Do good quietly

The death today of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has brought forth a torrent of responses, tributes and endless coverage on TV, radio, Internet and (tomorrow) the newspapers. I do not mean to add to the huge pile, but as most of you know I am a big Yankee fan, so allow me to chime in a few words here in both of my blogs.

Like most folks – famous and not-so-famous – Steinbrenner was a complex personality.

He was known for his bluster, for firing managers and other employees as frequently as we change the oil in our cars. He was also well-known for his irrational overspending on free agents, especially during the foolhardy decade of the 1980s, when the Yankees had high-priced players who often underperformed. He also did genuinely bad things that came with hugely negative consequences – he was banned from Major League Baseball twice!

On the flip side, many Yankee fans adored him. He cared deeply about winning above all else. There is no denying the success the franchise achieved during his watch. He deserves at least some of the credit for all the pennants and world titles began shortly after he took over the storied franchise back in 1973.

But here’s the thing that I want to focus on, something that few people knew about during his life and more folks may realize now that The Boss is gone: He was a quiet philanthropist. He donated to many causes. He helped many downtrodden people and organizations. He did this with absolutely no fanfare, and in fact shunned publicity for his good deeds. He might have been a General Patton-like bully on the outside, but on the inside there was a heart of gold.

This aspect of Steinbrenner intrigues me, in part because I do not know much about it. I’m hoping that Bill Madden’s book “The Last Lion of Baseball,” will shed some light on this subject. Madden, the longtime baseball writer for the New York Daily News, wrote the book, which was published earlier this year. I had requested it from the library about two months ago. This morning, I got the call that the book finally came in for me. A few minutes later, I learned of Steinbrenner’s death. Weird.

Anyway, one of the core values of the Marist Brothers is to “do good quietly.” This is something that I find deeply moving. The fact that Steinbrenner apparently embraced this edict, to me, is pretty cool.