC’s cameras zoomed in. They were close enough now for America to read Martin’s lips: “I ought to kick your fucking ass.”
“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, old man,” Reggie spit back. “Don’t you ever dare show me up again, motherfucker.”
Martin started after Reggie. “There they go!” said Garagiola. Ray Negron quickly threw a towel over the lens of the dugout camera, only it was the camera in center field that was recording all the action.
Yankee Coach Elston Howard grabbed Martin and pinned him against a pole. “Billy wants a little piece of Reggie Jackson, and he’s being stopped by Elston Howard,” narrated Garagiola. But Martin broke free. “There goes Billy—he is hot!” Now another Yankees’ coach, Yogi Berra, grabbed him in a bear hug. (“I swear if Yogi hadn’t stopped me I would have beaten the hell out of him,” Martin said later. “Reggie’s big, but I wasn’t afraid of him.”)
Mike Torrez told Reggie in Spanish to go into the clubhouse and cool off. Outfielder Jimmy Wynn wrapped his arms around him to make sure he did. “You don’t like me—you’ve never liked me,” Reggie yelled back at Martin as he made his way down the ramp.
“I was livid,” Reggie recalled later, “but I wasn’t going to fight him in the dugout.”
He was going to fight him in the locker room. Reggie stripped down to his undershirt and uniform pants, leaving his spikes on so he wouldn’t lose his footing on Fenway’s clubhouse carpeting, and waited for the game to end.
Healy came running in from the bullpen to talk to Reggie a few minutes later. He wasn’t worried about protecting Reggie from Martin—“I can assure you that Billy didn’t want a piece of Reggie, not if nobody was around, anyway”—he was worried about protecting Reggie from himself. It took some convincing, but Healy eventually persuaded Reggie to shower and leave the ballpark before the game ended. Negron came down to the clubhouse to check on Reggie and to ask if he needed a cab back to the hotel. Reggie wanted to walk.
Red Sox vice president Gene Kirby escorted him out a side door, up a set of stairs through Gate E, and onto Lansdowne Street. Reggie slowly made his way back to the Sheraton in the steamy late-afternoon heat.
None of the Yankees were exactly surprised. “I knew it was just a matter of time before it happened,” recalls Ken Holtzman, “but I figured it would be in the clubhouse, not on national TV.”
In the locker room after the game, everyone refused to be quoted. Off the record, however, most of the players expressed sympathy for their manager.
The Sox went on to win 10–4. Martin fielded questions in Fenway’s cramped visiting manager’s office. “When a player shows up the team, I show up the player,” he said.
“Did you think twice about pulling Reggie in such a close game?”
“We won last year without him, didn’t we?”
“Did you consider a more conventional means of discipline?”
“How do you fine a superstar, take away his Rolls-Royce?”
“Do you think the incident was bad for baseball since the game was on national television?”
“I don’t care if it went over the whole world.”
Steinbrenner, who’d been watching the game on TV in Cleveland, wanted Martin to attend an emergency meeting with Reggie and the Yankees’ head of baseball operations, Gabe Paul, at the hotel that night. Instead, Martin headed for Daisy Buchanan’s, a bar on Newbury Street. Moss Klein, the Yankees’ reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, found him there chasing scotch with beer later that night. It took Klein a while to write his game story, which is to say that Martin was operating on a full tank. “When Billy was drunk, he would repeat things, and he’d adopt a Southern accent that got more and more pronounced the drunker he got,” Klein recalls. “That night he kept saying, ‘They’re gonna say this was my fault. They’re gonna say this was my fault.’”
Across town Reggie sat in his hotel room with a bottle of white wine. The phone rang. It was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. At the time the thirty-five-year-old reverend, looking for a new act to follow the civil rights protests of the sixties, was in the throes of an extended flirtation with the Republican Party. He and Reggie had spoken outside Comiskey Park earlier in the season. “He’d had a bad day at the plate, and I said, ‘Reggie, the difference between popping the ball up and popping it out of the park is an eyelash of concentration,’” Jackson recalls. “You need to drop some of your distractions and focus on the ball.” More than a few autograph seekers had confused the two men, whose similarities ran deeper than their imposing frames. If Reverend Jackson represented the modern-day civil rights leader, a man who used the media as his pulpit and lectured his advance men on the importance of “drama,” Reggie was the modern-day baseball star. Everything about him, from his violent uppercut swing to his bristling, emotional aura to his colorful flights of rhetoric, was overstated.
Reverend Jackson was spending much of the summer of ’77 away from his Chicago headquarters, touring the nation’s inner city schools on a tough love crusade, urging young black students to start taking responsibility for their plight. It was not too different from the advice he gave Reggie when the slugger was thinking about quitting. Jackson told Reggie that this was the real world, that even if he was overwhelmed by New York’s expectations, no one was going to feel sorry for him if he quit.
A little later, Newsday’s Steve Jacobson called from the lobby to ask if he could come up. His deadline was approaching, and he didn’t want to file his copy without a quote from Reggie. Jacobson generously brought Phil Pepe of the Daily News and Paul Montgomery of the Times along with him. When they entered the room, Reggie was bare-chested, his gold chains dangling from his neck. Sitting open in his lap was his big red Bible. Mike Torrez, whom Reggie had recruited to act as chaperon—“cut me off if I get carried away”—was also on hand.
The reverend’s words doubtless still fresh in his head, Reggie sounded uncharacteristically stoic. “I don’t know anything about managing, but I’ll take the heat for whatever the manager says,” Reggie said, looking up from his Bible. “Thank God I’m a Christian. Christ got my mind right. I won’t fight the man. I’ll do whatever they tell me.”
Before long, though, Reggie’s emotions had taken over. “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. I’m a good ballplayer and a good Christian and I’ve got an IQ of 160, but I’m a nigger and I won’t be subservient. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. They’ve never had a nigger like me before.” The exception was Steinbrenner: “I love that man. He treats me like somebody. The rest of them treat me like dirt.” Reggie dropped down to his knees and began gesticulating wildly, the paranoid preacher who spied the devil’s shadows all around him. “He was talking about how everybody wanted a piece of him and was coming after him and how nobody understood him,” Pepe recalls.
On and on he went as Torrez sat silent and the writers scribbled madly. “I’m going to play the best that I can for the rest of the year, help this team win, then get my ass out of here.”
21.
THE image that had been seared on the nation’s consciousness, courtesy of NBC Sports, was now plastered on sports pages across the country: the brawny black slugger, his glasses removed and set aside, standing chest to chest with his scrawny white manager. Much of America grinned vindictively. Los Angeles Times columnist Melvin Durslag wrote that he expected no less. This was, after all, a team that played in the South Bronx, “one of the meanest places in America.”
The New York beat writers steered clear of the race question. No one wanted to point an accusing finger at Martin, nor was anyone eager to contradict a black man’s charge of racism. “Is Jackson persecuted or does he just feel like he is?” wrote Pepe. “It probably doesn’t matter.”
Yet the race issue was not so easy to set aside, especially considering that this wasn’t Martin’s first
clash with an outspoken black player. When he arrived in Detroit in 1970, Martin had inherited the outfielder Elliott Maddox, a University of Michigan graduate and convert to Judaism whom Martin dumped as quickly as he could. After the trade Maddox heard from more than a few writers and exteammates that Martin’s nickname for him was the Downtown Nigger. (Newsday’s Jacobson recalls hearing Martin use the n-word in reference to Reggie as well.) Three years later Martin and Maddox were reunited in Texas. Once again Martin encouraged a trade, this time to the Yankees. As soon as he arrived in New York, Martin drove Maddox out yet again. “I never liked his make-up, his laziness, his show-offishness,” Martin told a Sport magazine reporter in 1975. “I think he wants to get hit so he can cry. What he needs is a good asskicking.”
“Billy was a racist and an anti-Semite,” Maddox says now. “He had a drinking problem, and he had psychological problems stemming from his childhood. Most people to this day will not come out and tell the truth about Billy, but I’m not gonna lie. The truth comes out about presidents after they die. Why shouldn’t the truth come out about him?”
A few years after that fateful day at Fenway, Elston Howard, the first black Yankee, offered his take on Reggie and Billy’s relationship to Maury Allen for his book Mr. October. “Billy was jealous of him, hated the attention Reggie got, couldn’t control him,” Howard told Allen. “The other part, the big part was that Reggie’s black. Billy hated him for that. I believe Billy is prejudiced against blacks, Jews, American Indians, Spanish, anything if you don’t bow to him. He can get along with blacks if they don’t challenge him. But Reggie challenged him in every way. Billy was always hostile to him. Did everything to make him unhappy. Went out of his way to see him fail.” (Howard had his own reasons to dislike Martin: In the spring of ’77 he’d reported to Fort Lauderdale to discover that the Yankees’ manager had given his job coaching first base, a position he’d held for nine years, to Bobby Cox.)
In the summer of ’77, though, very few voices were heard in defense of Reggie. For the most part, New York was proud of Martin—their working-class hero, their link to a better era—for standing up to the arrogant, overpaid slugger. And the truth was, the narcissistic, chronically melodramatic Reggie didn’t make for a very convincing victim. Most of Reggie’s black teammates were unsympathetic to his cries of racism. Hearing Reggie complain in a hotel bar one night, an exasperated Chris Chambliss, the understated son of a navy chaplain, exploded. “Reggie, you know what you’d be if you were white? Just another damn white boy,” he said. “Be glad you’re black and getting all of the publicity you do, getting away with all of the shit you do.”
Even the city’s black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, sided with Martin. Early in the season Reggie had told a reporter for the weekly, America’s largest black newspaper, that he was going to do everything he could to improve Harlem. In the wake of the Fenway series, the Amsterdam News decided it was time for a follow-up. “He says he wants to rebuild the rundown Harlem he’s seen since he hit town at the start of the season in April,” the paper reported on its front page. “But he’s never taken the time to learn some of the problems of the community as he drives up Madison Ave. from his $1500 per month apartment at 80th Street and Fifth Ave. in his $27,500 foreign made car, across the 138th St. bridge and into Yankee Stadium where he earns $400,000 per year as a diamond super star.” Unkinder still was this quote from a “well-known” psychiatrist: “He [Reggie] came into town thinking that his reputation was all he needed to upset it, but this is New York, New York where many come but few conquer.” And then, for good measure: “He lacks the inner qualities and charisma of a Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis or Ray Robinson who were ‘people’s heroes.’”
Reggie should have been accustomed to this sort of treatment. Throughout his career it had often been other blacks, not whites, who’d made him aware of the color of his skin: teammates like Bill North in Oakland, old greats like Willie Mays, Billy Williams, and Ernie Banks, even his father, who’d never gotten a shot at the big leagues because of racism. “Remember you’re still a colored boy,” his old man would tell him when he complained about the way he was being treated. “Don’t forget that. You have to act a certain way. You have to be a certain way.” Reggie didn’t blame his father for this, just as he didn’t blame the elderly black woman who’d gotten angry at him one afternoon for cutting short an autograph-signing session. (“We helped make you. You owe black people something,” she told him. “It’s her generation,” Reggie reflected afterward. “It’s the only thing she knows.”)
The dugout incident at Fenway proved to be something of a turning point for Reggie. Over the years he came to sound very different on the subject of race, speaking eloquently about how his own coming of age had traced the arc of the postwar emergence of his race: “I was colored until I was 14, a Negro until I was 21, and a black man ever since.” He spoke out, forcefully and persuasively, against baseball’s failure to integrate at the executive and managerial level. And in his inimitable way, Reggie embellished his story, writing in his autobiography and in a first-person article published by Sports Illustrated in 1987 that his Little League coach had benched him in a state tournament to avoid any racial trouble with his team’s opponents from Florida and claiming that when he was injured playing minor-league ball, a hospital in Lewiston, Idaho, refused to admit him. (Score sheets from the state tournament indicate that Reggie did play; a subsequent Associated Press story revealed that Reggie had been admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Lewiston.)
22.
THE day after the dugout debacle, Billy Martin arrived at Fenway Park, his eyelids at half-mast, changed out of his wrinkled tan suit, and stalked silently into the outfield to shag flies during batting practice. It was the only way to avoid the nagging reporters and clear the thick fog inside his hungover head.
Even before he’d had to be restrained from attacking his right fielder on national television, Martin was having problems. His heavily favored team was struggling to stay in the pennant race. Nearly all his starting pitchers were getting lit up, and just about every southpaw in the league was shutting down his lefty-heavy lineup.
Since the start of the season Steinbrenner had been calling him on a nearly daily basis to share his unsolicited opinion that Reggie Jackson should be batting cleanup, which of course only strengthened Martin’s resolve to hit him fifth or sixth. Alas, a manager can control his lineup, but not his roster. Steinbrenner went out and bought a new shortstop, Bucky Dent, despite Martin’s devotion to his old one, Fred Stanley. He had also traded one of Martin’s favorite pitchers, Dock Ellis, and refused to fill an open slot on the roster with Elrod Hendricks, the third-string catcher for whom Martin had been furiously lobbying. When Martin complained that not having Hendricks had cost the team a game—lousy pitching and execrable fielding were more likely culprits—Steinbrenner fined him twenty-five hundred dollars.
There was no reason to expect Martin was going to survive the Fenway crisis. He had met with Reggie and Gabe Paul, the unofficial liaison between Steinbrenner and Martin, first thing in the morning and it had not gone well. Martin’s first mistake was referring to Reggie as “boy,” which an even more sensitive than usual Reggie interpreted as a racial slur. Martin insisted that it was just an expression, but Reggie was not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the meeting Jackson refused to shake his manager’s hand.
Reached in Cleveland for comment on Saturday’s events, Steinbrenner had sided with his high-paid slugger, telling a Boston Globe reporter that it didn’t look to him as if Reggie had failed to hustle. What it did look like, he added pointedly, was that his ball club was “out of control.”
The game got under way, and the Red Sox pounded the Yankees for the third straight day, sweeping the series and extending their lead over the American League’s defending champions to two and a half games. Adding to the humiliation, the Sox closed their final frame of the weekend with three of the longest home runs in the history o
f their ballpark, including Jim Rice’s five-hundred-foot bomb to dead center. Even little Denny Doyle, who hadn’t homered since 1975, went deep.
Back in the lineup, Reggie stung a couple of line drives but went hitless on the day and looked wobblier than ever in Fenway’s shadowy outfield. He was lucky to pick up only one error for overthrowing a cutoff man. Asked after the game if he thought all his troubles with Martin could blow over, he answered, “No way.” On the plane to Detroit that night, he stewed in silence.
Early the next morning a newswire reported that Martin was going to be fired and replaced by one of his coaches, Yogi Berra. As word spread through New York, angry fans flooded the stadium and local radio and TV stations with calls. The phone in Martin’s hotel room was vibrating nonstop with inquiries from reporters, but Martin was out. His old friend Phil Rizzuto had spirited him away for a round of golf. Rizzuto tried vainly to assure Martin that the story was wrong, that Steinbrenner was too smart a businessman to fire someone so popular with the fans.
Rizzuto was wrong. Steinbrenner landed in Detroit in the early afternoon with every intention of getting rid of his manager. Gabe Paul, Steinbrenner’s long-suffering lieutenant, made the case for why this was the wrong way to go: Fire Martin, and it will look as if Reggie runs the team. The new manager will have lost all his authority before he even fills out his first lineup card.
For his part, Reggie was letting reporters know that he didn’t want Martin to be fired either, at least not on his account. He figured that he had enough troubles without being blamed for costing the manager his job.
A few hours later Martin reported to the ballpark, changed into his road grays, and sat quietly on the bench during batting practice. The newsmen circled warily. Martin, still unsure of his fate, spoke softly and said little as Tiger Stadium, a tangle of girders scabrous with rust that had opened for business the same week the Titanic went under, slowly filled. Mark Fidrych, the Tigers’ flamboyant ace, was slated to pitch. With the Yankees in town, all 47,855 seats had been sold. The rest of America would be watching too, via ABC’s Monday Night Baseball.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 16