Peter Golenbock has written some of the most provocative sports books in the past half-century, including five that made the New York Times best seller list. His first book, Dynasty, is an oral history of the Yankees' Golden era from 1949-1964-when they won 12 pennants in 14 years. Dynasty should be on every Yankee fan's bedside table.
Among his other books are The Bronx Zoo, which he wrote with New York Yankee pitcher Sparky Lyle; Balls with Graig Nettles; Number 1 with Billy Martin; Wild, High, and Tight, his explicit biography of the embattled Billy Martin; and The Forever Boys, a look at major league baseball from the perspective of several retired ballplayers.
Peter lives with his wife and son in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In Part One of this interview, Peter focuses on the making of Dynasty and recounts his visits with Yankee greats from the past.
PHIL ALLARD: I've been a life-long reader of your books, so this is an honor for me. The first book of yours that I really got into was Dynasty. I think I read that one five times in a row.
PETER GOLENBOCK: Well that was my first one too.
PA: Can you walk me through the process of how you wrote it.
PG: It started when I was twelve or thirteen. A man named Frank Graham wrote a book called The New York Yankees, and I found it in a library where I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. The book enabled me to read conversations between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig-Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. These people were not just names; they became fleshed out by reading that book. I was a huge Yankee fan and I just thought this thing was terrific.
PA: The oral history format gives you a dimension you can't get from magazine or newspaper accounts.
PG: Yes. That's right. So I went to Dartmouth College and the Athletic Director at Dartmouth was Red Rolfe.
PA: 3rd Baseman for the Yanks during the 30s.
PG: Yep, during the great DiMaggio and Dickey years. Red and I became friends and I would just sit and talk with him about what he remembered. In fact, I did a 2 or 3-part series. I was writing for the Dartmouth newspaper and I thought this was so terrific to talk to someone who knew all these guys.
PA: You discovered a number of things you didn't know, even though you were a devoted Yankee Fan.
PG: There is so much I didn't know. If you don't talk to the source all you know is what you see, which is just surface. This is hearing it from the horse's mouth. So after Dartmouth I went to Law School and graduated from NYU in 1970. I practiced Law for 8 weeks.
PA: That long, eh?
PG: I didn't enjoy it. So I got a job working as a writer of law publications for Prentice Hall. After about six weeks I was bored working on President Nixon's wage and price control. Just by happenstance on the next desk was a catalogue of the Prentice Hall trade books. I looked to see what they published and I said to myself: "I can write a book better than these." My idea was to write a sequel to Frank Graham's wonderful book on the Yankees. The book copy I had was, I believe, 1946 or 1948.
PA: And Dynasty covers the years 1949-1964. when the Yanks won 12 out of 14 pennants.
PG: Right, so the idea was to write a sequel to The New York Yankees by Frank Graham. The question is how do I do that? Well, I had gone to the Yankees to see whether they would allow me to use their archives to do research for such a book. And Marty Appel, the assistant Publicity Director said: "If you can get a contract, we will let you do any research you want."
PA: This is pre-Steinbrenner, right?
PG: Pre-Steinbrenner. Exactly right. This was Michael Burke and CBS. Years later Marty told me: "In a million years I didn't think you'd get a contract, so why shouldn't I say you can do this if you get a contract?"
PA: Did you then go and write a book proposal?
PG: When I found the trade book catalog on the desk next to mine it was lunchtime. On a whim I got out of my chair and I found the Chief Editor of the trade book division. His name was Nick D'Incecco. I knocked on his door. For the next hour, I told him what a fabulous book it would make and that the Yankees said I could use their archives to do the research. He said write me a short proposal and I think we can do something. So I wrote him a short proposal. The last thing I put in the proposal was the attendance figures of those 14 years, which if you add the whole thing up is 20 million people. I said if 2% of these people buy the book you will have a big seller. The other thing that helped was that D'Incecco was a huge Yankee fan. And the 3rd thing was he was going to make a very small investment in me because who the hell was I? So he gave me a contract for $2,500 to write the book. I left Prentice Hall and went to Yankee Stadium to do my research.
PA: That was a lunch that changed your life.
PG: I'd say that is absolutely true. If Nick D'Incecco had been a Detroit Tiger fan, who knows what might have happened. So I went to Yankee Stadium and I spent the next year becoming a member of the Yankee family. I did my research. They had a huge archive-which, by the way, Steinbrenner threw in the garbage when took over. He just threw it all out when they moved to Queens.
PA: Steinbrenner did WHAT??? So somebody that wanted to go back now and retrace your steps couldn't do it.
PG: Nope, Couldn't do it.
PA: That's a tragedy. That's the library at Alexandria burning.
PG: Yep. So after I spent a year there I called Nick D'Incecco on the phone and I said: "I don't know any more now than I did when I started. I have to go see these guys. I need another $2,500." He said fine.
PA: So you didn't know at first that you were going to do an oral history. It evolved from your frustration of not getting to a higher level of information.
PG: I knew that without talking to these people I was in trouble. So I was fortunate enough to get the $2,500 and off I went. The first guy I saw was Jim Konstanty. I drove to his home in Oneonta, NY and he showed me his home movies of when the Yanks went to Japan in the 50s. He was a Whiz Kid in 1950; he had those big glasses. MVP in the National League in 1950. But I went to see them all in the next year. Tony Kubek in Wisconsin; Bobby Richardson in South Carolina; Clete Boyer in Atlanta. And Clete's friend-Roger Maris-happened to be there.
PA: That's the man I really wanted to ask you about. Roger Maris. It's hard to believe that he got the asterisk, given what's going on these days.
PG: Roger had never given any interviews. The Press had burned him so badly. He was a very self-composed guy satisfied with his life. He was never interested in publicity or becoming famous. He had never asked for it, and playing in New York he was whacked over the head with it. Without a doubt Roger would have been much happier if he stayed in KC. No question about it. So, we are sitting in Clete's bar, The Hot Corner in Atlanta, and Clete went off; he had to do some business and I am saying to myself: "I am sitting across from Roger Maris. This is amazing. How in the world do I approach the fact that I want to interview him." So after five minutes of uncomfortable silence Roger said to me "Why don't we go outside and talk." So there must have been a part of him that saw that I meant no harm to him.
PA: It probably helped that you didn't jump right into it.
PG: It helped that I was there to see Clete. So we went outside and he really opened his heart in a way. He broke his hand sliding into home plate in one of his last seasons in New York and the Yankees hadn't told him that his hand was broken. They needed him to be the attendance draw. The Yanks were not the attendance draw anymore in 1965 and 1966 and they needed him. They didn't tell him and he played the season and hit about .230 with no power. He was also very bitter toward Ralph Houk and Roger is the kind of guy who lives by "If you don't have something good to say, then don't say anything."
PA: So he held the anger in.
PG: ...and this was his chance to talk about it and we talked for 45 minutes.
PA: What year was it now?
PG: 1973.
PHIL ALLARD: So he had been retired from the Cardinals for over four years. His last year was 1968.
PG: He talked about it all in a wonderful way. The irony is that Clete then came out and gave me an hour of his own time. He was fantastic. It was a great day for everyone.
PA: You get to see their vulnerable sides. It makes them real men. It comes out in the book.
PG: I am not judgmental either. They trusted me. These are great people.
PA: Any cross-section of society is going to have X amount of people with drinking problems or marital problems. It would be the same if you interviewed accountants.
PG: I tell students the same thing. This isn't sports writing. It's writing. You don't approach these people differently. If you went and covered the Police Beat you would be doing it the same way. So I kept going back to D' Incecco and saying: "I've seen this guy and this guy and this guy and I need another $2,500" and he kept giving it to me. If he hadn't done it, the book wouldn't have gotten written. He kept giving me money and I went out to California to see Don Larsen and Johnny Lindell.
PA: Larsen is a very down to earth guy from what I understand.
PG: Absolutely. I was in Larsen's home. Very interesting guy. Of course if he didn't pitch that perfect game he would have been forgotten.
PA: He was 3-21 with Baltimore in 1954.
PG: But George Weiss recognized that the Orioles team was awful and he got Larsen and Turley in that 17-player trade. So then I saw Mantle in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium. He was charming and wonderful and I don't know why but I was the first one he told about those nightmares he was having.
PA: The dreams where he is standing outside Yankee Stadium trying to get in but he can't and he hears his name being introduced as the next batter by Bob Sheppard.
PG: And he wakes up in a cold sweat. That's the beauty of it; when you interview these people, you have no idea what they are going to tell you.
PA: You also talked to Elston Howard.
PG: I knew Ellie. We would go out to lunch and it was very interesting what he had to say about the racism. He felt he had to keep his mouth shut. People have no idea what that was like at the time. George Weiss, the GM, given his druthers probably never would have had a black on the team. He was afraid of alienating the white fans. New York was not immune to racism by any means.
PA: Weiss thought the three-martini businessmen would be scared away.
PG: That's what he thought. So Ellie was the representative of the African-American player for a number of years but then Weiss left and Al Downing came in and things began to change. I interviewed George Weiss' wife after he died and she was fabulous. In fact, if you go to the book Amazin', that interview I did in Dynasty with his wife is in there.
PA: She was happy that George got the Met job because after he was fired by the Yankees and before he worked for the Mets, he was home and she would say: "I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch."
PG: She was an interesting woman herself. And Weiss was like the Japanese carmaker. He took an original idea and made it better.
PA: The Yankees always had money to work with.
PG: And when you have a track record and there's no draft you say to somebody "Sign with the Yankees and you will be in the World Series."
PA: You go to someplace in Oklahoma and their net income for the year is $1,000 and a Yankee scout comes knocking at the door.
PG: The Yanks had very good scouts too, very good. So I figured I traveled 27,000 miles chasing down these guys. And then the last year was spent writing the thing. I wrote it in the home of my friend's parents because I ran out of money. When I was done with the book I plopped it down on the editor's desk. It's was 575 pages and he decided it was too long and he made me shorten interviews with people like Woodling and Bauer and it was cut back by over 100 pages.
PA: Well that's too bad. But with Dynasty, you brought something to the market that did not exist before.
In Part Two of this interview, Golenbock discusses his experiences writing The Bronx Zoo, his Billy Martin books, and Idiot, with Johnny Damon.
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