Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (14 page)

They were a welcoming presence, all the time, to any- and everybody. Mickey and I became good friends. He was always friendly, and he came to my Hall of Fame party in New York in January 1993 at McMullen’s restaurant. Whitey to this day is always friendly and respectful and playful. True Yankee class.

I was never in the Banana Boat with Billy Martin in there. There were rules. It’s one of the oldest rules: You don’t drink in the same place the manager drinks. If I’d seen Billy come in there, I would’ve left.

In those days, I was a young kid who was half-crazy. I wasn’t hanging out with Billy Martin. Just wouldn’t do it. Whether we liked each other or not, he was still the manager.

I traveled alone then. Almost all the time. I still enjoy traveling alone today.

No, I don’t think of Robert Ward as a bad guy. But I sure would love to see what he thought about the article and how he heard our conversations.

Things do happen with writers. So I can tell one and tell all: If you’re ever talking to a writer, make sure you’re reading what you’re saying as you’re saying it. Most writers will take the liberty of using
their
variation of what you’re saying. They only need to change one word …

I think what Robert Ward did was to take the opportunity to make things sound the way he wanted them to sound, not as I said them. For me to say, “Thurman Munson can only stir it bad”? Anyone who knows me, knows I
might
say, “I’m the straw that stirs the drink”—which
I did not say
. But with all the ego I’ve got, or whatever I had then, I’m not going to come out and say, “Munson can only stir it bad.”

I’m not that dumb. This guy just came off an MVP year. That’s not a statement that would make sense. If you look at my history to that time, I might say something flamboyant, I might say something egotistical, I might say something self-promoting. But I’m not going to say something stupid.

I just don’t think Robert Ward knew that much about baseball or that much about me. One of the other things he wrote in that article was that I was envying the kind of relationship Billy and Mickey and Whitey had.

Ward wrote, “Mantle, Ford, and Martin have a kind of loyalty and street-gang friendship that today’s transient players don’t have time to develop.”

I don’t think he knew what he was talking about. Because players weren’t any more or less
transient
in my day than they were before. I played for years with all those guys on the A’s. We were close as family. If you want to describe any team as close as a street gang, that’s what the Oakland A’s were in the ’70s.

That wasn’t these New York Yankees.

I had thought I was alone before that article came out. I found out what alone meant.

I remember when that issue of
Sport
went on sale. The June 1977 issue: “Reggie Jackson in No-Man’s Land.” Came out in late May.

The night it did, my teammates already had a few copies going around the locker room. They were just waiting for me to come into the clubhouse, to see what I was going to do or say.

There I was at my locker, all by myself, and there were these little groups of players huddled around the magazine, staring over at me and muttering imprecations. I didn’t know what was going on. I hadn’t read the article. I didn’t pay any attention to it. It wasn’t until Fran Healy came over and said, “Read this.”

And I started reading it, and I said to Healy, who was the go-between by then with me and the rest of the team, “Oh, my God. This is sickening. All of it. What am I going to do?”

Fran said, “Reggie, I don’t know.” I told him I was misquoted. So he went to Thurman, because he was friends with both of us, and he told him, “Well, Reggie says he was misquoted.”

And I have to say Thurman had the best quote I’ve ever heard. He said, “For three thousand f—in’ words?”

I just laughed when I heard that. Bad as I felt, I had no comeback for that. That was a pretty good line.

That night, I got dressed and got out on the field as quick as I could. I heard later that a few guys went by my locker first and made sure to give my shoes and my equipment bag a good kick. I don’t know, I didn’t see it. It couldn’t have happened with me there. But if it did happen, because I was lockering by myself in one corner of the clubhouse, they would have had to go out of their way to kick anything belonging to me.

Nobody knew if I’d said what Ward had me saying in the article or not. Nobody asked me for
my
side of it. Nobody came over and asked me about it, except for Fran Healy. Thurman never came over.

It was a situation where somebody needed to come in and say something. I felt just then like I couldn’t say anything; I was too angry and resentful. Thurman was the captain, but he couldn’t say anything. I think we were both in shock. And by then the writers were all over it, trying to make more of it.

I do remember that a couple days after the article came out, I was in the sauna with Fran and Thurman. And I remember that I told Thurman, “I didn’t say this. I didn’t say that.” But there were so many things that I said I didn’t say, Thurman just looked at me and said, “Reggie, how could you be misquoted that badly?”

It was just hard for him to look past it, with so many players on the team wondering what he was going to do about it. He was in as awkward a position as I was. If there was any hope for him and me fixing it, there were too many other negative things, too many other “people in the room” who were receiving it negatively—which was easy to understand. So it was hard for Thurman to take the lead and say, “Hey, I understand, let’s forget about it.” Something just between
him and me would have been different. But I really think with everybody being involved, the media and everybody else, it was just hard to get past it.

It was a place where we needed someone in leadership to step up and say something. Get us together and have a talk with us both and try to fix things for the clubhouse atmosphere. Billy, our manager, wasn’t about to do that. For Martin, this was like proving he was right.

Instead, Billy just let the bad blood fester between us. He wasn’t going to help you out. I didn’t even look there for help. I didn’t talk to my brother about that. I didn’t talk to my dad about that. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt worse. I was embarrassed.

Looking back on it now, I think that this problem that I created was an opportunity for Billy Martin to prove that I was not a good fit. This gave him an opportunity to try to impress upon the team that he was in charge, rather than fix the situation. That he would embarrass me to get even. Billy was determined, regardless of the effect on the team, to prove I was a bad apple. He was so hell-bent to prove that I “wasn’t a Yankee.”

So I just went out there that night and played against the Red Sox. Bill Lee was pitching, and he was running his mouth, like he always was. Always going on about how we were fascists, or Nazis, or some nonsense.

I went out and had a line-drive double off Lee, and I hit another ball hard that got turned into a double play, and then I hit a long home run off a sinker that didn’t sink. That tied the game in the seventh, though we lost in the end. After I hit the home run, I came back to the dugout, where the team was waiting to shake my hand.

I wouldn’t shake hands. I was just fed up with all the nonsense of the last couple weeks. I kept my hands to myself, walked to the end of the bench, and sat down.

I just wanted to be alone. My thought was, “You guys are going to be that way? Okay. I’ll deal with it. Let’s just move on and be open about it.”

You don’t like me, I don’t like you. Why hide it?

Of course the media made out like it was all my fault. Like I was just not going to shake their hands all of a sudden for no reason. Thinking about it later, I realized I shouldn’t have given them that opportunity. I should have been the one trying to rise above it and get us back to being a team, playing for each other. Which is what I did, eventually.

But I took this opportunity to make a stand and sulk. It wasn’t the thing to do. Not in the dugout.

Knowing myself at this point, I felt that it was time. Nobody was going to talk about it, and there was all this undercurrent going on … there needed to be a discussion. This had happened before at times, and it was why during my time in baseball I got the tag of being controversial. I wasn’t willing to let things ride. There needed to be a discussion. And if you’re not going to do it, then I’m going to do something and
make
you talk about it. We’re going to get it out on the table now.

We’re having a bumping of heads philosophically? You don’t want to talk? I’m going to make you talk. I’m not going to grab you. We’re not going to
physically
have a confrontation. But we are going to have a confrontation—and we’re going to sit down and talk about it.

It’s not that I want a pat on the back for being brutally honest. But you get to a point sometimes where there has to be a confrontation, an airing of issues and clutter. A clearing of the air. And whatever it brings, it brings.

You get to a point in time where it’s gotta come out. You want to control yourself physically—and let the chips fall where they may. I was in those situations with George Steinbrenner on more than one occasion. I was in that situation with Billy Martin.

With George, it was a situation where our relationship needed work. I was not going to disrespect him, because of the changes he had made in my life and for my family and my future. But I wanted to be heard as a man.

With George, it really wasn’t until I retired as a player and started to work with him. We had an issue in 1996 on the bus going to the plane to go to Texas for the playoffs. I went to talk to Joe Torre about where we were going to have dinner. I was very close to Joe, and I went up to him, and George pulled on my sleeve jacket and said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

It was just that he was in a mood, and he wanted to ruffle my feathers and get on me in front of people. He sure wanted a piece of me. It was just a building up of issues and discomfort that he had with me, and I had with him. George could agitate you over a long period of time. You had to stand up to him, or he would steamroll you. He would Jim Brown you. He would Earl Campbell you. He would Joe Greene you.

We cleared the air with words, but it was very tense on the bus. We were going to Teterboro, and it was a long way. It was very tense on the plane, all the way to Texas. We didn’t talk until the next morning, and it was suggested by him that I go home. When I went home, I didn’t want to go
back
.

I wanted to talk about it, and he didn’t. He said we would talk about it when I got back to New York, and I wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t want to come, but I came. We sat down and talked and started getting past it. We had another situation a few years later, but it really started a great bond between us.

George was the Boss, and he was going to let you know he was the Boss. He would start on you for some reason … I don’t know if it was for practice or for an appetizer. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. But he could chew you up and turn you into a salad, anytime he wanted.

I had been through that. Like George, my father was an agitator. Quick-witted, could heap a
load
of sarcasm on you. I felt that I had to stand up for myself. I had to establish myself.

I was about sixteen or seventeen the first time I stood up to my father. I had pretty good size; I was maybe 190 pounds. It was in the kitchen. We had those old aluminum chairs with the vinyl on them and the claw legs. I stood up and picked up my chair and bent it in half. I screamed, “Leave me alone!” and walked out of the room.

He was startled. Stunned. We didn’t talk for a day, and then it was over. He was disciplining me, riding me for something. He could ride you until you bled. And always in front of an audience. If he had a crowd, you had a chance to be in trouble.

My father didn’t drink or smoke, either. This was his recreation, gettin’ on your ass.

My dad was tough. Raised as an orphan. He barely knew what date
he was born. He used to tell us, “How do I know when I was born? They just wrote the date on a wall. So it’s either 1903, 1907, or 1910.”

He was just making us tough. He knew that the world was tough. He knew that we would be raised as colored children, that’s what we were. You were going to be tough, or you could leave home, he didn’t give a dang. My older sister left home; my oldest brother went into the service, to get some peace of mind. I went to college—my dad went to prison. Went to jail for six months for driving without a license—a third offense or something.

When he was younger, my dad ran numbers for some of the Italian and Jewish bookmakers in Philadelphia. It was an extra “hustle.” He was a tailor and a dry cleaner, but he would do that on the side. I remembered big bags of change being around—five-, ten-pound potato bags, filled with nickels and dimes for betting the numbers.

My dad’s favorite number was 010. He hit the numbers once in a while, made $100 here and there. Not bad for a nickel bet.

So by the time I came to know the Boss, I was used to a guy who could beat up on you, use you as a punching bag. During my confrontations with George, though, the comments would never broach something that you couldn’t take back. You could say you’re a pain in the ass; you could say you don’t know what you’re talking about. But we would stay away from something that would scar and could leave a mark. I swore in arguing with George, but I never swore
at
George.

With Billy, the ridicule and the embarrassment got to the point where I couldn’t take it. Whether I wasn’t humble enough, whether I didn’t understand my role, or whatever it was—it was bumpy, it got ugly, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. So I just had to let it go.

Now, that’s been my past. I certainly changed that. When I got out of the game, I was able to be a lot more diplomatic about it. The reason why was, when I got out of the game at forty-something years old, a lot of the tension was gone. The demand for excellence, the demand for success, the demand for production, is no longer there on a daily basis. So you’re able to relax, even in business. There’s no longer the everyday demand to produce the way there is being a cleanup hitter in baseball—especially in New York, where it’s just different than anyplace else.