Review: Who's the Boss?

"All Roads Lead to October"
by Maury Allen
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction/Sports
320 pages

July 12, 2000
Web posted at: 12:43 p.m. EDT (1643 GMT)

by L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- Anyone who follows baseball even casually has been amazed, amused and mystified by the antics of George Steinbrenner. The owner of the New York Yankees has made no secret about what he thinks of his team, whether good or ill. He has averaged about one manager firing per year since he bought the team in 1973. During the dog days of the 1980s, when the Yankees didn't make many headlines with their on-field play, Steinbrenner filled the publicity vacuum. A book about what makes him tick would be a must-read for baseball fans.

"All Roads Lead to October" is not that book.

Sportswriter Maury Allen has compiled more than 25 years' worth of memories and anecdotes from his years covering the Bronx Bombers during the Steinbrenner era. From his vantage point on the New York Post, Allen has had ample opportunity to observe and analyze the Yankees owner. But even though the subtitle of his book is "Boss Steinbrenner's 25-Year Reign over the New York Yankees," Allen offers few insights about the inner workings of the man at the helm.

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That's not to say the book isn't fun to read. It is. Allen is a font of stories about players and games. "All Roads Lead to October" brims over with chatty gossip -- from the Fritz Peterson/Mike Kekich wife-swapping episode, to the clubhouse furor surrounding Reggie Jackson, to Billy Martin's bouts with the bottle and the occasional bar patron. Steinbrenner is a major figure in the book. But in the end, he remains as enigmatic as ever.

There are a few telling moments about Steinbrenner. Allen touches lightly on his pre-Yankees career -- small-college athlete, a stint coaching football, running the family business under his demanding father. The day after he bought the team, Steinbrenner was invited to lunch by sportscaster Howard Cosell at New York's exclusive "21," a restaurant that had never granted him a coveted lunchtime reservation. "The Cosell table at high noon," Allen writes, "was in the center of the room. That spot, that lunch, that ego-stroking afternoon only cost Steinbrenner $10.3 million. Oh yeah, he also got the Yankees for that money -- to go with the lunch."

Then there's the courtship of Reggie Jackson, the most celebrated of the first batch of free-agent baseball players. Steinbrenner coveted Jackson, and courted him assiduously. The negotiations came to fruition in Chicago on Thanksgiving morning in 1976. Steinbrenner personally made the deal. It meant cooling his heels in a hotel lobby, waiting for a summons from Jackson. Allen records the way the owner remembers that day. "I was alone in that lobby Thanksgiving morning. I felt like some little kid as I waited for my time to call. I kept thinking how I had promised my kids I would be home for Thanksgiving. This seemed more important."

What sort of man would skip a family holiday for the opportunity to enrich a baseball player beyond the dreams of avarice? Allen offers no answer. Indeed, it's hard to figure out whether the writer even likes his putative subject. That ambivalence helps make "All Roads Lead to October" somewhat unfocused. Allen's account is arranged more or less chronologically. But it rambles off on tangents about the earlier history of the team (Boston fans will quickly tire of his references to "The Curse of the Bambino") and about the life of the sportswriter (including the author's fierce rivalry with columnist Dick Young). He's even a bit fuzzy about the math. Steinbrenner is in his 28th year of ownership, not his 25th. (To be fair, he has been suspended twice, but he didn't lose ownership either time.)

"All Roads Lead to October" takes the reader into the locker rooms and hotel lounges that are the natural habitat of the major league baseball player. It's full of the kind of stories that go with press box hot dogs and after-hours beers. But it falls short of providing an all-access pass to the New York Yankees, because it ventures so rarely into the owner's box.

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