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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 STEINBRENNER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 STEINBRENNER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
If you love the New York Yankees, arguably the most storied franchise in all of sports--or even if you're just a fan of baseball history, or big business bios--this biography of the larger-than-life team owner for the past four decades is a must for your bookshelf. For more than 30 years Bill Madden has covered the Yankees and Major League Baseball for the New York Daily News, and he brings all his insights and inside connections to Steinbrenner: the definitive biography of one of New York's most intriguing and long-standing sports figures, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
For longtime baseball fans, this biography of the mercurial owner of the New York Yankees is as painful to read as it is informative. It's hard to relive the contentious and unending hirings and firings of countless players and managers since 1972, when Steinbrenner bought the team from CBS; the owner's run-ins with authorities, from his troubles over contributions to President Richard Nixon's reelection to his efforts to find dirt on the foundation of his star player Dave Winfield; and the impulsiveness, bullying, anger, and underhandedness that have marked Steinbrenner's ownership style. Madden gives less attention than expected to Steinbrenner's career as ship owner and, more surprisingly, to the championship seasons of the last 13 years, though the owner has been less visible in recent years. But he offers an insider's look at how Steinbrenner has run his team, even finding unexpected certainly underpublicized humanity in his subject.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE Yankees are again world champions, and it seems a shame that the man widely credited with having returned the club to its historic glory has been diminished by age and infirmity. George Steinbrenner is 79, seldom seen and, more surprisingly, heard. But now comes Bill Madden's riveting biography, "Steinbrenner," to remind us that in this instance, silence is blessedly welcome. Madden, a longtime baseball writer for The Daily News in New York, subtitles his book "The Last Lion of Baseball." But the portrait that emerges is of a man of precious little nobility. The Yankees have won seven World Series on Steinbrenner's watch, triumphs that came not always as a result of his stewardship, but despite it. Steinbrenner was running an Ohio shipbuilding company in 1972, when he and a group of partners bought the game's most storied franchise from CBS for a paltry $10 million. The club had fallen on hard times - losing too many games and too many fans - and Steinbrenner set about making it a winner. His timing was propitious. The age of free agency was about to begin, and Steinbrenner would try to buy the best players on the market. Indeed, if he had limited his involvement to writing checks, there is every reason to believe the Yankees might have fared even better; the two periods of their greatest success under Steinbrenner - 1977-78 and 1996-2000 - followed the two times he was banned from the game, when other people were in charge of the team's future. (He was banned the first time for making illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, the second time for paying off a gambler who had gathered dirt on Dave Winfield, a star player who had fallen out of favor.) Madden covered the team and Steinbrenner at the height of his power, and embarked on his biography with the backing of the Steinbrenner family. He also had access to the many hours of audiotapes recorded by the first of Steinbrenner's many team presidents, Gabe Paul. The Paul tapes are a biographer's dream: a wise and seasoned baseball man's daily venting about the endless miseries of life in the orbit of "the Boss." What we see, almost from the beginning of Steinbrenner's tenure, is a man of overweening self-importance and callousness, with a breathtaking absence of empathy. Reading the book feels like the literary equivalent of passing a traffic accident; it is all but impossible to turn away. Steinbrenner could be charming and generous. But these qualities do little to mitigate what is, finally, a devastating account. Madden tells us that while Steinbrenner enjoyed the privileges of growing up a rich kid, he suffered mightily under the emotional weight of his father, a man who apparently never had a kind word for his son. But having a brute for a father did not instill in the younger Steinbrenner a capacity for kindness. Quite the opposite. His treatment of those who worked for him was capricious and cruel and was conducted with the bully's telltale streak of cowardice. When Yogi Berra, the manager at the time, lit into Steinbrenner for criticizing him and his coaches, the owner, ducking a confrontation, dispatched the general manager to fire him, adding this great Yankee catcher to the interminable list of managers, coaches and executives he fired with the impulsiveness of a 3-year-old. But as Madden chronicles an aging and fading Steinbrenner, the portrait softens, and pity frequently takes the place of outrage. Madden goes too easy, for instance, on Steinbrenner's campaign to squeeze the city for a new ballpark, with all those money-generating luxury boxes. This, however, does not lessen the impact of the blow to Steinbrenner's legacy. In the end, the man who felt it necessary to apologize to New York when the Yankees lost a World Series understood almost nothing about a game whose subtleties seemed beyond his comprehension. But then, this wasn't about baseball. It was, ultimately, all about him. There may be no I in "team." In the world of George Steinbrenner, though, there was, above all else, an M and an E. Have the Yankees won because of Steinbrenner or in spite of Steinbrenner? Michael Shapiro's latest book, "Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself," was recently published in paperback.
