As much as anything, George Steinbrenner wanted to prove he wasn’t only good enough to make it in New York, but big enough, too.
He could have been a king in Cleveland, his hometown, where he owned a shipping company, dabbled in semi-pro basketball and once tried to buy the Cleveland Indians. He could have been a titan in Tampa, where he spent his latter decades, an anonymous rich man doing good civic deeds and endowing scholarships, his name always on the tips of people’s tongues and never in the forefront of their brains.
But he always knew he wanted more than that, needed more than that. A few years ago, in conversation, he cited an old Frank Sinatra quote that flew out of his mouth far too quickly for it to have been the first time he ever used it.
“New York is The City,” he said, “and everywhere else is Wichita.”
He did that. He didn’t only make it in New York, he conquered it, he pillaged it, he all but embossed “GMS” in gold across every borough and every river. He didn’t always do it with grace. There are stories that still make the wallpaper curl, and his two suspensions from baseball immediately end almost any conversation that suggests he should own a plaque in Cooperstown.
But you know something else? Anyone who’s ever made it here — who’s ever really made it here — had to be unapologetic about things lesser men would apologize for.
And from the moment we were first introduced — Jan. 3, 1973 — he never would express regret about wanting to make the Yankees matter again, wanting to make them dominant again. He paid less than $9 million for them, used less than $1 million of his own money, and at the 21 Club that day he insisted he would let his baseball people run the baseball team, pledged absentee ownership.
But even the big room inside 21 wasn’t big enough for George Steinbrenner, and there were times when even this enormous, eclectic city didn’t seem broad enough to contain all of his ambition, all of his ego, all of his vision. Every now and again we’re told that New York doesn’t matter as much as it used to; hell, a punk kid who played in Steinbrenner’s own hometown of Cleveland named LeBron James essentially sent us that very message last week.
Steinbrenner? Steinbrenner understood how much the big town offered, how much it promised, and so he needed a room like New York, and he needed a vehicle like the Yankees. He needed those wonderful, old Bronx Zoo teams that would fight each other before the first pitch and then come after you with fists and spikes flying for nine innings afterward. He needed the dynasty boys of 1996-2000 to serve as appropriate championship parentheses. He always needed stars, and he chased them all, from Reggie to A-Rod, from Goose Gossage to CC Sabathia and everyone in between. He yearned for excellence, and demanded it, sometimes to the detriment of everyone, his baseball team included.
“New York likes a team that fights,” he said a few years back. “New Yorkers wake up fighting every day of their lives. They fight for taxicabs. They fight for seats on the subway. They fight to get promotions. You better believe I want a team that fights the way New York fights.”
All he did once he came here was become the most famous and most successful owner of all, more than Jerry Jones in Dallas or the Rooney family of Pittsburgh or the carpetbagging O’Malleys, who had such a good thing going in New York once upon a time with the Dodgers and ran away from the lights. In a city stuffed with pretender families like the Wilpons and the Dolans, only the Maras ever have belonged in the same conversation with Steinbrenner. But Steinbrenner won more, and now the Maras have to share top billing with the Tisches around new Giants Stadium. It became George’s town.
Boss Town.
He leaves behind the most extraordinary footprint in American sports, the Yankees having gone from second team in town in 1973 to the No. 1 sporting logo in the world. He leaves behind a baseball team whose mission is now engrained in his own relentless expectation, and a regional TV network that is the envy of that industry, too.
And he leaves behind a city that rarely has known a character this colorful, a personality this diverse, a legacy that leads in a hundred different directions. However you felt about Steinbrenner, however you feel about him now, you always knew this: you always knew he was in the room, the bigger the room the better.
Rooms that all seem a little extra empty this morning.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com