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Martin walked into the clubhouse early in spring training 1980, looked his callow collection of players in the eye and, in a fiery oration, told them: "You are going to be winners. You're good enough to win and I'm going to show you how." What a joke. Only Billy Martin would have been crazy enough to believe it. But then. Billy Martin's entire life has flown in the face of the odds. Dad was a Portuguese fisherman from Hawaii, Mom an Italian from West Berkeley. His grandmother took one look at her daughter's newborn son and pronounced him "bellissimo." Though his ears and nose were huge for his head, the description stuck, and he became known as "Billy."
He grew up a tough kid in a tougher neighborhood during the Depression. The price of failure was written in defeated faces on the breadlines, so a boy learned to hate losing. He also learned to use his fists, especially when the kids called him by his other nickname, "Banana Nose." One day his mother heard that there might be another woman in her husband's life. Mrs. Joan Downey, now 79, recalls with undiminished pride: "I went over and beat the hell out of her. I came home, took all his clothes and threw them out on the street. Then I took a hand mirror and I broke every window in his car." His father drove off in what was left of it, never to return. She also says: "If I were manager, I'd be tougher than Billy, for Christ's sake."
Baseball in those days was a lot like the streets: survival required guile and a mean streak. A pitcher was not fined for throwing a brush-back then. Fights on the field and waist-high slides were common. It was the perfect game for a street fighter.
He learned from the oldtimers, going to workouts with players from the Class AAA Oakland Oaks when he was still in high school. Cookie Lavagetto, who had won fame as a Brooklyn Dodger, was his roommate when he joined the Oaks in 1948 and Casey Stengel was the manager. From them he learned to scratch the most from his rather limited skills. A year after Stengel went to the New York Yankees, he brought the brash kid up to the big team.
As a Yankee, Martin was a minor light among some of baseball's greatest stars. Joe DiMaggio cheered him from the on-deck circle when he took his first major-league at bat. His roommates through the years were Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Mickey Mantle. "He wasn't a good player," recalls Mantle. "He had to hustle his ass off to stay on the team." Martin did become a good clutch player, a lifetime .257 hitter who came through when it counted: in five World Series, he averaged .333, winning the Series M.V.P. in 1953 after hitting .500.
More important, he sat at Stengel's side, learning the game from one of its managerial geniuses. Says Martin: "Stengel provided the psychology. [Dodger Manager] Charlie Dressen showed me brilliance. He didn't know how to communicate with people, though, and I learned from that too. [Yankee Coach] Frankie Crosetti was an astute observer of the game. He taught me how to act. Cookie Lavagetto gave me warmth. But I think I manage like I played."