Steinbrenner was dictator, and world champion
Late Yankees owner was bombastic, demanding, outrageous and charitable
BILL COOKE / APThis Feb. 28, 1998 file photo shows New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner flanked by manager Billy Martin, left, and vice president and general manager Lou Piniella, right, at spring training in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
By Mike Celizic
NBCSports.com contributor
updated 11:18 a.m. ET July 13, 2010
 | Mike Celizic |
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George Michael Steinbrenner III never set out to own the most famous franchise in American sports. All he wanted was the Cleveland Indians, and it was only when the deal he had in place to buy his hometown team fell apart that he looked around for another team to buy and found the New York Yankees.
"We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned," the unknown shipping magnate from the suburbs of Cleveland said when the sale was announced. "We're not going to pretend we're something we aren't. I'll stick to building ships."
In the annals of statements that didn’t turn out to exactly true, that ranks up there with “Peace in our day,” and “I did not have sex with that woman.”
It was both fortunate and unfortunate for the Yankees and for baseball that he broke that promise almost as soon as it was made. Fortunate because Steinbrenner would return the Yankees to glory, to the financial betterment of every team in baseball. Unfortunate because he would drive salaries up to astronomical levels, making it all but impossible for the teams at the bottom of the income scale either to hold onto top players or to dream about winning the World Series.
But no matter how you view the massive footprint he left on a city and a game, one truth can’t be denied: George Steinbrenner was one of the most important and transformational figures in the history of the game.
Steinbrenner was characterized in many ways during his epic career as the owner of the Yankees. He was lauded, loathed and lampooned, respected and reviled, feared and fawned over. He was bombastic, cruel, demanding, outrageous, outspoken, and charitable, a man who could fire a secretary for messing up a sandwich order but who also gave extra World Series tickets to bus drivers and servicemen, a man who fired managers in a blizzard of public invective, then hired them back as team executives at more than their original salaries.
He was called The Boss, the Mad Shipbuilder, George III, Mount St. Steinbrenner and, by New York Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo, General von Steingrabber. In the Yankee clubhouse he was Mr. Steinbrenner.
Steinbrenner was characterized in many ways during his epic career as the owner of the Yankees. He was lauded, loathed and lampooned, respected and reviled, feared and fawned over. He was bombastic, cruel, demanding, outrageous, outspoken, and charitable. |
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He was compared to many historical figures, most of them blood brothers of Attila the Hun. But the one person he should have been compared to, he never was. That would be Branch Rickey, the general manager with a social conscience who integrated baseball in 1947 when he brought Jackie Robinson up to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Rickey’s decision to integrate America’s pastime changed the game as profoundly as Babe Ruth had when he took baseball out of its dead-ball era and introduced it to the home run. Steinbrenner’s decision to break the salary line had no less an effect. Rickey’s decision brought a flood of new talent into the game; Steinbrenner’s brought a flood of money.
“Portfolio” magazine has estimated that Steinbrenner’s Yankees generate $700 million in revenue each year for the 29 teams he doesn’t own. Part of that is in the form of the luxury tax he pays on his enormous payroll, far and away the highest in the game. Most of it is in the form of the revenue his team provides by filling nearly every ballpark it visits. And when his Yankees are in the playoffs, television ratings — and revenue — increase substantially.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters George Steinbrenner takes part in the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Yankee Stadium last August.
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Steinbrenner always said that the Yankees owe it to their fans to contend for the World Series every year. The other 29 owners should add that the Bronx Bombers also owe the same to the game itself. When the Yankees are successful, everybody makes money.
And it’s all because of Steinbrenner, a fact that he knew — and broadcast.
He was also fiercely interested in sports and by winning. He got that — along with his business sense and his penchant for flogging his players and employees in public — from his father, who ran a shipping company on the Great Lakes.
Hank Steinbrenner was by all accounts an uncompromising and demanding sire. When little George, who took up the hurdles at the age of 12, finished first in a race, his father said little. When he finished second, the pater familias demanded to know how his son could let his opponent win.
It is little wonder that Steinbrenner once told an interviewer, “"Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next."
He went to Culver Military Academy, the same prep school his father had attended and the same one his own children would be shipped off to. He got his bachelor degree at Williams College and attended graduate school at Ohio State. For several years after, he tried to make his way as an assistant football coach, first at Northwestern and then at Purdue.
But in 1957, at the age of 27, he returned to Cleveland to work for his father’s shipping company, Kinsman Marine Transit. Six years later, he bought out his father, and four years after that merged with American Ship Building.
Steinbrenner had gotten his start in business as a boy, raising chickens in the yard of the family home and selling their eggs to neighbors. One imagines the gratification he harvested when underperforming hens were served up for Sunday dinner.
He often acted as if he’d like to do the same with his underperforming ballplayers.
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