Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (19 page)

These were solid businessmen who understood what was going on in the city socially and appreciated what I was going through. They were staid businessmen in their late forties or early fifties, but they knew how things worked in New York, what the press was like, and you could talk to them about it, I could share things.

They’d just say, “Reggie, you’re playing ball, the city loves you. Don’t worry about small-minded people, worry about your job. Listen to your father. You’re going to be all right. Keep playing hard.” Things like that.

So I did. So I tried to.

My father was the key. He pounded it into me that I had to keep one thing in the foreground, and that was hitting baseballs. When I was going bad, or when George Steinbrenner thought I was letting Billy Martin bother me too much, he would call my dad.

That he did. He would call up my father and say, “Mr. Jackson, Reggie is letting Billy Martin bother him now. And the press as well. I can tell these things are bothering him, because he’s not hitting. I need you to come up and see me on Monday.”

This would be on a Friday. My father would call me and say, “I need you to meet me at your brother Joe’s house,” which was near McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. He was stationed there in the air force at the time.

My father would call and say, “I don’t have time to go see George Steinbrenner. I’ve got to be at work on Monday at eight in the morning.” He would say, “I’ll give you an hour and a half to get down there after the game on Sunday, and we can have supper together. I need to straighten you out so you can start pounding on that ball again and just get Billy Martin out of your mind.”

So he’d have me down there with Joe, and sometimes with my other siblings, and he’d talk. I had tremendous support from Dad. He would tell me, “Billy Martin is nothing to you. Don’t worry about him. The money Mr. Steinbrenner is paying you should be your focus. Do your job. You don’t want to come out here in the real world and get a job with me, working in my shop at $60 a week.”

My dad was still a tailor, still owned a laundry and dry cleaning business. That was who he was. He’d say, “You’ve got a good job, you’re getting paid well, take care of your family. Go on and do what you’re supposed to do. Beat on the baseball.”

For my dad, you just went on, and did what you needed to do, and appreciated that you had the opportunity. You appreciated God for having blessed you with the skills and the ability you have—for the opportunity you had to put good meals on the table and get a good home for your family. If you had the other essentials—a roof over your head, a pillow to lay your head on, heat in the house—you were blessed and lucky.

My dad liked to say, “I’m not concerned about you being happy. You be grateful and thankful. And go on and do what you need to do.”

My oldest brother, Joe, was the same way. He was a chief master sergeant in the air force then. He’s a wonderful guy, very understanding of the necessities of life. He had that same attitude: “Go and do your job, Reg. Forget that Martin guy. Don’t worry about him. He is not your family.”

But my father really knew what playing baseball every day was like. He’d played ball with the Bacharach Giants, down in Atlantic City, and with the Newark Eagles in the old Negro Leagues, and he knew what it was like. I’m sure he could have been a major-league player if the color line hadn’t been in place.

It was harder in his day. He also had to work as the traveling secretary and drive the team bus, which was typical back in the Negro Leagues. But he knew what it meant to keep your mind on what’s most important, to keep concentrating on the task in front of you. He would tell me, “You get back out there and beat on that ball, son.”

It may seem strange to some people, I know, to have Mr. Steinbrenner, the team owner, calling up my dad. I thought it was cool.

I wasn’t a grown man. I was thirty-one. At that age, even when you
have two, three kids, you’re not grown yet. At least I wasn’t, being on my own, in this big town. I needed help—and it was nice to know somebody cared. Thanks, George.

I can’t tell you how much it brought me back into myself, going down there to southern New Jersey on a Sunday. Having most of the family there. Not everybody. My mother was ill at the time; she had a bad heart. But she was still supportive, still let me know she was behind me. Having the rest of the family around the table there, knowing that they cared, that they wanted to help and see me do well in the world—that was everything.

We all know the importance of family. Everybody cooked and helped out, then we’d sit down and eat home-cooked food. It was extremely important, getting to be around your brothers and sisters, having your dad talk to the family at the time. Give everybody support, correction, comfort. You’d go in with need and come out armed for the world.

That was tremendous. That’s one key to the whole conflict between Billy and me, too.

You know, I had a dad. Growing up, he could be hard on me when he thought I needed it, but he was always there. He was always proud of me. When he was older, he even had cards made up that read, “Marty the Tailor, Father of the Famous Reggie Jackson.”

George Steinbrenner, he had a dad who was important in his life. He sounds like he was always hard on him as well, always pushing him. But he was there.

Billy didn’t grow up with a dad. I understood he was always looking for one. The story has it that Billy was always hoping Casey Stengel would be a father to him, when he was playing for the Yankees back in the 1950s.

I remember hearing that Billy always complained, “I’m sitting in my hotel room, and George is wining and dining Reggie all around town. Why doesn’t he ask me, too? Why doesn’t he invite me to lunch, why doesn’t he take me to dinner?”

I think Billy was looking for George to be a friend, and he saw me as competition. That’s what Fran Healy thought as well, that Billy saw me as soaking up all the love from George.

There never were that many owners who really hung around with
their players. I know Horace Stoneham used to like to hang out with Willie Mays, but other than that …

George really liked it. I know he thought of Thurman like a son. I’m sure he thought of Piniella that way, as well as Mariano Rivera or Derek Jeter. I know George felt very close to Derek. I remember when he was telling me that he was going to go to Cincinnati and make him the captain. It was a big deal for him.

I’m sure that he felt that way about me as well. The number of George’s suite in the new Stadium could have been anything he wanted, and he made it number 44. I was aware of how Billy felt. I stopped hanging out with George because it bothered Billy so much. I know George was even complaining to his friends, guys like Tony Rolfe and Larry Fisher, “Reggie doesn’t hang out with me anymore. I don’t know what’s wrong. He doesn’t talk to me.”

I don’t know, maybe if George had invited Billy along things would’ve gone differently. But you know, Billy had trouble letting people know what he wanted. He had trouble letting people in, letting them see what was going on with him.

I did know that he had a habit of coming to the ballpark late. He would show up ten to thirty minutes before the first pitch sometimes and have alcohol on his breath. He’d have his sunglasses on, his hat pulled all the way down over his glasses. He would go in his office and fall asleep on the couch, while Dick Howser got the team prepared to play, wrote the lineup, and so on, sometimes. Dick really ran the team until it was time for Billy to wake up, just before the game. You’d see Billy wandering down the hall to the dugout. It was strange, obviously.

Sometimes Dick would take the lineup out to the umpires on his own. Billy wouldn’t like it, he’d get mad at him, but Dick would tell him, “I gotta give ’em something! You weren’t here. You weren’t in the dugout. What was I to do? We’re playing in five minutes! The umpires are standing at home plate. Should I just tell ’em to hold on?”

There was always plenty of drinking in baseball. There is less today, without a doubt. Back in the old days, guys
drank
—and drank and drank. It was like the pictures you’d see of old movie stars: They always had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. That was accepted; that was then. But even for that time, Billy drank a lot. Billy drank too much. It impacted him and those around him.

You just couldn’t drink like he did. It wouldn’t have been tolerated by George if he’d known about it—if he’d known the full extent of it. George didn’t drink himself; he was a Diet Coke guy. But obviously, everybody would cover for Billy. Writers would cover for him, players would cover for him, staff would cover for him. It never got in the papers. Except in the winter.

Now that I think back about it, it’s amazing that word never got out of the clubhouse, nobody ever said anything, and as a team we just … went by it. We didn’t walk by it. You just went by—without attention being called to anyone upstairs. I think it went back to the old locker-room placard:

I understood the coaches. They were loyal to their manager, and Billy was lucky to have them to back him up. That was maybe the best coaching staff that I was ever associated with—Yogi, Ellie Howard, Bobby Cox, Gene Michael. Dick Howser, who really was the manager. Hall of Fame, anybody? Guys who played on championship teams, or managed them, or built them. There was a lot of baseball knowledge there. They had all been with the Yankees for years, even decades.

George made sure to keep past Yankees with the organization. It was the same thing with the great coaching staff that Joe Torre had. I think if George were still around, there would be more former Yankees players still associated with the team. George kept people around; he paid ’em—even if they didn’t do anything, he still paid ’em. George had great understanding of the Yankees brand.

You really didn’t expect them to say anything. The players didn’t say anything. Nothing wrong with that. To this day, there is a baseball rule where you just don’t talk about so many negatives. You just ignored it. You were true to the code of the locker room. To this day, nobody really talks about Billy’s battles with the bottle. It’s laughable,
it’s tragic—and it’s like it never existed. It’s an amazing story. It was so blatant.

Somehow the writers could put in everything that I said and did and what everybody thought about me. But they couldn’t write about Billy sleeping on his office couch ten minutes before game time. That’s just not kosher.

Certainly, I was there to do a job, and so was Billy, but his act was just off the wall. The way he did things after a while that summer, there was no rhyme or reason. If he liked you, he treated you one way. If he didn’t, he treated you another (good luck figuring out why he did or didn’t like you).

I felt he always wanted to make it about him, about his strategic decisions. I guess because I’ve never been a manager, but have always been an important part of a team, I never much paid attention to all the strategy things Billy was trying to do. The bottom line is, you can’t win without great players.

All the great head coaches and managers in history had great players. Casey Stengel, Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, Joe Torre, Walter Alston, Sparky Anderson, Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich—no doubt these guys have great value and are important. But without the horse, there is no jockey. Put the feed bag two feet in front of the horse, he wins the race.

Billy always thought he could win it alone, just like he thought he could do everything alone. And that was the sad thing about Billy. On the ball field or off, he was always more alone than he needed to be. Sometimes, we all are. Sometimes, when we get too big for our britches, we wind up alone.

Being around my family always got my mind right. My dad just had a plain way of saying things. My brother Joe was just a great, plain Joe. My dad and Joe would say, don’t get into a contest with Billy or try to outwit the media. They told me to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes it will hurt you and others, but just say it like it is. Dad would say, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to worry about remembering anything.”

My family was key, and friends were key. Praying every day with Gary Walker, I really thought that kept me insulated from a lot of the strife.

You know, Fran Healy was rooming with me while I lived in New York, at Seventy-ninth and Fifth Avenue. He spent a lot of time there with me, and he’d try to warn me sometimes in the mornings. He’d tell me, “Man, did you see what they said about you in the newspaper?”—just so I’d have a heads-up.

But by then, I knew enough to just say, “Not really. Let’s go eat!” I might glance at it, look at the headlines, and put it down. Then I’d say, “Hey, man, let’s eat.” We’d go over to the Nectar Café. Get some eggs and bacon from George, the owner. I don’t think it seats more than fifteen, but it’s still there, and I still patronize it. We knew we had to get ready to leave for the ballpark by 2:30 if it was a night game, so I’d just have breakfast, or lunch, and be on my way. I loved getting to the ballpark early. Sometimes I’d go as early as 11:30 in the morning, to have time alone and to make sure my head was right for the game that night.

There was a kid there named Ray Negron. He would go out and get me soul food from Harlem. Love the smothered chicken, black-eyed peas, greens, and rice—corn bread on the side. I was addicted to it.

I could put everything else in the background. My dad told me what I needed to have in the foreground.

T
HE THING THAT
bothered me most, that just seemed to stick in my head, was how Billy kept moving me all over the lineup. Hitting me fifth, or sixth, or benching me all of a sudden. Even batting me second sometimes.

However, I knew enough to stay focused on the game, to put the other stuff behind me. I stopped thinking about how he was trying to screw me or what his next plan was going to be. I got past it affecting my game on the
field
.