Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  “I had walked out about twenty minutes to seven to get into the truck,” Guidry said. “There was a young lady a couple cars down from me. Her hood was up, [and] she was trying to start her car. It wouldn’t start, so I asked her if I could give her a hand, see what it was. I got out my jumper cables, started my car, and got her going.”

  But now Guidry was ten minutes behind schedule and had two stop signs and a long red light to get through. He arrived at 7:02, two minutes late. As he did every morning, he rolled the truck to a stop right in front of the hotel, reached over and opened the door. Berra looked at him unhappily. “Where the hell you been?” he said.

  “Yogi, you got grandchildren, right?” Guidry said.

  Berra nodded.

  “You got girl grandchildren?”

  Berra nodded.

  “Well, when I got to the truck, there was this young girl. She left her lights on, her battery was dead, and I had to jump-start her car,” Guidry said. “You’re gonna be mad at me because I was helping her? She could have been your granddaughter, for Chrissakes.”

  Guidry couldn’t figure out whether Berra’s grumpiness about him being two minutes late was more exasperating or comical. Finally he blurted out, “Aw, just get your ass into the truck so we can go.”

  “OK, OK,” Berra said, obediently climbing aboard with a shit-eating grin. Guidry looked at him and instantly realized that Berra actually liked being yelled at. Demanding as he could obviously be, he didn’t want to be treated like some fragile family heirloom or icon.

  “He doesn’t want to be treated like royalty,” Guidry said. “He wants to be picked on. So while I respected him and I wanted to do everything that I could for him, I decided that I wasn’t going to let him get away with murder. I started to tease him all the time. I’d say, ‘Look, the whole freaking world doesn’t revolve around you. Son of a bitch, we got things we got to do.’”

  That they did. And the ride was just beginning.

  6. Shared Values

  It made perfect sense to Ron Guidry that wherever he went with Yogi Berra in Tampa, Berra had admirers who seldom were shy about walking right up and saying, “Hello, how ya doing, would you mind signing this for my ailing brother in Topeka?” About town, Berra was more than a Hall of Fame catcher, a ten-time World Series winner, and an immortal Yankee. He was akin to a Disney character greeting visitors at the gates of his portable Magic Kingdom. Who, after all, would think twice about approaching a diminutive and elderly gentleman named Yogi?

  But what did amaze Guidry was how Berra could be so remarkably unfazed by the fuss and equally unassuming about the need for it in the first place. On many a night out, dinner inevitably turned into a quasi–autograph session, with Guidry coming to the conclusion that Berra was “the most beloved man in America,” and maybe the most tolerant.

  Only once could he recall Berra losing patience with well-wishers, and that was at the Bonefish Grill on the bawdy commercial strip known as Dale Mabry Highway, a couple of miles from downtown Tampa.

  “We were there for maybe the third or fourth time, and all of a sudden there was a huge crowd around the table,” Guidry said. “He was besieged when he sat down to eat, and that he didn’t like.”

  Berra didn’t complain, though. He scrunched up his face just enough to let Guidry know that he felt as if the attention was an intrusion on their time together, their chance to live and breathe baseball, which was the whole point of spring training to begin with.

  By then, Berra and Guidry had established an easy rapport and a five-restaurant rotation—the Bahama Breeze, the Rusty Pelican, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse, Lee Roy Selmon’s, and the Bonefish. After several visits, when they called ahead for reservations, a staff member would greet them at the door and try to provide a table with the most privacy.

  But after the incident at the Bonefish Grill, Berra wasn’t keen on going back there. He liked the food, though, so when Tino Martinez mentioned another Bonefish Grill on Henderson Boulevard, approximately the same distance from the hotel, Berra said, “Good, we can go there.” Replacing one franchise location in rotation with another was his idea of radical change.

  Occasionally, he and Guidry brought along an invited guest—Don Zimmer, Steve Donohue, Goose Gossage, Stump Merrill, a visiting wife or child. The younger of Guidry’s two daughters, Danielle, would visit for a few days most springs, and it didn’t take long for her to develop a feisty rapport with Berra that tickled her father no end.

  For Guidry, there also had to be time off for good behavior. He just couldn’t eat out every night, sometimes aching for a burger and a beer in his apartment. “Stay in your damn room tonight; have a ham sandwich,” he would say to Berra.

  To which Yogi would respond, “OK, Gator. Where we goin’ tomorrow?”

  Guidry would laugh, flattered that Berra never took his mock repudiation personally or seriously.

  If he had initially invited Berra to dinner out of a sense of obligation, noting that Yogi didn’t have the social options he once had and especially without Carmen in town, Guidry was quick to add that never for a second did he consider the gesture charity or a chore. His respect for Berra and for what he meant to baseball and the Yankees was part of his childhood romance with the game, having grown up a fan of Berra’s team.

  It wasn’t long before Guidry began looking forward to their nights out and realizing that if anyone was the beneficiary of the relationship, it was him. “I had this man who’s a damn baseball history book, the perfect encyclopedia, sitting across the table from me, a guy who has seen everything,” Guidry said.

  The challenge was how to pry it open. Berra was not a loquacious man, speaking with the terseness of a text message before there was such a thing. As his son Dale liked to say, “He’s the most quoted man in the world, and he never says anything.”

  But Guidry believed it wasn’t how much Berra had to say; it was what he had to say and how much his companion wanted to hear it. “It was like when I played, you have to ask him things,” Guidry said. “Just because he’s old, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t just come out with it. You have to reach out and touch him, and then you’ll be surprised by what happens. So we’re sitting at the table and it’s, ‘Hey, tell me about the time you did this and that, tell me about this guy or that guy.’”

  Tell me about Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and the famous home run chase of 1961.

  “I always wanted to know about Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, because at that time, that’s the early sixties, I’m a teenager, I’m pretty much deep into everything, and not only am I playing, but I understand more about it,” Guidry said. “And I understand about all those guys that were playing. Years later, when I got to the Yankees, I’d see them all at an old-timers’ game, but I didn’t bother them too much, asking about those things you’d really want to know. That wasn’t my thing.”

  He was, in other words, like any other young man who comes face-to-face with his boyhood idols. “It took me a whole bunch of years before I even shook Maris’s hand,” he said. “I was so afraid to talk. He was the only guy I wanted to say hello to that I never had the courage to, because, you know, with all the past things I had heard, how private a man he was.”

  Ever the social conduit, Mantle intervened in the clubhouse early one Old-Timers’ Day. He and Ford were chatting, while Maris sat by himself two or three dressing stalls away. Guidry was sitting nearby.

  “Ron,” Mantle said, “have you met Roger?”

  “No, but I’d like to,” Guidry said.

  Mantle called out to Maris, “Hey, Rog, you ever meet Guidry here?”

  Maris looked up with a welcoming smile. “No, I’ve been dying to, though,” he said.

  Guidry stood up, shook Maris’s hand, and berated himself for waiting so long. He never saw Maris at an Old-Timers’ Day again. Maris died the next year, 1985, at the age of fifty-one.

  “You say to yourself, ‘You’re such an idiot, you could’ve been
talking to this man for years and years, and now all of a sudden . . .’”

  Guidry had always wondered about the relationship between Mantle and Maris. He had heard conflicting stories about when they went head-to-head for the home run record, chasing Babe Ruth. Was it true that they were close enough friends that Mantle actually moved into Maris’s apartment in Queens? He asked Berra how two so very different men could have lived together under such daily pressure.

  “Nah, it wasn’t like that,” Berra said. “Mickey would go over and stay with Roger for a couple of days, and Roger would cook, Mickey would eat. Roger was just trying to get Mickey to stay in a little more because of what he meant to the club going down the stretch and in the World Series. They had their moments, but it wasn’t like he moved in.”

  Guidry asked about the toll the pursuit took on Maris—the overwhelming sentiment for Mantle, the resentment of Maris for having the audacity to try to beat Babe Ruth’s record.

  “Oh, yeah, it was tough on Roger,” Berra said, describing the late-season game in Baltimore when the Orioles brought in the masterful knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm just to keep Maris from hitting his sixtieth home run in the Yankees’ 154th game, the same point in the season when Ruth had hit his.

  “We were all mad,” Berra said. “You know, the wind was blowing in, and they bring in a knuckleballer to make sure he didn’t get it. We were all hollerin’ over at them about that.”

  Berra told Guidry that what happened with Maris—the abuse he took, mainly from the defenders of Ruth, reporters and fans, and even the commissioner—was one of the saddest episodes he had seen in the game.

  “He actually did lose his hair, and Roger was never the same after that,” Berra said. In retrospect, Guidry felt better about not having brought the subject up with Maris, but his compassion for the man grew exponentially.

  A good deal of what Berra told Guidry was in the history books, or probably in a book that Berra himself had published. But hearing it over dinner was different. It was intimate, special, reassuring to know that the memories were safe and secure inside Berra’s head.

  It was a delight for Guidry to listen to Berra talk about catching the old Yankees pitchers, most of all Ford. One night Berra recounted a game against the White Sox in which the first four batters reached base on four pitches—single, hit by pitch, double, and home run. On his way to the mound, manager Casey Stengel met Berra halfway and asked how Ford’s stuff looked. “How the hell would I know?” Berra said. “I haven’t caught one yet.”

  Guidry laughed and thought, Some things in baseball never do change. Berra’s story reminded him of the time he surrendered three solid hits to the first three batters in the first inning. When he turned around, he found Thurman Munson right in his face. “Do you want me to stop telling ’em what’s coming?” Munson asked. Like Berra with Vic Raschi, Munson must have known that Guidry pitched better when riled. He struck out the next three hitters.

  The more he and Berra went out, the more fascinated Guidry became with the history of all things Yogi and Yankees, and that was why he seldom talked about himself. “I don’t see the logic in that, because my stuff is incomparable to his,” he said. “That’s just how I feel.” Besides, Guidry figured, what could he possibly tell Berra about his own career that Berra hadn’t already seen for himself?

  On top of that, the more questions he asked, the brighter the twinkle in Berra’s eyes got. “As much as we talked about baseball, he really perked up when he talked about his grandchildren—so I would ask him if he had a favorite,” Guidry said.

  “Nah, they’re all good kids,” Berra would say.

  “And then he liked talking about being a kid himself in St. Louis, playing make-believe games, coming from a big Italian family, talking about himself in another time, which maybe he doesn’t get to do too much,” Guidry said. “You know how that gets—someone gets a little older, and everyone is too busy to listen.”

  That was the beauty of spring training for Guidry, who preferred a slower pace—his life in Louisiana versus the rat race of New York. His time in Tampa felt unhurried: sunny days around the Yankees’ complex, maybe a couple of hours on the golf course, a good meal out with a great man.

  For Berra, the feeling was mutual. What could be better than a shot of Ketel One to take the edge off things, a look at the menu, and then dinner with the most attentive battery mate he could possibly have for a metaphorical game of pitch and catch?

  Like Berra, Guidry is not a boastful man, but he is a proud man, well versed in heritage and history. His family roots can be traced to French settlers in Nova Scotia known as Acadians, who were persecuted by the British. Refusing to renounce their Catholicism, the Acadians staged years-long protests that eventually were met with brutal repression. In the mid-eighteenth century, they were violently driven from the island.

  Those who survived the grueling move south found refuge deep in the heart of Louisiana. Out of swampland, the Acadians—shortened to “Cajuns”—built a spirited homeland with their unique culture and cuisine. They became known for their earthiness and commitment to family and were easily identified by their French traditions and heavily accented speech.

  Hence, Guidry could relate to Berra when he spoke of how his immigrant parents, Pietro and Paulina, had settled in the tight-knit St. Louis neighborhood of narrow row houses called the Hill—or Dago Hill, by the ignorant and intolerant. He instantly admired the long-deceased Pietro Berra, who had left the poor tenant farms of northern Italy for the promise of America and a grueling but steady factory job producing bricks and other clay products.

  Guidry’s father, Roland, was also a laborer, on freight trains making their way across the bayous. Later he became a conductor on the Amtrak line from Lafayette to Houston. As a boy, Guidry loved trains, and now he was riveted by Berra’s rhapsodizing about his days riding the rails early in his career with the Yankees. Those teams, he insisted, were all the closer for the endless hours they spent playing cards and sharing meals and just about everything else that fraternal young men have in common.

  “We were like a family, real close-knit, always pulling for each other, always looking out for one another—on and off the field,” Berra said. “Everybody got along; everybody fit in.”

  Guidry also believed in the bonding power of trains, having experienced it with his father. Even after he had achieved full-blown stardom with the Yankees, he would make the run with Roland—who long answered to the nickname “Rags”—during the off-season as a way of making up for lost time. After months in the air, he enjoyed the relaxed simplicity, the earthbound views. He was proud of his father’s work, as was Berra, who learned about discipline and punctuality in the perfunctory act of providing a cold beer for Pietro when he got home from work.

  The youngest of four Berra boys, Lawrence had to drop whatever he was doing—including the bat if he was playing ball in the neighborhood—when he heard the factory whistle at 4:30 P.M. The beer glass had to be on the kitchen table before his father stepped into the house. There was no excuse for being late.

  Pietro Berra was Old World all the way, demanding that his sons learn a trade, find a job, and leave children’s games like baseball behind. Yogi’s brothers all played ball recreationally, and one in particular—Tony, known as “Lefty”—was good enough to earn an invitation to try out with the Cleveland Indians, if only his father had allowed it.

  There was a time in Guidry’s young life when it looked as if he, too, would be forbidden to play baseball. As a boy, his mother’s brother had been hospitalized for a lengthy period with a baseball injury. Worse, the death of another local boy after being hit with a ball in the heart had traumatized Grace Guidry. She looked at her only child—small for his age and frail—and told him that he should be content with watching the Yankees on television alongside her.

  The story Guidry likes to tell is that he remained on the sidelines until the day he walked past a ball field and picked up a ball that had rocketed past the
outfielders. Without so much as a stride—as he recalled it—his throw reached home plate on the fly. One of the coaches soon begged Roland to let his boy play. After a week or two of secret practices, father and son appealed to Grace, who finally agreed but would leave the field and sit in the car when skinny little Ronnie came in from the outfield to pitch.

  In Berra’s case, he was forever indebted to his older brothers, who not only made a left-handed hitter out of a natural righty but relentlessly lobbied their father to allow him to pursue the opportunity denied them. “If it wasn’t for my brothers, I’d probably have worked in a shoe factory or something,” Yogi told Guidry, adding that his father—much like Grace Guidry—eventually came around and realized that baseball was not just a game in America; it was a passion and a pastime. When Berra asked his father to imagine how much money the family might have made if all four brothers had played ball, Pietro said, “Blame your mother.”

  Berra survived his parents’ objections, but he found he had to overcome even greater challenges, in the baseball experts who doubted he was major-league material. The most famous of them was Branch Rickey. The Brooklyn Dodgers’ brilliant judge of talent refused to sign the teenage Berra after a tryout at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, saying that no kid who was all of five feet seven and not exactly built for speed would ever be more than a minor-leaguer.

  Though temporarily deflated by Rickey’s evaluation, Berra wound up with the same $500 signing bonus from the Yankees that his boyhood pal Joe Garagiola earned from the hometown Cardinals. But even as a minor-leaguer, Berra said, “nobody took me seriously.” When he returned to the United States after serving in World War II and was assigned to a submarine base in New London, Connecticut, he was laughed at when he said he was the property of the New York Yankees. The manager of the base team told him he looked like a wrestler.

  “Maybe being in a sailor suit didn’t help,” he admitted to Guidry. “I guess I looked worse in mine than most guys and smaller than I really was.”