Peter Golenbock, "7: The Mickey Mantle Novel" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 3

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s change gears a little bit. You have written so many books about the Yankees. Do you have a favorite among them?

PETER GOLENBOCK: You don’t have favorite books. It’s like children. I mean, each one is a tremendous experience while you are doing it. Dynasty was my first book, was my very, very first book, and that was the one book I did before the age of computers, so from ’72 to ’73, I spent a year in Yankee Stadium with the Yankees researching their archive, a 100,000 newspaper articles. When I got finished with the thing, it occurred to me that I didn’t know any more about the Yankees then than I did when I started. It was an amazing revelation. So I went back to the guy who signed up the book at Prentice-Hall, and I said to him, “Look, I need to go visit these guys. Will you front me more money to do it?” They originally gave me $2,500, and then he gave me another $2,500. He did it two more times as I kept going and interviewing players. Jim Constanti was actually the first one I went to see. I had gone to Cooperstown to see what sort of archives they had up there, and Constanti lived in the next town, Oneonta, so Constanti was the first guy. And then traveling the country, I saw them all: Kubek, Richardson, Roger Maris. I saw with Clete Boyer in Atlanta. I saw Mickey Mantle in the dugout in New York. He had come to New York for some commercial that he was doing. Billy Martin was the manager of the Texas Rangers at the time. Amazing. Vic Rashey I saw in his, he sold liquor, it was a liquor store in some upstate New York… Bill Stafford. Jim Bouton, who became a good friend of mine. Phil Linz. Yogi Berra, it was amazing. It was a tremendous, tremendous experience to go visit all these people and interview them all. And then the third year, I spent writing it.

ANDELMAN: This just caught my interest. You got $2,500 was the advance on that book?

GOLENBOCK: That’s correct.

ANDELMAN: And that was 1972, 1973, and then twenty years later, I got $2500 for my first book, which was the baseball book, Stadium For Rent, so I guess that’s just what they pay you the first time you do a baseball book.

GOLENBOCK: Well.

ANDELMAN: I am assuming that you are doing better on the advances since then.

GOLENBOCK: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Now, Jim Bouton, I would think, could relate to what you’ve gone through in the last few months, going from saint to pariah among some people.

GOLENBOCK: I haven’t become a pariah. That really hasn’t happened. I don’t believe that for a second. Until they read this book, they can’t make a judgment. And I still honestly believe that when people read it, most of the people who read it will love it. I have showed it to all sorts of people. Bob Lipsyte, who’s a close friend of mine, he just thought it was terrific. Burton Hersh, who lives here in St. Petersburg, wrote me a wonderful blurb for the back of the book. Ed Randall, who does Talkin’ Baseball loved it.

ANDELMAN: But you understand what I’m saying in terms of Bouton. He wrote that book and exposed a lot of stuff.

GOLENBOCK: There’s a difference. There’s a difference. The difference is that Jim was a player, and players are not supposed to reveal what goes on in the clubhouse. That’s the difference. I’m one of those sportswriter guys.

I’m a loose cannon. I can pretty much do what I want. I’m not under the same strictures as the ballplayers.

ANDELMAN: Now, when you went around interviewing all those guys for Dynasty, that was at a point where society and even sports writers were not quite at that point where they were documenting every moment of everything that happened in sports, and somewhere in the ’70s and ’80s, it became a lot more, we started telling all kinds of stories that maybe hadn’t appeared before. Did a lot of guys say, “What do you want to do this for?”

GOLENBOCK: Not one. Not a one.

ANDELMAN: Really? They knew they had something special to share on this?

GOLENBOCK: I got perfect cooperation from every single Yankee, with the exception, as we all know, Joe DiMaggio. Joe was there in San Francisco. I went to his brother Tom’s restaurant, this gigantic fish place out on the Pier, and Tom tells me, “Ah, Joe, he no here.” You know, it’s like, “Go away!” And as we know, Joe married Marilyn Monroe in 1954, and Joe beat her up a little bit and was a lousy husband, and Marilyn divorced him, and so he never wanted to write a book because he was always afraid that he would have to talk about Marilyn. And so, I mean, for ten years, I tried to get Joe DiMaggio to do a book with me. Even one time, I had a publisher who said, “If you can get him to do it, I will give him a million dollars,” and I passed that on to whatever the name of his guy was, and the answer always came back the same, “No.”

ANDELMAN: There was a word several years ago, because I remember it made its way around, and I heard it, that Steinbrenner was looking for someone for a long time to write a book with him, and I am kind of surprised that that didn’t happen with you.

GOLENBOCK: Don’t be, because I interviewed Steinbrenner for my Wild, High, and Tight book for about an hour or so, and after checking, you know, you check when people tell you things, I discovered that most of what he told me was not true. He was a football player. He wasn’t a football player! He played in the band. He was a band member.

ANDELMAN: He was at the football games.

GOLENBOCK: And then his senior year, he had, because he also wrote for the newspaper, he had befriended tremendously the football coach, so the football coach gave him a uniform his senior year, so you can actually find a picture of George wearing a football uniform, but by God, you know…. And then supposedly he was this track star at Williams, and so I interviewed five or six of his teammates, his track teammates at Williams, and it turned out he was this sort of big, fat, slow kid who worked harder. Now, he’s got traits, he’s got good traits. Nobody worked harder than he did, but he was so limited in his talent that the real good track stars looked at him askance. “Why is this guy busting his ass? He sucks.” That kind of thing. And so you discover after looking into some of these things he’s telling you….

The one thing he told me that is the truth is that he was born on July 4th. I went to his town, Rocky River, and I found the birth certificate. By God, the guy was born on July 4th! That was one thing that he told me that was absolutely true.

So having written The Bronx Zoo and having written Number One and having written Balls, don’t be surprised that I was not the guy who Steinbrenner asked to do his autobiography.

ANDELMAN: I understand. The books that you did do, you worked with Guidry and Nettles and Martin and so on….

GOLENBOCK: I sure did.





ANDELMAN: Do you have a favorite co-author, or do you have someone who was more colorful and interesting to work with than the others?

GOLENBOCK: Well, I loved them all. I mean, Guidry, we became very close while we were working on that book. He’s just a wonderful guy, and there was nothing in the world like going into a fabulous French restaurant in New Orleans with Ron Guidry. You know, the line’s around the block, and you and Ron Guidry go right in and sit at the best table. I mean, it was just fabulous. And I loved Sparky, because Sparky had a great sense of humor, and he was a wonderful reporter. I mean, he really could tell stories about the stuff that was going on. And the other thing about Sparky that I realized fairly early was that he had won the Cy Young Award in 1977, and George went and got Goose Gossage, paid a lot of money for Goose Gossage to be the new closer, and Sparky thought, “Well, maybe we’ll share it. Maybe we will share the job, he’ll pitch once, I’ll pitch the next time.” And as you saw in the Bucky Dent game, when the last out, Yaz, who was left-handed, he was up, it was Goose Gossage who got the final out as Sparky was sitting in the bullpen. So Sparky was also angry, and so Sparky was really the first one to talk about Steinbrenner and what an SOB he was in the things that he had done.

ANDELMAN: What do you think was the most controversial or surprising story that you have told until this time in all the books?

GOLENBOCK: That Jim Valvano was one of the biggest crooks, one of the most corrupt coaches in the history of college basketball. That surprised a lot of people and made a lot of people very angry.

ANDELMAN: It didn’t blow up in the same way, I mean, it wasn’t…..

GOLENBOCK: It blew up exactly the same way. In fact, Simon & Schuster decided not to publish that book. That was called Personal Fouls, and that was picked up by, again, another small publishing firm called Carroll and Graf, and it became a New York Times bestseller for 11 or 12 weeks.

ANDELMAN: We’re just about done time-wise, so let me ask you this: how will you top 7 or what will you do next? What are you working on now?

GOLENBOCK: My next book’s called The Borough. It’s about Brooklyn. It’s about people who grew up in Brooklyn and their stories. I’ve got a fascinating, fascinating troop of people I’ve interviewed for it, people who fought against racism, people who fought against HUAC. Ira Glasser, who for 25 years was the head of the ACLU, Neil Sedaka, Cousin Brucie Murrow, who played, he was one of the very, very first disc jockeys to play black music during the period when black music was kept from the airwaves.

ANDELMAN: 77 WABC.

GOLENBOCK: WABC.

ANDELMAN: I grew up there.

GOLENBOCK: Yep. So it’s a very, very interesting book about a lot of very interesting people.

ANDELMAN: Not about sports.

GOLENBOCK: Well, I asked myself the question: “Why was it when Jackie Robinson came up in 1947 that they loved him in Brooklyn and hated him everywhere else in the country?” And so there is a connection to sports. Robinson was really the reason I delved into this in the first place, and so this book also answers that question.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.