We all deal with loss in our own way, we place our feelings in different boxes, separate compartments, try to grind from today until tomorrow, this week to next. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone who is familiar with Joe Girardi — or who has ever read about his parents — this would be the way the manager of the Yankees would deal with the loss of his father, Jerry, who died Saturday after a long fight with Alzheimer’s disease:
“My dad would want me to do everything that we could to go win a World Series,” Girardi said, his voice losing the match with his emotions. “The one thing [both of my parents] taught me was to always finish the job at hand.”
Girardi was sitting on the Yankees’ team bus as it motored down the Henry Hudson Parkway Saturday, bound for the train that would take them to Baltimore. His cell phone buzzed. It wasn’t unexpected news. Jerry Girardi had been suffering with Alzheimer’s for years, and was finally admitted to a home shortly after Girardi became the Yankees’ manager in 2007.
He put his sunglasses on, to camouflage the tears. No matter how long you wait for a call like that you’re never really prepared. If anyone on the bus suspected something was wrong, they never let on. They wouldn’t be told until absolutely necessary.
“I didn’t want to have to deal with it with the team,” Girardi said. “And I didn’t want the team to have to deal with it.”
So he told a handful of friends, none of them Yankees. And across the first three games and four days of this series, he kept his own counsel, mourned his father privately even as he performed his most public job. It was his intention to keep the news private until next Monday, when his father will be buried in Illinois.
“Probably what a lot of men do when they go through difficult and sad times, we try to stay busy,” he said before the Yankees’ 2-1, 13-inning loss to the Orioles in Game 4 of the ALDS. “That’s what we do. And I tried to focus on what we were trying to accomplish and what we were doing because that’s what my dad would have done.”
But the news had started to circulate. It was time for people to know. And when the announcement came, so much of what had happened the past few days was given an entirely new context — notably, and inevitably, Wednesday night’s game, when Girardi pinch-hit Raul Ibanez for Alex Rodriguez and watched Ibanez hit the tying and winning home runs, one of the great hunch payoffs you’ll ever see.
Girardi is a religious man, and he conceded the notion his father would have been proud of that wasn’t lost on him. And neither was this: “It’s the first time in over 28 years my mom and dad have seen a game together again. They’ll be watching and they’ll be mad if I’m not doing my job. I know that.”
Girardi’s mother, Angela, died of cancer in 1984, surviving six years after being given a six-month prognosis. Jerry Girardi juggled three jobs, as a sales executive at a gypsum-manufacturing company, as a bricklayer (as his own father had been) and as a bartender. Later, Jerry would open Girardi’s, a 25-table restaurant in Washington, Ill.
In a wonderful piece on Girardi for The New Yorker last month, Girardi told author Gay Talese: “I loved the physical part of what he did. I carried the brick, I carried the blocks, I mixed the mortar, I did the smoothing.”
And it was the elder Girardi who introduced his son to the game, who always had a Cubs game on the radio, who made the pilgrimage from Peoria to Wrigley Field a few times a year. You could see all of these memories filling Girardi Thursday night. And could also understand how he would conclude the best way to honor a working man was to do just that: work.
“That,” he said, “is what he would have done.”
A son can honor a father no more completely than that.