My Memories of the Late George Steinbrenner

George at the 1997 Kentucky Derby with his entrant, Concerto. (AP Images)

The news of George Steinbrenner’s death Tuesday swept through the world of professional baseball like the raging wildfire that he was in real life.

A complex, sometimes impossible man to deal with or like, I knew George Steinbrenner as owner of the Kinsman racing stable and owner of Tampa Bay Downs Racetrack when I covered Tampa and national racing for the St. Petersburg Times in 1984-86.

George gave away tens of millions of dollars to worthy charities and hospitals and rarely asked for, or accepted, public credit. He gave out college scholarships to people he hardly knew after learning of their plight. He put people on the Yankee payroll so they could keep their families together even though they had no real role with the team.

He also let some office workers go without health insurance to save a few pennies and fired and re-hired his favorite manager Billy Martin five times.

I can attest to George’s volatility. It was not a fake display of emotion or a mere show for the media. In one season at Tampa Bay Downs he fired a personal friend, Christy McLaughlin, three times and called her at home the morning after the second firing and asked: “Where the hell are you? ”

“You fired me yesterday George,” she said.

“Well,” he shot back, “if you don’t get your bleep back in here in a half hour you’re fired again!”

George bought the New York Yankees from CBS Television for a modest $8.8   million in 1973 at a time when the legendary franchise of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio had fallen on hard times. By his indomitable will and commitment to excellence, Steinbrenner pushed the Yankees back into prominence, turning his relatively small   investment into a multi-billion dollar success that included 16 divisional titles, 11 American League pennants seven World Series titles a new and incredibly lucrative television network (YES)   and a privately funded $1 billion new Yankee Stadium that will be his lasting monument. In life and in passing, George Steinbrenner indisputably was the most successful, most influential owner of a modern American sports franchise.

But even beyond his influence on baseball, Steinbrenner also was a positive force in horse racing, a man who bred and raised many top-flight horses and rescued little old Tampa Bay Downs to the threshold of becoming a fine Florida track, owned now by one of his partners in that venture, Stella Thayer.

And, again, on a personal level, I saw both sides of this man ”¦ or should I say both extremes?

One day he instructed the track maintenance crew to roll the inside part of the track so his own horse who had Post 1 would have an unfair advantage. Reprimanded for that in secret by Florida’s ruling pari-mutuel board, I wrote a column saying “He should be suspended from the sport for at least a year for such unethical doings.”

The next morning in the track’s cafeteria on the backstretch, George came to my table and said, “I wish you hadn’t written that;   I was wrong for what I did. But now I can only hope they’ll accept my word that it won’t happen again.”

George was given a reprimand letter and continued on.

The following year, I was hired to become the first racing columnist for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Four months later, at the Preakness, George saw me from   across a large room at Pimlico and marched straight over to me as if I should have a bodyguard to protect me.

Instead, he gave me a big bear hug, and said: “Steve, congratulations, you’ll do a good job up there. I’m glad for you.”

Every once in awhile, George would call me in the press box at newly opened Canterbury Downs to ask how his friends in that state were doing with the new racing scene. During his prime, George never was shy in dealing with the media and you did not have to go through three layers of PR men and women to get his take on anything in the sport.

Once I called to ask him what he thought about Lasix and Bute -- the two legal but controversial drugs in American horse racing.

“They shouldn’t allow them,” George said. “It may or may not help some horses, but the game would be better off if trainers took more time to heal (the horses). Certainly ”¦ the public will think the game is being ruined by drugs.”

Quite prophetic, I think, and typical George Steinbrenner.

As a former baseball pitcher who almost signed a pro contract before an arm injury ruined that, I was graciously given the opportunity to go into the Yankee clubhouse during spring training in Florida, where every player on the telephone was asking about some horse in some race. My college catcher, Jeff Torborg, was a Yankee coach at the time and when Jeff told George that I had a book out on racing (Betting Thoroughbreds) George bought a copy, sent it to me and told me to autograph it for Don Zimmer, who was on Martin’s and Joe Torre’s Yankee coaching staffs.

As a horse breeder-owner, George never won the Kentucky Derby, but he did have several top-notch horses, including Majestic Warrior, the 2007 Hopeful Stakes winner, and Bellamy Road, a dominating winner of the 2005 Wood Memorial, one of six horses George owned in whole or part that raced in the Kentucky Derby. One of those six was Steve’s Friend, whom I saw train for the 1977 Derby, standing alongside George in the clocker’s stand years before I got to know him.

I had already seen Seattle Slew on the track and George asked me what I thought of his horse and the undefeated Seattle Slew.

“Your horse looks good,” I said, “but the best way I can describe Seattle Slew is this: If he were a boxer in the ring with all the other horses in the race, Seattle Slew would come out by himself and all the rest would be on their backs.”

Eight years later, George quoted back to me what I had told him. He was hugging me at the time at Pimlico, congratulating me for my new job!

George M. Steinbrenner III has died barely a week past his 80th birthday, and just as he did in life the headlines and the memories overshadow all other sports news on this Tuesday. In fact, he will be in the thoughts of many who participate tonight in one of baseball’s biggest days, the annual All-Star Game. He also will be in the hearts of those who knew him, even those who occasionally saw him at his worst.