Bill Madden - Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball

O N A COOL, OVERCAST afternoon in early March 1992, I had just finished having lunch in the dining room of George Steinbrenners Bay Harbor Hotel, in Tampa, where I was staying for a few days while touring the spring training camps of those major league baseball teams based on Floridas Gulf Coast. I had not seen Steinbrenner since hed been banished from baseball by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990, and had not spoken to him since hed fired Lou Piniella as Yankees manager for the second time, after the 1988 season.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Id enjoyed a mostly pleasant working relationship with Steinbrenner in my capacity as a baseball writer for United Press International and then the New York Daily News , perhaps in no small part because my bosses and mentors at both places, Milton Richman at UPI and Dick Young at the News , were both legendary baseball writers and particular favorites of the forceful New York Yankees owner. During that time he had often solicited my opinion on player deals or manager firings he was pondering (which put me in good company with a lot of the bartenders and cabdrivers in Manhattan), and while his bullying of players, other baseball execs and writers usually left me no choice but to spank him in print, wed managed to remain friends.

That ended when he fired Piniella after the 1988 season and, in an attempt to justify this, fed me a cockamamie story about how Lou had stolen furniture from the Yankees. That he would use me to discredit Piniella was, in my opinion, a new low, and I determined from that point on to have nothing more to do with him on a personal level other than report and comment in the Daily News on his activities as Yankees owner.

Two years later, I had little sympathy for Steinbrenner when he was tossed out of the game by Vincent for having paid a two-bit gambler for dirt on the Dave Winfield Foundation. It wasnt until months afterward that I learned from other baseball owners and attorneys who had worked on the case that Vincents methods of getting rid of Steinbrenner had been just as underhanded as any of the shenanigans the Yankees owner had been guilty of over the years. I subsequently wrote a series of columns critical of the commissioner and the imperial manner with which he was governing the game.

By the spring of 92, it was starting to seem likely that Vincent was going to lift Steinbrenners ban, and I remember feeling ambivalent about that. Left to his own means, general manager Gene Michael had been doing a commendable job of rebuilding the Yankees in Steinbrenners absence, and everyone, fans and media alike, could remember what an absolute menace Steinbrenner had been in the 80s.

After lunch, I was walking up the long corridor that connects the Bay Harbor dining room to the main lobby when I suddenly saw him approaching from the other end. All I could think of was the opening scene in Gunsmoke , in which Matt Dillon stares down an outlaw off in the distance, getting ready to draw.

Is that you , Madden? he hollered.

I plead guilty, I shouted back.

What are you doing here, Madden? he said as he kept walking toward me.

I dont know, George, I said. Other than I happen to like your hotel. Why? Am I on the banned list here?

Then we were standing face-to-face. He smiled, extending his hand, and said, Whatever happened to us, Billy?

The way he said this momentarily caught me by surprise.

What happened, George, was I never could understand why you fired Lou the way you did, I finally said, and then, on top of that, you tried to tell me he was stealing from you.

Oh, that was all a big mistake, he said. I know I was wrong. The biggest mistake I ever made was letting Lou go. He knows how much I think of him.

After that chance meeting at his hotel, we gradually began to repair our relationship. On March 1, 1993, he was reinstated to baseball. I would like to say that his 29 months of exile had made him a more humble, softer person, but that wasnt exactly the case. Even as the Yankees, with the additions of Paul ONeill, Tino Martinez, Jimmy Key, David Cone, and Wade Boggs and the development of players such as Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera, evolved into another championship team for him, he continued to butt heads with his underlings and fellow owners, and I was most often right in the middle of it.

It was not until July 2005, when I wrote a story titled Life with George for a special section in the Daily News commemorating Steinbrenners 75th birthday, that I first began thinking about doing a book on him. For years there had been periodic reports in the New York gossip columns that Steinbrenner was preparing to write his autobiography. But it never came to pass, and now, midway through his eighth decade, his health had begun to fail and it had become apparent that he was no longer capable of writing his own life story.

Over the years, Steinbrenner had successfully thwarted the attempts of freelance writers to write his biography simply by telling friends, associates and Yankee employees, past and present, that to cooperate would be at their own peril. But one night in 2005, over dinner at Elaines, Steinbrenners daughter Jennifer and her then-husband, Steve Swindal, broached the idea of doing her fathers book.

My fathers getting up there now, Jennifer said, and his book has never been written. Somebody needs to tell his story, and youre the person who should do it. No reporter has known him better than you.

At the time, she was talking about a collaborationwhich I knew would be impossible. Nevertheless, I took her encouragement as tacit approval from the family to go ahead and pursue the project on my own. In late 2006, I began seeking out former Yankee employees and other close associates of Steinbrenners, many of whom I hadnt seen or talked to in 20 years. On a few occasions, I was asked if Steinbrenner was cooperating with me on the book, to which I would invariably reply: Its not really necessary. I was there.

Unfortunately, Id joined the Daily News in 1978 and had not been around the Yankees on an everyday basis during the period when Gabe Paul was running the team for Steinbrenner. This posed a problem for me. As the baseball man who helped broker the sale of the Yankees from CBS to Steinbrenner in 1973 and became the architect of the 197678 championship teams with his trades for Chris Chambliss, Mickey Rivers, Ed Figueroa and Willie Randolph, along with his historic signing of Catfish Hunter, Paul was an integral character in the book. But engaging as Id found him to be in the years after he left the Yankees to go back to Cleveland as general manager of the Indians, Paul was never very forthcoming about his relationship with Steinbrenner and his trials as president of the Bronx Zoo Yankees from 1973 to 77. He died in 1998 without ever having written his memoirs, and that was a great loss, because he was an important figure in baseball for over half a century and knew Steinbrenner better than anyone.

In an attempt to learn more about Pauls relationship with Steinbrenner, I contacted his son, Gabe Paul Jr., who, by 2006, had himself just ended a long executive career in baseball, as the point man for the northern Virginia group vying to relocate the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C. Over lunch in Manhattan, Gabe Jr. confessed to having had little contact with his dad during Gabe Sr.s Yankee years. However, he had kept many of his fathers files, including Gabe Sr.s handwritten diary of the entire proceedingsmeetings, phone conversations, negotiationsof the CBS sale of the Yankees to Steinbrenner. Ill be happy to provide you copies, he said.