Sean Wilentz: Why I’m Actually Going to Miss that Meddlesome Pain in the Ass George Steinbrenner
[Sean Wilentz is the author of Bob Dylan in America, which Doubleday will publish in September.]
Writing back and forth with a fellow Yankee fan just after the news broke about George Steinbrenner’s death, I was surprised how touched we were. Like Yankee fans generally, we had lambasted Steinbrenner for decades. He was a meddlesome pain in the ass. He brought an obsessively willful football coach’s mentality to a subtle sport played over a very long season. And his strange emotional twists and turns with other troubled men, above all his many-time manager, Billy Martin, played havoc with everyone’s psyches. Indeed, Steinbrenner was capable of truly despicable behavior....
et there was another Steinbrenner, or, better, a later Steinbrenner, whose tragic flaws ceased to be quite so tragic. It did not take too much exposure to his public personality to see that the man’s imperiousness was driven by a fear of losing, a horror of disgrace, which, if it did not compensate for his sins, somehow rendered him less hateful, or at least more human (and also more of a baseball fan, like the rest of us) than his sadist caricature....
By the turn of the century, Steinbrenner had become a cultural icon, an exemplar of blustering authority. Once that icon became a comic figure, above all in Larry David’s back-to-the-camera performances of Steinbrenner on Seinfeld, his reputation was bound to soften. Sometimes, anyway, The Boss was not just in on the joke, he actually seemed to enjoy it. To the fictive extended family that is hardcore Yankee fandom, he became the grumpy old guy who still ran the show, but wasn’t as infuriating as before—especially because the show on the field, which is really all that matters, had become so wonderful....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Writing back and forth with a fellow Yankee fan just after the news broke about George Steinbrenner’s death, I was surprised how touched we were. Like Yankee fans generally, we had lambasted Steinbrenner for decades. He was a meddlesome pain in the ass. He brought an obsessively willful football coach’s mentality to a subtle sport played over a very long season. And his strange emotional twists and turns with other troubled men, above all his many-time manager, Billy Martin, played havoc with everyone’s psyches. Indeed, Steinbrenner was capable of truly despicable behavior....
et there was another Steinbrenner, or, better, a later Steinbrenner, whose tragic flaws ceased to be quite so tragic. It did not take too much exposure to his public personality to see that the man’s imperiousness was driven by a fear of losing, a horror of disgrace, which, if it did not compensate for his sins, somehow rendered him less hateful, or at least more human (and also more of a baseball fan, like the rest of us) than his sadist caricature....
By the turn of the century, Steinbrenner had become a cultural icon, an exemplar of blustering authority. Once that icon became a comic figure, above all in Larry David’s back-to-the-camera performances of Steinbrenner on Seinfeld, his reputation was bound to soften. Sometimes, anyway, The Boss was not just in on the joke, he actually seemed to enjoy it. To the fictive extended family that is hardcore Yankee fandom, he became the grumpy old guy who still ran the show, but wasn’t as infuriating as before—especially because the show on the field, which is really all that matters, had become so wonderful....