George Steinbrenner: July 4, 1930 - July 13, 2010

George Steinbrenner, owner of New York Yankees, has died in Tampa at age of 80 after heart attack

By Bill Madden
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.nydailynews.com/
July 13, 2010


Along with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Steinbrenner and Torre celebrate the Yankees Subway World Series victory over the Mets with a ticker-tape parade and rally at City Hall. It was the sixth and final world title of Steinbrenner's tenure as owner.

Credits: Keivom, James

George Steinbrenner, owner of New York Yankees, has died in Tampa at age of 80 after heart attack

George Steinbrenner, a towering and intimidating figure who dominated the New York sports scene for 35 years, winning 11 American League pennants and seven world championships as owner of the Yankees, in and around two suspensions from baseball and multiple feuds and firings, died Tuesday morning in Tampa after suffering a massive heart attack. He was 80.

"The Boss" - as he was so aptly named by Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, his longtime antagonist - died at around 6:30 a.m. He had been suffering from failing health, the result of a series of strokes, for the past few years.

His family released a statement Tuesday morning. "It is with profound sadness that the family of George M. Steinbrenner III announces his passing," the statement said. "He was an incredible and charitable man. First and foremost he was devoted to his entire family - his beloved wife, Joan; his sisters, Susan Norpell and Judy Kamm, his children, Hank, Jennifer, Jessica and Hal; and all his grandchildren. He was a visionary and a giant in the world of sports. He took a great but struggling franchise and turned it into a champion again."

In Steinbrenner's blustering and bombastic reign as the longest-termed owner in their history, the Yankees recovered from the rubble of their darkest era under CBS' ownership (1964-72) to win world championships in 1977 and 1978, only to fall and then rise again with another dynastic string of four championships under manager Joe Torre from 1996-2000 and then winning a seventh world championship for him under Joe Girardi this past season.

At the same time, the franchise Steinbrenner and a group of 15 limited partners purchased on Jan. 3, 1973 for $8.8 million from CBS (or $4.4 million less than the network had paid for it), skyrocketed in value to over a billion dollars, according to analysts, after Steinbrenner brokered unprecedented worldwide marketing deals for the Yankees and formed his own cable television network (YES) to broadcast the team's games. Steinbrenner's personal initial investment in the team was $168,000.

But until his mostly glorious sunset years, during which his management team of chief adviser Gene Michael, GM Brian Cashman and Torre remained intact and the team payroll escalated to the $200 million plateau, Steinbrenner's operation of the Yankees was one of constant upheaval, turmoil and instability. This was no better evidenced than by his hiring and firing of 12 managers (including Billy Martin five times) between Ralph Houk (whom he inherited in 1973) and Torre. And prior to Cashman's ascension at age 30 to the Yankee GM role in 1998, no less than 14 people (including Michael twice) held that position before ultimately finding the working conditions intolerable and, in many cases, hazardous to their health.

A gathering of legends. Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo (l.) presents Steinbrenner and Martin with a special Daily News 'Pride of the Yankees' cover in April, 1983.

Credits: Stahl, Bill

Hard as he was on his managers and general managers, Steinbrenner feuded with his players as well, the most notable being Dave Winfield, whom he signed to a then-record 10-year, $23 million free-agent contract in 1980. The ink was barely dry on the deal when Steinbrenner discovered his lawyers had neglected to inform him of cost-of-living clauses in it that greatly enhanced its value. This, in turn, led to a bitter feud between Steinbrenner and his new superstar left fielder that culminated with the Yankee owner's second suspension from baseball, July 30, 1990, after it was revealed he'd paid $40,000 to a self-described gambler, Howie Spira, to provide dirt to him on Winfield.

Through the years, Steinbrenner had acrimonious fallings out with many of his star players such as Reggie Jackson, Lou Piniella, Goose Gossage, Graig Nettles and Sparky Lyle, only to later patch things up and welcome them back into the Yankee fold. With Yankee icon Yogi Berra, however, the feud was a lasting one. Berra, who Steinbrenner fired as manager just 16 games into the 1985 season, vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium "as long as (Steinbrenner's) there," and was estranged from the organization until January of 1999 when a peace pact was finally brokered between the two with Steinbrenner issuing a public apology to him.

And when Steinbrenner wasn't publicly sparring with his own Yankee underlings, he was seemingly in constant war with commissioners, league presidents, umpires and other team owners and officials. From 1983 until 1995, it was calculated that he'd accrued $645,000 in fines stemming from those feuds. In 1983 alone, Steinbrenner was levied fines totaling $305,000 for various offenses against baseball mankind, as well as being suspended for a week by American League president Lee MacPhail for making derogatory remarks about umpires Darryl Cousins and John Shulock.

If nothing else, Steinbrenner's public jabs at his many targets of derision and contempt were colorful. He once called White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn "those two pumpkins" and "the Katzenjammer twins" (for which he was fined $5,000). Responding to a 1981 off-the-cuff remark by Mets GM Frank Cashen about Yankee Stadium being "Fort Apache," Steinbrenner referred to him as "that pus-sy face little man" - a term he used a variation of some 25 years later when he called his Japanese pitching prodigy Hideki Irabu "a fat pus-sy toad." And during the height of the Yankee-Red Sox hostilities in 2003, he referred to Boston CEO Larry Lucchino as a "chameleon" after Lucchino labeled the Yankees "the evil empire."

The low point of the Steinbrenner-created turmoil in 1983 came when The Boss was fined $250,000 by Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for his actions and statements surrounding the infamous "Pine Tar Game" in which MacPhail overturned an umpires' ruling disallowing a game-winning home run by the Kansas City Royals' George Brett because of excessive pine tar on his bat. MacPhail ordered the game to be picked up from the point of Brett's home run when the Royals returned to New York 3-1/2 weeks later.

In the meantime, Steinbrenner, with notorious rogue attorney Roy Cohn as his point man, filed lawsuits against baseball in the courts of Manhattan and the Bronx in an attempt to prevent the game from being restarted. The final straw for Kuhn was when Steinbrenner, in an obvious attempt to incite the New York fans against the AL president, suggested publicly that "MacPhail ought to go house-hunting in Kansas City."

It was Kuhn who handed down Steinbrenner's first suspension, barely 23 months after he'd purchased controlling interest in the Yankees. Having pled guilty to one count of conspiracy for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign, Steinbrenner was suspended in November of 1974 for two years by Kuhn for actions detrimental to baseball. The suspension was lifted by Kuhn after 15 months for "good behavior" but by then Steinbrenner had already been working undercover to buy and build the Yankees into a super power again.

In December of 1974, Oakland A's ace right-hander Catfish Hunter was declared a free agent by baseball arbitrator Peter Seitz on the grounds that his contract had been breached. A wild bidding war ensued and on New Year's Eve, the Yankees announced they had signed Hunter to what was later revealed to be a five-year $3.35 million deal.

Although Steinbrenner was on suspension at the time of the Hunter signing, there was no question he had engineered it, and from there the Yankees became the biggest players in the advent of free agency. Hunter was the cornerstone to their renaissance, followed by the high profile signings of Jackson and pitcher Don Gullett in 1976 and the fearsome closer, Gossage, in 1977. More than any other owner at the time, Steinbrenner understood how, through free agency, a team could go from the bottom to the top in a hurry, and he, of course, had the resources to do it.

Steinbrenner celebrates the Yankees five-game victory over the Royals in the 1976 ALCS with Yogi Berra (l.) and manager Billy Martin (r.). The Bombers are swept by Cincinnati's 'Big Red Machine' in the World Series.

Credits: Farrell, Dan

But after the back-to-back world championships in 1977 and 1978 and winning 103 games in 1980 (after which he still fired manager Dick Howser because the Yankees got swept in the ALCS by the Royals), Steinbrenner began to get carried away with signing free agents, to the detriment of the Yankee farm system. For all his free agent successes of the '70s, there were just as many expensive flops in the '80s - singles-hitting outfielder Davey Collins (three years, $2.4 million), pitchers Ed Whitson (five years, $4.5 million, Pascual Perez (three years, $5.1 million), outfielder Steve Kemp (five years, $4.5 million), reliever Rawley Eastwick, (five years, $1.1 million), all of which were considered at the time to be market-busting deals.

Steinbrenner's nadir as a meddling, destructive owner came in the 1981 World Series when he ordered the benching of Jackson, and got involved in a fistfight on the elevator of the hotel in Los Angeles where the Yankees were staying. He claimed at the time he was defending the honor of his players against two unidentified ruffians who had been making taunting remarks about the Yankees. The two never materialized and after the Yankees lost the Series in six games to the Dodgers, Steinbrenner ordered his public relations director, Irv Kaze, to read a public apology to the Yankee Stadium fans, further infuriating his players.

As a result of Steinbrenner's failed excesses, the Yankees, beginning in 1982, endured the longest pennant draught (15 years) in their history, and as their decline deepened, even their money couldn't lure the better free agents to New York. It was not until Steinbrenner was serving his second suspension, this one levied by commissioner Fay Vincent, that the Yankees, under Michael's stewardship, began planting the seeds to a new era of prosperity and refreshing stability.

A primary factor in the '90s Yankee renaissance was the farm system which for years Steinbrenner had repeatedly ravaged with impulsive "win now" deals in which he sacrificed top prospects like outfielders Jay Buhner and Willie McGee and first baseman Fred McGriff. With Steinbrenner again on suspension, the farm system was allowed to flourish and homegrown talents Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera - any and all of whom would have likely been traded under Steinbrenner's operating policy of the '80s - instead made it to the Bronx to form the nucleus of the Torre-managed championship seasons.
The October 1995 hiring of Torre - whose managerial term far exceeded any of Steinbrenner's previous 13 pilots - was the end result of another tempest. After leading the Yankees to the playoffs for the first time since 1981, Buck Showalter balked at the two-year $1,050,000 contract extension offered him, prompting Steinbrenner to take the offer off the table and sever ties with him. Steinbrenner then issued a statement in which he wished "nothing but the best for Buck and his little family."

Things start to turn around in 1995 when Buck Showalter leads the team into the playoffs, but it isn't until Steinbrenner brings Joe Torre into the mix as manager that the Yankees dynasty finally re-emerges. Here the emotional pair celebrate a 1998 World Series sweep over the Padres. It's the second world championship in three years for the Bombers.

Credits: PAT SULLIVAN/AP

But, as with Howser (whom he called from a roadside pay phone in Tampa, to say he'd reconsidered his decision to fire him), Steinbrenner had second thoughts about letting Showalter go and actually drove to his home in Pensacola, Fla., a few days later, asking him to come back. Like Howser in 1980, however, Showalter said "no thanks," pointing out the fact that Steinbrenner, on the advice of Michael, had already hired the Brooklyn-born Torre as his new manager.

Although they had their inevitable clashes, Steinbrenner admitted that he never had a better relationship with a manager than he had with Torre, although that, too, ended badly when Torre turned down a incentive-laded contract after another quick playoff exit in 2007. It was at that fateful meeting in Tampa that Torre looked Steinbrenner in the eye and called the offer "insulting." In turning down the offer, Torre then told Steinbrenner that The Boss would never have become a billionaire without Torre and his winning teams. Torre was replaced by Girardi, his former catcher, and went on to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Born July 4, 1930, in Cleveland, Steinbrenner spoke often about his demanding father, Henry, as having been the most influential person in his life. Henry Steinbrenner had graduated from MIT where he was an NCAA hurdles champion. Young George tried to emulate his father (whose dictum was "always work harder than anybody else") but, by his own admission, he was never able to please the old man.

After attending Culver Military Academy in Indiana, Steinbrenner didn't have the grades to follow his father to MIT. But he did get admitted to Williams College where he, too, excelled in running the hurdles. It was at Williams where Steinbrenner developed a passion for the classics, as well as Gen. George Patton. Throughout his years running the Yankees he would readily recite his favorite quotes of various philosophers, poets and military leaders, many of which are also inscribed on the clubhouse walls of both Yankee Stadium and the team's spring training complex in Tampa.

Upon graduation from Williams, Steinbrenner went into the military service for three years and, at Lockbourne Air Force base near Columbus, Ohio, set up a coffee cart franchise that served 16,000 soldiers and office workers. After his discharge, he stayed in Columbus to coach football and basketball at St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

It was also there that he met a local student at Ohio State, Joan Zieg, whom he married.

In 1955, Steinbrenner was hired as an assistant football coach at Northwestern under Lou Saban, who remained a lifelong friend and even served a brief term as Yankee president. In 1956 and 1957 he served as Jack Mollenkopf's backfield coach at Purdue. Then, in 1957 he elected to enter his father's shipbuilding business, Kinsman Transit, which had been a fixture on the Great Lakes since 1882.

By this time, the elder Steinbrenner had grown weary of trying to compete against the larger shipbuilding corporations, which was fine with his hard-driving son who relished the challenge of butting heads with big business. Steinbrenner later became part of a group that purchased American Shipbuilding Co. and by 1972 the company's gross sales were more than $100 million annually.

The Boss shows off his long-ball prowess as he joins Yankees practice in 1981. Steinbrenner dabbles in sports before buying the Bronx Bombers, serving as an assistant football coach at Northwestern and then owning a minor-league basketball team.

Credits: Carroll, Pat

In the early 1980s, however, the government had eliminated shipbuilding subsidies and American Ship began a long decline - ironically paralleling that of Steinbrenner's Yankees. In 1983, Steinbrenner shuttered the company's Lorain, Ohio, offices and moved all his operations to Tampa. Mounting losses, however, prompted the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1993.

Throughout his tenure of running the shipbuilding business, Steinbrenner maintained a connection to his real passion, sports. In the '50s he owned the Cleveland Pipers of the ill-fated American Basketball League, and he was a longtime member of the U.S. Olympic Committee. After moving to Tampa, Steinbrenner became actively involved in horse racing. He briefly owned Tampa Bay Downs and bred horses on his farm in Ocala, Fla. He was also presented with the prestigious Gold Medal award from the National (college) Football Foundation in 2002.

But his sports legacy, of course, is the Yankees. "I've just bought the Mona Lisa of sports teams," he said upon closing the deal with CBS for the team in 1973 - to which his father said to him: "You finally did something right."

But of all the quotes uttered by and about him, the one that probably most summed up the essence of Steinbrenner was that of John McMullen, one of his early limited partners with the Yankees. When asked why he was selling his share of the Yankees, McMullen replied: "Because I came to realize that there is nothing quite so limited in life than being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner."

Beside his wife, Joan, Steinbrenner is survived by two sons, Harold and Hank, and two daughters, Jennifer and Jessica, all of whom reside in Tampa.

Funeral arrangements will be private. There will be an additional public service with details to be announced.


George Steinbrenner: The Boss steals the headlines one last time on day of All-Star Game

By Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Tuesday, July 13th 2010, 11:28 AM

Of course he was the headline in baseball one last time on the morning of baseball's All-Star Game. George Steinbrenner died Tuesday morning, died less than two weeks after his 80th birthday on the 4th of July, died of a massive heart attack after being in failing health for years. The story in baseball now wasn't the game always known as the Midsummer Classic. It was him. A different kind of classic, good and bad but never indifferent, from the day he first showed up in town nearly 40 years ago.

A classic. Classic Steinbrenner, upstaging the All-Star Game. Not just the back page of the New York papers this time, the guy who really made that notion - The Back Page! - part of the conversation of New York and newspapers more than anybody ever had before him. Like the back page was one more part of the town he wanted to own. Like it was more real estate.

Just not as valuable as the real estate in the Bronx, on 161st St., where the Yankees were.

At the age of 80, he wasn't just the back page of the New York papers Tuesday morning. He was the front page everywhere. The first stories, before it became official that Steinbrenner had died around 6:30 in the morning, immediately described him as legendary. The old man would have loved it.

In passing, with the Yankees back on top one more time even if you wondered how much he was able to enjoy that last year, he was even more than just what he wanted to be when he first showed up in New York in the '70s, which means the biggest guy in town. He wasn't just a back-page story in New York, a story about him and Billy Martin or Reggie Jackson. Or Dave Winfield and Howie Spira.

He was the whole story in sports on this day and night.

Classic. Steinbrenner.

He had not run the Yankees for a while, he had turned the team over to his sons two years ago, he hardly ever showed in New York anymore, or at the new Yankee Stadium. There were would be statements from him, through his P.R. man, the kind that was issued after Bob Sheppard, a legend himself as the Yankees public address announcer, when Sheppard died at 99 this past Sunday.

But those statements did not sound anything like Steinbrenner, not the guy who made himself into the loudest, most famous owner in the history of American sports, the guy who put up less than a million dollars, whatever it was, of his own money when he bought the Yankees from CBS and built the Yankees back up into what they are now: A baseball team worth more than a billion dollars, a team back to being the biggest brand in sports.

I asked him one time, a thousand years ago, in his old office at the old Stadium with that big desk, one of those times when we were talking to each other, how much HE thought the Yankees were worth.

He shrugged.

"That only matters if you're selling," he said that day, "and I'm not selling."

He never did. Oh, he came close. There was the time several years ago when it looked like he might sell to Cablevision, which off what the company has done with the Knicks and the Garden might have meant the end of the Yankees. The story at the time was that he wanted to sell a controlling interest but still be able to run the Yankees. No one knows what the conversation was really like between him and Charles Dolan. Maybe only the old man knew how close he came. It never happened.

The Yankees stayed in the family. On the morning he died they still belonged to him. He brought in Joe Torre and saw Torre manage the Yankees back to the top of the baseball world and was still in the room when Torre rejected the Yankees' last contract offer and walked out the door. And before that, after the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Tigers in 2006, the last loud roar from Steinbrenner was when he nearly fired Torre himself, before he backed down.

After all the managers he had fired, after the ones like Martin that he kept firing and rehiring, he couldn't bring himself to fire one more.

The Yankees won 11 pennants and seven World Series while they were Steinbrenner's Yankees. While they were the Yankees of Boss Steinbrenner. It was a nickname given here as a joke. But he liked it. And it stuck. He understood the possibilities of free agency before anybody else did, and used free agency, with Catfish Hunter and Reggie back in the day, to get the Yankees to start winning the World Series again.

More than that, he understood the value and the power of a team like the Yankees having it's own television network. And even before that, the first huge money he got from the Madison Square Garden network, he saw how television money could give the Yankees a financial advantage over the rest of the field.

And he got convicted of a felony for improper campaign contributions before Ronald Reagan pardoned him. He was the only owner in the history of the sports kicked out of his own sport twice, first because of the felony and then because it was discovered that he had paid a man named Howie Spira money to dig up dirt on Winfield.

That was Classic Steinbrenner, too.

But he came back and the Yankees came back and won four World Series in five years with Torre managing them. Then came all the years when they didn't win. He got old. The guy who loved the spotlight more than anybody who ever owned an American team began to back away from it.

His last real moment in it came two years ago, another All-Star Game, this one at the old Stadium. "The field is for the players," he had told me once. Not on this night. The old man was driven onto the field at Yankee Stadium, sitting in a golf cart next to his daughter Jennifer and his son Hal, and a son-in-law, Felix Lopez.

Yogi kissed him on the cheek that night. Reggie was there. The old man cried. The people cheered. In all the big ways, the symbolic ways, that was his real goodbye, the place looking as if it had been built around him.


A Boss Made for the Big City

By TYLER KEPNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
July 13, 2010


Steve Nesius/Reuters

Hank Steinbrenner with his father at a spring training game in March 2008. Hank and his brother, Hal, became co-chairmen of the Yankees in May 2008.

Yankee Stadium was falling apart. A massive chunk of steel had fallen from the upper deck into the loge level seats during batting practice in 1998. I was covering the visiting team, the Angels, and this was my first game working in the Bronx. This was my first sighting of George Steinbrenner.

Standing behind Steinbrenner on the press elevator that night, I had the same view of him that was always shown on “Seinfeld” — arms gesticulating wildly, trying to bring some order to chaos. In this case, Steinbrenner was fuming because the elevator button was not following his command. If he could have fired it, he would have.

Soon enough in that crisis, Steinbrenner found the right presence to project. When play resumed after repairs, Steinbrenner sat in the seat where the beam had crashed, a leader reassuring the masses.

Steinbrenner, who died on Tuesday at age 80, was still a regular presence around the Yankees back then. By 2002, when I started as the Yankees’ beat writer for The New York Times, he was nearing his final chapter. He was still in charge, but he was relatively quiet in public. Yet he had his moments.

On a Saturday morning at Yankee Stadium that August, Steinbrenner’s publicist, Howard Rubenstein, called and said Steinbrenner wanted to talk. His one request was that I ask about a comment from Commissioner Bud Selig that the recent success of the Minnesota Twins was an aberration. We scheduled an interview for that afternoon in Steinbrenner’s office.

The context was important; baseball was closing in on a new collective bargaining agreement aimed at controlling the Yankees’ spending. To Steinbrenner, the fact that the small-market Twins were winning meant the status quo was working. He knew the new agreement would impose taxes on a payroll like his, and he wanted the platform of the Sunday Times to rant.

“I see it hurting us and the other big-market clubs,” Steinbrenner said. “You know, you don’t buy a big-market team thinking it’s a small market. That’s elementary.”

Of course, Steinbrenner, a Cleveland native, had first tried to buy the Indians. But he was made for the big market, the grandest stage. Most of his many charitable donations were done in private, but otherwise, if something was showy, he loved it. In his office that day, he beamed as he pointed to a photo of Joe DiMaggio and Secretariat.

“Two great champions!” Steinbrenner proclaimed, and what could I say. Indeed, they were.

When the Yankees lost to the Angels in the playoffs that fall, I called Steinbrenner at his home for a reaction. He took the call, lauding the late Angels owner, Gene Autry, and vowing to fix the Yankees. Part of his plan, apparently, was picking a fight with shortstop Derek Jeter. In a Daily News interview a few months later, Steinbrenner chided Jeter for partying too much, and lacking focus.

Looking back, the motivation seems clear: it was Steinbrenner’s final test for Jeter before naming him captain. Jeter passed, turning the incident into a cheeky Visa commercial in which he and Steinbrenner go dancing at a nightclub.

The jab at Jeter was a big story in the spring of 2003, and the Steinbrenner stakeout became a ritual in Tampa. You could tell he was nearby when staffers and guards started scurrying, making sure to be at attention. But Steinbrenner was not always angry; once, he greeted the writers with a box full of cheeseburgers from a favorite local hangout, Pete & Shorty’s.

That season was the last time Steinbrenner was truly feisty, when, as a beat writer, you had the hope — or dread — that he would say something provocative. For a few weeks I could reliably get him on the phone, and he told me why. The Times was dealing with the fallout from revelations that a reporter, Jayson Blair, had fabricated articles. Steinbrenner said The Times had always treated him fairly — “Tough, but fair,” he said — and he wanted to show support by helping us out.

Steinbrenner’s health began to decline — sharply, it seemed — after he collapsed at the funeral for the football player Otto Graham in December 2003. You still had to trail him in spring training for the occasional outbursts — a profane insult toward Hideki Matsui’s agent, for example — but he had little interest in the banter of old. As the years passed he seemed less sure of himself, lurching down hallways, forgetting names he had known for years.

Mostly he communicated through Rubenstein’s news releases. The Yankees lost their postseason touch, failing each October from 2002 through 2007, but the notion that Steinbrenner would act rashly was outdated. He often had the same impulses, but General Manager Brian Cashman and others could calm him down.

The Yankees went to great lengths to shield the fading Steinbrenner from public view. He ate in the press lounge in spring training, but usually at times when the writers were occupied elsewhere.

One day in 2006 I saw him there and shook his hand, thanking him for sending a baby gift for my daughter. It was a children’s book written by his daughter Jessica, and it included a congratulatory note that emphasized the importance of fatherhood.

He did not seem to make the connection when I shook his hand, and perhaps he did not remember, or someone had sent the gift on his behalf. In any case, it was a touching gesture, and a window to the gentler side of Steinbrenner so often obscured by his bluster.

I don’t really remember the last time I saw Steinbrenner. It was probably at an exhibition game this spring, when he would sit in an outdoor seat in front of his luxury box, wearing his Yankees windbreaker and dark glasses, looming over the ballpark that is named for him — George M. Steinbrenner Field, on Steinbrenner Drive.

Steinbrenner had not been in the Bronx in November when the Yankees won their seventh title under his command. They clinched it at the new Yankee Stadium, the grand castle on 161st Street that will be a living monument to his legacy. So will this undeniable fact: when George Steinbrenner died, he went out as a champion.


George was truly The Boss

By BOB KLAPISCH
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD COLUMNIST
http://www.northjersey.com/
July 13, 2010

It goes without saying that George Steinbrenner’s passing signals the end of an era in Yankee history, and perhaps, the baseball industry itself. There will never be another owner so powerful, so feared – yet so utterly committed to winning.

This Oct. 21, 1981, photo shows George Steinbrenner working at his desk at Yankee Stadium before Game 2 of the World Series. On the wall behind Steinbrenner is an autographed photo of Cary Grant. (AP)

The Boss was never the game’s richest proprietor, yet unlike the Twins’ Carl Pohlad, he was willing to pour every cent of the team’s profit back in the team’s day-to-day operation. Steinbrenner did so because he was obsessed with being on top. He considered winning his destiny, just as he imagined running the Yankees as part of the American dream.

Steinbrenner wasn’t just a businessman, he was icon, one of those larger than life figures who overwhelmed everyone, from his employees, to the players, even members of his own family. Steinbrenner’s sons, Hank and Hal, made no secret of how mercurial their father could be – loving one minute, spiteful the next.

Steinbrenner brought those traits with him to the ballpark, where he would fire not only Billy Martin, but even his secretaries – quickly re-hiring them after he’d realized those who worked for him often lived paycheck to paycheck. That was Steinbrenner at his best and worst, destroying those who got in his way, but just as capable of under-the-radar acts of kindness.

Back in 1975, Steinbrenner caught a young Puerto Rican kid spray-painting graffiti on the Stadium’s walls. He grabbed the boy and brought him to the police holding cell underneath the ballpark. But at the last moment Steinbrenner had a change of heart; he took the culprit to the Yankee clubhouse and shoved him into Martin’s office.

“Teach him something,” Steinbrenner barked at the manager, an edict that served as the starter’s gun on Ray Negron’s life. From bat boy to video archivist to special assistant to Martin himself, Negron climbed the ladder of the Yankee family. Today he is a member of the team’s community outreach program, as well as the author of four children’s books.

Negron was in tears when reached by telephone Tuesday morning. “I just couldn’t prepare myself for this,” he said, despite Steinbrenner’s advanced age and declining health.

The owner stopped showing up at the ballpark by mid-decade, and even when he did, the phalanx of security personnel made it impossible to actually speak to him. Steinbrenner was shielded for good reason: the old Boss was gone, replaced by a man who drifted in and out of lucidity, often crying for no apparent reason, barely able to finish a thought.

His sons assumed full control of the team and by doing so, ushered in an era of calm to the business operations. There was no need to worry about an angry outburst from Tampa anymore: Hank and Hal didn’t work that way. No one had to fear getting fired over a losing streak, or for ordering the wrong sandwich, which was the crime of one of George’s secretaries (she was brought back the very next day).

By the time George had receded, the Yankees had long since become a monolith, as big as Microsoft, it seemed. Steinbrenner bought the Yankees for just $8.8 million in 1973, and by last year they were worth $1 billion, according to Forbes.

The pressing question, of course, is whether Hank and Hal will remain emotionally attached to the Yankees. The temptation to sell the team’s controlling interest to a Wall Street giant like Goldman Sachs will be powerful.

No one dared address that issue while the elder Steinbrenner was still alive. This was his life, his passion – nothing else mattered except putting his team in first place. Other owners hated him for it, and, don’t let them kid you, Bud Selig railed against Steinbrenner’s excesses.

But in the end, The Boss turned the Yankees into a tonic for the entire sport. The power and fury of his ownership will never be duplicated.



Hard-driving Boss made a huge impact

Yankees' longtime owner learned his demanding nature from his late father

By Buster Olney
ESPN The Magazine
http://espn.go.com/
July 13, 2010

Henry Steinbrenner, father to George Steinbrenner, was a hard man to please and he was tough on his son. After news broke that George Steinbrenner, then 42 years old, had worked out a purchase of the New York Yankees, Henry Steinbrenner was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that it was about time George had done something right.

During a subsequent spring training game, father and son sat together and George chatted on and on about something going on in the game; others around them thought George was just showing off for his father. And Henry Steinbrenner turned and told George -- a grown man -- to shut up, in front of his employees.


George Steinbrenner was the owner of the Yankees for 37 years.

Henry Steinbrenner died in 1983. Twenty-seven years later, George Steinbrenner followed him, on July 13, 2010, at the age of 80 -- inarguably the most famous owner in the history of professional sports, and a man who transcended baseball. George Steinbrenner hosted "Saturday Night Live," inspired a recurring character on "Seinfeld," the most popular sitcom at the time, and his reputation as an impossible-to-please boss would inspire reality television that extended from chefs to designers to Donald Trump, who points a finger and jabs at employees with the words Steinbrenner made famous: "You're fired!"

Steinbrenner's attitude, shaped by his demanding father, was distinctly American. Finishing second was unacceptable. Not only did he want to succeed, he wanted to win with flair; he wanted to dominate, with the best and the brightest players and the biggest stars. The Yankees had a good team in 1975 and he fired the manager, inspired to do so by how he thought the best Broadway shows should operate. He pursued the first significant free agents, from Catfish Hunter to Reggie Jackson to Goose Gossage.

In the mid-80s, he was despised by baseball fans, by some of his own players and by some columnists for the way he conducted his daily business. But after Steinbrenner returned from his second suspension from baseball and the Yankees began their dynasty of 1996-2001, there was a transformation in how the fans and players felt about him. His brash style -- more refined in his later years as owner -- mattered less, and his competitiveness became a respected trait rather than something reviled. Fans called to him at the stadium, memorably, in one of the last years he controlled the team, and Steinbrenner broke down, deeply touched. His drive to win became something loved by his players. Derek Jeter and Roger Clemens called him "Mr. Steinbrenner," and Paul O'Neill and David Cone referred to him as George, with affection.

And he loved his players, and loved their approval. As a boy, he had gone to Union Station in Cleveland when the Yankees came to town, and the image of Joe DiMaggio's luggage was as dear to him as the moment he introduced DiMaggio to Henry Steinbrenner. He controlled the players, he bought and sold them, but they validated him. On a night when the Yankees won a playoff series during the O'Neill-Tino Martinez dynasty, Jeter had snuck up behind Steinbrenner as The Boss talked to some reporters and Jeter mentioned that somebody's hair was just too dry -- and as Jeter poured champagne onto Steinbrenner's head, the Boss giggled, in the way that he might have as a child.

He could be a brutal boss -- a man of small, petty and demeaning acts -- and he also was a man of extraordinary charity. He doled out college scholarships the way others doled out boxes of chocolates, and he honored and included military veterans every chance he could. He screamed at employees, who sometimes thought he was unnecessarily demeaning and ultimately correct in his demands.

When he was about to arrive at Yankee Stadium, somebody would send out an e-mail -- a warning, really -- and everybody would be on their best behavior, making sure any bit of trash that might set him off might be picked up, that the hallways of Yankee Stadium were clean, that everybody would appear to be doing what they were supposed to be doing. As a boss, he was much like Henry Steinbrenner was as a father -- tough and impossible to satisfy.

But George Steinbrenner, as The Boss, accomplished far more than what Henry Steinbrenner ever would have expected from his son. Today might have been a day when Henry Steinbrenner would have felt enormous pride in the impact that George has had, in sports and beyond.

Buster Olney is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He updates his Insider blog each morning on ESPN.com.


As Yankees owner, Steinbrenner was a bridge to baseball's future

Dave Zirin > VIEWPOINT
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
July 13, 2010

With the death of George Steinbrenner, we will undoubtedly hear endless stories about the imperious nature of the man who called himself The Boss. He was in the words of one writer, "every worker's nightmare, the satanic CEO, a fanatically controlling overlord who borrows his warmed-over rhetoric from Vince Lombardi and his managerial style from Stalin." One of Steinbrenner's favorite lines was, "I don't get heart attacks. I give them."

There was another side to this bombastic man as well: a side that even his detractors acknowledge was always there. When I was 11 years old, the legendary columnist from the New York Daily News and later the Post, Dick Young passed away. Young wore his prejudices on his sleeve, and wrote in a pugnacious style that made you gnash your teeth.

It was announced in the morning paper that the service would be open to the public. I couldn't help but notice that the Manhattan-based funeral home was a mere 10-minute bus ride from my house. Like any normal 12-year-old in New York City, I dressed up in a blue blazer and tie and went to Young's funeral. Everyone from the New York sports scene was present, from St. John's basketball coach Lou Carnesecca to the local sports anchors, perhaps straight from the television stations, the pancake makeup still streaked on their cheeks. I was out of my element. Also for an open service, there were no fans there that I saw, and certainly no unaccompanied minors, both of which made people's stares feel like daggers and the room's soft recessed lighting feel like a spotlight.

As I shuffled my feet, feeling more like a voyeur than a mourner, unsure whether I should make a break for the exit, a meaty hand clamped on my shoulder and started to rub the back of the head. "This guy's here. Now we can get started," he said as he guided me inside. I looked up and it was George Steinbrenner. He then pushed me inside roughly and turned his back to me, resuming his conversation with a big smile and a laugh. Several people then asked me, "Who are you?" I was more than grateful. Steinbrenner was doing what he told sportswriter Ira Berkow he loved most: "Inflicting some joy." As the late sports writer Dick Schaap noted, "that is a rather bizarre phrase: to inflict joy." But that day, upon me, he inflicted a little bit of mercy, if not joy.

It's remarkable how seamlessly this story fits with the Steinbrenner people remember: the kind of guy who would reach out to an awkward kid like some kind of Daddy Warbucks, and then shove him inside. He was a part of that last group of the paternalistic owners, the people who felt like it was their duty in ownership to plow profits back into the team, creating a brand that could change the way a city saw itself.

But before we wax nostalgic, we should remember that Steinbrenner, while being a bridge to the past with his larger than life personality, was also a bridge to the future. This was the kind of man who was the model for owners from coast to coast on how to hold cities hostage for an endless flow of municipal funds. He was the kind of man who demanded costly stadium renovations in the 1970s, when the city was already enduring a fiscal nightmare. He claimed that he needed just $48 million to bring the stadium up to code. It ended up, according to Baseball Statistics, costing $160 million. He periodically threatened to move the Bronx Bombers to New Jersey, Connecticut, and most jarringly, next to Manhattan's West Side highway. He hired a 21-year-old clubhouse gofer with gambling debts by the name of Howie Spira and paid him $40,000 to dig up dirt on Yankees star slugger Dave Winfield.

Steinbrenner justified all his misdeeds by saying, "The reason baseball has its problems is that owners weren't involved 20 years ago. ... I'm an involved owner. I'm like Archie Bunker. I get mad as hell when we blow one." But Archie Bunker never was known as anyone's Boss. He never fired secretaries by the carload. He felt tossed around by a world changing too fast, in his mind, for its own good. George Steinbrenner created that world. Now, we live with the results.

If anyone ever seemed too big for New York, for better and certainly for worse, it was this man. They will say that his death signals the end of an era. But his life signaled the beginning of one.