La Russa Tony - Three nights in August: strategy, heartbreak, and joy, inside the mind of a manager

Copyright 2005 by Tony La Russa and H.G. Bissinger

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bissinger, H. G.
Three nights in August / Buzz Bissinger.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-618-40544-5
1. St. Louis Cardinals (Baseball team) 2. Chicago Cubs
(Baseball team) 3. La Russa, Tony. I. Title.
GV875.S74B57 2005
796.357'09778'66dc22 2004065134

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Lisa, Caleb, and Maddy.
A beautiful woman. A beautiful son. A beautiful friend.

HGB

To Elaine, Bianca, and Devon, and the four-legged com-
panions who have been part of our family. They mean
more to me than they did yesterday and less than they will
tomorrow.

And to the baseball familythose I have competed with
and those I have competed against.

TLR

I'm as nauseous as I've ever been. I have a terrible
headache. My head is pounding. I feel like throw
ing up and I'm having trouble swallowing. And the
beauty of it is, you want to feel like this every day.

T ONY L A R USSA

THE FACE made me do it. It left an indelible image with its eternal glower from the dark corner that it occupied. I had always admired intensity in others, but the face of Tony La Russa entered a new dimension, nothing quite like it in all of sports.

I first saw the face in the early 1980s, when La Russa came out of nowhere at the age of thirty-four to manage the Chicago White Sox and took them to a division championship in his third full year of managing. The face simply smoldered; it could have been used as a welding tool or rented out to a tanning salon. A few years later, when he managed the Oakland A's to the World Series three times in a row, the face was a regular fixture on network television and raised even more questions in my mind. Did it ever crack a smile? Did it ever relax? Did it ever loosen up and let down the guard a little bit, even in the orgy of victory? As far I could tell, the answer was no.

I was hooked on the face. I continued to observe it as he stayed with the Oakland A's through 1995. I followed it when he became the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals the following season. Along the way, I became aware of his reputation as a manager, with a polarity of opinion over him such that when Sports Illustrated polled players on the game's best five managers and its worst five managers, La Russa appeared on both lists. But I liked seeing that because it meant to me that this was a manager who didn't hold back, who ran his club with a distinct style regardless of the critics' chorus. Had he been any different, surely the face would have broken into a smile at least once.

After La Russa came to the Cardinals, I did see moments when the face changed. I saw fatherly pride and self-effacement spread over it when Mark McGwire hit his record-breaking sixty-second home run in 1998. I also saw the face overcome with grief when he and his coaches and his players mourned the passing of the soul of the St. Louis Cardinals, broadcast announcer Jack Buck, followed four days later by the death of beloved pitcher Darryl Kile in his hotel room during a road trip in Chicago. Later that season of 2002, I saw the intensity return, all the features on a collision course to the same hard line across the lips during the National League Championship series that the Cardinals painfully lost to the Giants four games to one.

As a lifelong baseball fan, I found myself more curious about La Russa than about anybody else in the game. Which is why, when out of nowhere, I received a call from La Russa's agent at the end of November 2002 asking whether I might be interested in collaborating on a book with La Russa, my answer was an immediate yes. I jumped at the opportunity, although I also knew that collaborations can be a tricky business. I had been offered them before by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and legendary television producer Roone Arledge, and I had turned them down. But this was different, or at least I told myself it was different, becauseat the risk of sounding like some field-of-dreams idiotmy love of baseball has been perhaps the greatest single constant of my life. I knew the game as a fan, which is a wonderful way to know it. But the opportunity to know it through the mind of La Russato excavate deep into the game and try to capture the odd and lonely corner of the dugout that he and all managers occupy by virtue of the natural isolation of their craftwas simply too good to pass up.

In the beginning, this was a typical collaboration. I brought along my little mini-cassette recorder to where La Russa lived in northern California. I turned it on and interviewed him at length, thinking that I would listen to the tapes and transcribe them and try to fashion what he said into his own voice. As is common in collaborations, we also have a business arrangement, a split of the proceeds, although the entirety of La Russa's share is going to the Animal Rescue Foundation, known as Tony La Russa's ARF, that he cofounded with his wife, Elaine, in northern California.

The more we talked about the book, the more agreement there was about trying to do something different from the typical as-told-to. La Russa's interest in me as a writer had been on the basis of Friday Night Lights, a book I had written about high school football in Texas. He was struck by the voice and observational qualities of the book, and we wondered whether there was a way to fashion that here. We also wondered whether there was a way to write the book with a narrative structure different from the usual season-in-the-life trajectory, a book that would have lasting and universal application no matter what season it took place in.

It was during those conversations that we came up with the idea of crafting the book around the timeless unit of baseball, the three-game series. The one we settled on, against the eternal rival Chicago Cubs, took place in the 2003 season. Had the goal of the book been differentto write about a particular seasonit would have made sense to switch gears and write about the Cardinals' magnificent ride of 2004. But that wasn't the goal.

It was also during those conversations that La Russa agreed to give me virtually unlimited access to the Cardinals' clubhouse and the coaches and players and personnel who populate itnot simply for the three-game series that forms the spine of the book but also for the virtual entirety of the 2003 seasonto soak up the subculture as much as possible. La Russa understood that in granting such access, he was ceding much of the control of the book to me as its writer. In doing so, he was untying the usual constraints of a collaboration, allowing me wide latitude to report and observe and draw my own conclusions. He also knew that approaching the book in this manner required him to be revealing of not only the strategies he has come to use but also the wrenching personal compromises he has made in order to be the kind of manager he has chosen to be. La Russa did not waver from the latitude that he promised. I was made privy to dozens of private meetings between the Cardinals coaches and their players. I was able to roam the clubhouse freely. Because of my access, I was also able to probe not only La Russa's mind but also the minds of so many others who populate a clubhouse. La Russa has read what I have writtenthe place where collaborations can get odious. He has clarified, but in no place has he asked that anything be removed, no matter how candid.