Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (35 page)
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Authors: Marty Appel
Rookie Jerry Narron was sharing a rented apartment with Ron Davis when Cedric Tallis called. Davis took the call. The next day, Narron would be the Yankees’ “missing man” catcher in a never-to-be-forgotten ceremony at Yankee Stadium.
I was at my desk at the baseball commissioner’s office. I had joined Bowie Kuhn’s staff a year earlier. On the wall over my desk
was a large oil painting of Munson at bat, painted by Arnold Cohen, my uncle, who had taken the image from the cover of Thurman’s autobiography.
My phone rang, and it was George Steinbrenner. I knew he hadn’t asked for me, and I don’t know why it was put through to me, but he said, “This is George Steinbrenner, I have to speak to the commissioner at once.”
“It’s Marty Appel, Mr. Steinbrenner.”
“Marty, there’s been a terrible accident involving Thurman Munson, and he’s been killed. Please put me right through to Bowie.”
“Okay, hold on,” I said.
I didn’t want to take a chance on transferring the call. Imagine that call not getting picked up after being transferred. So I hurried out of my office and hustled down the hall, about sixty feet, to Kuhn’s office. I stuck my head in the door and also realized I shouldn’t be the one carrying this news.
“Commissioner, I have George Steinbrenner on my phone, and he needs to speak to you urgently—I’m going to transfer the call to your line, and I’m here to ask you to please pick it up yourself.”
I raced back and transferred the call. This was well beyond the limit of George Steinbrenner’s patience, but it worked and he delivered the news himself.
Meanwhile, as collaborator on Munson’s autobiography, I began to get media calls myself, some looking for comment from the commissioner, some looking for comment from me.
No one had ever called me before for a statement about the passing of a celebrity, unless it was some old-time Yankee and I needed to speak on behalf of the organization.
I said something about the shock and the parallel to his predecessor as Yankee captain, Lou Gehrig, also dying young (Gehrig was thirty-seven). The quote wound up on the back page of the early editions of the
Daily News
, with quotes from Martin, Kuhn, Carl Yastrzemski,
Pete Rose, Earl Weaver, and others. I didn’t think I belonged in such prominent company when such a great tragedy had occurred. By the morning editions, people more highly placed than I had been heard from, and I was moved to an inner page. I felt relieved.
Bowie Kuhn called the death “an almost indescribable loss. He was a wonderful, enormously likeable guy and a truly great ballplayer. As tough a competitor as he was on the field, he was a warm friend of baseball people and a loving family man. Baseball sends its heartfelt sympathy to his wife and children.”
In Cleveland, Gabe Paul did television interviews outside Municipal Stadium and talked about Thurman as a clutch ballplayer. “One year,” he said, “I think it might have been 1977—I believe he hit .722 with men on second and third.” It was a totally improvised statistic, at least three hundred points high and probably more.
Carlton Fisk said, “People always said Boston-New York was Fisk vs. Munson and there was a personal rivalry. If we were, as people said, the worst of the best of enemies, it was because we had the highest amount of respect for one another.
“We both thought for a while that we were the two best catchers in the league, and we tried to prove to one another that each of us was better than the other. I talked to him more than anyone else when we played them. We’d talk about catching, about how we hurt.
“People make baseball players out to be idols. They talk about how important it is to be the highest paid, to get the ink and print. And then this.
“I guess the point is driven home stronger to me because I respect the man so much. And because I’ll really miss him.”
Nat Tarnopol drove home from his record company office on Seventh Avenue, went into his study, and cried. “I never saw anything like that before,” said his son Paul. “For a long, long time, he just wasn’t himself.”
Duane Munson heard the news in Laurel, Maryland, got in his car, and drove to Canton, where he would stay with Darla. The two of them went to the crash site the next morning and even took some photos. Duane was photographed viewing the wreckage. They, along with Thurman’s parents, would be the forgotten family in the coming days. All attention would be on the widow and the children.
“I just wanted to stay in the background,” said Duane. “I was asked to do some interviews, but declined. I couldn’t believe Thurm had crashed. He had everything going for himself. I must admit I was a little bitter about all that. I wouldn’t fly with him and I told him that he shouldn’t be flying around too, but he wanted to do it, so he did.”
“None of us got called, not one of us,” says Darla Munson, speaking of her parents and her siblings. “I was walking down the street, and a neighbor called my husband over and whispered to him … I was wondering, what’s going on, and my husband said, ‘Your brother just died in a plane crash.’
“Janice was on her way home from work and heard it on radio. Mother heard about it in her nursing home. Someone said, ‘Your son’s dead.’ Just like that. And of course our father wasn’t around.”
In Tucson, Arizona, Darrell Munson, now sixty-four, heard the news when a neighbor came by and told him. “I don’t read news papers or watch television because I just don’t like the news—it’s all bad,” he would say. He had last seen his family five years earlier.
In this case, he was right. The news was all bad.
In Chicago, Bobby Murcer took a phone call from his friend Jimmy Lindstrom in New Jersey telling him the news. Lindstrom, along with his sister Candy, were old friends of the Murcers. The friendship had begun when they were running the Bobby Richardson Fan Club in the sixties. Richardson had introduced them to Murcer, then nineteen, as someone they would like.
By coincidence, I, as a youngster, was in that fan club! Richardson had been a special player to me and we had maintained a friendship
after I joined the Yankee PR department, one that continues to this day. (I call him each year after the World Series to “celebrate” his 1960 Series RBI records lasting another year.) So Richardson, Murcer, the Lindstroms, and I were all linked through this strange circle of connections.
With no hesitancy, Bobby called Diana’s house. Her friend Joanne answered the phone and Bobby told her they would be there as soon as possible. Kay hurriedly got her two children settled with neighbors while Bobby arranged a flight from Chicago to Canton. And they arrived Thursday night, hours after the crash.
Heading straight for the house, Kay remembers it being “full of family and friends, with lots of hugs, tears, and stories throughout the night. We gathered around the kitchen table and just told Thurman stories. There were many laughs too as the night progressed. Everyone was drained and sappy, but just too emotional to know any other way to react. No one was hysterical, mostly we were just operating in disbelief.”
The Murcers went to an upstairs bedroom at around three in the morning, had a little sleep, and returned to Chicago on Friday, gathering the kids and clothing for a trip to New York. Bobby phoned Billy Martin to tell him that Diana wanted the games played, but that he himself would have to miss the Friday game, and would be back Saturday.
They arrived on Saturday at the home of the Lindstroms in Wayne, New Jersey, where they would stay for the weekend. Kay and the Lindstroms went to the game on Saturday night, in which Bobby played.
“They were our port in the storm,” says Kay. “Our kids always knew them as relatives.”
Prior to his arrival, Bobby asked Jimmy Lindstrom to help him prepare a eulogy. Diana had already asked him to be one of the speakers at the still-being-planned funeral. Bobby was just too emotionally drained to focus on it.
When Bobby arrived in New Jersey, there were Jimmy and Candy at a table working on the eulogy. They showed Bobby a quotation from Angelo Patri, an American educator, that might work as the opening of the eulogy.
Together, Bobby, Jimmy, and Candy worked out the final draft, although Bobby would still be tinkering with it when I met up with him on Sunday night in Canton.
By six o’clock, the bulletin was being reported from coast to coast on television and radio. Five minutes earlier, the Mets had posted the news on the Shea Stadium scoreboard before 15,319 fans watching them play a Thursday doubleheader against the Phillies. Lee Mazzilli was at bat when the news went up and it caused a strange murmuring from the crowd.
“Usually when you hear something you look at the crowd,” said center fielder Gary Maddox. “When I didn’t see anything I turned to the scoreboard. I just felt grief-stricken.”
Tim McCarver, a catcher for the Phillies then, said, “I’ve never heard a ballpark that was any quieter than that.”
Arthur Richman, the Mets’ PR director, made the decision to put the announcement on the scoreboard. “We could do that, do it with a PA announcement, or do nothing,” he said. It was not an easy call.
Mickey Rivers, a teammate of Thurman’s just days before, was in Cleveland with the Texas Rangers, playing cards in his hotel room with his new teammates. He was confused. He wanted to go to Canton to pay his respects, but couldn’t get an answer at the house. He wanted to stay for the Monday funeral, but thought the Rangers wouldn’t let him. In the end, he just said, “Look, I’ve got to go to the funeral.” And he would go.
Keith Olbermann, who earned national fame on ESPN’s
Sports-Center
and became a prominent newscaster and commentator, was just beginning his career in journalism at UPI radio, where he had
taken his passion for baseball cards and baseball history and turned it into a daily sportscast.
I’d graduated somehow from Cornell and begun work for Sam Rosen at UPI’s old radio network in the Daily News Building on East Forty-second Street in New York. At twenty, I was thirteen years younger than the next youngest radio staffer, and among my UPI colleagues were Milton Richman, Joe Carnicelli, and Bill Madden.
I had been entrusted with maybe ten shifts of my own by August 2, starting with a 5:45 sportscast. I was then on, hourly, through 10:45. The UPI sportscaster had to take in and edit tape from games, do occasional enterprise interviews, write and voice a two-minute commentary, and do those six sportscasts.
I prepped them in the backup air studio, then crossed the tiny radio newsroom past a bank of teletypes, our means of interaction with the various bureaus and desks around the world. (There was one computer for all of radio and it was used only to prepare the radio “billboards” and such that went out on the clackety-clacking machines around the country.)
I grabbed my copy at about 5:43 and started to move toward the main air studio, and just as I passed the ten or twelve thermal printers, the bells went off as if the thing were about to explode. It was the “abstract” wire—the intra-UPI method bureaus used to send messages to New York. For some reason I stopped and read it: CLEVELAND BURO URGENT TO NY; THURMAN MUNSON YANKEES DEAD CRASH PILOTING PRIVATE JET CANTON-AKRON ARPT.
I got woozy. Not ten months earlier I had been a pure Yankee fan watching him bully and cajole his pitchers into a second straight world championship. Now I had to go on a
thousand radio stations and kill him. And I had sixteen words to work off.
I rushed into the booth and scribbled something on my script and basically started to wing it. I recited Munson’s Rookie of the Year Award, his leadership of the Yanks back to respectability, the 1976, ’77, and ’78 World Series. The sportscast was only two minutes long. Somehow I finished it.
The rest of the night was people grabbing me and telling me what to do next. The moment the 5:45 newscast was over, the news editor, Frank Raphael, burst in and pulled me out of the chair. “Write a forty-second bulletin on him! As quickly as you can!” A friend of mine from college said he heard it on the air on a Buffalo station at about six o’clock. He said he nearly drove off the road half because of the tragedy and half because it was me telling it.
Within minutes, Sam Rosen was on the phone. “Call every stringer you can get, get them to get reaction from any player they can before the games are over. I’ll get there as soon as I can!” I was not utterly numb. It seemed I’d just put the phone down when Sam walked in. “Here. I hate to do this to you, but I have to work on a special about him. These are the home phone numbers for Roy White and Lou Piniella.”
I haven’t gulped much in my life, but cliché that it is, I gulped then. Roy White had been with the Yankees since the day I became a fan. I tried him first. My memory’s hazy—either he or Piniella wept, but the other begged me to tell them it was a horrible mistake. But both of them—and I’ll never forget this—actually spent five minutes expressing their emotions eloquently and honestly. I could only thank them by telling them that I’d make copies of the interviews for the other networks and New York stations so they wouldn’t be barraged any further. I remember a stringer appearing
within an hour and to our credit, we really did it—we made copy after copy for the other stations.
At that time, of course, the details and the interviews and the memories kept flooding in. I suddenly got the picture in my mind of Thurman from the Yankee Stadium fiftieth anniversary book, back in 1973, carrying his infant daughter in his glove. He was dead because he wanted to see her, and the rest of his family, more often. It was suddenly a world filled with the potential for bitter, heart-rending irony. I think I started one of the sportscasts, or maybe the morning commentary, by describing that photograph and the tragedy it unknowingly portended.
And suddenly it was one a.m., two hours after my shift should’ve ended. Sam was tapping me on the shoulder. “They’re killing our team. We should go to Mexico and smoke ourselves blind,” he said. “And you should go home before you miss the last train to Hastings.”
I remember riding it, staring out at the inky blackness of the Hudson River. I couldn’t figure out why I heard somebody laughing elsewhere in the car. How could they be laughing? Munson was dead. He was the first man I remembered the Yankees drafting. I saw him play when they brought him up at the end of 1969. He was the hope of the future. The reality was even better. Sure he was tough on the media, but not on the kids like me. And he was there from my days as a novice fan through the start of my career. How could they laugh? His life was over—and so was my childhood.