Word: owners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last days of a frantic pennant race and Yankee Manager Billy Martin tossed in his bed, looking for ways to get even with his boss. For a moment, still thinking like the street fighter he used to be, he had a drastic idea. He would walk right up to Owner George Steinbrenner, insult him and goad the boss into striking him. Too wild, he decided. If only Steinbrenner would stop sending those foolish statistics down to the dugout during the game, stop pushing him so hard to discipline the players. Discipline, Martin thought as he lay awake, actually longing...
...part Steinbrenner, a barrel-chested former athlete and coach who became head of a shipbuilding company, considered himself a man who knew how to handle street fighters. Before he hired Martin-who had been dumped from his past three managing jobs-Steinbrenner closely questioned the other owners. The pattern, as he saw it, was clear: Martin each time-in Minnesota, Detroit and Texas-had shrewdly turned the players against management to his own advantage. "These other guys didn't choose to take Billy on," said Steinbrenner. "I felt I could change him." As a start, he got Martin...
...Trouble follows me," said Billy Martin, and the quarrel between these two perverse and powerful men often distracted people from a team that was full of fascinating conflicts. It was a sullen, gifted and divided ball club. Watching the owner and manager clash, the players eventually came to distrust them both. Stars such as Catcher Thurman Munson and Outfielder Mickey Rivers asked to be traded. The pitchers were often in revolt against the manager and each other. But the Yankees somehow were too talented not to endure. At season's end Martin, for all his sleepless nights, looked like...
...then went to bed. Shortly after midnight, two key players, Munson and Lou Piniella, knocked on Steinbrenner's door. They were distraught about the chaos on the team and bluntly told Steinbrenner that the Yankees could not win with Martin as the manager. Was this the way the owner ran his other companies, they challenged him? Steinbrenner was somewhat startled to hear the two players say Martin had little support from the rest of the team. Suddenly Martin himself was banging on the door. He was enraged to find his players with the owner. Steinbrenner calmed the group down...
...season Jackson stood in the corner of the locker room and said: "I wouldn't wish what happened to me here on anybody." He had already told Steinbrenner he would refuse to play another season for Martin, no small dilemma for the owner...