You want floral-patterned platitudes about George Steinbrenner? Then turn the page, now.
But if you want my version of the truth — and that’s all I’ve got — then here goes:
He made it very tough. To see Steinbrenner in a good light, you had to overlook a lot. Or close your eyes. He always put you in a place where you had to forgive and forget.
But no matter how hard and how often you tried to look past it — I was a born and raised Yankees fan, for crying out loud, and I wanted to stay that way — he’d eventually attack your dignity, get ya right in the labonza, making it difficult to stomach him.
If, from his start here, you forgave him his felony conviction for trying to buy influence in the Nixon White House, you also had to forget his felony conviction for trying to fix the investigation of his crime.
If you could forgive the fact that he four times hired and fired the same inveterate alcoholic to lead the New York Yankees, how could you forget that he did both a fifth time?
When he boasted that everywhere he goes in New York City, the “little people” — he used a doorman as an example — express great regard for him, he was, at the same time, negotiating a first-of-its-kind contract to sell all Yankees TV rights to cable, thus sticking it, one way or the other, to the little people.
But when he recruited a pathetic, 26-year-old, mentally ill soul, Howard Spira, to his secret police force, well, that was the endgame.
If, given 60 seconds to select the delusional, emotionally troubled person from a crowded room, you’d have selected Spira — in 30 seconds. Any right-headed businessman would never have indulged Spira beyond giving him 10 bucks for carfare, then sending him on his way.
Steinbrenner paid Spira $40,000 in exchange for all the dirt he could dig on Dave Winfield. Then, after Steinbrenner was caught, he relied on his milk-fed friendly forces in media and law enforcement (need tickets?) to get the word out that he, George Steinbrenner, had been the victim of a shake-down artist.
To this day, history identifies Spira as a “a gambler,” as if he was a hood, a sharp, tough street guy. An online archived Sports Illustrated story from October 1990 identifies Spira as “a gambler with mob connections.”
If he’d been connected to “the mob,” there would be no mob — a school crossing guard would have busted it up. He was a profoundly delusional and childlike misfit with folders of clinical diagnoses to prove it. Spira was no more a criminal threat to Steinbrenner than he was to steal home.
That’s the episode that did it for me, no more rationalizing, forgiving or forgetting. There was no doubt in my mind that Steinbrenner and his pals in the Tampa FBI — that division’s former top man, Phil McNiff, was a special assistant to Steinbrenner — had a mentally ill man arrested, then sentenced to two years in a penitentiary.
After Spira, in 1991, was convicted of trying to extort Steinbrenner, two interesting events occurred.
1. The court sent Spira to a prison in Butner, N.C. — its psychiatric unit.
So delusional was Spira that during calls from prison he remained hopeful that Steinbrenner would deliver on his promise for a job — as assistant GM of the Yankees or as an executive within his shipbuilding enterprise. After all, Spira asked, yet again, why else would Steinbrenner have given him that American Ship Building prospectus to read?
2. Commissioner Fay Vincent suspended Steinbrenner, his second banishment as owner of the Yankees. Vincent didn’t see Steinbrenner as Spira’s victim. To the contrary.
And that suspension helped convince team owners that Vincent, until further notice, would be the last independent commissioner. A year later, Vincent was out; Bud Selig, team owner, was in. Get the picture?
So you see, Steinbrenner would eventually hit your breaking point.
Bob Gutkowski, when he ran MSG Network, helping it win Yankees TV rights, had to battle Steinbrenner for final say on announcers. Steinbrenner wasn’t wild about MSG’s hire of Tony Kubek. He felt the former Yankees shortstop was too independent, that he’d operate out of Steinbrenner’s control.
Steinbrenner had only one prerequisite to work in the Yankees’ TV and radio booths: You had to swear full allegiance to George Steinbrenner. He may have been born on the Fourth of July, but he was more like King George.
It didn’t matter if you were any good at broadcasting or what the audience thought. It didn’t even matter to him if you knocked the Yankees. When he was angling to ditch or goad a Yankees player or manager, Steinbrenner encouraged announcers to take shots.
But he expected his TV and radio voices to, at all times — starting with their first approach — revere him. He regarded boot-licking as an act of sincerity. He was flattered by it.
He once had me. During nasty rights negotiations with Cablevision boss Chuck Dolan — when Yankees telecasts were on Dolan’s SportsChannel — we’d swap phone calls, two, three a day, Steinbrenner feeding me this and that.
Hey, I’m a young columnist and George Steinbrenner’s calling me! Neat!
But he was playing me as his secretary. I’d take his dictation, then publish it under my name in a New York newspaper.
On the day I politely told him that what he told me often turned up partially true or totally false, our secret society folded. I had been disobedient, disloyal.
But I was relieved it was over, glad to no longer have been co-opted, dirty. OK, so I wouldn’t break the next big Yankees TV story, not with his help, anyway.
But I can understand how Yankees fans who didn’t have to deal with him — those who wanted to root for a winner — wouldn’t much care, one way or the other. Just as long as the Yankees won.
If Steinbrenner never fired their good friend for no good reason, or if, for sport, he bullied and humiliated some front-office functionary and it happened out of their sight, such fans neither had to forgive nor forget. They could just root, root, root for the home team.