Driving Mr. Yogi Read online

  The General knew the difference between a golf course and a war zone. He recognized the beauty of competition without obsessive scorekeeping and the benefits of helping even the oldest folks to feel young. The longer he played by the Guidry rule, the more he asserted himself in enforcing it.

  “It got to the point with the General that when Yogi would get on the green, I wouldn’t have to say a thing,” Guidry said. “He’d be riding with Yogi, and I would be with whoever the other guy was, and the General would point to Yogi’s ball and say, ‘That’s good. You’re done.’ And then he’d turn to the other guy—it could be a major from the base, a colonel, whatever—and say, ‘You’ve got to put yours in.’”

  Guidry was delighted to relinquish the reins. He had the General well trained, and nobody, least of all Berra, was going to argue with the base commander.

  10. Frog Legs and Friends

  The first harbinger of spring—or spring training—at the home of Ron and Bonnie Guidry was a telephone call from Yogi Berra.

  “You get the frog legs yet?” Berra would ask.

  “Yog,” Ron Guidry would say, “it’s freaking January.”

  Too late, Berra was already in serious countdown mode for the next Guidry frog fry extravaganza.

  It seemed like only yesterday that Berra had looked askance at Guidry’s beloved delicacy, like it was tofu wrapped in seaweed. It had actually been years since Mel Stottlemyre had bragged one spring training day about hunting frogs in the Northwest and cooking them himself. Guidry, with all due respect, was obliged to inform him that he hadn’t really experienced frog legs until he’d had them Cajun-style, or straight from the Guidry family cookbook.

  Guidry returned to his apartment that evening, fried up a fresh batch, and the next day passed them around the coaches’ room. He offered one to Berra, who immediately made a face.

  “Come on,” Guidry said. “You’ll like ’em.”

  Stottlemyre, munching nearby, couldn’t disagree. But still Berra demurred.

  “Yogi, I’ll tell you what, if you don’t try one, we’re not going to supper tonight,” Guidry said.

  Was he serious? Probably not, but if Berra knew one thing about Guidry, it was that he was proud of his Cajun culture and cuisine. Yogi wondered if he was in some way hurting his friend’s feelings.

  So he finally gave in, picked one off the plate, and gave it a nibble. Lo and behold, it was delicious. He wanted another, and as the years rolled by, he would continue to find a place in his diet for something no conscientious doctor would have ordered for a man in his eighties.

  Following treatment in the seventies for an arrhythmia, Berra assiduously watched what he ate. He avoided cholesterol-heavy breakfasts, pushed away most desserts with a dismissive “too fattening,” and made sure that the Progresso soup prepared for him at his museum almost daily and specifically at noon by the museum’s faithful business manager Bettylou O’Dell was low in sodium.

  He had even long ago disassociated himself from the Yoo-hoo soft drink that he had made famous in the fifties and sixties (by chiming in a commercial, “Me-he for Yoo-hoo!”) because he objected to the preservatives that had changed the drink’s texture and flavor.

  If he relaxed his calorie counting, it was usually at dinner, especially at big family dinners, where everyone down to the youngest of the Berras was taught that the heels of the long Italian bread were reserved for Grandpa. Berra’s favorite dish was tripe—the stomach tissue of cows and a peasant staple in the old country—but he enjoyed a fairly wide range of gastronomic fare that occasionally didn’t agree with him.

  For instance, he liked to munch on hot peppers right out of the jar. It was another habit that Carmen wanted him to break—except it turned out that Guidry, who used peppers to spice up his Cajun cooking, was Berra’s main supplier.

  “I’d have them with me in spring training, and then when he’d go back to New Jersey, he’d tell me to send him a batch when I got back to Louisiana,” Guidry said. When Guidry would comply, he would get a call from Carmen asking that he stop sending the peppers. When he didn’t send them the next time Yogi asked, he’d get a call wanting to know where the peppers were. “Either way, I had one of them fussin’ about the damn peppers,” he said with mock resignation.

  After so many years of sitting across the table from him at one Tampa establishment or another, Guidry could probably expound on Berra’s culinary preferences better than anyone but Carmen. At the very least, he could discuss them like a comedian working his monologue.

  “When we go to the Rusty Pelican, that’s a seafood place and they have swordfish, which he loves, so he gets that all the time there,” Guidry said. “When we go to the Bahama Breeze, he likes the black bean soup, and with that he’ll have the seafood paella or the barbecued ribs. Four times out of five, he’ll have the seafood, but let’s say we have been to the Pelican the night before, well, that means he’s already had seafood, so he’ll get the ribs.

  “Now Fleming’s is the steakhouse, so that’s what he gets there, and then at the Bonefish he has to have the sea bass. Then after he moved into the Residence Inn, he went one night to eat with Carmen at Lee Roy Selmon’s, which is right next door. So he tells me the next day, ‘Hey, it’s not bad.’ The guy recognized him, sat him at a nice table, everything was fine. OK, so now we got to go to Selmon’s, and there he gets the meatloaf. But since he’s been at the Residence Inn, where they put out a spread in the evening, he also keeps a list on the door of his refrigerator that tells him what they’ll be serving. If he likes something he’s had before, he’ll say, ‘On Tuesday, I’m going to eat in the hotel.’ ‘OK, that’s good, Yog.’”

  No Tampa meal, however, was as anticipated and as fussed over as Guidry and Berra’s “Frog Legs Night,” which by the end of Berra’s first decade back with the Yankees had taken on the ritualistic weight of Old-Timers’ Day.

  Before leaving for Tampa every spring, and after being badgered by Berra, Guidry would pack about two hundred legs into the truck, having purchased them inexpensively (about $200 for a hundred pounds) in Lafayette, where they are plentiful and sold year-round. From the same vendor, he would buy a mixture of flour and cornmeal seasoning in a gallon jar.

  “They’re so simple to fix,” Guidry said. “You got the egg batter, the fry mix, dip ’em in the batter, throw ’em in the frying pan.” From the frying pan, the frog legs would be transferred to paper towels, to soak up some of the grease. It took about ten minutes to cook up a batch of forty legs.

  Guidry would ration his supply so that it would last throughout spring training. He would prepare some for the more adventurous players looking for a break from the standard clubhouse fare. Jorge Posada was a longtime fan. CC Sabathia joined the club when he came on board in 2009. Guidry would also invite two or three buddies over on one of his first nights in town and playfully have Goose Gossage dial New Jersey to let Berra know what was on the menu that night.

  “Yogi, we’re over here at Gator’s, and we’re eating all the frog legs,” Gossage would say.

  That was enough to set Berra off. “There’d better be some goddamn legs left when I get down there,” he’d growl.

  Guidry was way ahead of him, having set aside enough for Berra’s Frog Legs Night, knowing that he was good for about eight or nine, accompanied by sides of sweet potato and green beans wrapped in bacon. If they were eating in, Berra wasn’t settling for a snack.

  “Everything’s got to be just the way it was the last time and the time before that,” Guidry said. “If I forget one thing, he’ll look at the plate and say, ‘Where the hell is the sweet potato?’”

  Berra would choose the night, usually in March and timed to an NCAA tournament basketball game he was eager to watch. A wide-ranging sports fan, he enjoyed March Madness and happened to be a devout follower of the Rutgers University women’s team, coached by C. Vivian Stringer—who once offered him a seat on the bench for a game when she learned he was a Scarlet Knights fan.

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bsp; “If Rutgers was playing, that was a good night for the frog legs,” said Steve Donohue, the rare person allowed into Guidry’s place when he was cooking for Berra.

  Berra protected the occasion as he would his wallet, typically limiting the guest list to Donohue. In Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame’s induction weekend one summer, Kevin McLaughlin, a family friend who had been accompanying Berra to autograph signings for more than twenty years, said he had heard about Guidry’s frog legs dinners and wondered if he might be able to arrange an invitation for the following spring. Guidry pointed to Berra and said, “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “No,” Berra said. He might have been kidding—but probably not.

  Donohue was included because he was part of the inner Tampa circle—a dedicated masseur, a trusted colleague, a Yankees lifer—and, well, because Berra needed someone to drive him the short distance to Guidry’s apartment without having to take the chef away from his work.

  “Most of the guys in Tampa, you look in their refrigerator, and you’ll see a bottle of water and a loaf of bread,” Donohue said. “Gator’s got the whole kitchen set up—the pots, the pans—and whenever he would cook the frog legs, you could see how serious he was.”

  For Guidry, cooking had long been as earnest an undertaking as pitching. He learned to appreciate the subtleties of the art—the same way he could distinguish the movement on a four-seam fastball compared to a two-seamer. To the common assertion that frog legs are pretty much the same delicacy as chicken wings, he would scoff, “That’s a dirty-ass bird. Frog legs are much better.”

  Thrilled with the taste, Berra would nod in full and devoted agreement. It was his own way of recognizing the pride Guidry had in his cooking and the satisfaction he derived from sharing it.

  “They’re his specialty, and Gator goes all out,” Berra said. “It’s like watching one of those famous chefs.”

  But chefs, like coaches, are evaluated on performance and are subject to being replaced when the restaurant changes hands. When Guidry was let go as pitching coach at the start of the Joe Girardi regime, and with George Steinbrenner fading as a presence in the operation of the ball club, there was really no guarantee that Guidry would be invited back as a spring training instructor.

  The uncertainty weighed on Berra throughout the off-season. Left to wonder, he could do only one thing: call Guidry during the winter, early and often.

  Did you get the frog legs yet?

  It was Berra’s way of finding out what he needed to know without asking the more sensitive question. If Guidry had made the purchase, didn’t that mean he was planning to be back in Tampa and at the airport to pick Berra up when he arrived?

  Guidry would roll his eyes, tell him to calm down, and hang up the phone with a smile fit for spring. He knew exactly what Berra meant. And that, he said, felt good.

  Only once did Berra agree to a large frog legs gathering, but that was in New Jersey on the night before his 2010 golf tournament.

  Before the annual event, Carmen and Yogi would host a dinner at their Montclair home for those visiting from out of town. After hearing Berra rave about the frog legs for years, Carmen suggested that Guidry bring a batch with him and prepare them in her kitchen.

  He agreed on one condition: he would do all the cooking and cleanup. She had to promise not to lift a finger or to so much as wash a single pot or pan.

  But after all she had heard, Carmen, a proud cook in her own right, was curious to know just how Guidry went about preparing his famous frog legs. She asked if she could at least observe.

  “Carm, leave him alone,” Yogi said, pleading with her to give the maestro his space.

  Guidry waved him off. “She can stay,” he said. “You get your butt in there with everyone else.”

  Berra shrugged and went off to talk baseball with Goose Gossage and Graig Nettles. When Carmen asked if she could help, Guidry put her to work on the stove, operating the gauges. She was amazed by his confidence in her kitchen, the way he made it his own.

  “I told you, Carm,” Berra said when dinner was served.

  Those were his last words until he had polished off half a dozen legs.

  When the golf outing was rained out the next day, Carmen consoled her disappointed husband by reminding him that he had been fortunate to have experienced a taste of spring training in Montclair.

  Berra had never visited the Guidrys in Louisiana, and given the passage of years and his advancing age, he probably never would. Guidry understood, of course, but part of him was disappointed that Berra would never see for himself that the “swamp” is actually a pretty sweet place to live.

  Most of all, Guidry would have loved for Yogi and Carmen to come down to stay with him and Bonnie and to spend some quality time with his parents. Accents aside, he believed they would find much common ground in their stubborn but transcendently sincere approaches to life.

  “My dad was hard-working, but I can never remember him really giving me a whip—my momma, yes, but not my dad,” he said. “My dad was just set in his ways, a little like Yogi, and there were times he just wasn’t going to be happy. But as much as you wanted to strangle him sometimes when you were growing up—you know, the conflict between parents and kids—you get to a point when you realize, well, I know what you were trying to teach me. I finally get that, because now I have kids and they’re doing the same things.

  “My dad, he doesn’t say much. I mean, he knows how much we love him, and I know that he’s proud of me because I turned out to be an OK kid. And I do think he feels an appreciation for the way I look at Yogi. He knows Yogi is not going to take his place, so I think he can appreciate that it’s all because of the way he and Momma brought me up—that this is the way I should be treating the guy that meant so much to me in my career.”

  In the Guidry home, gratitude has always been expressed in the kitchen, and Guidry learned from his father that it is perfectly acceptable for a man to have a place there. More than a hobby, cooking has been a passion for Rags Guidry, a source of existential pride. Cajuns, he believes, can in large part be defined by food.

  Two of his favorite sayings: “A Cajun is a man of great friendliness who will give you the crawfish off his table” and “Little Cajun children are made of gumbo, boudin, sauce piquant, crawfish stew, and oreilles de cochon [pig’s ear pastries].”

  Over the years, Rags Guidry had devoted so much time and energy to culinary endeavors that he finally decided to put them into printed form, self-publishing a one-hundred-page booklet of recipes—his own and those of family members and friends, including his famous son. He called it Rags Guidry’s Cajun Cookbook and spiced it with delightful archetypal homilies, tender commentary, and even a touch of political cynicism.

  For example, under the heading “Rags’s Mother’s Depression Era Boiled Eggs and Dried Shrimp Gumbo,” he wrote:

  Since fresh shrimp were not generally available where we lived during the Depression, everyone would use dried shrimp. Times were tough, thanks to the Republican Party. My father was a tenant farmer. We raised ducks, turkeys, hogs, sheep, cattle and especially chickens. I remember every four or five days walking about two miles with a basket of two-to-three dozen eggs to sell at the country store. He would pay us 12 cents a dozen. I could buy a pack of dried shrimp for about three cents and it contained more shrimp than you can get today for $2.

  The booklet contains page after page of intricate recipes—Rags’s Cajun Blackbird Jambalaya, Cajun Italian Meat Loaf, Bacon-Wrapped Chicken Gizzard, Rags’s special vegetable soup, his favorite sweet potato pie, his chef salad à la Rags.

  Mixed among the recipes are photos of a much younger Ron demonstrating the art of cleaning crawfish and of Bonnie demonstrating how to prepare a roux and crawfish gumbo. There are dishes solely devoted to Travis Guidry—his preferred meals on designated nights. There are several variations of frog legs, including frog legs smothered, frog legs court bouillon, and Ron’s real fried Cajun frog legs.

  The index
in the back lists Rags’s, Ron’s, and Bonnie’s recipes in separate categories. Ron is credited with six different rabbit dishes—though it was a rabbit stew prepared by his father in the late seventies that attracted the attention and appetite of no less a critic than George Steinbrenner himself.

  Back then the Boss had forged his own Louisiana connection—a close relationship with Eddie Robinson, the legendary football coach at Grambling State University. In 1970, Yankee Stadium hosted the inaugural Whitney M. Young Jr. Memorial Classic, a football game between two historically black colleges, one of which was often Grambling. Steinbrenner went a step further in the spring of 1977 by sending his American League–champion Yankees to the Grambling campus for the first of several charity exhibitions, presenting Rags and Grace Guidry with the perfect opportunity to take Travis on a two-hour road trip to see his brother.

  “Do you want me to bring the team some home cooking?” Rags asked Ron one year.

  “Drinking and eating, you know, that’s always a priority over here,” Ron told him.

  So the Guidrys rolled into Grambling early, located the baseball field, set up shop under a big shade tree, and went to work. When the team bus pulled in, Ron greeted his family and gave his father the game plan: everyone would be introduced to the crowd prior to the game; most of the regulars would play a couple of innings; after a shower, they’d be ready to eat.

  When Ron was done on the field, he went out by the tree and took a seat in the shade. From there he could see Steinbrenner walking around near the Yankees’ dugout, looking all distracted. “I knew he could smell the aroma—it was like, what the heck is that?” Guidry said. “All of a sudden, he sees us and starts walking over. I’m thinking, Uh-oh.”

  “Is there a problem?” Rags asked his son.

  “We’re about to find out,” Ron said.