George Steinbrenner

George Michael Steinbrenner III (born July 4, 1930 in Rocky River, Ohio), often known as "The Boss", is an American businessman and the principal owner of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees. His outspokenness and role in driving up player salaries have made him one of the sport's more controversial figures, though his willingness to spend to build the club (and its post-season success since 1976) have earned him grudging respect from some baseball executives, while at the same time earning him the contempt from some non-Yankee fans.

Background

Steinbrenner was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He ran track, played football, and sang in the choir at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, graduating in 1948. Steinbrenner hails from a three-generation Culver Academies' family. His father, Henry, was a 1919 Culver Summer Schools graduate, and each of Steinbrenner's children graduated from the Academies: Hank in 1976, Jennifer Swindal in 1977, Jessica Molloy in 1982, and Hal in 1987. Steinbrenner's grandchild attend(ed) Culver. Steinbrenner then attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he also ran track and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He graduated from college in 1952.

After two years in the Air Force, Steinbrenner coached high school basketball and football at Aquinas High School (Columbus, Ohio), semi-pro football (Pope's Inn) under Ohio State University All-American Victor Marino, and attended Ohio State University. On March 1, 1955, he was named an assistant football coach at Northwestern University, but was fired along with head coach Lou Saban on December 13 of that year. Saban soon resurfaced at Purdue University and took Steinbrenner with him. After marrying Joan Zieg on May 12, 1956, Steinbrenner spent one season with the Boilermakers before joining his father's struggling company, the American Ship Building Company, the following year. Steinbrenner became CEO of the corporation and helped it to regain some success by moving corporate headquarters to Tampa, Florida and building ocean-going ships.

In 1960, he bought the Cleveland Pipers of the National Industrial Basketball League. The team joined the American Basketball League the next year, with Steinbrenner making history by hiring John McLendon as the first African-American head coach in professional sports. The team went on to win a championship, then pulled off a public relations coup during the off-season by signing Ohio State All-American Jerry Lucas. The signing led to the National Basketball Association admitting the team as its tenth team on July 10, 1962. However, since he was unable to raise $250,000 and the ABL was threatening to sue the NBA because of the shift, the deal collapsed on July 30.

The Pipers soon went bankrupt, with Steinbrenner returning to the relative anonymity of the American Ship Building Company, before eventually buying the company. During much of the next decade, Steinbrenner invested in Broadway productions and later gained a small piece of ownership with an NBA team, the Chicago Bulls. His involvement with Broadway began with a short-lived 1967 play, The Ninety Day Mistress, in which he partnered with another rookie producer, James M. Nederlander. Whereas Nederlander threw himself into production full-time, Steinbrenner invested in a mere half-dozen shows, including the 1973 Tony nominee for Best Musical, Seesaw, and the 1988 Peter Allen flop, Legs Diamond.

In 1971, Steinbrenner offered $9 million to buy the Cleveland Indians, but after agreeing in principle with Indians owner Vernon Stouffer, saw the deal fall apart at the last minute. Indians General Manager Gabe Paul had played a major role in brokering the deal, and when the New York Yankees became available the following year, he helped Steinbrenner achieve his dream of owning a baseball club. In gratitude, Steinbrenner offered him the opportunity to direct baseball operations for the club.

Buying the Yankees

The Yankees had been floundering during their years under CBS ownership, a regime that started in 1965. In 1972, CBS Chairman William S. Paley told team president Michael Burke the media company intended to sell the club. As Burke later told writer Roger Kahn, Paley offered to sell the franchise to Burke if he could find financial backing. Burke ran across Steinbrenner's name, and Paul, a Cleveland-area acquaintance of Steinbrenner, helped bring the two men together.

On January 3, 1973, a group of investors led by Steinbrenner and minority partner Burke bought the Yankees from CBS for $8.7 million. "We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned," said Steinbrenner, according to an article in The New York Times reporting on the sale. "We're not going to pretend we're something we aren't. I'll stick to building ships." He also said "It's important to me, it's important to all of us, and it's particularly important to New York and to the Yankees, that the group that gets behind the Yankees at this point has the wherewithall and the interest to get the kind of job done that the sportswriters, that the fans, that the city and the media in New York deserve."

The message was that Burke would continue to run the team as club president. But Burke later became angry when he found out that Paul had been brought in as a senior Yankee executive, crowding his authority, and quit the team presidency on April 29, 1973, but remained a minority owner of the club into the following decade. It would be the first of many high-profile departures with employees who crossed paths with "The Boss." At the conclusion of the 1973 season, two more prominent names departed: manager Ralph Houk, who resigned and then signed to manage the Detroit Tigers; and general manager Lee MacPhail, who became president of the American League.

The 1973 off-season would prove to be controversial when Steinbrenner and Paul sought to hire former Oakland Athletics manager Dick Williams, who had resigned immediately after leading the team to its second straight World Series title. However, because Williams was still under contract to Oakland, the subsequent legal wrangling prevented the Yankees from hiring him. On the first anniversary of the team's ownership change, the Yankees hired former Pittsburgh Pirates manager Bill Virdon to lead the team on the field.

During Steinbrenner's ownership, the longest in Yankee history, the club has won 10 pennants and 6 World Series titles.

Controversies

Steinbrenner is famous for both his pursuit of high-priced free agents and, in some cases, infamous for feuding with them. In his first 23 seasons, he changed managers 20 times (including dismissing Billy Martin on five separate occasions) and general managers 11 times in 30 years. In July 1978, Martin said of Steinbrenner and his $3 million outfielder Reggie Jackson, "One's a born liar and the other's convicted." The comment resulted in Martin's first departure, though technically Martin resigned (tearfully) before Yankees President Al Rosen followed through on Steinbrenner's dictum to release the manager.

Campaign contributions to Nixon and Pardon

The "convicted" part of Martin's comment referred to Steinbrenner's connection to U.S. President Richard Nixon: he was indicted on 14 criminal counts on April 5, 1974, then pled guilty to making illegal contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign and obstruction of justice on August 23. Steinbrenner was personally fined $15,000, while his firm was assessed $20,000 for the offense. On November 27, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years, but later reduced that amount to nine months, with Steinbrenner returning to the Yankees in 1976. U.S. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner on January 19, 1989, in one of the final acts of his presidency.

1981 World Series

During the 1981 World Series, Steinbrenner provided a colorful backdrop to the Yankees' loss of the series. After a Game 3 loss in Los Angeles, Steinbrenner called a press conference in his hotel room, showing off his left hand in a cast and various other injuries that he claimed was earned in a fight with two Dodgers fans in the hotel elevator. Nobody came forward about the fight, leading most to believe that he had made up the story of the fight in order to light a fire under the Yankees. Additionally, after the series, Steinbrenner publicly apologized to Yankee fans for the team's defeat.

Dave Winfield

On July 30, 1990, commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life after he paid Howie Spira, a small-time gambler, $40,000 for "dirt" on his outfielder Dave Winfield after Winfield-- whom Steinbrenner derisively referred to in the papers as "Mr. May"-- sued him for failing to pay his foundation the $300,000 guaranteed in his contract. At Yankee Stadium, where a ballgame was being played, word of Steinbrenner's banishment filtering over the transistor radios resulted in a standing ovation from title-starved fans.

Reinstatement

Steinbrenner was reinstated in 1993, the same time the Yankees regained momentum as a quality sports franchise — helped by Steinbrenner's willingness to delegate authority to executives such as Gene Michael, and to let promising farm-system players such as Bernie Williams develop instead of trading them for established players. Steinbrenner's having "got religion" (in the words of New York Daily News reporter Bill Madden) paid off. After contending briefly two years earlier, the '93 Yankees were in the American League East race with the eventual champion Toronto Blue Jays until September.

Off the field

In addition to being an intense boss to his on-field employees, Steinbrenner is also known for pressuring and changing off-field employees (including various publicity directors), sometimes chewing them out in public. Former sportscaster Hank Greenwald, who called Yankee games on WABC radio for two years, once said he knew when Steinbrenner was in town by how tense the office staff was.

He usually kept his complaints about the team broadcasters he approves (who, except for the YES Network crew, have generally not been his direct employees) out of the newspapers. However, he has been known to be upset with the sometimes blunt commentary of former broadcaster Jim Kaat and former analyst Tony Kubek.

Steinbrenner's one publicly aired gripe with a team announcer came when he accused respected Yankee broadcaster Bill White of low-keying his WMCA radio call of Chris Chambliss' pennant-winning home run in the 1976 American League Championship Series. The actual aircheck of the live broadcast (on the Major League Baseball website) finds an unusually emotional White calling the home run and its aftermath — so excited as the ball was in flight that his voice broke.

Steinbrenner has also developed a reputation for being a very generous man in donating to those who are in need. He has given to the Jimmy Fund and, most recently, in March 2007 he paid for the funerals of at least 8 children who died in a house fire in the Bronx. [1] These are gestures that he has repeated throughout his tenure as Yankees principal owner. As an alumnus of the Culver Academies, he remains a heavy giver to the school.

Success

The 1994 Yankees were the American League East leaders when a strike wiped out the rest of the season. The team returned to the playoffs in 1995 (their first visit since 1981) and won the World Series in 1996. The modern Yankee Dynasty was born during the 1996 World Series. The Yankees went on to win the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000. The Yankees lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, ending their dynasty. Though they have not won a World Series since, the Yankees have made the playoffs in every subsequent year since 2001, most notably winning the AL Pennant in seven games from the 2003 Boston Red Sox but then losing the World Series to the Florida Marlins.

Steinbrenner has also been awarded The Flying Wedge Award, one of the NCAA’s highest honors.

The Boss in the media

Despite Steinbrenner's controversial status (or perhaps, because of it) he does appear to poke fun at himself in the media. He hosted Saturday Night Live on October 20, 1990 at the same time his former outfielder and Yankee manager, Lou Piniella, led the Cincinnati Reds to a world championship. In the opening sketch, he dreamt of a Yankees team managed, coached, and entirely played by himself. In other sketches, "he" chews out the SNL "writing staff" (notably including Al Franken) for featuring him in a mock Slim Fast commercial with pariahs such as Saddam Hussein, and plays a folksy convenience store manager whose business ethic is comically divergent from that of Steinbrenner.

He appeared as himself in the Albert Brooks comedy The Scout.

After a public chastising of Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter for "partying too much," the two appeared in a recent Visa commercial club-hopping. A 2004 Visa commercial depicted an injured Steinbrenner unable to sign any checks, including that of his current manager Joe Torre.

Steinbrenner also has a soft spot for professional wrestling. He wrote the foreword of the 2005 Dusty Rhodes autobiography and was a regular at old Tampa Armory cards in the 1970s and 1980s. In March 1989, he appeared in the front row of the WWE Saturday Night's Main Event broadcast, even interacting with manager Bobby "The Brain" Heenan at one point.

At the funeral of his long time friend Otto Graham in December 2003, Steinbrenner fainted, leading to extensive media speculation that he was in ill health.

In the 1994 computer game Superhero League of Hoboken, one of the schemes of the primary antagonist, Dr. Entropy, is to resurrect George Steinbrenner.

In The Simpsons episode "Homer at the Bat", Mr. Burns fires Don Mattingly for refusing to shave sideburns only Burns could see. This was a parody of an argument Steinbrenner and Mattingly had in real life. As Mattingly walks off the baseball field, he states, "I still like him (Burns) better than Steinbrenner."

New York radio host Mike Francesa has called Steinbrenner as "General George M. Steinbrenner III", when reading his speeches on the radio.

In ESPN's miniseries The Bronx is Burning, he is portrayed by Oliver Platt.

Steinbrenner caricatured in Seinfeld

Steinbrenner was caricatured in the comedy Seinfeld, when George Costanza worked with the Yankees for several seasons. Larry David voiced the character, who talked nonstop, regardless of whether anyone was listening, and sometimes referred to himself as "Big Stein." His face was never seen, and he is never mentioned in the ending credits. He was always viewed from the back whenever Costanza entered his office at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees logo always appeared in the hall behind the office doorway. The Seinfeld Steinbrenner was known for bad decisions, such as cooking jerseys, threatening to move the team to New Jersey "just to upset people", wearing Lou Gehrig's uniform pants (and panicking about his nerve problems in the leg) and trading several players much to Frank Costanza's dismay. The real Steinbrenner had filmed two scenes for the Seinfeld season 7 finale, "The Invitations", but they were edited out because the episode ran too long and his scenes were entirely superfluous to the plot (they can be seen in full on the Seinfeld season 7 DVD). Nevertheless, he maintains that he is a fan of the show and that "Costanza is always welcome back." In one episode ("The Wink"), Steinbrenner mentions all of the people he fired, with him saying Billy Martin four times. He also mentions then-current manager Buck Showalter, then quickly clams up about it. Though the show meant it as a joke, it turned out to be prophetic: just weeks after the episode aired, the real life Steinbrenner did not bring back Showalter as Yankees manager and replaced him with Joe Torre.

He "appeared" in the following episodes:

The Opposite, The Secretary, The Race, The Jimmy, The Wink, The Hot Tub, The Caddy, The Calzone, The Bottle Deposit, Part 2, The Nap, The Millennium, The Muffin Tops, The Finale, Part 1, The Finale, Part 2

Health

In recent years, Steinbrenner's mental and physical health have come into question. The first signs of potential problems with his health came to the public conscious when Steinbrenner fainted at the funeral of his long-time friend Otto Graham.

External links

• George Steinbrenner at IMDb
• The List: Steinbrenner's Worst ESPN