Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Epilogue

  Signing Off Till Spring

  Ron Guidry finally made it to Cooperstown about fifteen hours late, according to Berra Standard Time, with the excuse that his flights from Louisiana through Atlanta had been delayed by storms. But here he was, bursting into the cramped backroom of TJ’s Place, a restaurant on Main Street, and there was Berra, with a stack of Sports Illustrated magazines in front of him, pen in hand and a Yankees cap sitting high on his head.

  Eyeing Goose Gossage stretched out in a chair to his right, Guidry picked right up where the fraternal clowning had left off the last time they had all been together, at Old-Timers’ Day.

  “Shit,” he said to Gossage while pointing at Berra. “He won’t sign for me. I got to pay the damn money.”

  Berra looked up from his tedious work and smiled. He was sitting behind a desk that was littered with baseball memorabilia, the area in front of him cleared so that he could put his autograph on a few dozen covers of the magazine that had featured him in its annual “Where Are They Now?” issue.

  On this steamy late July weekend, Berra was exactly where he had been for years, save the previous one, 2010, when he had missed his beloved Hall of Fame induction weekend while recuperating in the hospital from the fall outside his home. One year later, it was no secret that the mishap had placed Berra at yet another fork in life’s road. The cane propped against the side of the desk was evidence that in order to keep going, he needed some help.

  The stumbles and soup spill in Florida were followed by another near fall at Joe Torre’s charity golf tournament in Westchester County in June and a slip on a bathroom floor at an autograph show soon after. Kevin McLaughlin, the longtime family friend who considered himself Berra’s protector at shows and gave himself the comic title of “senior signing consultant,” grabbed him and turned white in the process.

  “Goddamn it, Yogi, don’t do that to me,” he said.

  “Aw, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Berra said, still believing in the power of his protective bubble. “Don’t worry.”

  His family and friends did worry, with good reason, but were also amazed and somewhat in awe of his determination to keep moving, not to let go of his baseball life. In Berra’s mind, he had already missed one induction weekend too many. There was no way he wasn’t going to Cooperstown and making his usual appearance at TJ’s, where the legends of the game set up shop to sign for the masses.

  “I think out of everything, including Old-Timers’ Day, he loves this the most,” McLaughlin said. “The Yankees are the Yankees, but he considers the Hall of Fame a special club.”

  Unlike Gossage, a 2008 inductee, it was a club that Guidry did not belong to, and the truth of the matter was that he didn’t really need to be making the long trip back to New York so soon after Old-Timers’ Day. Yes, he stood to make a few dollars for appearing at an autograph show or two, but nowhere near what Berra earned—anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000, depending on the location and size of the show.

  Berra did only a few shows a year, and the money—though appreciated for what it could do for his grandchildren—was no longer the motivation. The people closest to him would swear on a stack of old Yankees yearbooks that it never had been.

  “He loves being out there, being Yogi and around these guys,” McLaughlin said. “You can’t get him to stop.”

  Guidry put it differently, more emphatically. “He has to keep going, or he’s going to shut down,” he said.

  Therein was the reason for Guidry’s presence in Cooperstown—though only at gunpoint would he ever have admitted that he was there mainly because it made Berra happy. Eleven years after their first spring training together in Tampa, Berra counted on Guidry to walk into the backroom at TJ’s and stir up shit the way he always did.

  When Ted Hargrove, the owner of the restaurant, told Guidry that he looked tanned and toned—as he always did—Hargrove assumed that Guidry must have spent a lot of time on the golf course during spring training. “Hell, no,” Guidry said. “Goose, here, he was playing all the time. Me, I was too busy taking care of this guy.”

  He pointed again at Berra and said, “That’s my job, my very full-time job.”

  “Hardest damn job you ever had,” Gossage said, playing along.

  Having gotten in his jabs, Guidry walked over to Berra to pay his respects.

  “How you feeling, Yog?” he said, leaning over to share a hushed conversation until Gossage intervened by asking, “Gator, how come you couldn’t get out of Atlanta?”

  “I don’t know,” Guidry said. “Maybe they didn’t want my ass to take away the attention from this son of a bitch right here.”

  With a fresh stack of magazines in front of him, Berra resumed signing, firmly and meticulously, nothing like the standard celebrity scribble. He took his cue on that from the men he considered the masters of legibility, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

  “They had beautiful signatures,” Berra said in a reverent tone. He bristled over how modern players’ signatures tended to be indistinguishable. For clarity’s sake, whenever Berra asked one of the kids like Evan Longoria to sign a ball, he would also request that they write their number under the name.

  While Berra signed, Guidry and Gossage began telling old war stories, hoping there was someone in the room who hadn’t heard them before. If not, well, too bad, the memories got better with age and occasionally a little more dramatic as well.

  Somehow they got on the subject of the late-seventies Yankees’ futility at the old Seattle Kingdome, where the Mariners didn’t seem capable of beating anyone but them. Guidry remembered pitching there one night during the 1979 season and being undone by perhaps the strangest play he’d ever seen.

  “Something crazy always happened in that place, but this one, un-freaking-believable,” he said.

  He was standing in the middle of the room, recounting how he had taken a one-run lead into the ninth inning, when he’d loaded the bases with two outs and Leon Roberts, an average right-handed hitter with decent home run power, coming to the plate.

  “So I throw him a good slider in on the hands, and he pops it up down the first-base line, way the hell up there,” he said, pantomiming a windup, clucking his tongue for the crack of the bat, and doing a little dance to demonstrate how Chris Chambliss had circled under the ball in foul territory.

  “So what happens?” Guidry continued. “The ball hits one of those damn speakers and comes down in fair territory between first base and home. I’m right here. Chambliss is there. Willie Randolph is coming in from second. We’re standing there, and, boop, the ball bounces off the hard turf right between us with a crazy spin and back into foul territory before anyone can pick it up. Foul ball!”

  Guidry shook his head and said, “And what happens next?”

  He wound up again and clucked again, only louder this time.

  “Home run—grand slam—and we lose another damn game in the dome.”

  He turned and pointed at Berra, whose rapt attention he already had.

  “You were there, right, Yog?” Guidry said.

  Berra nodded, dutifully.

  “Yeah,” Gossage said, “but you wouldn’t let me come into the game, would you?”

  Guidry waved him off. “Sheeet,” he said, stretching out the word with his Cajun lilt. “I’ll lose the damn game by myself.”

  (Let the record show that Guidry did lose to the Mariners on July 10, 1979, when Leon Roberts homered after his pop fly struck a speaker 150 feet high, rolled over the top of it, and fell harmlessly into foul territory. But it happened early in the game. Guidry went only six innings that night, and George Steinbrenner was so incensed about losing again to the Mariners that he ordered an extra workout for the team. Bucky Dent was the only regular to show up.)

  Stories told, misremembered or embellished, it was time for Berra, Guidry, and Gossage to go outside. It was almost high noon. The line of autograph seekers for Berra already stretched down the block.

  There were two
tables set up, one on each side of the front entrance to the restaurant. Berra and Guidry were situated at the one to the left. Gossage joined his fellow Hall of Fame reliever Rollie Fingers and the great San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal to the right.

  For the next hour, there were at least five people in line to see Berra for every one person en route to the Gossage-Fingers-Marichal table. The fans brought photos, bats, balls, caps, gloves, and the occasional piece of clothing to be signed at prices that varied based on the item. Many came just to lean across the table, press a shoulder to Berra’s, and have a photo snapped. Fathers pushed their young sons forward and told them not to be afraid to shake the grandfatherly legend’s hand.

  While signing sporadically—there were no two-for-one deals— Guidry provided an ongoing color analysis. He told one female fan not to be fooled by Berra’s age and recounted the Tampa shopping story, when Berra had insisted that they trail an attractive young woman up and down the aisles.

  Another woman said, fawning, “He’s so cute.”

  A woman even older than Berra, age eighty-eight, came with her granddaughter to have him sign her beautiful white sweater with a Sharpie. (Berra was reluctant to ruin the sweater and talked her into a more conventional autograph.)

  A middle-age man thanked him “for coming out and doing stuff like this.”

  Yes, he was being well compensated, but could the fans imagine their own octogenarian parents or grandparents sitting patiently for an hour in such oppressive heat, shaking hand after sweaty hand, smiling in every pose—which he prided himself on doing?

  The sixtyish Kevin McLaughlin couldn’t. “I go with him to these things, and I’m tired afterward,” he said. “I don’t know how he does it.”

  Not so easily anymore, in fact, and that became obvious to Guidry after about an hour of signing. He could see that Berra was fading in the afternoon steam bath. The line of fans remained long, but a cool drink inside along with a rest—or a nap—seemed like a good idea.

  Guidry whispered to Berra and then took it upon himself to call a time-out. He helped Yogi up—chagrined by how Berra struggled to stand after sitting so long—and they went inside. On the way to the back, Berra insisted on stopping at a table to say hello to Pete Rose, the banned all-time hits leader, who struck an isolated and lonely pose when appearing in Cooperstown to peddle his tainted name.

  In many ways, Berra was the anti-Rose, welcome in every clubhouse in any ballpark. “The most loved man in America,” Guidry said, before predicting—correctly, as it turned out—that the line outside TJ’s would re-form as soon as Berra was ready to return.

  On the day after the autograph show, Berra, Guidry, and a couple of other players went to the Otesaga, the historic Cooperstown hotel and resort, to meet a disabled boy at the request of Ted Hargrove. About the time they were ready to leave, a group of players’ wives—Carmen Berra included—were finishing a luncheon there and were exiting the hotel to board a bus for an afternoon outing.

  Guidry was sitting in a car, waiting for Berra, who was busy greeting all the wives as they exited the hotel, and Gossage, who had his back turned to Guidry while talking to Juan Marichal and one or two other players.

  “Where’s Yogi?” Guidry asked Kevin McLaughlin, saying he wanted to get going.

  “He’s over in the front with all the wives,” McLaughlin said.

  Guidry decided it was time to get Berra’s attention and have some fun in the process. He got out of the car and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Hey, come on, you dirty old man!”

  To which Gossage—in a classic “Who, me?” moment—turned around.

  “Not you,” Guidry said. “That dirty old man.” He pointed at Berra, whose face lit up with a smile.

  What cracked up McLaughlin—besides Gossage assuming that he was the dirty old man—was that Berra, the American icon, paid no mind to being called that in a crowded public place in which people had no way of knowing the nature of his relationship with Guidry. “But that’s the way it is with Yogi if you’re one of his real friends,” McLaughlin said. “He doesn’t want to be treated like a superstar or a celebrity. He wants his friends to bust his balls. He loves it. And nobody does it better than Gator.”

  But then, McLaughlin added, there was the serious point in the weekend, when it was time for them to part. “That’s when you really see the love,” he said.

  In 2011, the goodbyes actually unfolded in stages—the first one coming in spring training, when Guidry delivered Berra to the Tampa Airport, where he would be met at the curb by an airport employee and helped through security and on to the gate.

  “When we get there, I mean, I can’t walk in, so it has to be quick,” Guidry said. “We get out of the truck, and I ask him if he has everything. But we’re both sad because, you know, that’s it, the time together has ended again. One minute I was looking forward to picking him up, then it’s three or four weeks later, and before you know it, it’s over. It goes so fast, and for me it’s like, Oh, God, I hate this part. When I go to hug him, it’s this lonesome feeling.”

  Of course, Guidry knew they would see each other again within a couple of months, but the emptiness came with the recognition that spring training was their special shared adventure, their forever sleepaway camp, their club of two.

  “It’s so special to me because, I guess, of the trust he has in me,” Guidry said. “Whether you want to call it love on his part for letting me do what I do with him all the time, I don’t know. I can’t say. But for me, to spend the time that I do is my way of showing the respect I have for him. It’s not a burden. It’s something I look forward to.

  “I guess in a small way, all the little things he helped me accumulate when I was a player, maybe in some way I’m repaying the kindness, and sometimes I feel what I’m doing might even not be good enough. I don’t expect that he thinks I owe him anything, but I’ve always felt that that’s the way I should carry myself in the Yankee tradition. He’s one of the last surviving members of those great Yankee times, an idol to millions. When you go all over with him and you watch the way people react, that’s only fortifying what you already know.”

  From the time Guidry was let go by the Yankees as pitching coach, it occurred to him that Berra might also be his last hold on the game that he loved, and whenever Berra stopped going to spring training, that might be it for him, too.

  Emotionally, it had come to the point where he was more prepared to give up the Yankees than he was to lose Berra. “I don’t feel like I owe anything to the Yankees or that they owe anything to me,” he said. “I’ll go as long as Yogi goes, that’s for sure. I didn’t know the relationship would bloom into this. That’s not why I did what I did. I just did it because I love the old man. You can’t help but love him. I say it over and over—he’s my best friend, and the game of baseball brought us together.”

  In Cooperstown, they shared some laughs, did their shows, went out to dinner, and watched Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar get inducted into the Hall of Fame. Then it was time to really say goodbye.

  Time for Guidry to return to Louisiana, where he would recount the weekend to Bonnie, catch her up on the inside scoops, admit how upsetting it had been to see Berra struggle to get up and walk, how the reality of his age had finally hit home. But Guidry also would begin to anticipate and look forward to the first frog legs call from New Jersey.

  For Berra’s part, he would return to Montclair and keep trying to move forward as fast as he could. He would go to the stadium for the first game of every series and would suffer with the Yankees when they lost at home to Jim Leyland’s Tigers in the heartbreaking fifth game of the American League Division Series. He would leave the ballpark that night mumbling under his breath about how the Yankees had failed to hit in the clutch.

  “Wait till I see Swish in spring training,” he would say, already plotting another tutorial with Nick Swisher, a playoff washout, assuming he would be back in New York. “Damn, he was trying to pull everythin
g against the Tigers, trying to crush it. Don’t know why he wasn’t going with the pitch like he used to.” Or as Berra had advised him to in the dugout on that glorious Tampa afternoon during spring training 2010.

  One day, as the leaves turned yellow around Montclair, he would even feel spry enough to drop a bombshell on Dave Kaplan and some of the folks at the museum: he was going to try to convince Carmen to let him drive again, if only in the daytime—a motion he conceded she was not likely to second. (If anything, Carmen would consider live-in help as Yogi continued to take the occasional spill.)

  Everyone around him nodded and thought: What is with this man? What in the world is driving Mr. Yogi?

  But before any of that could happen, before Berra would get into the limousine with Carmen and Kevin McLaughlin for the long, scenic drive from Cooperstown to Montclair and Guidry would get into another limo heading to the city, they had to say goodbye. Until next year, next season, until it was time for the pitcher and catcher to meet again, the way it happened every spring.

  And in that moment, Guidry could admit to harboring a deep-seated fear of the future and to not wanting his best friend to see his eyes moisten. He could admit to saying a silent prayer that Berra would indeed be back and that he would in fact see him again.

  “Look, we all know that at some point in time, it’s going to end,” Guidry said. “He’s going to stop going to Florida. This can’t be forever.”

  But spring training always did symbolize hope, the power of renewal, one more chance. So Guidry embraced Berra and spoke to him in the tone that Berra loved best, the one guaranteed to make him smile.

  “I’ll see your ass in Tampa next year, OK?”

  Berra did smile and surrendered to the hug.

  “OK, kid,” he said, nodding. “See ya then.”

  Acknowledgments