The straw that stirs the drink

Posted: Fri October 17, 1997

Ron Fimrite covered 18 World Series for Sports Illustrated. We asked him to share one of his favorite memories.

The day before the start of the 1977 World Series, Reggie Jackson was in a positively melancholy humor. Life was cruel and unfair, and he had become the innocent victim of circumstances, the future Mr. October told me.

Reggie and I had known each other since we had appeared together on a sports- trivia TV show in San Francisco back in 1968. He was displeased with me at the time for something disparaging he mistakenly accused me of writing about him. But once we got that straightened out and identified the true journalistic culprit, we became pretty good friends. I say "pretty good" because with a man of such monumental ego, that's about as close as you can get.

But Reggie did seem to trust me, and on this day in '77 he recounted his myriad grievances. For starters, Yankees manager Billy Martin hated his insides. How else to account for Billy's perverse behavior? In midseason, for example, Billy had insulted Reggie by removing him from a game in the middle of an inning, following what the manager considered to be an indifferent effort in the outfield. They nearly came to blows in the dugout afterward. And in the just-concluded American League playoffs with Kansas City, Martin had benched Jackson for the fifth and deciding game on the insubstantial—in Reggie's view—basis of the slugger's .071 batting average for the first four games. Furious at this latest humiliation, Reggie snapped, "I know what I can do. If he [Martin] did, we'd be a lot better off."

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The manager wasn't Reggie's only antagonist on the Yankees. Catcher Thurman Munson detested him because on first joining the team for the '77 season, Reggie proclaimed with his usual modesty, "I'm the straw that stirs the drink.... Munson thinks he's the straw ... but he can only stir it bad." The rest of Jackson's teammates were less than fond of him for reasons that included his inflated salary (a then-princely $3 million over five years); his supposed chumminess with the despised owner, George Steinbrenner; and for such public utterances as "My story is not really an athlete's story, it's a human story."

After listening to Reggie on the eve of the Series, I wrote for SI that while the opposing Dodgers considered themselves, in the fashion of the time, a close family, "the Yankees, too, are a family. A family like the Macbeths, the Borgias and the Bordens of Fall River, Mass." I wondered how Reggie, in his gloomy state, would fare under the pressure of a World Series.

I needn't have wondered. Reggie hit .450 and set Series records for homers (five), total bases (25) and runs scored (10). And in the sixth and final game, a Yankees win, he tied Babe Ruth's record by hitting three homers. Reggie actually one-upped the Babe by belting his in consecutive at bats off three different pitchers—each homer coming, astonishingly enough, on the first pitch. It was the most extraordinary performance by a slugger in World Series history. He had become Mr. October, the Toast of the Town.

A few days later, I showed up for an informal party at the Fifth Avenue apartment Reggie kept during the season. The great man was exhausted from the post-Series hullabaloo, but hardly the brooding victim of fate I had seen earlier. In fact, he was working the room in the ingratiating manner of such legendary New York innkeepers as Toots Shor and Sherman Billingsley. He was the eye of his own hurricane.

I found a seat in a relatively quiet nook and was blissfully sipping a glass of wine when I spotted a large man across from me who not only looked enough like Reggie to be his brother but, although he was not related, shared his surname. I introduced myself to the Reverend Jesse Jackson and asked him what he thought of our genial host. He was, as might be expected, more than ready to expound on the subject.

"Reggie," he said, in that now familiar voice, "is a fascinating man. He has a sense of history, which so many athletes don't have. I think that's why he gets up for the big games. He has a sense of moment. Greatness against the odds is the thing. Anyone can be famous. Just by jumping out of one of these buildings you can be famous. To be great is a dimension of the authentic."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I didn't.

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