A Boss book

“Adversity can be your greatest teacher, success your shortest lesson.”

What great thinker said this? Plato, Socrates, DesCartes? Emerson or Thoreau? This quote kind of reminds me of a few lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” that went like this:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

But it wasn’t Kipling. It wasn’t Hemingway. It wasn’t even Mark Twain.

You know who it was? You’ll be surprised to find out that this original quote can be attributed to none other than … George Steinbrenner, recently deceased king of the New York Yankees’ empire.

I just finished reading Bill Madden’s excellent book on Steinbrenner called “The Last Lion of Baseball.” The book was meticulously researched and so well-written that it was a can’t-put-down page-turner – rare for a historical, non-fiction book. It helps immensely that Madden lived through all of the Steinbrenner era and was closely associated with a lot of it.

Like Madden, many of my heroes growing up were not necessarily the players who played the game but rather the men who covered the games. So it was really cool to see many references to Moss Klein, Dick Young, Phil Pepe and other sportswriters that I grew up reading in the Newark Star-Ledger and New York Daily News.

Steinbrenner was many things. The book points out his tyrannical rule over the Yankees – he fired two front-office people on separate occasions, with their primary sin being that IT RAINED AT YANKEE STADIUM. He could be emotionally irrational. That’s an understatement. He was very much into military history and a military approach to a sport in which that approach very often backfires.

Make no mistake that this was a very smart man. He bought the Yankees for an original outlay in the low six figures. At the time of his death, the Yankees and their network were worth in the billions (not millions, billions). A pretty good return on his original investment in 1973.

I was surprised that Madden only made glancing references to all the good work and behind-the-scenes community service stuff Steinbrenner did in his life. This book focuses almost exclusively on baseball.

Anyway, I liked the Big Stein quote and felt like sharing it. And I really liked the book; if you are a baseball fan and a Yankee fan, it is a must-read. Even if you are not, it is a fascinating case study of an extremely successful but somewhat flawed leader of a powerful empire called the New York Yankees.