Had it been any other team, in any other city, it never would have worked, the brashness, the bluster, the always butting in.
But because George Steinbrenner owned the greatest baseball team in the greatest city in the world, he could be The Boss that everybody hated, The Boss that everybody loved.
He could own the back page, and have a lease on the front.
“To compete for the entertainment dollar, particularly in New York, you have to have more than nine guys playing baseball,” the Yankee owner once said. “You have to have an attraction. And I have tried to do the best job I possibly can to give my fans an attraction.”
Fans might not have appreciated that 30 years ago, when Steinbrenner was as reviled in some circles as LeBron James is now. Back then, he was the buttinsky in a turtleneck, the fingernails on baseball’s blackboard, the man who wouldn’t go away.
Indeed, when Steinbrenner was banned from baseball in 1990 for 30 months after hiring a small-time gambler to dig up dirt on All-Star Dave Winfield, Yankee fans — in replica jerseys and midnight-blue hats — rose to their feet during a game in The Bronx and cheered as if they had just seen a perfect game.
But in the end, after building a new Yankee dynasty, the 80-year-old Steinbrenner couldn’t have been more revered if he had safely landed a plane with no engines in the middle of the Hudson River.
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“George was The Boss, make no mistake,” said Yankee great Yogi Berra. “He built the Yankees into champions, and that’s something nobody can ever deny.”
Before he started building winning baseball teams, Steinbrenner worked with his father in Ohio building ships. Henry Steinbrenner was as demanding as a drill sergeant, pushing his son to excel at all times.
George Steinbrenner was born on the Fourth of July in 1930 in Rocky River, Ohio, to fourth-generation Great Lakes shipbuilder Henry Steinbrenner II and his wife, Rita.
Steinbrenner received his bachelor’s degree in 1952 from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was an average student who excelled at athletics. He was an accomplished hurdler on the varsity track-and-field team, and served as sports editor of the student paper. He also played piano in the band and played halfback on his senior-year football team.
But despite his exploits, he had a hard time pleasing the only person whose approval mattered to him — his father.
Steinbrenner once recalled how he won three straight hurdle races as a teenager before he was beaten in the fourth.
“How did you lose that one?” Henry Steinbrenner barked.
Friends said Steinbrenner did all he could to please his dad, but had as much success as he would have had trying to hit a curveball. After Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973, his father said it was the first smart thing he’d ever done.
“Sometimes, you could say, it was asking too much, but that’s the way my father was,” Steinbrenner told a reporter once. “He was a very tough German. Very tough.”
Years later, when the Yankees were back on top, Steinbrenner was asked how his father would have judged his success.
“I hope that he would have been proud of me, but you never know,” Steinbrenner said. “I don’t look back and think about how he would judge me. He was very happy when I bought the Yankees, and he very much enjoyed being a part of it.”
After his father retired in 1963 from his Kinsman Marine Transit Co. shipbuilding firm, Steinbrenner merged the business with American Ship Building, tripling the new company’s net worth. While at the helm, Steinbrenner would eventually earn the millions that would ultimately put him in a position to buy the most storied franchise in all of sports.
But before that happened, Steinbrenner tried his hand at basketball. In 1960, at the age of 30 — and against his father’s wishes — Steinbrenner purchased a minor-league basketball team called the Cleveland Pipers.
During one Piper game, Steinbrenner was so upset over a call against his team that he barreled down to the court to berate an official. In another game, he yanked a whistle from a referee’s mouth.
A Cleveland columnist wrote that Steinbrenner was “congenitally unsuited” to run a pro sports team. Building a Yankee dynasty would have been payback enough. But Steinbrenner ordered all team personnel to cancel their subscriptions to the paper and call 15 friends and ask them to do the same.
When Steinbrenner and several partners bought the Yankees in 1973, the team had gone eight seasons without a first-place finish, the club’s longest drought since Babe Ruth & Co. won the team’s first pennant in 1921.
And The Boss was almost immediately off to a rocky start. In 1974, Steinbrenner was indicted on 14 criminal counts and pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and to a felony charge of obstruction of justice.
Steinbrenner was personally fined $15,000, while his firm was assessed $20,000 for the offenses. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years, but later reduced that 15 months.
Ronald Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner on Jan. 19, 1989, in one of the final acts of his presidency.
When Steinbrenner wasn’t involved in pennant races, he was busy racing horses. He entered six in the Kentucky Derby over several years, failing to win with Steve’s Friend (1977), Eternal Prince (1985), Diligence (1996), Concerto (1997), Blue Burner (2002) and the 2005 favorite, Bellamy Road.
But it was baseball where the hard-driving Steinbrenner made his biggest splash, publicly berating players and sending a parade of managers through his revolving door.
“The phone would ring in the middle of the night, and you knew it was either Mr. Steinbrenner or a death in the family,” Harvey Greene, the Yankees’ former public-relations director, once said.
“After a while, you started to root for a death in the family.”
No relationship on the team was more dysfunctional than the one The Boss shared with Billy Martin, the manager he fired five times. Steinbrenner sided with Reggie Jackson during a feud between the slugger and the manager, sparking one of the most famous quotes in all of Yankee lore.
“The two of them deserve each other,” Martin said. “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”
But Steinbrenner said the public got it all wrong.
“I’m really 95 percent Mr. Rogers, and only 5 percent Oscar the Grouch,” he said.
It was Steinbrenner’s free-spending style that made the Yankees the best team money could buy, an industry-wide attraction and the club with the bull’s-eye on its pinstriped back. “If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em,” was the guiding philosophy, and Steinbrenner always had his checkbook at the ready. From Jackson to Winfield, from Giambi to A-Rod, The Boss didn’t have a problem opening his wallet.
“George Steinbrenner is an American icon and was one of the pre-eminent owners in all of sports,” said New York Jet owner Woody Johnson. “A true champion with his own unique style, he held his team to the highest standards and demanded a title for Yankees fans each and every season.”
Steinbrenner often said it was all about being on top.
“Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing,” he said once. “Breathing first, winning next.”