George Steinbrenner, Not a Hollow Man

steinbrenner

Sports Saturday

Mistah Steinbrenner—he dead.

So I imagine T. S. Eliot announcing the death of the legendary Yankee owner this past week. That’s because, if one goes by Eliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” one could not say that “the Boss” was “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” In fact, an adjective that people have been applying to Steinbrenner is “colorful.”

Eliot begins his poem with a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” The line is delivered contemptuously by a Congolese servant and seems (so the narrator thinks) to be an inadequate eulogy for a man who at one point seemed to embody the hopes and ideals of the British empire before becoming utterly and thoroughly corrupt. Eliot is plugging into a key theme in Conrad’s book, seeing Kurtz, for all his faults, as a big man who at least faced up to what he did. Conrad and Eliot practically say, “Better this than the hollow and stuffed scarecrows we have become today.”

To be sure, Steinbrenner would have had to be pretty awful to be compared to Kurtz, who committed acts of unspeakable horror. (Conrad is vague about the actual acts, encouraging us to fill in the blanks with the worst we can imagine. We do know that somehow a number of heads get stuck on a number of stakes.) Steinbrenner apparently treated all of his employees horribly (with the exception of the players) and was twice banned from baseball—once for giving Richard Nixon secret donations, once for hiring a hustler to dig up dirt on David Winfield, the Yankee slugger who was on the outs with him.

Here’s a great quote about Steinbrenner reported by New York Times columnist Gail Collins:

A friend just sent me a quote from Harvey Greene, the former Yankees PR director: “The phone would ring in the middle of the night and you knew it was either Mr. Steinbrenner or a death in the family. After a while you started to root for a death in the family.”

By the way, I see from recent news reports that Steinbrenner’s billionaire heirs will be paying no inheritance tax—thanks to the tax cuts passed in the early years of the Bush administration.

On the plus side, Steinbrenner apparently was a very charitable man, and (as everyone points out) his fierce commitment to winning turned around a stumbling franchise. During his tenure the Yankees won an astounding 11 American League Pennants and 7 World Series trophies. Furthermore, he made it a delight to root against the Yankees.

In his poem Eliot says that he will be afraid of looking into the eyes of those who came before, the Kurtzes and (perhaps) Steinbrenners, because they at least accomplished something. No shadow fell between between their ideas and their realities, their motions and their acts, their conceptions and their creations, their emotions and their responses, their desires and their spasms.

Whereas now we live in a dead land, a cactus land, a valley of dying stars. The world will end, Eliot predicts, not with a bang but a whimper.

Is this fair? It’s interesting to watch New York Times columnists David Brook and Gail Collins wrestle with the issue of Steinbrenner. Brooks is normally impatient with large egos and yesterday launched into a diatribe against Mel Gibson, calling him a quintessential narcissist. Yet he admits to a soft spot for the Yankee owner. He acknowledges that Steinbrenner was “the personification of the tough, obnoxious, imperious, hyper-demanding, win-at-all-costs business owner.” But at least he wasn’t a “tepid non-entity” suffering from “a lack of spirit.”

Collins admits that Steinbrenner was fun to watch. We are fortunate, she says, that he “had the good sense to park his ego in a place where it couldn’t do any harm.”

In the decade following the publication of “The Hollow Men,” we would have a number of figures on the world stage who were indeed colorful and overrode any number of shadows that got in their way: Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini.  Colorless bureaucrats look pretty good by contrast.  “The Hollow Men” may work as a defense of flamboyant sports owners, but it can also be used to celebrate enterprising tyrants.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.