CLEARWATER, Fla. — Yesterday, I watched John Wayne cry.
Dallas Green was always a True Grit type to me. He was the Yankees manager when I joined the beat for this newspaper in 1989. And my initial impression of Green has not changed over the last two-plus decades.
He is big and boisterous, tough and honest. He lacks an editing valve, so he tends to speak his mind in a loudspeaker of a voice. One night Green took the whole beat out in Detroit and I watched him drink enough VO and water to kill the average rhinoceros. But Green, if anything, grew more mirthful in the storytelling.
He embodied something of the Old West, hulking, robust and uber-masculine. He was Wayne as a baseball lifer.
And he was Wayne come to life yesterday when on a continuation of the worst day of his life, Green summoned the kind of grace and dignity and courage and pathos that we all can hope for on our worst days.
For the first time publicly, Green spoke about the death of his 9-year-old granddaughter, Christina Taylor Green, on Jan. 8 in Tucson. Christina was one of six people shot to death in a supermarket parking lot rampage that also left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) shot through the head.
Green made an opening statement and then handled every question with thoughtful answers that offered the kind of detail that showed his granddaughter was no stranger in his life. His lip quivered often, his voice cracked and, finally, when he could restrain it no more, a single tear rolled down his right cheek from behind dark sunglasses.
“That little girl woke an awful lot of people up,” Green said. “We just miss the hell out of her. You know, I’m supposed to be a tough sucker. I’m not really tough when it comes to this. So I apologize.”
Actually he hardly could have been tougher. Despite limping on problematic legs, the 76-year-old Green stood for the entire interview at Bright House Field, the Phillies’ spring home. He has returned to work as a special adviser to the GM. But why? At this age, with this kind of tragedy now in his soul?
“It’s helped me because you sink yourself into the work,” Green said. “You don’t see a little girl with a hole in her chest as much.”
That heartbreaking sentiment conjured images of the killing field a Tucson supermarket parking lot became on Jan. 8. Christina had become interested in politics in school. Aware of that interest, a neighbor, Susan Hileman, took Christina to see Giffords talk to constituents at a nearby Safeway. Green described what happened next to Christina as “wrong place, wrong time.” Nineteen people were shot and six were killed, including Christina.
Green more than absolved Hileman, he praised her attempt to shield Christina, in which Hileman took six bullets. “We’ll never forget [Hileman],” Green said. “I know she’s going through her own hell, but she shouldn’t, because Christina did want to go. She did want to be a part of that.”
Jared Lee Loughner, 22, was arrested at the scene and is awaiting trial. The weapon used in the attack was a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol that has a 33-round magazine.
“I guess the one thing that I can’t get through my mind, even though I’m a hunter and I love to shoot a gun, I love to have my guns, I don’t have a Glock or whatever it is,” Green said.
“I don’t have a magazine with 33 bullets in it. That doesn’t make sense for me, to be able to sell those kinds of things. I guess I never thought about it until this happened. What reason is there to have those kinds of guns, other than to kill people? I just don’t understand that.”
It is unfathomable outside the family, so imagine inside. Green, in fact, deflected sympathy several times away from him to his son, John, a Dodgers scout and former Yankees farmhand; his daughter-in-law Roxanna; and Christina’s brother, Dallas Jr.
Green, who skippered the 1980 Phillies to a championship and also managed the Mets, has only memories now of the granddaughter born on Sept. 11, 2001. How she was adept enough at softball that “she wanted to be the first major-league gal.” How he called her “princess” despite protests by her mother that she be called Christina Taylor. How great Christmas was down in the Turks and Caicos Islands vacation home Green and his wife, Sylvia, have long owned and that Christina was able to share with “Nana and Pop-Pop.”
Every memory was enough to make even the toughest man cry.
And it did.
joel.sherman@nypost.com