National Sports Journalism Center

As a lifelong Mets fan, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was a constant, uninvited presence in my sports life: a larger-than-life figure whose triumphs and tirades were constantly taking over the back pages of the New York papers and crowding out talk of anything else on sports radio. Sometimes this was welcome – if the Mets were doing something embarrassing and self-defeating, there was always the chance that Steinbrenner might do something even worse. Other times it wasn’t – the Mets would be taking aim at their opponents instead of their own feet, but some sideshow from the Bronx would cheat them of their laurels. And we’d ask, “Who invited the Yankees?”

At various points I found this amusing or exasperating, but eventually I just accepted it. It was part of the physics of being a sports fan in New York City; complaining about it was like griping about dropping something and having it hit the ground. Really, it was no surprise that Steinbrenner died just in time for the All-Star Game to become a baseball-wide wake. There was no spotlight he couldn’t steal.

But after his death, I realized something: I knew a huge amount about George Steinbrenner despite so many years spent trying to ignore him. Steinbrenner was hard to overlook, and I’d learned about him through sports-fan osmosis and, I suspect, the sheer force of his titanic personality. Accepting the fact that he was gone, I found myself in the odd position of seeking out the very Steinbrenner news I’d tried so hard to avoid.

That’s not supposed to be a compliment, but I suspect it is one anyway.

Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski, unsurprisingly, chose a  terrific metaphor for thinking about Steinbrenner: A man of his complexity, known for displays of amazing cruelty and startling kindness, really needed two obituaries. As far as I know, nobody tried that, though twinned Jekyll and Hyde profiles would have been an interesting experiment. But what I did get, thanks to the Web, was dozens and dozens of columns by talented sportswriters, seeking one last time to take The Boss’s measure. And that added up to a shifting view of the man, with every column revealing a new anecdote, or a new thought, or a new spin on a familiar tale.

If you want to be digital about it, we could call this an exercise in curation, which of course it is. But more than that, I’d like to think of it as a celebration of great writing.
 
For an excellent overview of Steinbrenner’s life, start with SI’s Alex Belth, whose warts-and-all chronicle moves smoothly across the painful contrasts of his personality and key episodes in his biography. The New York Times also has a terrific interactive timeline of his life, one that really comes to life through the inclusion of video clips of two iconic Steinbrenner ads – the Miller Lite yukfest with Billy Martin (though I wish they’d been able to find the original “You’re fired” version) and Steinbrenner’s later Visa spot with Derek Jeter. I vividly recall being puzzled by the Miller Lite ad as a child: The idea that the same adults who’d been part of something serious could step back and make fun of it was at once slightly worrisome and oddly thrilling. (Today for better and for worse, it’s the coin of the realm.)

The first reactions I saw to Steinbrenner’s death were on Fox Sports, and predictably saccharine and forgettable. So I was pleased that columnists mostly avoided whitewashing his many faults. Dave Anderson of the New York Times was unsparing in his recollections of the man abusing his employees, while Joel Sherman of the New York Post insisted that readers not back away from the basic truth that Steinbrenner ruled by fear, writing that to do so would be more disrespectful than offering a sanitized look back.

The tragedy of Steinbrenner was that his bluster and cruelty masked an essential neediness that was his constant companion. Wayne Coffey of the Daily News recounts his last interview with Steinbrenner, and reveals him as simultaneously driven and damaged, as a lot of successful sons of awful fathers are. Buster Olney, writing for the New York Times, contributes a portrait that would make even a lifelong Steinbrenner hater feel some sympathy for him. His charitable side emerges in a reminiscence by SI’s Dave Zirin of being treated kindly by Steinbrenner as a boy, while Royals great George Brett tells the Daily News about seeing both sides of The Boss. Many accounts of Steinbrenner are first-person remembrances by columnists, and that’s entirely appropriate, for he remade the lives of everyone in his orbit, whether they wished it or not.

Separating Steinbrenner from the dizzying forces that remade baseball during his Yankee tenure is impossible, and the Times’ Joe Nocera digs into this rich material in a smart business story for the Times, one that reminds us that Steinbrenner turned to the Yankees after failing to buy his hometown Indians. Backtracking briefly, don’t miss Zirin noting that Steinbrenner isn’t so much the last of an old guard as the first of a modern, me-first breed of magnates.

Reading this material, I found myself remembering the tales of Steinbrenner’s reign, each episode as familiar and somehow perfect as the twists in a Shakespeare production. His opening declaration that he would be an absentee owner. The crazy string of managerial hirings and firings. His two Yankee dynasties, and the long, comically dysfunctional interregnum between them. His two suspensions, and the irony that the second one allowed his lieutenants to create the foundation for the Yankees’ apparently eternal success. The spontaneous standing ovation Yankees fans gave when they learned he’d been suspended, and their love for him in his final years. His agitation at having appointed a manager (Joe Torre, of course) who was somehow immune to his barbs. His minimalist, fussy eye for detail and his gargantuan payrolls. His blasting Dave Winfield as “Mr. May” and lambasting Hideki Irabu as a fat toad who exhibited the quality of being filled with pus, a word that will bedevil copy editors for as long as the story is told. The iconic images of him: looming over Yankee Stadium like a giant, or riding back into the major leagues dressed like Napoleon. And of course all the back pages.

Yep, without ever meaning to, I knew quite a bit about George Steinbrenner. Including, finally, this: I first opened Jeremy Schaap’s fine ESPN retrospective in a new tab on my browser, so it started playing while the window was hidden. I heard Steinbrenner’s voice coming out of my computer and recognized it instantly. I’m a lifelong Mets fan, but if you played me a clip of Mets owner Fred Wilpon, I’d probably need a few seconds to place him.

That’s not supposed to be a compliment either. But once again, it probably is.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.