Everyone LIED to You About Reggie and Billy — The REAL Story Is Sadder Than the Fight

He had them printed at a shop in Philadelphia, and he carried them with him for years. Cheap little business cards, nine words, Marty the Tailor, father of famous Reggie Jackson. The man who printed those cards had played ball in the Negro Leagues for a few dollars a game. He raised his son alone in the rooms above that shop, and he went to prison the year that boy finished high school.

 And in the summer of 1977, when the most talked about athlete in America wanted to walk away from baseball, the tailor was the man he called.  You’ve seen the footage. Everybody has seen the footage. Fenway Park, a hot Saturday afternoon, a manager coming across a dugout at his own right fielder while two coaches throw their arms between them.

 It’s been replayed for almost 50 years.  It gets used as a punch line. Two big egos, one small dugout. That’s not what it was. What the record books never tell you is that both of those men grew up without a father in the house. One of them lost his before he could walk. The other watched his get taken away, and neither of them ever said a word about it to the other.

 Not that day, not for the rest of their lives. Here’s what I want you to understand before we go any further. Nobody in that dugout was fighting about a fly ball. To see this the way it actually happened, you have to go back to the winter before, because the war started months before either man threw a punch at anything.

 November of 1976, the Yankees had just been swept out of the World Series by Cincinnati four straight, and George Steinbrenner was humiliated. Free agency was brand new. For the first time in the history of the game, a player could finish his contract and sell himself to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder in America was a shipbuilder from Cleveland who had bought the Yankees three years earlier and had no patience left.

 There was a meeting. The general manager, Gabe Paul, wanted Bobby Grich. He said the Yankees needed a shortstop. Billy Martin sat there with his voice half gone from getting thrown out of a World Series game the night before, and he agreed on Grich. And then he said the name he really wanted, Joe Rudi. Rudi was a Billy Martin kind of ball player, quiet, good glove, right-handed bat, showed up, did the job, went home.

 Martin had just taken this team to its first pennant in 12 years, and he thought he’d earned the right to say what it needed. Steinbrenner  wrote the names down. He wasn’t really asking. On November 29th, 1976, George Steinbrenner signed Reggie Jackson,    five years, close to three million dollars, the biggest contract anybody in baseball had ever seen.

 He did not consult his manager. Now, think about what that does to a man. Not the money, the message. Your boss goes out and spends more on one player than your entire coaching staff will earn in a decade, and he doesn’t pick up the phone. You find out the way the guy pumping your gas finds out. And Billy Martin’s response was the most Billy Martin thing imaginable. He did nothing.

He said nothing. He didn’t call. Two months went by. Christmas came and went. Spring training opened in Fort Lauderdale. In all that time, the manager of the New York Yankees never once welcomed his new star to the ball club. That silence is where the whole thing lives. Reggie walked into that clubhouse and found 24 men who had gone to the World Series without him and didn’t think they’d needed the help.

Thurman Munson, the captain, the reigning most valuable player of the American League, had already gone to Steinbrenner and asked for his own deal to be reopened. Graig Nettles had led the league in home runs, and nobody outside the Bronx knew his name. And then there was the city itself. You have to remember what New York was in 1977.

The city was broke. Whole blocks of the Bronx were burning. There was a killer loose who was writing letters to the newspapers. That July the lights would go out across five boroughs and stay out for 25 hours. This was not a town that felt like a man who’d just been handed $3 million. Reggie later wrote that until he came to New York, he didn’t know what the word alone meant.

 Then, in late May, the June issue of Sport magazine hit the newsstands. The writer was Robert Ward. He’d sat with Reggie in a bar in Fort Lauderdale during spring training, and here’s the part that almost never gets told because it doesn’t fit the story America decided to tell. By Ward’s own account, Reggie wasn’t bragging when the conversation started.

 He was talking about how his teammates resented him. Ward asked him straight out whether he thought race had anything to do with it. Reggie said yes. He said they didn’t like a black man getting that kind of attention. Ward pushed further and asked whether it was also because he was intelligent. That’s when Reggie went off, and that’s when the sentence came out that followed him for the rest of his life.

 He was quoted saying the team all flowed from him, that he was the straw that stirs the drink, and that Munson could only stir it bad. Reggie has denied that quote for almost 50 years. He says the line was fed to him, and that it never happened the way it was printed. Ward stood by every word of it and never backed off it once. I’m not going to tell you which man is right because nobody alive can prove it either way, but here’s what isn’t in dispute.

Munson read it, and Munson never forgot it. 24 men stopped talking to him in a clubhouse for 162 games. Now, here’s a small thing. It’s going to seem like a footnote. Hold on to it anyway. Billy Martin was born in West Berkeley, California, on May 16th, 1928. He was born in his grandmother’s house. His grandmother had come over from Italy and never really learned English, and she’d lean over that crib saying the same word again and again, “Bello, beautiful.

” Everyone in the house started calling the baby Billy, and Billy is what he answered to. Then he went to school, and a teacher read the roll and called out a name he had never heard before in his life, Alfred Manuel Pezzano Jr. He didn’t answer. He had no idea she meant him. That was his father’s name.

 The man had walked out when Billy was 8 months old. His mother had scrubbed the name off the family so completely that her own son didn’t recognize it. Now, remember that detail because who that man was and what he wasn’t is going to matter before this story is over. Billy grew up small, poor, and angry in a neighborhood  where kids got hit for less.

 He was mocked for his size and for his nose and for the strange situation at his house. He became a street fighter.  He’d do damn near anything to win. And then baseball gave him the one thing he’d never had. His name was Casey Stengel. Stengel managed him in Oakland, brought him to New York, and treated him like a son. That’s not a figure of speech people used later. That’s what it was.

 Stengel would defend that scrappy little second baseman when nobody else would. And Billy Martin loved him for the way you love the first person who ever chooses you. In May of 1957, a group of Yankees went to the Copacabana for Billy’s birthday. There was a fight. Nobody could ever prove who threw the punch, and most people believed it wasn’t Billy.

 On June 15th, the Yankees traded him to Kansas City anyway. The next day, in his first game with his new team, Billy Martin faced the Yankees and hit a home run. He never forgave the organization, and he never forgave Casey Stengel, who he believed could have stopped it and didn’t. They stopped speaking for years. So, understand what walked into that dugout in 1977.

Not a manager, a 49-year-old man who had been left twice. Once by a father he’d never met. Once by the only father he ever had. And who was now watching a new owner spend $3 million without asking him a thing.    But that’s not the part that breaks you. Because across that same dugout stood a man whose story rhymed with his in a way neither of them ever seemed to notice.

Reggie Jackson’s parents split when he was a small boy. His mother took most of the children and went. His father stayed and took Reggie and raised him in a house in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, where the first floor was a tailor shop and the family lived above it. Theirs was one of the only black families in that town.

 Martinez Jackson had played ball with the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues. The game had used him up and given him nothing, so he bought needles and thread and a pressing machine and built something the game had refused to give him. Reggie has said his father was a no excuses man. The deal in that house was simple.

 You make the first team or you come work the pressing machine after school. And then, in the middle of his senior year, the police came. Martinez Jackson had been running bootleg whiskey out of the basement under the tailor shop. He was arrested and he went to jail. When Reggie graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1964, his father was not in the audience.

 He was locked up. That is the man. That is the man the country would spend 1977 calling arrogant. A tailor’s son from a town where they were the only black family, whose father had been used up by segregated baseball  and then thrown into a cell, standing in Yankee Stadium being told he wanted too much. And that’s still not the worst of it.

June 18th, 1977, Fenway Park, 34,603 people. NBC has the game of the week and the whole country is watching. Boston leads 7 to 4. Bottom of the sixth. Fred Lynn singles. Jim Rice comes up and checks his swing and the ball dies in shallow right field, out toward the line. Right field at Fenway is a sun field.

 Reggie takes a step back, then sees it’s falling short. He’d say afterward that he thought Willie Randolph had it, so he held up. Rice pulls into second standing. Billy Martin walks out to take his pitcher out of the game. His name  was Mike Torrez. Remember him, too. And on his way back to the dugout, Martin tells Paul Blair to get his glove.

 Blair is a center fielder. It is the middle of an inning. In baseball, you do not do this. A man comes out mid-inning when he’s hurt, and that’s it. Everything else is a message.    Reggie sees Blair jogging out toward him, and he cannot believe what he’s looking at. He comes in, down the steps, hands spread wide.

 He asks what he did, and Billy Martin comes across that dugout at him. Two coaches get between them. One of them is Yogi Berra. The other one is Elston Howard. Think about who that second man is for a second. Elston Howard was the first black man to ever wear a Yankee uniform. He’d come up in 1955,  eight years after Jackie Robinson, and he’d spent his career being told where he could sleep and where he could eat.

 In 1963, he became the first black player to win the most valuable player  award in the American League. By 1977, he was a coach, and he would never be given a team to manage.    He is one of the men standing between them. And as they move down the dugout, he keeps himself in front of Martin, keeping him off his own right fielder, on national television, while America watches. No punch is thrown.

 That’s the thing nobody remembers. There was no fight. There was just a 49-year-old man who had been abandoned twice, screaming at a 31-year-old man whose father was a felon and a tailor, and neither one of them had any idea they were looking in a mirror. The Yankees lost that game 10 to 4.

  Nobody remembers the score now. Remember that detail I asked you to hold on to? Billy Martin learned his own name from a stranger. He had no father to call. He’d had one substitute, and that man let the Yankees sell him,  and never explained why. When Billy Martin was in trouble, there was no phone number.

 Reggie Jackson had one that summer, when he’d had enough, when the clubhouse had gone silent on him and the papers had turned him into a cartoon and he was ready to quit the game entirely. He talked to his father about walking away. Long conversations, more than once. We don’t have a transcript of what Martinez Jackson said to his son.

Nobody wrote it down, but we know what happened next. Reggie Jackson didn’t quit. October 18th, 1977, game six of the World Series, Yankee Stadium, 56,407 people. Fourth inning, first pitch, home run. Fifth inning, first pitch, home run. Eighth inning, first pitch, home run. Three swings, three pitches, three different pitchers.

 Eight to four, five runs batted in. The first man in the history of the World Series to hit five home runs in one series, and the first Yankee since Babe Ruth to hit three in a single game. 56,000 people chanting one name in a city that had spent that entire summer on fire. And the pitcher who went the distance that night, the man who threw a complete game and put the Yankees back on top of the world for the first time in 15 years, was Mike Torrez, the same pitcher Billy Martin had walked out to remove at Fenway on the afternoon everything fell apart. But

here’s what nobody saw coming, the nickname, Mr. October. That didn’t come from a broadcaster, and it didn’t come from a headline writer. It came from Thurman Munson, the captain, the man Reggie was supposed to have insulted in that magazine. Munson said it to a reporter after a loss in that same series, and he said it sarcastically.

 He meant it as a shot. It became the name Reggie Jackson carried into the Hall of Fame. Munson and Jackson made their peace. They flew together just days before Munson’s plane went down in Canton, Ohio in August of 1979. Billy Martin resigned the following July after saying of Jackson and Steinbrenner that one was a born liar and the other was convicted.

 Five days later, at Old-Timers Day, they announced he’d be back, and the crowd stood up and roared. He would manage the Yankees five separate times. He died on Christmas Day, 1989, in a truck that went into a ditch near his farmhouse in Upstate New York.  He was 61. The next day, the marquee at Yankee Stadium read, “Billy Martin, always number one.

” Martinez Jackson lived to see his son inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993. He died the following year at 89, still keeping hours at his tailor shop.  He was still handing out the cards, Marty the tailor, father of famous Reggie Jackson. Reggie wrote about Billy Martin years later, and he didn’t write what you’d expect.

 He said people think he hates Billy Martin. He said he doesn’t. He said he hates some of the things Martin did, and then he admitted something harder than hatred. He said he doesn’t understand him. I think that’s the truest sentence anybody ever wrote about the two of them, because those two men stood eight feet apart in Boston with the whole country watching, carrying the exact same wound, and neither one ever recognized it in the other.

 One of them had a father to call. That’s the whole difference. That’s the entire story. If this one got to you, do me a favor and hit the like button, because it helps other people find these stories, and subscribe if you want more of them. There’s a lot of this era we haven’t gotten to yet. In the comments, I want to know something.

 Who was the man you called when you didn’t know what to do? I read every one of those, and next time, we’re staying with this ball club, because there’s another man in that dugout nobody talks about. Thurman Munson taught himself to fly an airplane, and the reason he did it had nothing to do with money, or with baseball, or with getting away from anybody.

 It had to do with three kids in Ohio. That story is coming, and it’s going to hurt.