The Boss Abides: George Steinbrenner as New York

by Nate Freeman

George Steinbrenner at the end was not the man who once ruled American sport. His neck bubbled out into a series of rolling chins. His skin was sallow and plastic-looking. As he sailed out his years in Tampa, draped in Yankees pajamas for the entirety of the day, his mind had slipped away. “Great to see ya, Tommy,” Steinbrenner said to his friend Tom McEwen when Franz Lidz visited George’s Florida compound in 2007 to report a story for Portfolio. And then he said it again. Great to see ya, Tommy. Great to see ya. Great to see ya. He would repeat the phrase after every question.

But George Steinbrenner was more than this caricature of a man putzing around his Florida digs, speaking nonsense and carrying an extra layer of flesh on his face. He was the man sitting in Elaine’s, where he was a regular, holding court among the prominent faces. He was the man reviled when the Yankees lost, and even more reviled when the Yankees won. He was the man who, like many New York scions, came from somewhere else, in his case the Midwest, and built an empire here instead. And he was the man who, when voiced by Larry David on Seinfeld, just really wanted that eggplant calzone. “Big Stein wants an eggplant calzone!” he yells at George Costanza. “He must have one!”

And when the calzone is in the building, Steinbrenner can smell it.

* * *

George Michael Steinbrenner III was born on the Fourth of July. He grew up in Rocky River, Ohio, where his father used his MIT education to build up Kinsman Marine Transit, one of those uniquely Midwestern companies that can make a man a magnate through the transport of grain and ore. He graduated from Williams-where he was a DKE, naturally-then went off to join the Air Force. Getting shipped off to Korea wasn’t exactly in the cards: his father pulled strings to ensure that he would stay at Lockbourne Air Force Base.

While completing his masters in physical education at Ohio State, Steinbrenner secured a gig as the graduate assistant to Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, which led to positions at Northwestern and Purdue before leaving to work at his father’s company. From there he went to the American Shipbuilding Company, where he worked his way to the top and cultivated his initial fortune by merging it with his dad’s company. He initially invested in the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, and, to expand his hometown holdings, he attempted to acquire the Cleveland Indians in 1971; the deal fell through. The next opportunity would force him to look outside the world where his grain-carrying cargo ships dominated the waterways-he put together a group of investors to purchase the New York Yankees from CBS. The arrangement was reached when Steinbrenner met with CBS Chairman William S. Paley, as The Boss giddily recalled to John Cassidy for a 2002 article in the New Yorker.

His first move would be prescient of the remainder of his time seated high up in a luxury box in The House That Ruth Built-he signed a player for a shitload of money. The first of these deals was for Catfish Hunter, for a then-absurd $3.85 million, and this tradition of empire building would continue until today. In 2009, the Yankees’ $210 million budget was far higher than any other team in baseball.

His loose pockets caught up with Steinbrenner on occasion, such as when he made an illegal corporate contribution to Nixon’s re-election, and then made a subsequent bribe to his shipping company to cover up the fact. This brought him a 15-month suspension from commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In 1989, Ronald Reagan granted him an 11th-hour pardon.

Then, in 1990, Steinbrenner made an ill-advised deal with gambler Howard Spira to find damaging information about Yankee outfielder Dave Winfield, whom The Boss had less than kind feelings toward. He was asked to step aside, but Steinbrenner again made his return to the captain’s seat of the franchise in 1993, a few years before a late-nineties period of his team’s wild success on the diamond. He was absent these last few years, and ceded most control to his sons Hank and Hal.

* * *

So what is the legacy of The Boss, then? The longest tenure of ownership in Yankees history did not elicit fanfares from New Yorkers. In an article for New York that ran in the August 15, 1977 issue, Jeff Greenfield spoke for the group resentful of Steinbrenner’s gauche big-spending philosophy, and presupposes this to be a uniquely Ohioan sensibility.

“George Steinbrenner comes from Cleveland,” Greenfield wrote. “It is really too bad for the city of Cleveland, which has been fighting its image as a benighted city of the bush league, but Steinbrenner is so visibly, unavoidably no-class…. It is the ultimate irony: a big-league team in a big-league town in the hands of a bush-league owner.”

This impression of Steinbrenner-the picture of a moneyed upstart from nowhere unable to navigate the currents of the big city like he did the currents of the Midwest-seems absurd now. Yes, he has spent decades infuriating the general populace with his need for total control and his brutally capitalistic approach to the most celebrated franchise in the history of America’s Pastime, but this makes him the consummate New Yorker. His brash and obnoxious demeanor ensured that America’s greatest city had a team that could match it in swagger, flash and performance. The Boss’ Yankees could be sore losers-but when they won, they won with unapologetic pride, the way New York should.

George Steinbrenner was first portrayed as a monumental asshole, hell-bent on whoring out the beauty of baseball for moneymaking purposes-and then as the cheating, lying figure that hobnobbed with the richest and talked through his public relations man Howard Rubenstein, mouthpiece to the high and mighty. In his last, absent decade, he became the dough-faced man struggling with competence at home in Tampa, no matter how many times we were told that wasn’t true.

As which of these should we remember him? Really we should think of him as that back of the head, sitting at a desk, barking into a phone, wanting nothing more than his eggplant calzone. Because you can’t hate a guy for wanting an eggplant calzone-not much more than you can hate a guy for wanting to outspend the entire world.

Photo by Chris Ptacek from Flickr.