Yankees owner George Steinbrenner dies at 80 – Yahoo! News
So the ol’ goat finally kicked off.
World will be a bit duller, sans doubt!
I’ll never forget his greatest quote, offered up during the 1981 World Series, when I was amidst a ton of New Yorkers during my first month at Brown. That was the one during which the Yanks went up 2-0, then got swept by the Dodgers.
Big George had gotten into a widely-reported confrontation in a hotel elevator w/ some Dodger fans once the tide had turned their way, and at the press conference the next day made the following comment, in typically SUPREME bad taste. I have the original NEW YORK TIMES clipping somewhere in my sports archive—
“When I bought the Yankees, the team picture looked like the poster for birth control!”
They just don’t make “minds” like that anymore! LOL Or entrepreneurs either.
P.S. Here’s an on-line account of Steinbrenner’s biographer that indicates The Boss may have deployed the “birth control” trope more than once—
“It’s funny! As Seinfeld did, Golenbock shows that while Steinbrenner may have been the world’s worst boss, he was [unintentionally] hilarious. In one story, “The Case of the Red Lips,” the editors of the 1981 Yankee yearbook used a shade of red for Steinbrenner’s lips that looked enough like lipstick to prompt George to destroy all ten thousand copies of it. He also was quoted as saying the 1973 Yankee team picture “could very well serve as a poster for birth control,” and there’s even an anecdote in there that made me think, just for a second, that the venal Lonn Trost might not have always been so bad.” [For more, click here.]
