Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (22 page)
Read Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain Online
Authors: Marty Appel
The Yankees had a new assistant trainer in camp that year. Barry Weinberg had come up from the team’s Columbus farm club to begin a major league career that would see him serve Tony LaRussa as head trainer in both Oakland and St. Louis.
The rookie trainer introduced himself to Thurman. “I’m Barry Weinberg,” he said.
“Goldberg?” said Munson.
“Weinberg.”
“Okay, Goldberg, nice to meet you.” And he would continue to call him Goldberg.
One day Munson went into the training room for a rubdown. Gene Monahan was working on someone else, so Weinberg said he’d do it.
“Oh no, Goldberg,” said Thurman. “I’m a German and I can’t be rubbed down by a Jew” And he left.
That night, Weinberg and a friend were seated at a table in a restaurant, when a waitress brought over a drink, saying, “It’s compliments of the gentleman at the bar.”
Weinberg looked up and Munson was sitting there with a big grin, giving him the finger.
“I wound up idolizing him,” said Weinberg. “He was one of the greatest guys I ever knew. That April, we played in the cold in Chicago and I only had a short-sleeve shirt with me. He came over and handed me a flannel parka. Only that night did I see that inside in Pete Sheehy’s printing it said
MUNSON-15.
It was his own parka. I still have it.”
In the spring of 1979, Thurman bought a Beechcraft King Air Model E-90, a twin-engine turboprop, and flew it to spring training. It was an upgrade on his Beechcraft Duke.
“One afternoon we flew out together to the Bahamas,” said Piniella to Maury Allen in his autobiography.
He was in complete control and secure in his skills. We flew together several more times and I was fascinated with the fun he was having and started to think about getting a plane myself. We talked about my taking flying lessons, but I never got around to it. Still, I understood.
Early in ’79 we played a game in Baltimore and after the game, Reggie and I flew back to New York with him. Thurman and Reggie were getting along okay by now. We hit bad weather over Pennsylvania, thunderstorms, but he just got a new flight plan from the control tower and went around the storm. [He showed] total confidence, total control. Very professional.
A few weeks later I flew with him from Teterboro [N.J.] to Canton to have dinner after a Sunday game. He buzzed his house to let his family know he was almost home. He got a kick out of that.
One night we were sitting in a hotel bar after a game, Bobby Murcer, Thurman and me. He was talking about flying and he said, “I’m buying a jet for a million and a half, a Cessna Citation, a real beauty.”
Bobby made a face and said, “What do you need such a big plane for?”
“It’ll be great. I’ll get home much faster. I’m getting it in a couple of weeks.”
Bobby and I, neither of us liked this at all. It was a whole different kind of plane. Plus it was very expensive to fly, with the fuel, repairs, insurance. “Now I’ll have to play three or four more years to pay it off,” he said.
Indeed, his friends and fellow aviators were astounded by the rapidity of his graduation to bigger planes. He had started with the Cessna 150 in spring training of 1978. By June of that year he was in a Beechcraft Duke twin-piston. By February 1979 it was on to a Beechcraft Duke Air Model E-90, a twin-engine turboprop. And now he had taken delivery of the jet on July 6, just five months later.
On the field, things weren’t going well for the Yankees, and some felt there was a pall over Bob Lemon, still mourning his son, that
took some fire out of the team. (Not that Lem was particularly fiery, but it was a whispered theory.)
Some felt the year was doomed from the start, when Goose Gossage tore a ligament in his right thumb during a scuffle with Cliff Johnson in the clubhouse on April 19. With that, they lost their closer until July 12.
Winning a fourth straight pennant would indeed prove to be a challenge. The Yankees played .500 baseball, more or less, through Memorial Day, but Baltimore was hot and between June 1 and June 30, the Yanks fell from three games out to twelve. Steinbrenner fired poor Lemon on June 18 and replaced him with Billy Martin, yet again. Did they have another comeback in them like 1978?
Nobody was feeling it.
The Yankees played a weekend series in Oakland July 6-8, during which a Cessna pilot delivered Thurman’s new Citation to him. He was thrilled! With the Cessna pilot in control and Thurman in the copilot seat, he took it up that very weekend, joined by Bucky Dent and his old Cape Cod teammate John Frobose, who was now living in San Jose.
Thurman was loving his new jet, and was not shy about talking it up and inviting teammates to fly with him. Some just said, “Are you crazy?” and some said, “Yeah, I’ll do it sometime.” Like any cross section of society, ballplayers had varying senses of adventure when it came to flying in a small plane.
On Thursday night, July 12, after playing a game in Seattle, Graig Nettles and Reggie Jackson agreed to accompany Thurman in his Cessna on a trip to Anaheim, where the team would begin a three-game series the next evening. A flight instructor joined Munson in the cockpit.
Nettles told author Peter Golenbock:
Reggie and I were in the back, and his instructor was in the pilot’s seat next to Thurman … We had finished a night game in Seattle, and we were flying south, and all of a sudden I heard a big boom in the back of the plane. It sounded like someone had thrown something against the plane. Reggie was napping and he jerked awake and looked around. “What was that?” he said, as oxygen masks were dropping down. The pilot said, “You’re going to have to use the oxygen.” My mask worked, but Reggie’s didn’t. I told Reggie, “Thurman told me to make sure you sat in that seat.” Reggie laughed ’cause they were supposed to be feuding at that time, but they really weren’t. It turned out there was nothing wrong with the oxygen supply, and we didn’t need the masks after all.
Except for that one incident, the flight was spectacular. We flew over Washington, Oregon, and California, and it was a bright night and you could see the snow-capped mountains. I told Thurman how much fun I had and he told me that when he got back to New York he would be going to Teterboro to practice and that I could fly with him and bring my son.
Thurman took flying very seriously. After ballgames we would often sit around and have a few beers, but if he knew he was going to be flying, he would only have Coke or Pepsi. He wouldn’t even have one beer.
Two days later in Anaheim, Jackson made out a hundred-dollar check to Munson and wrote “Plane fare, Seattle to Cal” in the memo. Thurman never cashed it.
The Saturday night game in Anaheim ended late. Phil Pepe was on the trip covering the team for the
Daily News
. “I was in the hotel gift shop and I was about to go to my room for the night, when I noticed Munson in there picking out some snacks, a bag of Doritos, a bag of potato chips, etc. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.
“‘I didn’t have dinner and I’m hungry,’ he said.
“‘Don’t eat that junk,’ I said. ‘There’s an all-night burger joint up the street, why don’t you go up there and get something nutritious?’
“‘I don’t like eating alone,’ he said.
“‘I’ll sit with you.’
“‘You will?’ he said. So we went and spent about two and a half hours, talking about life in general, no baseball, until about two a.m. At one point, Munson began to talk about flying, telling me how much he enjoyed the peace and serenity of being up in the air, alone with his thoughts. As if to convince me, he said, ‘I’ll take you up with me one day’
“‘No way’ I said. ‘I’m not going up there with you.’
“‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly safe. Look, I don’t care if you live or die, but I care if I live or die!’”
After the Anaheim series concluded on Sunday, Thurman had the All-Star break off. (Darrell Porter, Brian Downing, and Jeff Newman were the A.L. catchers.) Billy Martin wanted to go fishing in Kansas City with his friend Howard Wong. He asked Thurman if he would fly him there on his way home to Canton. Munson was more than happy to accommodate him.
Diana was with Thurman, and this was her first experience in the jet. Thurman took his place in the copilot seat, with a Cessna instructor
in the pilot’s seat, as Thurman was not yet licensed to fly without one. Billy and Diana were in the back midsection seated across from each other.
As Martin told Golenbock (who also cowrote his autobiography):
We were in the jet which Thurman had just bought, and he landed in Albuquerque to gas up, and coming out of Albuquerque we hit an ice storm. I was looking out the windows, facing the engines, and I saw a flash of flame hit one engine. I didn’t want to say anything because Thurman’s wife, Diane, was sitting right across from me and I didn’t want to scare her, but when we landed in Kansas City, I took Thurman aside. I said, “You better check your engines. Did you see flames coming out of the right one?” He said, “Maybe that was when I switched on the deicer.” I said, “No way. I’ve never seen flames come out of an engine like that. You better check it out.” My car came and Howard and I got in, and two days later … Thurman came over and said, “You know we had to take another plane out of Kansas City after we dropped you off. We had to stay overnight and take a commercial jet out.” I said, “You’re kidding me.” He said, “The rotors of the right engine were all mashed in, bent. They must have put them in wrong when they built the plane.”
That scared me. Here was a million-and-a-quarter-dollar plane, and the engines weren’t working right. They had to put a brand-new engine on the plane.
I told Thurman I didn’t like him flying. I said, “Why are you flying this thing? Does George know you’re flying?” He said, “Yeah, he gave me permission.” I said, “You gotta be kidding me.” … I didn’t like it because here this guy could fly all over the country whenever he wanted, and I was yelling at other players that they had to be on the bus on time. He was
being treated differently than the other guys, and it wasn’t right.
Indeed, Cessna had sent one of their pilots to fly the plane from Kansas City to Dallas, where repairs were made on the Citation at Cooper Industries. It had been flown back to Canton on July 31, while Munson was in Chicago, by Cessna pilot Morgan Lilly.
During the All-Star break, Thurman slipped off to Wichita, Kansas, to fly a number of solo hours with an instructor, enabling him to move closer to his license. On Tuesday, July 17, the day of the All-Star Game, he received a Citation-type rating after doing four hours of training in a flight simulator in Wichita, allowing him to ultimately serve as his own pilot-in-command.
“The problem with this period of instructor training,” says his friend Jerry Anderson, “was that you mostly sit back and cruise, most certainly on autopilot, and you certainly don’t learn how to take off and land or recognize emergencies, while at cruise.”
Edward McAvoy, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, would later say, “Such rapid progress is unusual for a part-time flier.” He was critical of the whole FAA system under which the licensing and rating of pilots were done by examiners who first teach them to fly, and then license them, while working for the companies selling the planes. It amounted to a conflict of interest, thought McAvoy.
And there was nothing unusual about the procedure. It was standard among airplane manufacturers.
“I agreed with McAvoy,” says Anderson. “Cessna promised Thurman he could learn to fly with their instructors during the season so they could sell him the plane.”
The Citation name is still used by Cessna for its business jets. Thurman had purchased a Citation I/SP, which was introduced in 1977 and enabled single-pilot operation and the use of short runways. It was thirty-two feet long and sat six, with a wingspan of forty-four feet, and was capable of flying at 300 knots (about 332 miles per hour), which was about twice as fast as the King Air C90 twin propeller. The first Citations had appeared in 1969. The company produced 312 Citation I/SPs between 1977 and 1985, when the Citation II line was introduced.
“When I flew [it],” wrote pilot Richard L. Collins, speaking of the new Citation line, “the word from Cessna salesmen was to use it like any airplane. Just do what you do, only do it faster …”
“Looking back,” says Anderson, “the King Air C90 was the perfect plane for Thurman—fast enough for New York-to-Canton trips, but not so complex or expensive to operate that he struggled. I flew many times with him in the King Air; it was a very comfortable aircraft for his piloting skill level and five-hundred-mile trips. Of course, he wanted ‘faster and higher,’ as all us pilots do at times.”
While the Yankees were at home playing the Mariners, back home in Canton Bill Shearer was having a Sunday breakfast with Jack Dole at a farm just outside of town. Shearer had played third base in American Legion ball when Thurman had been a shortstop. “We were the most scouted Legion team in the country,” he says. “Four of our guys signed pro contracts. Gene Woodling used to watch us when he was scouting.”
Dole’s job was manager of the Akron-Canton Airport.
At one point, when the conversation turned to baseball, Dole looked at Shearer and said, “You know Thurman Munson pretty well, right?”
Told that he did, and that in fact Thurman often called him when
he was in town, Dole looked him in the eye and said, “Please talk to him … this jet… he’s not getting it done.”
Shearer thought about his own conversations with Munson on the subject. They had been talking on Thurman’s driveway after he’d come home from the 1978 World Series. Munson already owned one of the fastest propeller planes available. Why did he need the jet?
“Bill, I can get home between twenty-five and thirty minutes quicker than with the propeller plane,” said Thurman.
“It was true,” says Don Armen, who hangared Thurman’s plane in Canton. “He bought the jet to save time. He could fly in all kinds of weather, high enough to get up over storms. And this way, he could start branching out, flying to the West Coast and taking his family and flying from almost anywhere after a game. It was for convenience.”