Love and Other Ways of Dying (50 page)

I give you Thurman Munson getting beaned by a Nolan Ryan fastball and then beaned by a Dick Drago fastball—and then spiked for good measure at home plate by a 250-pound colossus named George Scott, as he’s been spiked before, blood spurting everywhere, and the mustachioed catcher they call Squatty Body/​Jelly Belly/​Bulldog/​Pigpen refusing to leave the game, hunching in the runway to the dugout at Yankee Stadium in full battle gear, being stitched up and then hauling himself back onto the field again.

I give you Thurman Munson in the hostile cities of
America—in Detroit and Oakland, Chicago and Kansas City, Boston and Baltimore—on the radio, on television, in the newspapers, in person, his body scarred and pale, bones broken and healed, arms and legs flickering with bruises that come and go like purple lights under his skin, a man crouched behind home plate or swinging on deck, jabbering incessantly, playing a game.

I give you a man and a boy, a father and a son, twenty years earlier, on the green expanse of a 1950s Canton, Ohio, lawn, in front of a stone house, playing ball. The father is a long-distance truck driver, disappears for weeks at a time, heading west over the plains, into the desert, to the Pacific Ocean, and then magically reappears with his hardfisted rules, his cold demand for perfection, and a photographic memory for the poetry he recites … 
No fate, / can circumvent or hinder or control / the firm resolve of a determined soul.

Now the father is slapping grounders at the son and the boy fields the balls. It is the end of the day and sunlight fizzes through the trees like sparklers. As the boy makes each play, the balls come harder. Again and again, until finally it’s not a game anymore. Even when a ball takes a bad hop and catches the boy’s nose and he’s bleeding, the truck driver won’t stop. It’s already a thing between this father and son. To see who will break first. They go on until dusk, the bat smashing the ball, the ball crashing into the glove, the glove hiding the palm, which is red and raw, until the blood has dried in the boy’s nose.

I give you the same bloody-nosed boy, Thurman Munson, in a batting cage now before his rookie year, taking his waggles, and a lithe future Hall of Famer named Roberto Clemente looking on. Clemente squints in the orange sun, analyzing the kid’s swing, amazed by his hand speed, by the way he seems to beat each pitch into a line drive. If you ever bat .280 in the big leagues, he says to Thurman Munson by way of a compliment, consider it a bad year.

When the Yankees bring Thurman Munson to New York after only ninety-nine games in the minors—after playing in Binghamton and Syracuse—he just says to anyone who will listen: What took them so long? He’s not mouthing off. He means it, is truly perplexed. What took them so goddamn long? Time is short, and the Yankees need a player, a real honest-to-God player who wants to win as much as blood needs oxygen or a wave needs water. It’s that elemental.

And wham, Thurman Munson becomes that player. He wins the Rookie of the Year award in 1970. He takes the starting job from Jake Gibbs as if the guy’s handing it to him and plays catcher for the next decade, the whole of the seventies. He’s named the Yankees’ first captain since Lou Gehrig forty years earlier and shows up at a press conference in a hunting vest. He wins the Most Valuable Player award in 1976, and he still wears bad clothes: big, pointy-collared shirts and dizzying plaid sport coats. Not even disco explains his wardrobe. He helps lead the Yankees from a season in which the team ends up twenty-one games out of first place to the 1976 World Series, where they fall in four straight to the Cincinnati Reds despite the fact that Thurman Munson bats over .500. Then he helps take the Yankees back to the Series in 1977 and 1978—two thrilling, heaven-hurled, city-rocking, ticker-tape-inducing wins!

And shoot if those seventies teams weren’t a circus. The Bronx Zoo. Manager Billy Martin dogging superstar Reggie Jackson, superstar Reggie Jackson dogging pit bull Thurman Munson, pit bull Thurman Munson dogging everyone, and then George—you know, Steinbrenner—the ringmaster and demiurge, the agitator and Bismarckian force who wants to win as badly as Thurman Munson. Birds of a feather. And alongside, a hard-nosed gaggle of characters—Catfish Hunter, Graig Nettles, Ron Guidry, Lou Piniella, Sparky Lyle, Mickey Rivers, Goose Gossage, Bucky Dent, Willie Randolph—who are fourteen and a
half games behind the Boston Red Sox in late July 1978 and come screaming back to beat them in a one-game playoff to win the division, then trounce the Royals to win the pennant and thump the Dodgers to win the World Series. One of the greatest comebacks of all time.

And since this is New York, the press has an opinion or two. They call Thurman Munson grouchy, brutish, stupid, petty, greedy, oversensitive. It becomes a soap opera: Thurman Munson pours a plate of spaghetti on one reporter’s head and nearly kicks another’s ass. But the fans—all they see is this walrus-looking guy who plays like he’s a
possessed
walrus. During a game against Oakland, when he commits an error that scores Don Baylor and then he subsequently strikes out at the plate, they heap all kinds of abuse on him, and, heading back to the dugout, he just ups and gives them the finger. Hoists the finger to everyone at Yankee Stadium. That’s not family entertainment! The next day when he comes to bat, when his name is announced and Thurman Munson steels himself for a rain of boos, the same fans begin to applaud, then give him a tremendous ovation.

See why? Bastard or not, the man cares. Thurman Munson cares. Never backed down from anyone in his life—not his father, not another man, not another team, let alone fifty thousand fans calling for his head. And they love him for it. To this day they hang photographs of him in barbershops and delis and restaurants all over the five boroughs—all over the country. A Thurman Munson cult. Tens of thousands of people who bawled the day he died.

Including me.

So, I give you a boy—me—and a pack of boys: Bobby Stanley and Jeff DeMaio, Chris Norton and Tommy Gatto, Keith Nelson and John D’Aquila. All kids from my neighborhood, playing ball
in the 1970s. All of us—each of us—pretending to be someone else: Catfish Hunter pitching to George Brett or Ron Guidry pitching to Carl Yastrzemski or Reggie Jackson or Lou Piniella or Graig Nettles batting against Luis Tiant in the ninth inning of a hot summer eve in suburban Connecticut as blue shadows fall over the freshly mowed backyards.

In our town’s baseball league, I play catcher. I suit up in oversized pads and move as if I’m carrying a pack of rocks on my back. When a pitcher starts out shaky—maybe walks the bases loaded and then walks in a couple of runs to boot—I call time and trot out to the mound, kick some dirt around, chew gum. Keep throwing like that, I say, but can you try to throw strikes?

And, naturally, my man is Thurman Munson. Or not so naturally. I mean, why would a skinny, hairless nine- or ten- or eleven-year-old twerp identify with a gruff, ungraceful grown man who’s known to throw bats at cameramen? What shred of sameness could exist between a do-gooding altar boy and a foulmouthed truck driver’s son? But then, just playing Thurman Munson’s position bestows some of his magic on me. Each wild pitch taken to the body, each bruise and jammed finger, is in honor of the ones taken by Thurman Munson. Each foul tip to the head becomes a migraine shared with Thurman Munson, and each hobbled knee brings a boy closer to the ecstatic revelations of a war-tested veteran, pain connecting two human beings on a level that goes beneath intellect and experience and age. Goes to a feeling. Writ on the body. We are the same dog.

At night during these muggy summers, my brothers and I watch the Yankees on television. When Munson takes the field and crouches behind home plate, or when he comes to bat, spitting into either glove and turtling his head once around, we watch. We watch him hoofing in the batter’s box like an angry bull, excavating the earth, twinkle-toeing a pile of it in circles
like a ballerina, and then digging in. For some reason, his presence is mesmerizing. He bears a striking resemblance to the butcher at our local supermarket: the same weak chin, the same fleshy cheeks. He has a number of tics and twitches—cocks his head, messes with his sleeves—as if being harassed by horseflies. Yet somewhere deep in those brown eyes, he is as calm as a northern pond waiting for ducks to land. In that place he is seeing things reflected before they actually happen, and then he makes them happen.

And there is one magnificent night—October 6, 1978—when Thurman Munson drives a Doug Bird fastball as deep as you can take a pitcher to left-center field at Yankee Stadium for a playoff home run that seals the deal: Yankees beat the Kansas City Royals 6–5 despite George Brett’s own three home runs and then beat them once more for the pennant and it’s nothing but bedlam. At the stadium, the dam explodes; in this Connecticut suburb where the leaves are turning in the fingers of an autumn chill, four boys pump their fists, hooting and hollering and then rioting themselves—pig-piling, whacking one another with pillows, hyperventilating with happiness. A free-for-all!

So I give you a boy and a neighborhood of boys and a town of boys. I give you a suburbia of boys, and I give you five boroughs of boys, a city following a team that is a circus. A stitched-together bunch of brawlers and hustlers, cussers and bullies, led by their captain, who, as Ron Guidry puts it, can make you laugh and then just as soon turn around and put a bullet through your chest.

I’m not sure how the news about Thurman Munson gets out—maybe someone’s older brother hears it on the radio or maybe someone’s mother sees it on television. A friend dons a Yankee uniform and disappears inside his house, watching the news behind drawn curtains with his father and brother. Another friend hears about it in the backseat on the way to football practice
and puts on his helmet to blubber privately, behind his face mask. Another simply won’t come out of his bedroom.

For me, August 2, 1979, has been like other summer days: swim-team practice, some baseball, lawn mowing, then down to the Sound with a friend to swim again. And that’s where I hear that Thurman Munson is dead. I’m dripping salt water, and someone’s brother says that Thurman Munson was burned alive.

When I get home, the downstairs is empty. Somewhere I can hear running water—my mom pouring a bath for my youngest brother. Something is cooking and I turn on the television. An anchorman and then the wrecked Cessna Citation, a charred carapace emblazoned with NY15, and strobe lights everywhere like some strange Mardi Gras.

It was an off day for the Yankees, and Thurman Munson was practicing takeoffs and landings, touch-and-gos. He’d had less than forty hours of experience with his new jet, and he accidentally put it into a stall. The Cessna dipped precipitously before the runway. It scraped trees, tumbled down toward a cornfield, hit the ground at about 108 miles per hour, spun, and had its wings shorn off. It crashed a thousand feet short of the runway and sailed to a stop some five hundred feet later, on Greensburg Road. The two other passengers—a friend and a flight instructor—survived, and they tried to drag Thurman Munson from the wreckage. He was conscious, probably paralyzed, calling for help. And all of a sudden jet fuel leaked, pooling near Thurman Munson, and the Cessna exploded.

Afterward, he was identified by dental records. Nearly 80 percent of his body was badly burned. The muscles of his left arm were wasted. He had a busted jaw and a broken rib, and the corneas of his eyes were made opaque by flame. He had a bruised heart and a bloody nose.

“The body is that of a well developed, well nourished, white
male,” read the autopsy, “who has been subjected to considerable heat and fire, which has resulted in his body assuming the pugilistic attitude.”

The truth is I’ve had only one hero in my life. And his death coincided with a hundred little deaths—of boyhood, the seventies, a great Yankee team, an era in baseball, some blind faith. I didn’t go Goth after Thurman Munson’s death, I just changed a little without knowing it, in full resistance to change. And to this day, I don’t understand: What happens when your hero suddenly stands up from behind home plate, crosses some fold in time, and vanishes into thin air?

One answer: You go after him. You enter your own early thirties and, crossing the same fold, you try to bring him back, if only for a moment. You go to Canton, Ohio, on a hot day not unlike the day Thurman Munson died, to the house that Thurman Munson built, a fourteen-room colonial set on a knoll, a house with pillars out front like some smaller, white-brick, suburban version of Tara, and meet Thurman Munson’s family—his wife, Diana, and the three kids: Tracy, who has three kids of her own now; Kelly, who just got married; and Michael, who was four when his father died and who himself played catcher in the Yankees’ farm system.

Their father has been gone twenty years and they still don’t exactly know who he is. Or he is something different for each of them, and then different in each moment. An ideal, an epiphany, a hero, a heartache. People didn’t know Thurman, says Catfish Hunter today, they just loved the way he played. And sometimes his wife didn’t know the real Thurman, either. He might visit some kids in a hospital, and later, when Diana learned about it, she’d get angry and say, Why didn’t you tell me, your own wife?

’Cause you’d go tell the press, said Thurman Munson.

Maybe I would, she said. And why not? They think you’re a spoiled ballplayer.

And Thurman Munson said, That’s why. That’s exactly why.

Show the world that he was a goofball? A sap? A romantic? The man was a koan even to himself—he couldn’t be figured or unraveled. He’d help lead the Yankees to a World Series victory—one of the proudest, sweetest moments of his life, he told Diana—then, based on some perceived locker-room slight, refuse to go to the ticker-tape parade.

There were five, six, seven Thurman Munsons, not counting his soul, and the one who mattered most was the private one, the one who came walking down a long hall like the one at the beginning of
Get Smart
, with doors and walls closing behind him. When he walked over the threshold after a long road trip, he’d hug his wife and say “I love you” in German.
Ich liebe dich.
He wrote poetry to her. He scribbled philosophical aphorisms. He loved Neil Diamond—“Cracklin’ Rosie,” “I Am … I Said”—played the guy’s music nonstop, incessantly, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, carried it with him on a big boom box. Thurman Munson, the grim captain, identifying with picaresque songs about being on the road, lost and alone against the world, having something to prove, falling in love.