IF Sports Illustrated was the Time magazine of the sports world, Sport was its Esquire, a slick monthly filled with well-marinated profiles and straight-to-the-wall photographs—dispatches from the American dreamland. When it first sprang to life in 1949, a smiling Joe DiMaggio and son Joe, Jr., on its cover, Sport was in the business of making heroes. By 1977 the magazine was more concerned with satisfying the public’s increasing appetite for personality. That was why Dick Schaap, Sport’s editor in chief, had sent Robert Ward down to Florida in March to profile the newest member of the Yankees. It was a perfect match of author and subject. Ward was a surging, scenic writer who went on to make a small fortune writing for the television shows Miami Vice and NYPD Blue.
Reggie initially refused to cooperate with Ward, claiming he’d been burned by Sport before (“They wrote a piece that said I caused trouble on the team, that I have a huge ego”). Ward started on the piece anyway, hanging around the clubhouse, watching Reggie as he moved through camp, asking his various teammates to comment on their new right fielder. After a few days of this, Reggie agreed to a drink, as long as Ward agreed to tell him what the guys were saying about him.
They met at a bar called the Banana Boat. Reggie showed up in a windbreaker, which he promptly ditched, revealing a blue T-shirt on which the word SUPERSTAR! was spelled out in silver letters
across the chest. It was from the TV show that he hosted, but the implication was clear.
Ward began by telling Reggie that some of his teammates had expressed reservations about him. “You see,” Reggie said as they started in on their first round, “I’ve got problems the other guys don’t have. I’ve got this big image that comes before me, and I’ve got to adjust to it … Also, I used to just be known as a black athlete; now I’m respected as a tremendous intellect.”
They were just getting going when the old Yankees’ Rat Pack-Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Billy Martin—settled down at a backgammon table at the other end of the bar. Reggie told the cocktail waitress, who was decked out in a green Tinker Bell costume, to send over some drinks on him. She returned with a message: “Whitey Ford appreciates your offer, but says he’d rather have your Superstar T-shirt.” Ward glanced over and noticed Mantle and Martin cracking up; they had obviously put Ford up to this bit of hazing. Reggie stripped off his T-shirt and delivered it to Ford, who in exchange gave Jackson his sweater, a pink cashmere V-neck that must have been three sizes too small for the slugger’s thick torso.
The encounter, coupled with Ward’s report on Reggie’s unpopularity among his new teammates, tripped something inside Reggie. In a sense, it was Martin who was the odd man out. Mantle and Ford were “living legends”; Reggie’s legend was still in the making but well on its way. Of the four, only Martin would be condemned to a lifetime of faint praise adjectives like “scrappy,” “feisty,” and “hardworking. ” That was not how it felt to Reggie. He knew that he would never enjoy the kind of camaraderie with his teammates that Martin, Mantle, and Ford shared. Players were more transient in the nascent era of free agency, but more than that, Reggie was too self-centered to command much in the way of personal loyalty from anyone.
Back at the bar, Reggie stirred around the fruit in his piña colada and delivered himself of an unforgettable soliloquy. “You know, this team … it all flows from me,” he told Ward. “I’m the straw that stirs
the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson … but really he doesn’t enter into it … I’ve overheard him talking about me … I’ll hear him telling some other writer that he wants it to be known that he’s the captain of the team … And when anybody knocks me, he’ll laugh real loud so I can hear it … I’m a leader, and I can’t lie down … but ‘leader’ isn’t the right word … it’s a matter of PRESENCE … Let me put it this way: No team I am on will ever be humiliated the way the Yankees were by the Reds in the World Series! That’s why Munson can’t intimidate me. Nobody can … There is nobody who can put meat in the seats the way I can. That’s just the way it is … Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad … Just wait until I get hot and hit a few out, and the reporters start coming around and I have New York eating out of the palm of my hand … he won’t be able to stand it.”
All the essential Reggie Jackson contradictions were here: the swaggering free spirit versus the self-conscious brooder; the supremely sure exterior versus the vulnerable interior; the desire to feel loved versus an unconscious need to feel alone, embattled, by way of motivating himself.
“Thank you, God,” was all Ward could think as he scribbled furiously.
Jackson finally came up for air. “Are you sure you want all of this printed?” Ward asked.
“Yes,” Reggie said, smacking his hand on the bar for emphasis. “I want to see that in print.”
It was the sort of scene that magazine writers fantasize about, and because Ward didn’t have to cover the ball club day in and day out, he didn’t have to worry about alienating anyone. He flew back up to New York and emptied his notepad. He added some memorable flourishes of his own—“God, he looks like some big baseball Othello as he smiles at the gaggle of reporters who rush toward him, their microphones thrust out”—and filed the story to Sport. The
whole office could hear his editor, Barry Stainback, howling as he made his first pass through Ward’s copy. Stainback was soon walking up and down the halls, his face crinkled up into a big smile, as he read sections aloud to the staff.
Sport scheduled the story—REGGIE JACKSON IN NO-MAN’S LAND—for its June issue. Schaap messengered the galleys over to Sy Presten, an old-fashioned publicist who had been in the game long enough to have peppered the Journal-American’s gossip maven Dorothy Kilgallen with items about the Copa. The “straw that stirs the drink” quote was buried inside the piece. Presten broke it out in the headline of his press release, which he promptly sent to every sports desk in town. Within hours Sport’s phone lines were lighting up like a pinball machine.
Several years later, when Reggie published his autobiography—in vintage fashion, he dedicated the book to his biggest fan, God—he claimed that the whole conversation at the Banana Boat had been off the record, and that he had been misquoted to boot. Most sports heroes set out to “write” their life stories with mythmaking on their minds. The ’77 Yankees were more concerned with settling scores, and no one had more scores to settle than Reggie. (He settled fewer than his publisher was expecting. The book, for which Reggie was paid a then-whopping three hundred thousand dollars, was a best seller but still fell far short of expectations.)
Reggie claimed that he had asked Ward if his story was going to be positive and that Ward had assured him that it was. “Bullshit,” says Ward. “I told him that I was going to set the record straight. He interpreted that as yes because he’s so egocentric.”
“All in all,” Reggie wrote, “it was the worst screwing I ever got from the press. And I’ve had a few in my day.”