Bill Veeck (54 page)

Before the 1980 season began, Roland Hemond predicted that the team would come in second in the division, while Veeck predicted no lower than third.
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After an interview with Veeck during the last week before the season began, John Schulian exclaimed, “There's a school of thought that William Veeck Jr. invented euphoria.”

Veeck still had the ability to draw fans, even effecting some rare conversions. On April 20, 1980, Mike Royko, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
, played a surprise on the city of Chicago: he became a White Sox fan, claiming he could no longer put up with the Cubs, whose players were making fools of themselves in public. “I don't like these guys. I don't like whiners, I don't like people who go out and cry to the public about their problems when they have no problems. At a time when people at all levels of life are really having a hard time making it, you have a bunch of grown men, not even grown men, young men making these incredible sums of money and just crying and moaning. I don't care how unhappy they are, and what their business dealings are. I don't care how much money they make. I just don't understand people going public with this…. These guys are a bunch of jerks. So what am I doing here, wasting my time, cheering for jerks?”
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Royko went to Comiskey Park following the article and, accompanied by Veeck, walked out to the pitcher's mound to toss out the first pitch. He said: “It was an uplifting spiritual experience. Veeck bought me a couple of beers; Harry Caray welcomed me and bellowed ‘Holy cow' in my left ear, and I went home and learned the words to ‘Na, Na, Na Na.'”

Though the game had changed around him, Veeck would not change the way he operated. He was, for example, no less accessible now than he had been in Milwaukee decades earlier. The White Sox had gotten off to a
surprisingly good start, recalled Randy Johnson, then managing editor of the
Gadsden Times
, a small daily newspaper in northeast Alabama. “There were rumors the Sox were planning to trade one of their young pitchers for a bat. I had heard of Veeck's open-door policy and how people could call him and immediately be put through to him. As a fan, I called one afternoon and, sure enough, I was put directly through to him. I don't remember the receptionist even asking who was calling. Mr. Veeck put up with a nutty Sox fan from Alabama calling him, and he discussed the pros and cons of a trade with me. I was impressed with that.”
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Veeck also remained eager to help someone in a jam. Bob Greene of the
Chicago Tribune
devoted one of his columns to the plight of a thirty-five-year-old man with four children whose wife had left him, and who had been out of work for eight months. The gas had been cut off, they had no more hot water, and they were fast running out of food. The man told Greene that although he had never committed a criminal act in his life, he was about to turn to crime to save his children. “It was a story that belonged to another country,” Greene wrote, “in another century. But it was happening in the economic environment of the United States in 1980.”

The morning the column appeared, the phone didn't stop ringing as people called Greene to offer money. Greene explained that the man was not looking for handouts; what he really wanted was a job. Caller after caller admitted they could not provide one, but around noon the phone rang again.

“This is Bill Veeck,” the caller said. The two men had never talked before, and Veeck got right to the point.

“Well, I've got a big old ballpark out here and I could probably use another hand to keep things up. It's just manual labor, but if he wants to work why don't you send him out here and let us talk to him.”

Greene asked why was he doing this.

“Oh, I went through the Depression. I've seen this before. Sometimes when a fellow is in trouble you want to go out on a limb for him.”

About a week later Greene got a call from the
Tribune
's security that the man was downstairs. He was sent up and said to Greene that he would have been there sooner but that he had been hired on the spot and this was his first time off. The man tried to thank Greene, who said the person he should really thank was Bill Veeck.
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The man then began to cry. “I'll never
forget that somebody was willing to give me a chance. I didn't know that people like Mr. Veeck really existed anymore.”
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On July 2, White Sox broadcaster and former major leaguer Jimmy Piersall tried to strangle Arlington Heights
Daily Herald
sports reporter Bob Gallas as he conducted interviews in the clubhouse on Piersall's future as a White Sox coach. Piersall was both a television broadcaster and the team's voluntary outfield coach, but he had been going after both Veeck and La Russa on the air and the players had voted to have him removed from his coaching job. He had, in fact, called Mary Frances “a colossal bore” on the radio. Piersall's mental illness and eccentric behavior were well known when he was hired by WMAQ television to cover the White Sox.

Dr. Bruce Kraig, a professor in history and humanities at Chicago's Roosevelt University, had been invited to bring his family to dinner in the Bards Room that night. In the middle of the meal, two security guards suddenly burst into the room dragging a highly agitated and red-faced Piersall behind them. “Veeck jumped up and said, ‘I have to go and deal with this,' and that was the last I ever saw of Veeck,” recalled Kraig.
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Gallas, who according to eyewitnesses turned blue during the altercation, wound up going to work for the White Sox organization. Piersall lost his coaching job and spent four days in Illinois Masonic Hospital for exhaustion, went to Texas for a while, and then, two weeks after the incident, returned to the White Sox broadcasting booth. In his book, Piersall later acknowledged Veeck's role in the incident: “And it was Veeck who took care of me, calmed me down in his office, and got me taken to the hospital.”
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In late July 1980, Veeck traveled to Fort Worth, Texas, in a last-ditch attempt to sign shortstop Turner Gill, the White Sox' second-round pick in June's amateur draft. Gill wanted a quarter of a million dollars, which was well out of the club's price range. “He was the first draft choice I have personally visited that I was unable to sign,” Veeck commented. That he could no longer sign prospects was the final sign that keeping the team was no longer an option. Veeck returned to Chicago to tell his board that they could either sell now or watch the club go down the drain in little pieces. The board approved the sale.
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However, not only the ballclub was going down the drain; so was Veeck himself.
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist and Veeck confidant Bill Gleason,
for one, believed that health was a major reason for the sale: “He was overstretched, overworked, and totally exhausted.”
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On August 22, with the team in fifth place in the West Division the White Sox accepted an offer from Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. to purchase the club for $20 million. Described in the press as shy and dapper, DeBartolo was a successful developer of shopping malls from Youngstown, Ohio, who owned several racetracks, the National Hockey League's Pittsburgh Penguins, and the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, which he purchased in 1977 and immediately turned over to his son Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. The elder DeBartolo had attempted to purchase the Seattle Mariners and the Oakland A's but failed because of the opposition of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Ownership of the White Sox was to be shared with DeBartolo's daughter Rose Denise DeBartolo York.

Two days after the sale was approved, Veeck was hospitalized in Illinois Masonic Hospital with respiratory problems, which landed him in intensive care for several days. The day after being released, Tuesday, September 30, he climbed out of bed to attend the pre-game ceremony at Bill Veeck Appreciation Night, a tribute suggested by Gleason. Veeck, who had a 102-degree fever, was accompanied by Edwin Feldman, a White Sox physician, who remained at his side.

The crowd of 18,903 gave Veeck a roaring two-minute ovation. Veeck, who seemed embarrassed by the attention, told the fans: “This is evidence of what I knew from the first time I was here and what I've known since I've come back. The White Sox have the greatest fans in the world.”

He apologized for the club's failure to repeat its 1959 pennant triumph. After that he hesitated, and then, his voice thickening with emotion, he told the fans: “Thank you again for a lovely time and thank you for a delightful night.”

“The fans responded with another cheer,” reported Jerome Holtzman. “Even the veteran members of the press corps, listening in a jammed press box, joined in the ovation,” breaking a set of unwritten rules for the writers never to cheer from the press box, and never to cheer an owner.

Presentations followed, including a telegram from President Jimmy Carter, which read, in part, “You have had a key role in restoring a uniquely American game to its present high level of popularity. Wherever baseball is played, it bears the indelible imprint of your imagination and promotional skill.” And Veeck must have chuckled when a woman returned a mannequin that had been awarded to her four years earlier. “I want Mr. Veeck to have his dummy back,” she said with a laugh.

Ten minutes before the game began, Dr. Feldman escorted Veeck home, and so he missed the seventh-inning stretch and the chants and rhythmic clapping of “Bill Veeck! Bill Veeck!” that followed the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
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On September 9 word came from the hospital that Veeck was so appreciative of his care that he had invited all 2,000 hospital employees and their families to be his guests for two upcoming games with Minnesota.
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With the sale of the team still awaiting approval, the Sox under Tony La Russa finished the season with a 70–90 record, in fifth place, twenty-six games out of first place in their division.

On October 24, the American League met in Chicago and owners voted on the transfer of the team to DeBartolo; surprisingly, the plan got only eight of the ten votes needed for approval. DeBartolo seemed like the perfect owner, and he had the right credentials, including having served in World War II. American League president Lee MacPhail cited “absentee ownership” and DeBartolo's interest in thoroughbred horse racing as the probable reasons for the defeat.
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However, more important was Commissioner Bowie Kuhn's opposition, which was so clear and loud that an Illinois Republican legislator named Henry Hyde called for a congressional investigation into Kuhn's objection, which was allegedly because of DeBartolo's racetrack connections.
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DeBartolo announced that he would sell all three of his racetracks and spend 20 percent of his time in Chicago if that would satisfy Kuhn and the owners. One of DeBartolo's associates posited in an interview that the issues surrounding absentee ownership and the racetracks were a sham and that the real reason Kuhn was so adamant in his opposition was DeBartolo's Italian ancestry. He pointed out that after almost two years of attempting to buy the Oakland A's and discussing the possible purchase of other teams from other owners, it had become obvious that Kuhn's blacklisting of DeBartolo was based on his ethnicity.

Kuhn responded that the charge was “contemptible, irresponsible and false.” A small pro-DeBartolo, anti-Kuhn demonstration in Chicago ensued. Kuhn was careful in regard to what he said. He referred to DeBartolo as “not R.P.”—not the right people—in cocktail conversations with owners.
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At the Winter Meetings in Dallas, the American League met again about
DeBartolo's offer to buy the White Sox. It was defeated again, this time by a vote of 11–3, with only Oakland, Cleveland, and the White Sox standing by DeBartolo. Kuhn had persuaded the Rangers, Angels, Twins, and Yankees to change their votes. Veeck called the turndown capricious, ghastly, and unfair: “I have never been ashamed to be a member of the American League before. Today I am.”

DeBartolo, who had cried the first time he was turned down, now felt betrayed and angry. At a press conference he attested to his own character, including three and a half years of honorable service in World War II: “We live in a country where there are still prejudices, where some people create doubts about the viability of free enterprise. I have, and my family has, conducted ourselves in an honorable fashion… . And then to have 14 people, as well as a commissioner, to sit in judgment—it's impossible to conceive what has happened.”
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In DeBartolo's hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, Paul Humes, an official of the company that owned the local newspaper, the
Vindicator
, wrote an open letter to Bowie Kuhn in which he said that it was “inconceivable that the Dallas Debacle of Thursday, December 11, 1980, should have occurred. It is sad for the American way of life, the American League, and baseball in general that a fellow American with ‘Hall of Fame' credentials is treated in this manner. May God forgive your part therein.”
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To those who covered the event, it made no sense.
Dallas Times Herald
writer Blackie Sherrod was not the only one to point out, for example, that the New York Yankees were owned by George Steinbrenner, who lived in Tampa and owned a racetrack. Searching for answers, Sherrod brought up to DeBartolo the unspoken implication that he had something unsavory in his past, such as mob connections. “From the snatches of conversation I have heard and from the innuendos,” DeBartolo said to Sherrod, “I have come to the conclusion they didn't think I was ‘kosher.' Well, my family has four banks, three racetracks and a pro football club, and we've been checked every way.” Sherrod added that the National Football League had a checking system that rivaled the CIA's, and that DeBartolo was clean, a fact verified by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle himself.
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