Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (35 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I was back on a plane. Off to Hawaii. I just threw another bag together, told no one I was leaving. Talk about tripping! Color me gone!

It was a surreal situation. The team was still in turmoil. There were all these big debates in the press about what the Yankees should do with me. Suspend me for the rest of the season. Try to cancel my contract. Whatever.

At the time, I was hoping to be traded. The day after I left, the Red Sox won again, and we dropped to fourteen games out of first place. In the whole history of baseball, just one other team had ever come back from that many games down or more, and that was the Boston “Miracle Braves” of 1914. (They didn’t call them the Miracle Braves for nothing.) I was hoping the Yankees might trade me to some team that still had a chance to make the playoffs, and maybe I could show what I could do.

The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t think I would be traded. George wasn’t going to trade me. I’d tried to get him to do that before. I was a marquee attraction, regardless of whether I was a mess or not. George was not a quitter. When he set out to do something, he was going to do it, whether it was right or wrong. It was not going to just slip by. And after I’d brought everything to a confrontation, something
had
to be done.

By then, my feelings were, “While you’re all discussing what’s to become of me, I am, by the way, going to go to Hawaii for a few days and kick around.” And that’s what I did.

My thinking was, “Hey, here’s what’s going on, guys. You had a
team that was coming apart.” I thought, “You chose to ignore this before, even as the manager came apart at the seams, wrecking our pitching staff and putting some of his best players on the bench. Hopefully, I’m bringing this to your attention. I’m bringing this to a head. I’m not so wrong as you think.

“You’re going to suspend and fine me? Okay. I expected that. At least everything is going to stop for a while. There’s going to be some discussion about how it gets fixed. I’m not coming back the way it is, and I don’t mind that.” Of course, I never said that to anyone!

I knew the Yankees still wanted me, because pretty soon they called my attorney, Steven Kay, and wanted me to come back. At the same time, they were still saying I was suspended indefinitely. They told everybody, “As long as Reggie’s not here, we’re gonna fine him and suspend him without pay.”

I said, “Fine.”

I had a nice little savings, and I didn’t have too big a house. I didn’t have too many cars, I didn’t have too many bills, and I could get through. At the time, I was doing pretty well.

I was not too worried about that fine.

I went to the hotel in Honolulu, and hung out there. Ironically, it was a place I knew from going there first with ABC for the
Superstars
competition—where I first met all my welcoming teammates.

I went there and just kicked around. Got lost. I knew a girl over there who was a friend. I had someone to talk to and have dinner with. The best part of it was she knew nothing about baseball. She said she had heard about my suspension, but she didn’t care. I didn’t give a hoot about going back or not. I didn’t pick up a sports page. It was nice being away from it all.

The Yankees called and asked Steven Kay to get me to come back. This time they said they had rescinded the fine. They’d found out, too, that you couldn’t suspend someone “indefinitely.” Not under the basic agreement with the players’ union—another thing we had to thank Marvin Miller for.

You had to make it a definite time. So Al Rosen decided I was suspended for five games. They asked me to come back right away, but I couldn’t get back in time. I was in Hawaii!

Billy wanted to make it seven games, but Al overrode him. Billy was making all kinds of pronouncements since I’d left. He told the press, “If Jackson comes back, he does exactly what I say. Period.” Note the “If.” He said, “From now on, nobody tells the manager or the front office what he’s going to do. Nobody’s bigger than this team.”

They asked him if he’d accept an apology from me. Billy told them, “I don’t believe in apologizing. I won’t talk anything out with him.”

Fair enough, I said. I rejoined the team in Chicago, where we were playing. I did not have to pay a fine. I flew in and went to the ballpark in a cab with Fran Healy. I went straight to my locker to get dressed. I was ready to play. I got in too late to take batting practice, but I went out on the field, got ready. Played catch, stretched, jogged, got loose. I just told myself I should go in, shut my mouth, get it out of the way, do what you’re supposed to do. Play ball.

That’s exactly what I did. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I understood afterward Billy was so perplexed that I didn’t ask for a meeting to apologize to him and the team. But I’d seen how that worked out the year before, and I didn’t really think I had anything to apologize for—to him or the team. I didn’t need to go to Billy. Neither one of us wanted to see the other.

I probably should have apologized to the team, for creating a ruckus. I did go around to each player who I thought cared anything about me and apologized to him individually. Maybe a dozen or so guys who cared to hear anything I had to say. Some could have cared less.

Billy left me on the bench that afternoon. We beat the White Sox, 3–1, in the top of the ninth, when Chambliss doubled in Piniella and then Billy called for a squeeze play, a bunt by Nettles that caught them completely by surprise and scored an insurance run.

Afterward, in the locker room, the press all came around, and Fran Healy said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t apologize.” That was right up my alley. I didn’t have to be coaxed.

You know, Fran was always a peacemaker, but he didn’t really like Billy. Not very many people did. He told me, “Don’t apologize, you don’t have to do that.”

Fran always had great advice. I don’t know if he had great advice about me not talking to Billy—but I wasn’t going to talk to him anyway.

All I told the press when they asked was that it was difficult coming back, but that I didn’t have any intention of
not
reporting. I wasn’t going to jump the team at that time and give Billy what he wanted. I told them I’d had a lot of time to think about the magnitude of the situation, the magnitude of New York. I admitted it was an uncomfortable situation.

One note here about using the word “magnitude.” A lot of the writers at the time thought it was very pretentious of me to use it, particularly when I would say “the magnitude of me.” They thought it sounded almost as if I were talking about myself in the third person.

I didn’t mean it the way they thought. All it reflected was how crazy I thought the whole situation was—all this nonsense revolving around me, and the manager, and what was said about it. I didn’t use the word to aggrandize myself, just to express how out of hand, how magnified, and out of proportion I thought everything could get.

How could I be such a big story? How could the manager and I not get along? It was crazy. I guess I was supposed to just go along with whatever Billy was trying to prove. To go through this at thirty-two years of age. I was too young to manage it. I was overwhelmed.

To have him not just put me in the lineup and get the hell out of the way—never speak to me. Just let me play ball. Why he couldn’t do that—I just didn’t get it.

At the time, it made me wonder, “Is it because I’m black and speaking my own opinion? Is it because I have a certain arrogance about me? The way I present things? Tell me what it is.”

One of the writers asked me if I would bunt again in that situation if I had to do it all over again. I told him that if I’d known what the consequences would have been, I probably would have just swung away and avoided all the hassle! I admired the guts of the guy to ask me the question. I wanted to pinch his head off.

However, looking back on it now, I don’t know if that’s true. I was so upset at the time I don’t think I was considering what the consequences were. And if I had, I still don’t know if I would’ve backed down. I wouldn’t have wanted to.

Something had to be done. Something had to be done to stop the team from coming apart any further. Something had to be done to keep the situation between Billy and me from getting any worse. I wasn’t going to sit by and watch him ruin guys, including me. I wasn’t going to sit on the bench and spend the next three and a half years as a part-time DH.

Maybe it was only my unconscious mind that was telling me to force the situation. I don’t know. But if I had gone along and bunted just like Billy wanted, it wouldn’t have done him or anybody else any good. If I had just meekly gone along with the changes George wanted, it wouldn’t have helped anybody. We wouldn’t have won anything that year, and Billy would’ve been fired pretty soon anyway. George (the Boss) would’ve torn the team apart.

Instead, as it happened, Billy took himself apart. He sounded very pleased with himself while I was out in Hawaii. The team won five in a row, and Boston finally ran into a rough patch. The Sox started suffering a few injuries of their own, started running into some hot clubs, and we cut their lead over us down to ten games—even if we were still in third place.

Billy was apparently saying to all the writers that this showed how right he was about things and how I was the problem with the team. He was really hoping I would just stay out in California, maybe get traded somewhere. And now I was back.

You know, one of the writers, I think it was Henry Hecht, had a theory from the year before that Billy was trying to “gaslight” me. It was a reference from this old Ingrid Bergman movie, in which her husband tries to convince her she’s going crazy. Henry thought Billy was trying to do that to me, moving me all around the lineup, trying to undermine my confidence. Taking the bat out of my hand. Getting
me to demand a trade and move
myself
out of there. If he only knew how much I was trying to be traded …

In the end, I was the one driving
him
crazy. Just by being there.

You’d think Billy would’ve been on top of the world just then. He’d just won five straight games without me. Just won a game playing Billy-ball, squeezing in a run the way he liked. You’d think he would’ve been happy.

Yet I don’t think Billy was ever happy. Not then, anyway.

Then came the next unbelievable twist in the story. We were trying to get out of Chicago. We get out to O’Hare Airport, and our flight was delayed, and Billy starts fueling. Oh, Billy Martin and airport bars! He started pouring down the fuel with Art Fowler. Then Murray Chass of the
New York Times
came by and told him what I’d said after the game—about how it was an uncomfortable situation.

It wasn’t much of anything to say, I thought, but Billy went off on it. He told Murray, “I’m saying, ‘Shut up, Reggie Jackson. We don’t need none of your s—t.’ ” He told him, “ ‘We’re winning without you. We don’t need you coming in and making all these comments.’ ”

Billy told him, “If Jackson doesn’t shut his mouth, he won’t play, and I don’t care what George says. He can replace me right now if he doesn’t like it.” He told Chass to go ahead and phone the story in, then he went back for more fuel.

Meanwhile, word was starting to get out about the sort of stuff he was saying. Henry Hecht went back with Chass to the bar, and Billy just kept running off at the mouth. When Henry told him what I’d said about what I would do if I had to do it all over again—how I guessed I would’ve gone ahead and swung away against Kansas City as ordered—Billy told him that was like “a guy getting out of jail and saying, ‘I’m innocent,’ after he killed somebody. He and every one of the other players knew he defied me.”

Billy told them that I had taken off my glasses when I got back to the bench because I was getting ready for a fight. That was only half-wrong—I
was
getting ready just in case he thought I was going to be another in a long line of Billy Martin sucker-punch victims.

“He expected to get popped but good,” he told Chass, and Billy said it took him “the most restraint it’s ever taken in my life” not to hit me there. He said something about how he was going to kick my ass.

Uh-huh. He must’ve spent a lot of time in the off-season down at Disneyland, because that’s where they got Goofy. He’d got real goofy if he ever thought he was going to kick
my
ass. I didn’t want that confrontation. I knew I couldn’t win in the public forum.

Billy just wouldn’t shut up. Even as he was walking to the team plane with Hecht and Chass, he went on about how upset he was that I hadn’t apologized. Then, when they told him they’d asked me and I said he hadn’t spoken to me yet, he told them I was lying. Then he threw in George.

“The two of them deserve each other,” he said about George and me. “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted”—referring to how George was found guilty of making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon.

Now he was comparing me to a murderer
and
saying I’m a liar.