Word: schaap
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steinbrenner! ABC sports reporter Dick Schaap gives The Great White Shipbuilder as fair a treatment as he'll probably ever get. Oh, he can't resist the usual jokes--he calls his subject "George III" for his tyrannical reign over the ballclub, and "the Yankee Clipper" for forcing his charges to get haircuts. (That demand angered at least one Yankee--outfielder Oscar Gamble, whose legendary afro added more than 12" to his six-foot frame, forcing his to affix his baseball cap with bobby pips...
...sure, Schaap has to tell the usual Steinbrenner stories, the ones the New York Post and Daily News have subsisted on since the Cleveland multimillionaire bought the squad in 1973. There's the derigeur stuff about the owner's hate-hate relationship with two-time manager Billy Martin, and the latest dirt on what Steinbrenner considers his "father-son" relationship with once and future Yankee manager Gene Michael, whom he canned last fall but soon rehired for the 1983 season. Schaap doesn't forget to mention the owner's interference with his managers' decisions, or his proclivity for spending ungodly...
...SCHAAP saves Steinbrenner! from becoming an easy hatchet job by accepting the controversial owner on his own terms: his refusal to make the book a compendium of New York Post columns turns Steinbrenner! into a valid, if often irreverent biography. Realizing that the owner has zealously shielded his wife and children from the press, for instance, Schaap resists the temptation to delve into Steinbrenner's family life. He does, however, rightly chide the owner for hiding behind his family, Schaap's recounting of the numerous times that his subject refused to talk with reporters, lying that his wife...
...Despite Schaap's eagerness to interview Steinbrenner, and his obvious qualifications as a biographer (he has covered the Yankees since Steinbrenner took over, without taking sides in the team's regular internal battles) the owner refused to cooperate. In fact, Schaap says, Steinbrenner tried to quash the book, exhorting his friends not to answer the writer's questions (Most disobeyed.) Only when Schaap had completed the body of the book late this winter did Steinbrenner finally agree to talk to the author about his life. Unfortunately, the postscript that relates their nine-hour conversation does little besides confirm what Schaap...
...toughness in him--placed heavy demands on his only son. For one thing, he forced young George to wear a tie and jacket to grade school, losing him any friends he might have had; for another, he shipped the boy off to a military academy at age 14 where. Schaap observes, Steinbrenner's one good mark was an A-plus in military science...