This was early August of 1977, the Yankees were actually in Syracuse for an exhibition game against their Triple-A team and Thurman Munson was announcing he wasn’t going to be speaking to the press for the remainder of the season. Seems that Munson, fuming over the circus that the George-Billy-Reggie-Thurman show had become in Mr. (Not Quite Yet) October’s first season in Pinstripes, had begun to grow a beard in direct violation of the owner’s rules. “Beard of Defiance,” is what we called it.
Now, threatened with a fine, Munson had shaved away about a week’s worth of growth. He walked to his locker and pleasantly informed the writers surrounding him that he’d have nothing to say the rest of the way. As is not at all unusual, I operated as though the rules applied to everyone but me. So a couple of minutes later I moseyed back over his way.
“Billy,” Munson called out to the manager, Billy Martin, “could you please ask this gentleman to move away from my locker and stop bothering me.”
I covered the Yankees for most of that summer, filling in for the beat writers on vacation. I barely knew Munson. I barely knew any of them, though with that team, the writers all chose sides. I chose for Reggie, which meant Munson and Martin and Graig Nettles and Sparky Lyle didn’t have much time for me, and that Jackson (and his greatest ally, Fran Healy, and also Mike Torrez) did.
So through the next couple of weeks I had even more limited contact than usual with Munson, who was only on his way to his third straight season of batting over .300 while knocking in at least 100 runs. Until one night in Detroit when I passed him in the tiny visitors’ clubhouse on my way to the dugout for batting practice.
Munson called me over to his locker, gestured for me to sit. And then began to talk, man-to-man, about his life, about his family; about my life, family and interests; about everything that didn’t have anything to do with baseball. I don’t know why, I don’t know where it came from. I just know that in that short time, maybe 20 minutes or so, Munson gave me a glimpse of the man his teammates revered; a glimpse of the leader who, despite Reggie and Sparky and Ron Guidry and, too, Catfish Hunter – and despite Steinbrenner, himself – was truly the heart and soul of the world’s most famous professional sports franchise.
It was an extremely enjoyable conversation, the kind of which I would never again engage Munson; not that year, not the next summer, not in 1979, when I was with the team covering the road trip to Milwaukee and Chicago from which he would never return to New York.
“You never knew this side of me existed, did you?” Munson asked at the end of that conversation in Detroit.
“You never let me,” I responded.
“That’s right,” he said.
STATS
7 All-star selections
.373 World Series Average
.339 AL Playoff Average
