Driving Mr. Yogi Page 10

  When Berra joined the Yankees in the spring of 1947, the reporters were the worst critics of all. Petty to the point of being cruel, they called him Quasimodo and said it was a good thing he was a catcher and would be wearing a mask.

  There were mean jokes about his perceived intelligence. After he was hit in the head with a ball during practice and carried off the field on a stretcher, one wise guy wrote, “X-rays of his head showed nothing.”

  “I can believe that,” Guidry said, shaking his head with a flash of anger in his eyes. He had experienced firsthand how mean-spirited coverage of the Yankees could be.

  On another level, he was amazed by how matter-of-fact Berra could be when discussing the slings and arrows that had to be piercing for a young man starting out in the world. Yes, it was ancient history, long since survived and surmounted, but it occurred to Guidry that Berra must have had an incredibly thick skin, an innate ability to ignore the gibes and keep moving forward.

  The more he heard about Berra’s past, the more Guidry’s chest swelled—for Berra and for himself. He, too, had dealt with a fair amount of skepticism regarding his chances of becoming a major-league pitcher. Soon after hanging up the phone with a scout named Atlee Donald, who’d informed him that he had been taken by the Yankees in the third round of the 1971 amateur draft, Grace Guidry had said, “You’re joking.” She had never imagined her son making a career of baseball.

  No one ever poked fun at Guidry’s looks, however. He was a handsome and popular high school baseball player and track star, capable of running a 9.8-second 100 and a 49-flat 440 and triple-jumping 45 feet. Guidry may have been a lightweight in the power pitcher division, but he was as fine-tuned and muscularly proportioned an athlete as anyone who ever stepped inside a baseball clubhouse.

  Still, as fast as he could run and as hard as he could throw, many people—George Steinbrenner among them—just couldn’t imagine Guidry as a successful starting pitcher until he was one. How, they asked, could a man under six feet with the frame of a cyclist throw in the midnineties and possibly last for up to nine innings?

  Guidry and Berra both drew satisfaction from conclusively demonstrating that there was much more to the game than the perfect body type. In Guidry’s mind, this only strengthened their bond.

  “Guys like him and I, we get no more pleasure from anything than proving people wrong,” Guidry said. “A lot of people think they know something, and they don’t know crap. I don’t know what makes planes fly. I don’t know why rockets can go to the moon. But just because I’m small doesn’t mean that I can’t throw nine innings.

  “When I would hear Yogi talk about himself, I remembered feeling the same thing. Our thoughts were on the same level. Nobody was going to tell us that we couldn’t do the job. We knew they were wrong in thinking what they thought about us because if somebody is telling you that you’re too small, well, there are a lot of things that you don’t know about me. You don’t know what I have experienced. You don’t know what’s inside of me. You don’t know where I come from.”

  The southern terminus for Interstate 49 just happens to be Guidry’s hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. Not that he asked for that number when he joined the Yankees in 1975. Pete Sheehy, the Yankees’ clubhouse man going back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, handed him the uniform and said, “No one’s ever worn it before. Take it and make it famous.”

  Guidry proceeded to do enough in number 49 to get it retired by the Yankees in 2003 and to earn a plaque in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park, if not in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. With twenty-twenty hindsight, one might consider the number coincidence a sign that Guidry was meant to be a big-league star.

  To some people, it might have sounded strange when Guidry referred to Berra as his best friend, since Yogi was twenty-five years his senior. Guidry, in fact, was born only months after Larry Berra, Yogi’s oldest son. Yes, they were bonded as proud, champion Yankees, but that didn’t get to the heart of their relationship. Perhaps more than baseball itself, what they most shared was their personal values, lives anchored in the proverbial American dream.

  In 1955, Main Street, U.S.A., was introduced to Yogi Berra, family man, during a nationally televised Edward R. Murrow Person to Person segment. The cameras found the man who had been derided as Quasimodo to be the picture of suburban bliss, with a beautiful wife and two sons. (Carmen Berra would carry their third child to Don Larsen’s perfect game one year later and promise to name him Dale if the Dodgers’ Dale Mitchell cooperated by making the last out.)

  When Berra was fired as the Yankees’ manager in 1964, he had offers to manage elsewhere, thanks to ninety-nine wins and reaching the seventh game of the World Series. He instead took a coaching job with the lowly New York Mets because he “didn’t want to uproot Carm and the kids, make them go to a new school in a strange place.” He stayed home in New Jersey until the Astros hired him as a coach in 1986, long after his sons were out on their own.

  The Berra boys all settled within a few miles of their parents, the family ultimately expanding to include eleven grandchildren. Most holidays, especially Thanksgiving, were celebrated at Carmen and Yogi’s Montclair home.

  When Guidry visited each year to play in Berra’s annual charity golf tournament, usually held in early June, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his own home life. The terrain and culture were different; the pace of life was faster; and the housing lots were certainly smaller than the property he lived on. But the family structure was not unlike the one he and Bonnie had built a short drive into the country from downtown Lafayette, in the neighboring township of Scott.

  Off commercial Route 93, dotted with HAY FOR SALE and other farm-related signs, the turnoff for the Guidry homestead is a narrow road, Rue Novembre. The landscape itself is flat enough so that Guidry can point to an intersection far across his property in the direction of where his parents live, a short drive away.

  When he lost grandparents on his paternal and maternal sides and the surviving spouses were reluctant to move from their longtime residences, Guidry had both houses lifted off their lots and relocated so they could be closer to family. He moved Bonnie’s aging parents into a small house on his own property, and when they passed away, his daughter Jamie and her husband moved in. They had a daughter, Ava, the Guidrys’ first grandchild, in the spring of 2011. Their other daughter, Danielle, remains in the area. Only their son, Brandon, has left, taking up residence in New York.

  The family is not large, although there are several hundred Guidrys listed in the area phone book. During his baseball-playing years, fan mail would occasionally come from other Guidrys wondering if they were related to the suddenly famous Ron. Rags Guidry joked that with each succeeding victory, people claiming to be his son’s third cousins would become second cousins, and so on.

  Like Berra, Guidry married his hometown sweetheart, Bonnie Rutledge, in 1972. He was twenty-two; she was eighteen. Their first residence was an apartment behind his parents’ home, which was fine with Guidry. Other than the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium, he never aspired to be anywhere other than Lafayette, a city of about 120,000. That was why he wasn’t bitter when the Yankees cut him loose as a pitcher. Like Berra in 1964 and again in 1985, he at least got to go home, financially secure, and what was so bad about that?

  “It’s quiet here, and that’s what I love,” Guidry said, welcoming a visitor to an old barn he calls “the doghouse.” It contains all the trappings—tools, tractor, pool table, finished room with a small kitchen and a large-screen TV—of the proverbial man cave.

  With his lyrical Cajun accent and his fondness for keeping a spittoon nearby, Guidry has old-fashioned hardball written all over him. He has been an avid hunter almost since he could lift a gun and his paternal grandfather, Gus, took him out in the woods. He is not shy about sprinkling a story with well-timed profanity. But only when the extremely private Guidry lowers his guard—when he speaks of his relationship with Berra, for instance—does his emotional complexit
y reveal itself.

  When the Yankees drafted him in 1971, he was studying architecture at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. When his career took off in 1978, fueled by the most dominant season a Yankees starter has ever had, Guidry might have exploited the moment and cut numerous endorsement deals. He instead rejected offers to pitch a soft drink because it wasn’t the one he preferred and a tobacco product because he didn’t want to encourage young people to emulate him. He also had little patience for the self-promotional banquet circuit. It took time away from his family, especially his younger brother, Travis, with whom he spent as much time as he could during the off-season.

  So excited was the seventeen-year-old Guidry when his mother told him she was pregnant with Travis that he begged his parents to let him name the baby if it was a boy. He chose Travis after Travis Williams, the star running back of the Green Bay Packers. Guidry was ecstatic to finally have a sibling and especially a brother. But the mood changed dramatically when doctors disclosed that little Travis had been deprived of oxygen for too long during the birth and would have severe mental and physical handicaps.

  Given the age difference between his brother and him, Guidry practically became a third parent. On Travis’s delayed terms, Ron spent hour after hour encouraging him to walk and talk, run and throw, even shoot a gun. He understood that his brother would never navigate the world as a “normal” child, but he took pride in Travis’s victories, both physical and mental, bragging about his prowess with puzzles and his knack for remembering names and faces.

  Guidry has an appreciation not only for the small pleasures of life but also for life itself. The birth of his first grandchild in May 2011, for instance, was a time for celebration, but not only because of the baby’s birth. Ron and Bonnie could again count their blessings for Jamie’s survival of a horrific car crash when she was in high school. The police officer who found her told Guidry that his first thought when he came upon the wreckage was that there could be no survivors.

  These are the victories that most sustain Guidry, the trophies he values. He insists that if it wasn’t for Bonnie, the evidence of his fourteen years of major-league service would be boxed and in storage, ultimately left for the children to deal with. She insists on displaying some of it behind sliding glass doors in the den.

  But even these items are not conventional trophies. Propped against the trophy case is a golf bag from Berra’s charity golf tournament with his trademark logo—a silhouette of him leaning on a bat. Inside the glass are team photos of the late-seventies Yankees, candid shots of Guidry with his favorite teammates, and an enlarged box score of his first major-league game against the Red Sox at Shea Stadium in 1975—symbolic of his long struggle to get to the big leagues and stay there.

  Singled out for a visitor’s attention by Guidry was a Los Angeles Dodgers cap, a souvenir of the 1981 World Series received on an off day when the Yankees and Dodgers were working out at Dodger Stadium. Guidry was minding his own business near the dugout when he heard Jeff Torborg calling to him from the Dodgers’ side of the field. Torborg was striding toward home plate with none other than Sandy Koufax.

  Guidry knew Torborg, a New Jersey guy who had caught for the Dodgers and Angels in the sixties and was Koufax’s battery mate when he pitched a perfect game in 1965. Koufax was taller than Guidry by three inches and in his pitching days probably outweighed him by forty pounds. But he apparently had noticed similarities in their pitching styles, as had others. As they came face-to-face for the first time at home plate—Guidry on the Yankees’ side, Koufax on the Dodgers’—Koufax held out his hand and said, “I marvel at the way you pitch. I watch you as much as I can.”

  “That’s really nice of you to say,” Guidry said, startled and hoping not to blush.

  “I’m not in the habit of asking a Yankee for an autograph, but I was wondering if you’d be willing to exchange autographed caps,” Koufax said.

  Guidry grabbed the cap with the interlocking “LA” logo and surrendered his own before Koufax could change his mind. Koufax’s inscription read, “To Ron: Good luck and very best wishes—Sandy Koufax.”

  Guidry rushed to the clubhouse to put the cap away. Thirty years later, he called it his most treasured baseball keepsake.

  Berra also felt a strong connection to Koufax, despite having been an opponent, though never having faced him in a game. The closest he came was at the very end of the 1963 World Series, during his final year playing for the Yankees, when he stepped into the on-deck circle to pinch hit with two outs and two on in the ninth inning. The Yankees were down a run to Koufax and the Dodgers and trying to avoid a four-game sweep. Hector Lopez grounded out, and that was that.

  Nine years later, in the class of 1972, Berra was thrilled to be inducted into the Hall of Fame with Koufax. When he and Guidry were out one night, he said that he sure wished he could have faced the great Dodger from Brooklyn in his final at bat for the Yankees, whatever the outcome would have been.

  Seizing the moment for pitchers everywhere, poking Berra as he took every opportunity to do, Guidry shot him a look as if to say, Like there would have been any doubt?

  7. Total Recall

  The first thing Yogi Berra typically did after settling into his hotel room in Tampa was remember everything he had forgotten.

  Mouthwash. Shaving cream. Q-tips. Packs of Dentyne to last him over the coming weeks.

  “Gator, I gotta go shopping,” he’d say.

  Off they would go to the nearest supermarket, where Berra could also pick up cold cuts, bread, and assorted treats for those evenings when Guidry decided he needed a night off from the restaurant rotation.

  So there they were one afternoon, the septuagenarian and the fiftysomething Guidry, pushing a cart up and down the aisles of the neighborhood 7-Eleven, with Guidry thinking Berra had everything he needed.

  “Ready to check out?” he said.

  “No, let’s go this way,” Berra said, steering the cart into another aisle, slowing to look at the items on the shelves but not taking anything off.

  When he turned down another aisle, Guidry realized what Berra was up to. “You dirty old man,” he said, nodding at the attractive young woman in the short sundress whom Berra was following around the store.

  Berra flashed a sheepish smile that said, OK, you got me. Guilty as charged. Sue me for not having forgotten that I was young once.

  Guidry was finding out that there was little Berra had forgotten, especially when the subject was baseball.

  More than most, Don Zimmer knew how to get Berra’s goat when walking down memory lane, even over a pleasant dinner out. “Watch this,” he said to Guidry a few months after the Yankees had beaten the Mets in the 2000 World Series.

  The buzz of New York’s first “subway series” in forty-four years was still in the air, at least in that part of Tampa where proud Yankees roamed. Zimmer only qualified as a half-breed, having played for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers and managed the Red Sox—albeit at a time, circa 1978, few people in Boston cared to remember. He’d signed on as Joe Torre’s bench coach in 1996 and served as interim Yankees manager when Torre underwent treatment for prostate cancer during the 1999 season.

  A character in his own right—with a nickname, “Popeye,” befitting a fair facial resemblance—Zimmer lacked a notable playing resumé. Just the same, he was a beloved lifer, with the touch, tenure, and temerity to tweak Berra as often as he could.

  “Yog,” he said, “I don’t see why you got that big picture in your museum of you and Jackie that you’re always hollerin’ about. You know damn well he was safe.”

  Berra didn’t go all apoplectic on Zimmer the way he freaked out on Bill Summers—the umpire who believed he saw Jackie Robinson slide under Berra’s tag while stealing home in the eighth inning of game one of the 1955 World Series. Mask in hand, Berra was right in Summers’s chest and chased him several feet behind the plate to argue his case.

  “How come you didn’t get tossed?” Guidry aske
d.

  “He probably knew I was right,” Berra said.

  When it came to the Robinson call, Berra wore his certitude like a badge of honor, even signing a photo of the play that was destined for Barack Obama with the inscription, “Dear Mr. President: He was out.” He would argue that Frank Kellert, the Dodgers hitter who was at the plate at the time, had admitted to reporters that he had had the best view of the play and that Summers had gotten it wrong. Berra figured the admission at least justified the most visible outburst of his career.

  Forty-five years later, Berra’s resistance to any opposing view of the call was still as predictable as a pinstripe. Determined to make sure his new pal Guidry knew the score, Berra grumped at Zimmer, but Zimmer was just getting started on the subject of that series. A second-year infielder for the Dodgers at the time, he had slugged a robust 15 home runs in 280 at bats that season and had started the game because of his hitting.

  Fast-forward to game seven, the Dodgers clinging to a 2–0 lead in the sixth inning behind left-hander Johnny Podres. Walter Alston, the Brooklyn manager, decided to make a defensive change in left field. Replacing Jim Gilliam with Sandy Amoros, he then moved Gilliam to second base, pulling Zimmer to keep Gilliam, one of his better players, in the game.

  Billy Martin walked to lead off the inning, and Gil McDougald beat out a bunt. Then came the lefty Berra, who chased a pitch that was tailing away—no surprise for a man whose strike zone was however far he could extend the meat of the bat—and drove it down the left-field line. The ball had two-run double written all over it until Amoros, who had outstanding speed, seemingly appeared out of nowhere to make one of the great World Series catches of all time. He was able to make the grab in the corner, a few feet from the wall, only because he was left-handed and had his glove hand in perfect position.