Red Sox Rule (9 page)

For Terry, 1982 changed his life. At 22, it’s natural to think of an arc on the rise. No one peaks at 22, so there is a gaze toward tomorrow and an excitement about what it might bring. Who would imagine that the very first month of the year would contain the most joy? Terry married that beautiful girl and he made it to
the big leagues, so now the plan was framed nicely, just as he always knew it would be. But that was just the snapshot, and all the sadness was in the moving pictures.

The year was intent on reshaping Terry, and this time fate met him somewhere he always was: at the ballpark. It was June 16, in left field, and the Cardinals were involved in the lesson. The Expos were at a wet Busch Stadium, and thanks to eight runs in the first three innings, they were coasting in St. Louis. Terry, with a .321 average, was an everyday player for Montreal. Even with the soggy track in a runaway game, he was also an every-inning player for the Expos.

The warning track at Busch was still holding water from a previous storm, and that was the problem as Terry went back to retrieve a rare double by light-hitting utility man Julio Gonzalez. That ball was smoked, and as Terry turned for it, part of the track came up. He lost his balance and crashed into the wall. He felt his knee explode then, and the pain was excruciating. It was odd: as he went back to the dugout, he was suddenly embarrassed that he had made such a production on the field. The knee didn’t hurt as much as it had minutes earlier, although he couldn’t turn on it.

It was a torn anterior cruciate ligament. His season was over. The good news was that the injury was not career-ending, at least not in the way that most people understand the term. It didn’t end his career as a player, but it was the first step to ending it as a starter. It was also the beginning of a lifelong struggle with his legs. He began his rehab as soon as he was cleared, and that didn’t surprise anyone. He’d do anything to get back on the field, to get back to competing.

In September, though, Terry put his rehab on pause. Carmen Francona, in his dress shirt, slacks, and black shoes, went to the basement as he always did and turned on an old radio. The Cardinals and
Expos were playing, and even without an injured Terry on the field, Grandpa wanted to listen. Oh, was he proud. His grandson was making a living at the game he loved, and getting a lot of crisp ten-dollar bills to do it. That game marked the last time Carmen Francona, father and grandfather to a pair of big-leaguers, could check up on his grandson’s team. He had a heart attack later that night, and the heart attack took his life.

Carmen’s passing wasn’t just about the passing of a family’s patriarch. He was literally the voice of a town, tuning those pianos and then singing along as he got the pitch just right. He was the one who could make you laugh, unintentionally, when he sang in church and his voice drowned out the music, no matter how loud that music was. If you met him just once, he was your buddy. If you saw him again, he was probably your best friend. He was the reason people in western Pennsylvania initially thought of music and preaching, not baseball, when they heard the Francona name.

Later that fall, Terry visited his parents in New Brighton. He was still rehabbing, but he felt much better physically than he had in months. He told Tito and Birdie that he was going out to the road behind their house to run. They peered out the windows and watched him laboring back there, going up and down the road, running like someone who didn’t make a living as a professional baseball player. He looked horrible. And that wasn’t even the worst part of the story. After a while, he returned to the house and gave his analysis of what he had just done.

“Dad, I felt great out there,” he said. “I’m almost there.”

Tito couldn’t tell him just then how bad he looked, and Birdie could only cry. He was 23, and he looked like an old man running out there. They could see it, but he couldn’t. Birdie probably knew right then that he’d have a full baseball life, just not the one that he had expected.

T
he news broke on a Tuesday night, and as it buzzed its way through Chicago, there wasn’t a soul in the city who looked forward to facing Wednesday morning. This was the king of all scoops, so it was appropriate that it took the strength of three media outlets—NBC, the
Chicago Sun-Times
, and the
Denver Post
—to simultaneously carry it to the public: Michael Jordan was going to wake up on October 6, 1993, and announce his retirement from pro basketball and the Chicago Bulls.

Jordan was in his prime as an athlete and as a stylist and pitchman, too. His team had won the previous three NBA titles and was favored to secure a fourth. He was the finals MVP in each championship year, and he had averaged at least 30 points per game in the previous three seasons. His elevation of basketball was literal, and he was the only athlete for whom the following statement was true: he couldn’t follow the trends of pop culture because those trends were too busy following him, from his bald head to the Air Jordans on his feet. The cliché of commissioners is that their leagues are stronger than one superstar, but Jordan wore the NBA’s crown, was its most charmed and recognized
face, and was its proof that ferocity could be perfectly blended with grace.

The 250 reporters who covered his retirement press conference were familiar with the highlights of Jordan’s résumé, so they essentially remixed one question—why?—and asked it several different ways over the course of an hour. His comment that there was nothing “left to prove” didn’t seem believable, especially given his thirst for any type of competition, so they pressed. They asked if his decision had anything to do with the death of his father, James, who had been murdered by two North Carolina teenagers 3 months earlier. They asked about themselves, knowing that Jordan had been annoyed by the media’s scrutiny of his gambling appetite in general and, specifically, his gambling trip to Atlantic City the night before a playoff game in New York. They asked, simply, what he planned to do next.

“The word ‘retire’ means you can do whatever you feel like doing,” he said. “I’m going to sit there and watch the grass grow. When it needs mowing, I’ll get up and cut it.”

Well, not exactly. The season began without Jordan, and while the Bulls of Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant were not a great team, they were good enough to have won two-thirds of their games going into New Year’s Day 1994. At the same time, rumors about early retiree Jordan began to circulate. He wasn’t content to watch the grass grow, so he was looking for a patch of outfield grass on which to run. Michael Jordan, who was basketball’s best player even when he was sitting on his couch, wanted to play baseball.

The news of Jordan’s retirement had led sports columnists to write glowing tributes, but there was no love or tolerance for this baseball business. Baseball? Jordan hadn’t played the sport with any type of regularity since he was a skinny 16-year-old kid in North
Carolina. How was he supposed to take a 14-year break from the game and still be able to hit a curveball? How was he going to be able to do his favorite thing—compete—when he hadn’t played baseball in college and never spent a day in the minor leagues? For Jordan, each day produced a new question, and each article and broadcast offered unsolicited advice.
Don’t do it, Mike. And come back to the NBA.

If Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf was having those thoughts, his actions didn’t show it. Reinsdorf also owned the White Sox, who were a few weeks away from beginning spring training in Sarasota, Florida. Since ending their 1993 season with a loss in the American League Championship Series, the White Sox had made a number of moves in free agency. They re-signed Tim Raines, and added designated hitter Julio Franco and outfielder Darrin Jackson. They also signed Jordan to a minor league contract.

The plan was for him to rub shoulders with White Sox stars like Frank Thomas, Jack McDowell, and Robin Ventura, and then be assigned to a team in the minors. He had no chance of being the team’s fourth outfielder, utility man, or 25th player. Baseball people love to talk about a prospect’s “makeup,” and Jordan was a plus in that category. But he was a long and busy symphony of arms and legs at the plate, with no form or game plan. He was raw, and he needed work in every area just to keep from embarrassing the organization and himself.

One morning in Sarasota, the White Sox’s entire baseball staff met in the trailer that served as their temporary office. It was just after 7:00, and a bleary Terry Francona was asleep with his eyes open. He was the 34-year-old manager of Chicago’s Double-A affiliate, the Birmingham Barons. The previous year, in his first season of managing Birmingham, his Barons had won the Southern League championship.
Baseball America
named him its Minor
League Manager of the Year, one year after it had given the same honor to the Greenville Braves’ Grady Little. He was highly regarded in the organization, probably more than he knew, because his bosses had just said something that gave him a jolt for the rest of the meeting and season. They were putting Jordan’s development in his hands.

“MJ’s going to Birmingham,” they said to him. “So be heads-up and don’t say anything stupid.”

“Okay,” Francona replied. “I can handle it. No big deal.”

When he opened the door of that trailer, he was forced to become a different manager. Had he actually said, “No big deal”? Yeah, right. There were reporters and camera crews already waiting to talk to him, because they had gotten the word before he had. This was going to be nothing like his first year in Birmingham, when he called all the beat writers by their first names—all two of them, Wayne and Reuben.

Now that he was managing Jordan, he was going to have to learn, for at least part of the day, to be as organized as his pal Millsie. If this were basketball and he were Phil Jackson, managing Jordan would still be challenging. Jordan in baseball was something entirely different. Francona knew that he was going to have to be alert at 7:00
A.M.
, thinking about his plans for the team, his plans for Jordan, and his plans for the paparazzi. He was getting Jordan at a time when both men were growing into unfamiliar jobs and dealing with various personal heartbreaks.

Francona had stopped playing baseball 3 years earlier, finally incapable of icing all the things that hurt. In his final season, he had gotten into a routine of dunking his entire body in a whirlpool in an attempt to soothe the pain. After his first ACL injury in 1982, he was able to come back in 1984 and hit .346 in the first 3 months of the Expos’ season. Then, on June 14, almost
2 years to the day of his injury in St. Louis, his other knee exploded against the Pirates. John Tudor was pitching for Pittsburgh that day, and when Tudor went to cover first base, he said he could hear the sickening pop that caused Francona’s knee to collapse.

Maybe he could have adjusted to one ACL injury, but not two. He truly needed to have reconstructive knee surgery, but he worked around it. He could no longer think of being a special hitter because he had no sturdy leg base; he couldn’t expect to be a full-time player because he couldn’t stay on the field.

It was a physical struggle for him to play at all. He wore bulky leg braces and sometimes used four or five rolls of tape to keep his knees in place. He often said to himself, “I’m not a very good player,” but he was still the boy in New Brighton who never would have left a baseball game if his father didn’t know how to whistle. He still wanted in somehow.

The reality was that he was a bench player in his early 20s, and no matter how great a teammate you are, you don’t come to the ballpark at that age expecting to watch the game. There were times on the road when Francona and Expos teammate Chris Speier would be so restless, knowing that they weren’t going to play, that they’d drive around searching for competitive pickup basketball games just for a good sweat. A “caged animal” is how Jacque Francona described the player who was losing playing time due to his body’s betrayal.

At the end of his career, with his knees and shoulders breaking down, Francona was the happiest ex–big leaguer in Triple-A. He was in Louisville in 1990 and he was getting at bats. (He even pitched seven and two-thirds innings and had an ERA of 1.17.) He became a better evaluator then, too, of himself and other players. He looked at kids like Ray Lankford and Bernard Gilkey and saw that they
were better than he was. He also studied manager Gaylen Pitts and noticed how he consistently made tough decisions and still maintained the respect of his players by not embarrassing them.

Francona wanted to be that kind of manager, and now he was getting his chance to learn with Jordan. What better way to finetune his skills as a teacher than by imparting the nuances of pro baseball into a pro basketball player? Is there a better way to balance the interests of big-city media versus the interests of the team than to have a graduate course in Dealing with Michael Jordan’s Media? Jordan was definitely going to have some rough nights at the park, and yes, even he would be insecure and lose his confidence. No one in Double-A knew how it felt to have Jordan’s genius and drive, but Francona knew how everyone felt on a baseball field. He had been all of them: bonus-baby/first-round pick, starter, platoon player, defensive replacement, pinch hitter, player frustrated by injuries, player who sat on the bench without playing for 2 months, player who had been released.

That was just the professional perspective he could give to the world’s number-one athlete. He couldn’t have conceptualized what their personal relationship would become.

The first time they talked was on that onetime sleepy morning in Sarasota. After Francona learned that he was Jordan’s manager, he found him on one of the minor league fields and introduced himself. Jordan was scheduled to play in a game that day, and he was hosting a line of players and coaches who wanted to give him baseball pointers.

“We’ve got five days until we get to Birmingham, so I’m going to leave you alone for now,” Francona said. “There’s too much coaching going on here, so go play and we’ll talk in depth later.”

That was all they said until Francona actually saw Jordan play. He had been jammed on a pitch and popped it up. It was a normal
day in the life of a ballplayer, except that Jordan didn’t run out the play. As soon as it happened, all heads turned to Francona. Typical: it’s easy to be Jordan’s coach when you want to teach him how to swing and maybe sneak in a question about the Knicks, but the numbers in the coaching line start and end at “1” when the job requires scolding him.

After the game, they crossed paths on a back field.

“Just tell me now: are you going to do that every time?”

Jordan may have been a baseball rookie, but he knew what Francona was referring to. In basketball, he was able to set the tone for the amount of effort his team exerted because he brought the most passion and, when necessary, fury. He knew he wasn’t going to be the best player for the Barons, but he would be their most watched; therefore, he could still determine how hard they worked.

“No, that will never happen again,” he said, his dark brown eyes making contact with Francona’s so the manager could sense the sincerity. “Never.”

And soon they were off to Birmingham, beginning one of the most enchanting tales in American sports history. The country’s most popular athlete, who earned $30 million in endorsements alone, had accepted a job that paid $850 a month. He spent his time on a 45-foot luxury bus, “luxury” because in the words of Francona, “It didn’t break down much and it didn’t stink; it actually looked like the Partridge Family bus.” That garish green-and-purple bus was where you could find a bunch of kids happy to make $10,000 a year, sitting next to the handsome spokesman for Nike, Gatorade, and Coca-Cola.

It was as if the companies were satisfied with Jordan’s performance in all the top 25 markets, so they wanted to know how he’d go over in the flesh somewhere between Tupelo, Mississippi, and Talladega, Alabama. It was one thing to see Jordan go to McDonald’s in
his commercials, but it was quite another to see him there at 3:00
A.M.
, ordering fries on his way to Orlando, Jacksonville, and Greenville, North Carolina.

Extended travel is one of the great tests of any relationship, especially the trips in which the 5-hour mark means that you’re only halfway there. Jordan had been used to traveling on private jets and chartered flights, but he enjoyed the bus hours because that was the time when he could not be reached. He could let his guard down and not worry about being the guy America knew from 48-minute games and 60-second jingles. Sometimes that meant going to the back of the bus and playing dominoes with the kids, and at times it was edging toward the front and listening in on the conversations of the coaches, who were all close to his age. They saw the things that made him one of the guys, like how he ate where they ate and stayed where they stayed. They also saw flashes of his former life, flashes of how he reached the point where people just said
Michael
and you knew who they meant.

Forget about the great start he was able to have at the plate, hitting .330 in late April. He did have a background in basketball, right? The coaches were reminded of that one day on the bus when they mentioned a pickup game they planned to play in Birmingham. Jordan wasn’t listening to their conversation. At least, he wasn’t in the beginning. But the more they talked about playing, the more he rubbed those huge palms of his together. After a while, it became clear that inviting him to play was moot. He was going to play when they got back to Birmingham whether they wanted him to or not.

The game was a treat for anyone who happened to be walking near the public court where some locals, some Barons, Francona, and Jordan were playing. Word spread quickly that Michael Jordan—
the
Michael Jordan—was playing ball at the park. The only
thing that distinguished him at first was his height. He was playing an understated game, getting everyone else involved, and graciously passing the ball even though anyone playing or watching knew what he was capable of doing. One of the young locals, tall and ripped, a twentyish athlete, didn’t seem convinced. There’s always someone who wants to show a superstar that they don’t believe everything they see on TV.