MONEY BRAWL
Dolan isn’t first owner in a fan confrontation
THIS isn’t the first time we’ve had one of our owners come this close to asking a fellow to step outside.
Surely you remember October 1981, and George Steinbrenner taking an elevator from his suite on the 11th floor of the Hyatt Wilshire in Los Angeles the night the Dodgers beat the Yankees a third straight time to take a 3-2 lead in the World Series. According to the Boss, two fans approached him. “Steinbrenner, right?” they asked. Steinbrenner said yes. The fans called the Yankees “chokers,” according to the Boss.
New Yorkers? “These two called them animals,” Steinbrenner reported. That was more than enough for the owner of the New York Yankees. He dropped an obscenity on them. One allegedly responded with a punch. Steinbrenner, ex-football player, came unglued.
“I clocked them,” Steinbrenner said, a few hours later, after his face had been tended for bruises and his hand placed in a cast after throwing a couple of punches. “There are two guys in this town looking for their teeth and two guys who will probably sue me.”
Those guys never did come forward. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. It was one of the stories that went with Steinbrenner to the Great Owners Suite in the Sky seven years ago.
Oh yes, it should be noted: These were Dodgers fans who caught Steinbrenner’s ire, and his right cross.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had an owner exchange a cross word or two with a paying customer. A few years before he died, Wellington Mara told the story of a time — early ’80s, the Giants already 15 years into a playoff drought — when he encountered a group of 10 fans wearing Cowboys jerseys outside an elevator at Giants Stadium.
“Are you from Dallas?” Mara asked them.
No, they explained. Some were from Westchester. Some were from Jersey. Some were from Manhattan. Mara asked why they weren’t Giants fans. One of them, stoked with a little liquid courage, answered: “You drove us away.”
“There were quite a few things I wanted to tell these fellows,” Mara said. “And then when we won the Super Bowl a few years later, I wished I had their phone numbers so I could ask if they watched the game.”
And, yes, it should be noted: Mara never actually did say any of those things to those fellows. And even if he had those phone numbers? Smart money says he wouldn’t have placed those calls.
Steinbrenner and Mara are especially relevant in the world of James Dolan, it should be pointed out, and not only in a week when he went after a chatty Knicks fan the way Steinbrenner allegedly went after a few L.A. fans back in the day, the way Mara fantasized about putting those Cowboys fans in their place.
A few years ago, Dolan was talking about fans and their frustrations. He was asked, specifically, about Steinbrenner and Mara. As unpopular as Dolan has been as an owner these past 15 years, it still doesn’t approach the venom Yankees fans had for Steinbrenner in the ’80s and early ’90s (when the team stunk and he also got himself thrown out of the sport), that Giants fans had for Mara in the late ’60s and ’70s (when the Giants stunk and also abandoned New York for North Jersey). Of course, toward the end of their lives, Steinbrenner and Mara enjoyed complete 180-degree reversals in both reputation and legacy. Both died beloved. Dolan laughed at that and roared: “See? They’ll love me when I’m dead!” — an observation that at the time he asked be kept off the record, but one he paraphrased to Michael Kay on the radio not long ago. It is simpler and less tragic than that. Steinbrenner and Mara were preceded in death by the kind of success that serves as the greatest eraser in sports. Think about the last time there was a spasm of outrage about the Wilpons, who used to be right there with Dolan at the front of the list of disliked owners. Two playoff runs are better than a gallon of Wite-Out when it comes to editing an owner’s standing. And it beats the prospect of an elevator fight.