[新聞] Baseball after the Boss

[decorum (Brave New World)]

蠻長的一篇八卦報導，討論大老闆之後，洋基所有權的問題。
大老闆這幾年健康不佳，神智似乎也不太清楚了，
幾個兒子好像對經營球隊沒啥興趣，可能有興趣的女兒，
卻因為是女人，根本沒機會，而原來可能接班的女婿，
由於在辦理離婚，也被判出局。


Baseball After the Boss
by Franz Lidz

http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/sports/
2007/08/02/Baseball-and-Steinbrenner#


The gates have finally opened.

For more than a month, I have been trying to get an audience with George
Steinbrenner III, the principal owner of the New York Yankees. His son-in-law
and designated heir, the infelicitously named Steve Swindal, was arrested on
the night of Valentine’s Day for allegedly driving under the influence and
is now divorcing his way out of the team hierarchy. I want to ask
Steinbrenner who will succeed him at the helm of the most famous franchise in
American sports.

But the once bold and blustery Boss, as he often calls himself, has been in
nearly silent retreat since fainting at a friend’s memorial service in 2003.
He has been slowed by a bum knee, and his nearly uncontainable energy has
ebbed noticeably, some say alarmingly. At 77, he attends his club’s games
less and less frequently. He hasn’t been sighted at Yankee Stadium since
opening day, April 2, and on that occasion he looked unsteady and hid from
public view. The Bronx Bloviator, who used to love sparring with
sportswriters as much as bullying employees, now speaks to the media in
canned statements issued through his designated mouthpiece, the New York P.R.
guru Howard Rubenstein. Steinbrenner’s Howard Hughes-like reclusiveness has
fueled rumors that he is, at best, recovering from a mild stroke, at worst,
in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

He has only added to the mystery by refusing interview requests and
instituting a gag order on the Yankees front office and his relatives. His
own publicist declines to discuss him. “Mr. Rubenstein is not available to
talk about Mr. Steinbrenner or his team,” the flack’s flack told me. “Nor
will he be available in the near future.” (Rubenstein later told Condé Nast
Portfolio, “I speak to George each day, and he seems okay to me.”)

I seek out Tom McEwen, the onetime sports editor of the Tampa Tribune. He and
Steinbrenner have been golfing buddies since 1973, the year the Boss bought
the Yankees and moved his family from Cleveland to Tampa, Florida. But they
haven’t talked to or seen each other in more than a year. “I’ve heard all
the speculation,” McEwen says. “I hope he’s okay.”

The 84-year-old McEwen doesn’t get around much anymore himself. Circulation
problems in both legs have confined him to a wheelchair. Still, he offers to
accompany me to Steinbrenner’s home, which borders the Palma Ceia Golf and
Country Club in downtown Tampa. “I don’t care if George gets mad,” he
says. “At this age, what can he do to me?” So on a bright, cloudless day in
June, we pull up to the Steinbrenner compound, a stucco palace with thick
white columns.

As my rental car idles near the entrance, the black wrought-iron gates part
and another car drives out. McEwen says, “Let’s go in.” We do. A portly
gardener in a Yankees T-shirt leans against a huge white anchor that
dominates the front lawn. McEwen asks him, “Is George home?”



The gardener nods. “Tell him Tom is here to see him,” McEwen says. The
gardener disappears into the house. We park in the circular driveway, and I
help McEwen out of the car and into his wheelchair. Then I push him to the
front porch. We stare into a dark alcove and wait.

Five minutes later, a solitary figure emerges out of the shadows, limping
toward us. It’s 2 in the afternoon, and George Steinbrenner is wearing
slippers, silk pajamas, and a terry-cloth robe—all Yankee blue. A
diamond-encrusted World Series ring nearly as big as a Ritz cracker obscures
his wedding ring.

When he sees McEwen, a big, goofy grin spreads across his face. “Great to
see ya, Tommy,” he exclaims.

“Great to see you, George,” McEwen says. He introduces me as a writer
working on a story and asks about Steinbrenner’s wife, Joan.

“Great to see ya, Tommy,” Steinbrenner says.

McEwen asks about his sons, Hank and Hal.

“Great to see ya, Tommy,” he says.

McEwen asks about his daughters, Jennifer and Jessica.

“Great to see ya, Tommy,” he says.

McEwen asks about his health.

Steinbrenner sighs heavily and mutters, “Oh, I’m all right.”

He doesn’t look all right. In fact, he looks dreadful. His body is bloated;
his jawline has slackened into a triple chin; his skin looks as if a
dry-cleaner bag has been stretched over it. Steinbrenner’s face, pale and
swollen, has a curiously undefined look. His features seem frozen in a
permanent rictus of careworn disbelief.

McEwen recounts a surreal showdown at a Tampa dogtrack in which George and
Joan cursed each other out in the most obscene language possible. “That’s
Joan,” Steinbrenner says, chuckling. “She’s feisty.”

I ask Steinbrenner about the Yankees, who are struggling mightily at the
time. The grin turns into a snarl. “They’ll come around,” he snaps. It’s
the first sign of the old George.

I ask Steinbrenner whom he wants to succeed him. He ignores me. That’s the
last sign of the old George.

A few minutes later, Steinbrenner starts repeating himself again. “Great to
see ya, Tommy,” he says in response to every question. “Great to see ya.”

Shifting uneasily in his wheelchair, McEwen thanks his old friend for
receiving us and says goodbye. Steinbrenner waves and grins. While I wheel
McEwen to the car, he whispers, “It’s the strangest thing. George didn’t
want us to go, yet he didn’t want us to stay.” I look back at the Yankees
owner, who is still waving and grinning. “Great to see ya, Tommy,” he
shouts. “Great to see ya.” Then he turns and limps back into the house.

“I’m shocked,” McEwen tells me. “George doesn’t even seem like the same
person. I figured he might be in a bad way, but I never expected this.”

Yankee Ingenuity

For 34 years, George Steinbrenner has run the New York Yankees the way
General Douglas MacArthur ran Japan: somewhat more imperiously than the
emperor. By investing all profits in new players and paying them more than
any other owner was willing to, he made a dormant team a winner again. Under
Steinbrenner’s stewardship, the franchise has not only won 15 division
titles, 10 pennants, and six world championships but has turned into the
biggest attraction in sports. The Yankees’ annual revenue exceeds the
average team’s by $132 million. Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist estimates
the Yankees’ total value to Major League Baseball at $500 million to $700
million, which is between $50 million and $100 million more than the No. 2
team, the Boston Red Sox.

Wherever the Yankees play, their games are almost guaranteed sellouts. When
they don’t make the World Series, ratings plummet. When Steinbrenner has
lambasted a player, his rants have become back-page headlines. For four
decades, the Yanks have been a three-ring circus, and he has been their
clown, their ringmaster, their Barnum. “There is no such thing as apathy
when it comes to the Yankees,” says Bill Giles, chairman of the Philadelphia
Phillies. “He has made his team into something you either love or hate.”

The same can be said of Steinbrenner himself. His force of personality is
such that he’s admired even by some who have reason to despise him. “Les
Yankees, c’est moi” is Steinbrenner’s attitude. Surely no modern owner is
more meddlesome—he has been involved in almost every facet of the team, from
negotiating major player deals to running the parking concession for a day—
and surely none is more powerful. “Baseball rewrote its collective
bargaining agreement in 2002 for the purpose of getting its hands on some of
his money,” observed Sports Illustrated baseball writer Tom Verducci, “both
to chip away at his power and to prop up the weaker clubs.”

The value of the club Steinbrenner bought 34 years ago from CBS for $10
million—his initial equity contribution was $168,000—has increased to an
estimated $1.2 billion, the highest in baseball. The $302 million that the
Yankees grossed last season came largely from ticket sales: A team attendance
record of 4.2 million fans generated gate receipts of $155 million. Of the
$103 million the Yankees pocketed from broadcasting rights, more than half
came from the YES network, a regional cable station in which the team has a
35 percent share. The combination of YES money and lucrative marketing deals
accounts for how the Yanks lost more than $25 million yet accrued $170
million in value last year. Investment bank Goldman Sachs, which owns a
minority stake in YES, has been exploring a possible sale of the network—
analysts say it could be worth at least $2 billion. “Goldman is merely
testing the market,” Rubenstein says. “They do not represent us. The
Yankees have no interest in selling their share in YES.”

The new $1 billion ballpark set to open in 2009 will make a team that’s
already the most bankable in sports even more attractive, boosting annual
revenue by another $50 million to $60 million from the sale of tickets and
luxury suites.

The Yankees will cover 80 percent of the construction and receive a $44
million tax break. Most of their financing comes from a 40-year bond to be
paid off in yearly increments of $55 million. If the Yankees don’t field a
good team, they’ll be saddled with some very handsome fixed costs. There
will be more pressure than ever on the owner to produce a competitive
champion, which is why, in the winter of the patriarch, the person who draws
up the flight plan for the Bronx Bombers matters.


Despite his reputation, it has been years since Steinbrenner micromanaged the
Yankees. Team president Randy Levine and chief operating officer Lonn Trost
have autonomy over business decisions, as does Brian Cashman, the general
manager, on the baseball end. “George still calls the shots,” says a
prominent baseball agent, “but his passion for the game seems to have faded
along with his health, and no one is quite sure who’s got his ear anymore.”
 Steinbrenner, he notes, loves aphorisms, and one of his favorites is “The
speed of the pack is determined by the pace of the leader.” “In the past
few years, George’s pace has slowed considerably. He’s been so detached
this season that I wonder if he’s still in the hunt.”

The owner who once crowed “I will never have a heart attack—I give them”
 has said that the only way he’ll leave the job is horizontally. “George
used to talk about turning over the operation to his kids,” McEwen says, “
but I think he’s gonna run the Yankees until the day he dies.”

Though Steinbrenner’s four children are now middle-aged, he said three years
ago that he had never spoken to any of them about the line of succession. In
this late inning, with George unwilling to relinquish control, it’s doubtful
that Hank, Hal, or either of their two sisters will take charge while their
father is still in the picture. Hank has long been George’s pick, but in the
past, he’s shown little interest in the job. Hank’s indifference has left
the door open for Hal, who clearly wants to be the new Boss.

Regardless of which Steinbrenner leads the Yankees next, the organization is
so well managed, the transition will probably be orderly. “This is not
Castro dying in Cuba,” Zimbalist says.

Steinbrenner’s children could band together as a single voting bloc, but
Major League Baseball requires that each team pick one managing partner to
represent it at league meetings. Over the past three years, Levine has
largely performed in that capacity for the Yankees.

Whoever inherits the biggest capital gain in sports history will probably
face staggering gift or estate taxes. That could be avoided, temporarily, if
Steinbrenner bequeathed his stake in the team, which is now at least 55
percent, to his wife, who owns at least 5 percent herself. But Joan has
always kept a low profile, and McEwen is sure she would insist on keeping it
that way. (There are at least a dozen other minority partners, but it’s
unlikely they would play any significant role in the succession. As a
previous shareholder once put it, “Nothing is more limited than being George
Steinbrenner’s limited partner.”)

Some Yankees insiders believe that once the Boss is gone, his family will
sell its stake to an outsider. Donald Trump has expressed interest, and
assuming Rudy Giuliani doesn’t land in the White House, the former mayor
would be a likely candidate to front a consortium of buyers. But Trump is
thought to have too much debt and not enough ready cash. And any billionaire
who could afford the Yankees wouldn’t appoint someone else to run them—that
would be the equivalent of producing a Broadway show and not sitting
front-row center on opening night. At a cost of more than a billion dollars,
everyone agrees, this would not be about making money. It would strictly be
an ego buy.

If the team is sold, the next Big Ego probably would be someone like
Cablevision chief executive James Dolan—overlord of the New York Knicks, the
New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden—assuming he has no financial
ties to the Cleveland Indians, which are owned by his brother Larry. (Dolan
would not
comment for this story.) Or it could be a relatively unknown hedge fund
manager with a forest of performance fees to burn. Not that the thickest
bankroll guarantees success. The nine members of Major League Baseball’s
ownership committee have absolute say over whom they’ll admit to their club,
and they tend to be more arbitrary than a Manhattan co-op board. “The
committee polices potential investors to protect the game’s profitability
and reputation,” a former high-ranking baseball executive says. The owners
don’t want a free-spending financier who would try to better a losing team
by upping its $200 million payroll to $400 million. In other words, the
owners don’t want another George Steinbrenner.

A new, more frugal owner could roll back salaries and try to increase
profits. That would be foolish, says Zimbalist: “The Yankees play on the
world’s biggest stage—on Broadway—and they need marquee players. They can’
t afford to lose their sex appeal.” By making the payroll cheaper, an owner
would risk devaluing the brand.

Still, we will probably never see another baseball owner with his audacity,
chutzpah, and dominant stature. “Steinbrenner’s economic legacy is the way
he illuminated the synergy between baseball and big cities,” Zimbalist says.
“He took advantage of the fact that his team was in the country’s largest
media market and the entertainment capital of the world.”

Less a visionary than a canny capitalist, Steinbrenner changed the way
baseball owners behaved by refusing to play ball by their rules. As a result,
he dramatically increased player salaries around the league, and the other
owners hated him for it. In 2002, they tempered his extravagance—and got a
piece of his money—by instituting the luxury tax, the proceeds of which form
a pool that is shared by all the teams. Last year, other team owners split
$105 million in luxury tax and revenue sharing from the Yankees. For most
clubs, that $3 million in trickle-down Yankee bucks would cover the cost of a
new starting pitcher. For the Yankees, it might fetch a backup catcher and a
half-dozen Yankee franks.




Who's the Boss?

“The Yankees are America’s team,” Hank Steinbrenner once told me. “To put
it bluntly, nobody outside of Missouri gives a crap if the St. Louis
Cardinals or the Kansas City Royals are in the World Series.
George was the oldest of three children, and the only son. Raised on a
gentle- man’s farm, the 14-year-old followed in his father’s goose steps to
the Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where he, too, excelled at the
hurdles. He tried hard to impress his old man but rarely did. During one
meet, young George won three races, only to be chewed out by Big Hank for
losing a fourth. Big Hank, George has said, “always focused on the failures.
”

George went to Williams College and was a graduate student at Ohio State and
an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue. He returned to
Cleveland in 1957 to join his family’s shipping company, Kinsman Marine
Transit. Six years later, he bought out his father and reversed the company’
s faltering fortunes by switching its principal cargo from ore to grain. In
1967, Kinsman Marine merged with a bigger local rival, American Ship
Building, and became the dominant grain carrier on the Great Lakes. Still,
Big Hank remained unimpressed. When his son later bought the Yankees, he
muttered, “Well, the kid finally did something right.”

Which may or may not have been meant as a commentary on George’s 1956
marriage to Joan Zieg, the daughter of an Ohio real estate tycoon. Joan (who
pronounces her name JoAnn) and George had met at Ohio State while she was a
dental-hygiene student and he was working on his master’s in phys ed. They
had two children, Hank and Jennifer, but Joan soon found her union to George
to be as blissful as a root canal: In July 1962, she filed for divorce. Two
months later, the couple reconciled.

As a parent, George tried to be democratic: He browbeat his kids equally.
Papa George demanded that his children best their peers at walking, reading,
even toilet training. He enrolled all his children at Culver, his alma mater.
“Being one of George’s kids was not easy,” McEwen says. “He rode the boys
hard. And he rode Hank hardest of all.”

Hank, 50, was the first and only Steinbrenner to be publicly groomed to
follow in his father’s footsteps. He stumbled along the way. Though George
was Culver’s Man of the Year in 1971, Hank wasn’t exactly a model cadet. He
hated the place. He was constantly getting demerits—for sleeping late, for
not shaving, for not cleaning up his room. He would sneak out after taps and
climb down the fire escape to rendezvous with his girlfriend. Hank had his
serious side too. “While the rest of us guys were out hustling chicks,”
 says a former classmate, “Hank was spending hours studying horses’
 bloodlines and ballplayers’ batting averages.”

Eventually, Hank came to think Culver was the “greatest experience” of his
life. It wasn’t always so. “Hank resented everything the school stood for,”
 says the classmate. “He was very rebellious, always going tooth-and-nail
with the superintendent. It always seemed to me that he acted that way to
defy his father. Hank loved George and hated him too. His biggest problem was
living up to his father’s expectations.” After graduation, Hank had an
argument with George and took off for a couple weeks. Hank turned up at an
Ocala motel. “When Hank reappeared,” says the classmate, “George softened
a lot on him.”

Hank didn’t go on to Williams. Instead, he made a couple of academic pit
stops before settling at tiny Central Methodist in Fayette, Missouri.

“I wasn’t more than an average student,” Hank once told me. George thought
a degree was important; Hank didn’t. He dropped out before his senior year
and found work at Kinsman Farm, the family’s 750-acre Thoroughbred stud farm
in Ocala, Florida.

His great passion was researching horses’ bloodlines and matching stallions
with Kinsman’s breeding mares. In 1985, the first crop of foals he bred
himself raced as three-year-olds. Hank’s track record has been fairly
impressive: five Kentucky Derby entrants, though one of them, Bellamy Road,
was a big disappointment; the colt started the race as a 5-to-2 favorite but
finished seventh.

In 1986, Hank served a limited apprenticeship with the Yankees. Though he had
no title and drew no salary, he traveled with the team, sat in on staff
meetings, and manned the phone on conference calls with the club’s top
brass. Hank’s ideas sometimes met with resistance. When he declared that
relief pitcher Dave Righetti would be more effective as a starter and should
be replaced by Alfonso Pulido, a career minor leaguer, Righetti grumbled, “I
don’t mind when people I know and whose opinions I respect make suggestions
that affect me and my future. But I don’t want to hear it from someone who
doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Righetti finished the season with
46 saves, still the American League record for left-handers. Pulido returned
to the minors and was out of baseball entirely by the end of the following
season.



Hank also took a lot of high, hard ones from sportswriters. A New York
tabloid columnist threw the first knockdown pitch, chastising the 29-year-old
for smoking a cigarette on the field at the Yankees’ spring training camp in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. When the Yanks released veteran pitcher Phil Niekro
before the ’86 season to avoid having to pay a bonus, Hank’s sarcastic
reaction to the sympathetic reportage didn’t charm anyone: “Gee, those
Niekro stories really broke my heart.” In the press box, he was called Boy
George and Damien, after the demon child in The Omen.

Like most things Steinbrenner, the nicknames were overblown. Friends of Hank
say he is generally mild and terribly shy. In New York, he recoiled from the
spotlight and was overshadowed by his dad’s despotism. Back in 1986, I was
profiling Hank for Sports Illustrated. When George found out, he threatened
to revoke the magazine’s Yankee Stadium press credentials indefinitely. The
story never ran. Hank later apologized. “I’m sorry we have to play hardball,
” he told me.

Before the end of the 1986 season, he returned to the stud farm. He stayed
there until 1990, when his father was banned from baseball for the second
time, for paying a gambler $40,000 to dig up dirt on star player Dave
Winfield, who had sued the Yankees for breach of contract. (The first
suspension, in 1974, was for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s
1972 campaign fund.) Steinbrenner père nominated Steinbrenner fils to
succeed him as the Yankees’ general partner. Hank refused the job. “It was
pretty obvious to me and everyone else that this wasn’t Hank’s thing,”
 said Charlotte Witkind, then one of the team’s 18 limited partners.

One of Hank’s “things” is drag racing, and he may have come to regret
bringing his father into the sport. In 2000, he persuaded George to sponsor a
team in the National Hot Rod Association and pledge $10 million over three
years. True to form, George constantly pulled rank on Hank and overrode his
decisions. And truer to form, Dad wanted to fire the crew chief a few days
before the 2001 U.S. Nationals. Eventually, Hank persuaded him not to. “Hank
is an intelligent guy—unfortunately, his father is George Steinbrenner,”
 says drag-racing legend Darrell Gwynn, the racing team’s co-owner. “I hate
to say this, but as long as George is alive, Hank will never blossom as a
businessman.”

During the 2001 racing season, Gwynn was summoned to Legends Field, the
Yankees’ spring-training base in Tampa, to meet with George and Hank. George
announced he was ending his commitment. “We went from $10 million to $3.3
million,” Gwynn says. “My screamathon with George lasted four hours, during
which I mostly just listened. Then he apologized and said I could have
anything I wanted in the Legends Field gift shop.” Hank didn’t say much of
anything. Thirty minutes into the discussion, Gwynn says, he disappeared.

A year ago, worn down by a wrenching divorce, Hank vanished from the family
businesses as well. He resurfaced last winter when his brother-in-law Steve
Swindal fell from favor. “I’m sure Hank felt George needed him to get on
board with the team again,” Mc- Ewen says. “Either that or George just
insisted on it.”

This season, Hank has been a fixture at the Yankees team offices in Tampa.
George has made a point of trumpeting his son’s renewed involvement with the
franchise. In May, when Roger Clemens came out of retirement to re-sign with
the Yankees, George issued a press release praising the part Hank and brother
Hal played in the deal. “The funny thing is that their sister Jenny may be
savvier in business,” McEwen says. “Yet her name never comes up.”

The 48-year-old Jennifer briefly worked in the Yankees public relations
department after graduating with honors—she was a Morehead scholar—as a
business major at the University of North Carolina. “Even if I wanted to
move up in the organization, I would’ve never been allowed,” Jennifer, a
mother of two, told the New York Times in 2004, “not in this family.”
 George is such an entrenched chauvinist that in 1995, when trawling for a
new general partner, he bypassed Jennifer for her husband, Swindal, a former
tugboat-company executive.

Swindal’s responsibilities ran from acting as a buffer between his
father-in-law and general manager Cashman to monitoring the progress of the
new stadium. His biggest accomplishment was the amicable way he negotiated
manager Joe Torre’s three-year, $19.2 million contract extension in 2004—in
stark contrast to the acrimony of ’01. Two years ago, Steinbrenner rewarded
Swindal by anointing him Boss-to-be. Swindal still has a hand in running
Yankees Inc., but few insiders thought that he was ever anything but a
pretender to the throne. Swindal is not blood, and George is very big on
blood.

That would also seem to rule out Joseph Molloy, the first husband of Jessica
Steinbrenner. When George needed a new managing general partner during his
second suspension in 1992, he named Molloy, who quickly rose from
junior-high-school basketball coach to vice president in charge of the company
’s Tampa operations. He is now an assistant middle school principal in Tampa.


A children’s book writer with four kids, Jessica, 43, has a sociology degree
from Sweet Briar College, a solid reputation for co-managing Kinsman Farm
with Hank, and, according to McEwen, “absolutely no shot at running the
Yankees.” She and Molloy divorced in 1998, and she later married his best
friend, Felix Lopez. The Cuban-born landscaper had been hired by Molloy to
work on the construction of Legends Field. He was tending Jessica’s yard
when they became an item. He is now a senior vice president of the Yankees,
and among other duties, he helps evaluate Latin baseball talent.

The most ambitious of the Bosses-in-waiting is Hank’s younger brother, Hal,
who at 38 has rotated in and out of the Yankees loop for 17 years. Known to
the Yankees court as Prince Hal, he followed his father to Williams, got an
M.B.A. from the University of Florida, and joined the Yanks. George put him
through the paces in various departments of the club. Hal, too, clashed early
and often with George and bolted from the realm in 1996 to run the family’s
hotel business. When he turned innkeeper, the Steinbrenners owned three
properties. Today, the family has eight.

Though he bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Steinbrenner senior, Hal is
keen to show he is his own man. He has become a sort of champion of the
Yankees’ 200 employees. After the 2003 season, George wanted to take away
their dental coverage; Hal talked his father out of it. Unlike George, Hal
seems to disdain players and the media.

Since Swindal’s exit, Hal has bunkered down in his office at Legends Field
and has taken on many of his ex-brother-in-law’s responsibilities. The new
Yankee Stadium is the hotelier’s pet project. But the question of whether
Prince Hal will ascend to the throne may have less to do with his competence
than the madness of King George. “I’ve always thought that Hank was the
favorite of the mother, and Hal of the father,” McEwen says. “But who knows
what George is thinking now? He’s got his family in a puzzlement.”

Long shots and dark horses aside, the smart money is on Hank, perhaps only
because he’s the oldest. That’s if he even wants the job. Until now, he hasn
’t.

To be elevated to general partner, Hank would have to win approval from
two-thirds of the Yankees’ quiescent stockholders. Barring an internecine
battle, he would be a shoo-in. Approval by Major League Baseball, on the
other hand, will not be automatic. In the past, numerous potential general
partners, most notably Eddie DeBartolo of San Francisco 49ers football fame,
have been batted down in the rigorous process of interviews and background
checks. The nomination must be okayed by three-quarters of team owners. “
Being a Steinbrenner should simplify things,” says Patrick Courtney, of the
baseball commissioner’s office. “The family is not unknown.”

Though Hank may lack his father’s fire and fervor, there’s no reason to
believe he would be any less of a spendthrift. Five years ago, he argued at a
front-office meeting for the team to trade for Raul Mondesi, a famously
overpaid and underachieving outfielder. “The Yankees go out and make the big
deal!” he told general manager Cashman (as reported in Sports Illustrated).
“It’s what the Yankees do!” Cashman disagreed, but Mondesi became a Yankee
and was a colossal bust.

Hank has not talked to reporters about baseball in a very long time, though
some 20 years ago, he and I spoke for four hours about his childhood, his
father, the team, and all things Yankee. He sat behind a desk in his ballpark
office, empty except for a butt-filled ashtray. He wore a monogrammed white
shirt, a well-pressed blue pinstriped suit, and a tie with a Yankees
insignia. He had a watchful reserve, his hair combed and trimmed with
plebe-like precision. The only hint of insouciance was a cigarette cocked
Bogart-style in the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to sound conceited,”
 he said in a voice that was almost gentle, “but I’m second in command in
this organization.”

“What I think Hank means,” his father later told me, “is that he’s No. 2
at the dinner table.” Whether that was confirmation or denial is still
debatable.

Though having their father buy the Yankees would be a dream for many kids,
Hank initially found it distasteful. “The big salaries repulsed me,” he
told me. “The fact that guys were playing a kids’ game and getting enormous
amounts of money seemed illogical. They get millions a year to bitch and moan
and be pampered. They ought to try putting on a suit and working behind a
desk at I.B.M. for a month instead of jumping around a field.” Of course,
many people think his father was the cause of all those high salaries, but
Hank said, “Dad didn’t create the system. He just took advantage of it.”

By 1986, Hank had changed his mind and come to think of ballplayers as
entertainers who should therefore earn as much as rock stars. Until this
epiphany, his only professional connection with the game had been a softball
team he managed in Tampa, where labor costs weren’t so high. Hank told
George he would like to learn the business. “It’s about time,” Dad said.

And what had he learned? “Four big lessons,” Hank told me. “My father
taught me you’ve got to outhustle the competition. He taught me that in
business, there’s always a time when you can take a risk. And he taught me
that if you’re not a benevolent dictator, your subjects will take advantage
of you every time.”

The final lesson—the one that may be most significant if he does become the
next Boss—was to ignore public opinion. “The temptation would be to throw
up my hands and say, ‘Fuck it!’” Hank said. “When my dad bought the
Yankees, fans were getting tired of rooting for a piece-of-crap team. I’m
certainly not going to sell a club with a strong farm system to some jackass
and have him get credit for winning the World Series.” Spoken like a true
Steinbrenner.

I asked Hank how he would improve the Yankees. He flashed a smile that was
broad and diabolical. “Get rid of my - father,” he cracked.

--
There are a lot things we don't want to know about the people we love.

                                                    --- Chuck Palahniuk

--
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◆ From: 203.67.150.156
推 windowboy:會不會太冗長 @@
推 Joeng:我自願當他兒子
→ Joeng:或是他有沒有孫女呀
推 windowboy:有女兒 看樓上要不要 XD
→ opie:END
→ djcc:他兒子們一定會有人接手的
推 KETANKO:交給我好了
推 miluco:實在太長...直接end. @@
推 djcc:有沒有孫子 不然給大孫子接手好了 XDD
推 moudy:這麼麻煩的東西，送我處理吧
推 westlife138:我可以自願嗎
推 mezz:卻因為是女人，根本沒機會  <== 這是？
推 kim:是因為女人不能當領隊嗎？
推 oplz:紐約人不要的話乾脆賣給波士頓人吧?? 就像八十幾年前那樣
→ oplz:只是這次反過來
推 decorum:大老闆是沙豬，女兒再怎麼厲害，都比不上兒子女婿
→ decorum:外界都認為，他的女兒性格強悍，其實和大老闆最像
推 zen0812:女兒接手...洋基制服通通給我改成短裙....
推 gutou:基特去把老闆女兒阿 這樣就能滿足當球隊老闆的心願了
推 zen0812:樓上中肯..
推 erichito19:他女兒也一把年紀了吧.....
推 greatmovie: 好長一篇啊!!!
推 stormyuan:洋基不是一直在賠錢嗎？接手的人會不會直接賣球員？
推 atb:樓上的是事實嗎?