INTRODUCTION

B-E-R-R-A

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Why did I write this book? The short answer is that I love my dad. That may sound obvious, but it is part of a larger answer: my dad’s love for me did nothing less than save my life.

When he died in 2015 at a very well-lived ninety years of age, everyone knew Yogi Berra as an American icon, a legend of almost mythical proportions. Far fewer know me as the son who made it to the big leagues, following in his footsteps. I made it through ten years. I was on a world championship team, the ’79 “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates. I even set a record—not anything like my dad’s stockpile of them but a record nonetheless—reaching first base seven times on catcher’s interference. Hey, any way you can get on base, right? I’m sure Dad would have said just that. I once led baseball in hits by an eighth-place hitter in the lineup. I also played for my dad when he managed—for sixteen games—the ’85 Yankees, the biggest thrill of my life, making me the first son to play for his father since Earle Mack on Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in 1937. That’s my piece of history.

I wasn’t a great player, certainly not in the same universe as Dad. People in the stands would sometimes yell at me, “You’ll never be as good as your old man!” But I always thought, who was? And I was fine with that.

I wasn’t a bad. I played third base and shortstop. Like Dad, I had a good glove. The bat? Not as much. I hit .238, had forty-nine home runs, 278 RBIs. I had more hits than any son of a Hall of Famer, 853, fifty-four more than Dick Sisler, son of George, and when I retired my dad and I had hit the most home runs by a father and son, 407 (since surpassed by the Fielders, Griffeys, and Bondses). Sure, I had only forty-nine, so that’s like Tommie Aaron being able to say he and his brother hit more home runs than any brothers in history—with Tommie hitting only 742 fewer than Hank. But, hey, don’t take that away from us.

The historians, the SABR crowd, rank me on the same level as players like Clete Boyer and Félix Mantilla. I’ll take that. The flip side is, I had a chance to be better, much better, a star. When I came to the majors, I was only twenty and the best prospect in the minors. And while I don’t make excuses for not being what I could have been, there’s no doubt that my downfall was getting involved in the drug plague within the game during the ’80s. Cocaine was the villain. It took my career away. I’m not alone. Ask Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. And Steve Howe. The Yankees, for some reason, have had a bunch of ’em.

Of course, I put more than a baseball career in jeopardy. And at the heart of this story is that it was my father and my family that turned me around. Only by hitting bottom did I learn what my dad had tried to teach me when I was a child growing up in his massive shadow. Those lessons are what I wanted to write about. I only wish I would have appreciated them when they could have saved my career.

I had a box-seat view of my father’s life and death no one outside our family did, an intensely personal view of years that were both wonderful and painful for both of us. It’s not every day that someone who’s been written about as much as my father—and he was one of the most written about athletes of all time—can be seen in a new light. But I had that light, and after a great deal of soul-searching, I wanted to share it, because it was good for my soul. They call that a catharsis.

The other works about Dad were perfectly justified. A family friend of ours who helped establish the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center wrote a couple with Dad. His famous “Yogi-isms”—those observational baubles of fractured but solid logic—alone have filled more than a few books. People still haven’t gotten their fill of him, because he was truly one of a kind as an American icon, a national treasure, and the most quoted man in the world. It’s automatic that when his name is mentioned, people will reflexively smile. And yet no book has told of the Yogi I knew, the father of three sons, grandfather of eleven, great-grandfather of one. That is the story of us, our family, and it’s one that only my brothers and I know.

In many ways, Dad and I both had to grow up and learn from each other what life really meant. I hope that when he died, he knew I loved him and had learned from him, that I carried his good name. And I hope I taught him that life has its pitfalls and we all arrive at our destination on different roads but end up on the same ground.

I don’t think of this book as another Yogi history, but rather as a letter to him from my heart. That Dad was a legend is incidental to his role as a father needing to set his son straight. I knew that reliving the details of the story would be painful. It was something like therapy revealing a very stupid span of my life that reflected badly on him and wrecked a burgeoning career. Getting my two older brothers, Larry and Tim, and my oldest daughter, Whitney, to pitch in with their observations helped a lot, because their memories filled in gaps and allowed Yogi’s boys to tell the story from all of our points of view.

I won’t say it ain’t easy being me, because I have been extremely fortunate to have grown up with the family I had and to have walked in the footsteps of my dad all the way into the big leagues. Yet I have to live with the shame and guilt of my descent. Today, three decades after I hung ’em up, I will walk through an airport or mall and someone will know me, even without the bushy, porn-movie mustache that was my signature as a player but I said goodbye to in the ’90s. Maybe it’s because, as I age, I look more like my dad. I’ve been told I look like I could still play. But my nose keeps getting bigger, my ears stick out more, and where’s my hair going? Back in ’75 when I was a nineteen-year-old wunderkind, my manager with the Pirates, Chuck Tanner, said I was “handsomer” than my father. I wish Chuck were still around, so he could say it again.

It’s flattering, but only until someone will segue from “Hey, didn’t you used to be…?” to “You had a drug problem, right?”

I can accept that. Because it’s true. I used cocaine for over a decade. Richard Pryor once said he used Peru. Well, I used it through my promising career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, when I got swept up with ten other big-league players in the bust and trial of a Pittsburgh drug dealer in ’85, baseball’s second-biggest scandal since the “Black Sox” threw the 1919 World Series. You’d think that would have set me straight, but I kept using, thinking I had it all under control. Even after I retired and was arrested in a 1989 New Jersey drug investigation, I had rationalizations, telling myself I was doing cocaine the “right” way, somehow within the rules.

I couldn’t see how it had affected me and a career that went downhill. When the Pirates won it all in ’79, Chuck said that my play late in the season filling in for our injured shortstop “won the pennant for us.” Not Willie Stargell. Not Dave Parker. He also said I was half of the best shortstop–second base combination in the game, a future star. I didn’t even know that I was throwing that future away. I could never foresee that, long into the future, an online writer would say that my rookie baseball card “is a reminder that Dale Berra was once a poster child for cocaine running amok in pro sports.”

These are all facts. I can’t run away from them, because they cost me a major league career and a marriage, although I can add there was a happy ending, thanks to Dad and the tough-love support of my family. I got myself straight in time for him to be proud of me, after all. What I can’t accept is that some people will blithely assume that my dad was to blame for his son’s stupidity. He wasn’t. Full stop. The poor choices I made, the delusions I lived with, didn’t stem either consciously or subconsciously from a bad childhood or resentment about living in his shadow. Those expecting a poison-pen, “Daddy Dearest”–type memoir can close the cover right now and stop reading. The truth is, I was walking in the footsteps of a giant shadow, but never did I feel it or any pressure to excel because I had the name B-E-R-R-A stitched across my back. I was on my own to sink or swim. We both wanted that.

But hands-off doesn’t mean indifferent. He was always there for me, in his understated but unmistakably caring way. And he could only take so much of my self-destruction, not because his name was being soiled but because he hurt for me, seeing his flesh and blood ruining his life. He knew I knew better. In a way, the changing culture was to blame. Dad came from an era when players killed themselves with booze. He had watched Mickey Mantle do that in their glory days, like all the Yankees and the writers who covered them keeping it a secret from the public. But he himself never was a drunk; he knew his limits. And drugs were something he knew almost nothing about. When he managed the New York Mets in the ’70s, half his team were regular potheads and he never even knew it. What I did was far worse.

And yet, generational differences aside, we were both Berras, descendants of Italian immigrants with a ferocious competitive instinct. Was he the perfect father? Who is? While he had that big, ingratiating smile, he wasn’t an overly warm man. To us, he was strict but fair; just like the public Yogi, he didn’t say much, but you knew where he stood. He was tough but forgiving. He didn’t tell us he loved us—those words were reserved for Mom—but we felt it. He had his rules we had to decipher and apply to our lives. My brothers did that better than I did, but, as crazy as it sounds, even when I was doing drugs those rules kept me from making it worse. I only hope he knew that in his soul.

He was good to people because he didn’t have to think about being good. He just was. He was the most humble man who’s ever lived, a guy who said so much by saying so little, even if the rest of the world did a double take when he uttered a Yogi-ism. They’re so well known now that people know them by heart: “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” “You can observe a lot by watching.” “It’s déjà vu all over again.” “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” “Never answer an anonymous letter.” Even a president repeated one of them. In 2015, Dad was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Barack Obama called him an extraordinary man, then, with a grin, “One thing we know for sure: if you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

I certainly never could have copied him. You can’t successfully copy an original. He is not an easy man to describe; he was neither as simple nor as complicated as people would alternately define him, because he could be both, in the space of a few seconds. Under his lovable facade there were real feelings and pain. He had to bury both of his parents within two years as a still-young man, and his fifteen-year exile from the Yankees after being fired in 1986 by George Steinbrenner after only sixteen games ate him up inside with anger very much unlike him. Ending that exile not only made the whole world feel better; it made him feel better. I had a lot to do with that, and I considered it repaying what he’d done for me.

All I could do was try to see life as he did, something I’m still trying to get right. That’s why I call this a book about life; rather than being about my dad or me, it is about us, about our family, keeping the bonds between us strong, no matter what. It is a view of Yogi Berra seen only by his family, a view of a man larger than life who himself had to learn late in the game that life is not a fable after all, that there were lessons he had to learn from his son’s failings so that they could be turned into success.

That was my saving grace. He is the reason I have not touched a drop of cocaine in twenty-seven years, nor substituted booze for it. I’ve stayed clean and sober, and I have never felt better than I do right now. I lost one family through no fault of theirs, but I remarried and became the father of two more beautiful daughters. And I could share the last years of Dad’s life as the son he wanted. Rather than another well-worn, from-the-depths “drug” story, then, between these covers is a memoir of Yogi Berra from the point of view of his own flesh and blood, the son who could have been his legatee in baseball but found his real success being his legatee in life. Long after I stopped wearing a uniform, I feel B-E-R-R-A across my back and all the way to my soul. And I wear it with pride and joy.