The George Steinbrenner I knew was actually Larry David. He was the rambling, semi-coherent septuagenarian yelling for George Costanza to get him a calzone. He was the mild mannered owner who sat back and let Derek Jeter and Brian Cashman do all of the work. He was a guy who I heard was crazy, but I had never seen act out. Mark Cuban is a wild, over-involved owner. Jerry Jones is a lavish, extravagant owner. But George Steinbrenner was cordial. He was willing to spend the money on the top players, but stepped back and let them take him to the promise land. That was the George Steinbrenner I knew. That was what I witnessed. Then, he died.
Within 2 hours, that perception was completely changed. ESPN either has the quickest editors in the business or they had been sitting on a life retrospective of the late Yankees owner for some time. I was fascinated by his exploits before my memory fully kicked in (sometime between ages 6 and 23.) I sat there in astonishment listening to the stories of his prime. I knew he fired managers, but I never fully grasped to what extent. I knew he had arguments with players, but somehow I missed the story of him hiring a known felon to blackmail Dave Winfield so he could get rid of the player. (I’m shocked and a little ashamed that I didn’t know about this until now.) That is amazing. An owner actually putting someone on the pay role to dig up dirt on his starting left fielder. It made me long for the good old days. It made me wonder why things like this don’t happen in sports anymore. Have we become to politically correct to allow it? Is the media just not as investigative as they once were? Have the penalties for extortion become too harsh for anyone to risk it? Or am I simply missing something?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that stories like Steinbrenner-Winfield are still happening all the time. It’s just that when you see it play out live, it never seems as amazing. If you see the build-up, the climax, and the aftermath, everything seems to make sense. Within context, nothing seems as amazing as it does out of context. The Steinbrenner example was a huge story at the time, but everyone knew Steinbrenner already. They were witness to two decades of erratic behavior, so when the news broke about Winfield-gate, people were able to temper their shock. They could believe his actions because they had the context of his previous relationships with his players and managers.
So when I say stories like this don’t happen anymore, I am missing something. In fact, with the emergence of the internet and 24-hour reporting, we have had more jaw-dropping stories than ever. The trick is, you have to remove the context. Twenty years from now, when Brett Favre is firmly entrenched in the halls of Canton and our kids are comparing his statistics with Matthew Stafford’s (I predict big things from him), some kid is going to read the “Retirements” section of his Wikipedia page in disbelief. To us, we think his indecision is more annoying than astonishing. But that’s because with lived through it. We remember Brett from his Packers days. We remember his first retirement, second retirement, third retirement, fourth retirement, fifth retirement, sixth retirement...wait, what number are we on? So when our kids come to us with “Hold on, so he just kept retiring and coming back right before the season every year???”, we will just shrug it off as nothing. “Wait, so Lebron thought it would be a good idea for his image to go on National TV to spurn his hometown and the team he played with for 7 years without warning them? Then he spent the next two months trying to play it off by acting like the city never meant anything to him, because he actually grew up in Akron and not Cleveland? Then he blew out his knee and became a rich man’s Penny Hardaway? (That last part is called foreshadowing)” and we will just half-heartedly nod. “OK, so you’re trying to honestly tell me that Shaq was in a movie where he played a street-wise Genie, then he launched a rap career in which he went by the alter ego Shaq-Fu? A rap career, that 13 years in, he could still only come up with lines like ‘I’m a horse, he ratted me out now I’m getting divorced, I love ‘em, I don’t leave ‘em, I got a vasectomy so now I don’t breed ‘em’?” Us: “Yep”.
(Side thought about vasectomies: They are one of the more under-rated plots in sitcoms. Vasectomies have been at the heart of some great episodes: Tim ‘the Tool Man’ Taylor getting one on
Home Improvement, Jerry and Kramer pulling a Favre on the decision on
Seinfeld, Jack on
30 Rock, Zach Morris on
Saved by the Bell: The College Years (I think that happened), Antonio Cromartie on
Hard Knocks and according to a quick Google search, some guy on
Reba and the hit series
LA Ink: Fresh Ink. To TV writers, a ‘vasectomy episode’ is as golden as a ‘the kids breaking something valuable and trying to find a way to raise money to replace it before their parents find out episode’. Also, I may or may not have thought vasectomy was spelled with a ‘b’ until spell check told me otherwise.)
Antonio Cromartie is still trying to list all of his children
Steroids in baseball will be a huge shocker to anyone who wasn’t alive to see it play out. If you think back to just the bullet points of the public realization that nearly everyone was on PED’s, it is pretty astonishing. McGwire and Sosa captivating a nation. Bonds breaking the career record, but no one caring because everyone knew he cheated. The Mitchell Report and players being called before Congress. A-Rod being exposed by a reporter. The Rocket going to jail (Again, it’s called foreshadowing). If you didn’t live through this in real-time, you would think this was the biggest scandal in sports history. And maybe it is, but to a person that has all of the surrounding details, it’s just something that happened.
I’m afraid, however, the steroids saga is going to be too well-known by future generations. It’s not going to sneak up on anyone. Something that changed the history (or in this case, erased the history) of an entire sport is going to be immortalized by writers in countless books and by Hollywood in endless movies and documentaries. Everyone knows about Pete Rose. The best thing about the Steinbrenner deal was that it was a big deal at the time, but it didn’t have lasting power. It was a fringe story in the history of the sport. The only writers who would spend significant time on it these days are the people who keep his Wikipedia page updated. (And those are the best writers. Thank God for Wikipedia. I owe much of the historical knowledge I’ve acquired over the past 4 years to the site. I trust everything that’s written there and, really, the only people I know who don’t view it as a credible source are high school english teachers.) Fringe stories are a big deal at the time but they fly under the radar for future generations. They are the best stories to happen upon. Kermit Washington and Rudy Tomjanovic is a fringe story. Jeffrey Maier is a fringe story. Tom Dempsey’s half foot is a fringe story. Chad Johnson legally changing his name to Chad OchoCinco for the sole purpose of selling more jerseys and having the NFL refuse to recognize the change, only to blindly and completely accept it a year later is a fringe story.
The fringe story I’m most looking forward to regaling to future generations is the saga of Ron Artest. If you’ve watched him for the past eight years, his post game interview in Game 7 of the Finals was par for the course. But imagine if you didn’t have any prior knowledge of Ron-Ron and you just happened upon that game on ESPN Classic thirty years from now. By the time he gave his final shout out to Queensbridge, you would want to know everything there is to know about that man. And you would not be disappointed. From the brawl to the story about the table leg game growing up to the Kobe shower meeting to ill-advised shot after ill-advised shot, your eyes would widen. With no context to stifle Artest’s insanity, he’s amazing. (The NBA, where Artest happens.)
Pre-Psychiatrist Ron Artest
However, there is a reverse to the context belief. There are some stories that will amaze because of the context. I think I’ll look back at the Tiger Woods saga twenty years from now with the wonderment of a ten year old kid. Tiger has been in my conscious since I was 12 (his dominating ’97 Masters). He was the most famous athlete in the world for all of my teenage years. I had all the context I could have for him. And because of this, when the scandal played out, I became more amazed by the day. I thought I knew Tiger. He was a soft-spoken robot who hadn’t shown emotion since ’05 (aside from a few four letter words the mic would pick up throughout his rounds). He played golf, made commercials, pretended to drive a Buick, and was married to a Swedish model. His sole purpose in life was to win Majors. That was the Tiger I knew. So when rumors started to swirl, I initially dismissed them. In comparison to Steibrenner, I’m sure that when the rumor broke that he hired someone to blackmail his best player, people thought, “Yeah I could see that”. It all depends on the context that person has built up in your mind.
