Gator Read online

  Now Lem had one final decision. He could leave in Goose to face Yaz, who had gotten that big hit against him in the eighth. Or he could bring in Sparky for the last out. Sparky had been our closer in ’77 and won the Cy Young. But when George brought in Goose in ’78 and gave him the job, Sparky got diminished. Sparky, however, unlike Goose, was a lefty. It would make sense to bring him in to face Yaz, a lefty. Yaz owned Goose, but Sparky owned Yaz, holding him to a .147 batting average in their careers. Sparky was getting ready in the bullpen for just this moment. Lem didn’t budge. He left in Goose.

  I’m not sure it was the right decision. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes the right decisions don’t pay off and the wrong ones pan out. Who knows. But it worked. Yaz popped one high into the air down the left-field line. Nettles settled under it right by third base. He waited and closed his glove.

  We jumped all over one another on the field, elated. Yet it was a somewhat subdued celebration because the game had taken so much out of us. The season had taken so much out of us. We were physically drained. It had taken every one of us in this traveling Bronx circus to get us to the playoffs. And tomorrow we had another performance.

  2

  WHO I AM AND WHERE I’M FROM

  During spring training before the 1977 season, we went to play a game against Grambling. That’s about a three-hour drive from where I grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, and it was a natural opportunity for my folks, Roland and Grace, to see a game. My father and I had spoken on the phone, and I’d explained that I’d be able to spend some time with them. Spring games were very informal. It’s not like there was a real dugout, just a fenced one, and after a few innings you could go hang out on the grounds and do what you wanted if you weren’t playing.

  “Want me to cook anything?” my father had asked. I could taste Louisiana home cooking on my tongue. We discussed the various menu options. But I knew what I wanted. I had a couple of rabbits that I had hunted stored away in the freezer, saved for rabbit stew. It was the perfect dish, and we could cook it up right by the field.

  Sure enough, on game day my dad arrived at the ball field and set up his pot beneath a big oak tree. At some point George Steinbrenner rolled up to the field in his limo. I watched him having a conversation with Billy before a strange look came over his face. Sniff. He looked left, then right, trying to identify the source of the smell that caught his nose. Sniff.

  Mr. Steinbrenner and I hadn’t always gotten along so well at this point. Mainly, he had wanted to know why I hadn’t done anything of note, while everyone around him kept telling him about the fireballing lefty from Louisiana who the Yankees would be crazy to trade away. Still, I went up to him and asked him if he’d like to meet my parents—the source of the aroma that I could tell he was thinking about. So I took him over and introduced them.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Guidry, how do you do?” Steinbrenner said. “And what smells so good?”

  “Well,” my father said, “I’m cooking Ron his favorite, rabbit stew. We’ve got plenty, if you’d care to join us.”

  “I’d love to try some.”

  George proceeded to sit his ass down. He filled up his plate three times and nearly ate the whole damn pot. Boy, did he love it. If you’ve ever had traditional, fresh, Cajun rabbit stew, you’d probably do the same. Especially if it’s a little cool out, it just hits the spot. Even if it’s warm out. George thanked my parents for the meal and began walking away. Before he was out of earshot, he said to me, “Oh, by the way, if you don’t bring this stew next year for spring training, don’t bother coming.”

  And so I did just that every February for the rest of his life. I think he refused to eat any rabbit stew that wasn’t Guidry rabbit stew. Even in his older years, after I had retired, even if he was in a meeting, once he saw me he’d get that look on his face he had the first time he smelled that aroma, and he’d chase everybody out of the meeting and say to me, “Got my stew?”

  * * *

  —

  George wasn’t the only person who got to know me and my roots through Cajun delicacies. Quickly it was the entire team. Whenever we’d play road games in Texas, my mom and dad would come to Arlington for the three or four games we’d play there. Daddy would always bring some food to cook for us. One time (in addition to the stew) he asked if I’d like anything else and I suggested he stop by the seafood place and get some frog legs for him and me to fry up. He got a couple dozen, and I didn’t finish them all, so I brought the rest to the ballpark, planning to eat them after the game.

  Well, I wound up having to share one with anybody who caught a whiff of them. They loved them. So the next time we went to Texas, Daddy invited a few of the guys to join us. All of a sudden, by 1978, he was hauling three hundred frog legs to Texas and practically the whole team was joining in.

  Fast-forward to the 1990s, when I was going back to spring training as an instructor with the team. The great thing was that by a certain point, it felt like a reunion. Mickey Rivers, Graig Nettles, Goose Gossage, Willie Randolph, and others would all be back in Florida. So, of course, they eventually started saying, “Why don’t you bring us down some of those frog legs for all of us to fry up next year?”

  In time even the great Yogi Berra, who became my closest companion during spring trainings, grew to love them, even if in typical Yogi fashion he was a bit stubborn about it. I had brought a lot of them into the coaches’ room one day for all of us to share and everybody started chowing down. Goose grabbed a handful and so forth, but not Yogi, in spite of everyone’s encouragement.

  “No, no, no,” he kept saying.

  We were supposed to eat at this place called the Rusty Pelican after the game, one of Yogi’s favorites. I said, “Yogi, we’re not going to the Rusty Pelican tonight if you refuse to try even one of my frog legs. You’re going to eat a bologna sandwich in your hotel room in that case.”

  So he reached in. He nibbled a little bit. He nibbled a little more. He nibbled on the rest of it. He put the clean bone down. Sure enough, he stuck his hand back in the tray and grabbed as many as he could. Needless to say, we didn’t have to go to the Rusty Pelican for dinner that night.

  At the same time, you start to find out it’s not just the coaches who want some. One day, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera came over. Both of ’em were giving me a look.

  “We heard you were cooking frog legs for the coaches.”

  “We’re coaches, you’re players.” I was teasing. So I cooked a dozen up for Mo. And a dozen for Jorge. It became an annual thing. Later with C.C. Sabathia, too.

  What started with my bringing a small ice chest of food down to Florida every year had become so much I couldn’t fit it all in one freezer. I always had to borrow space in Goose’s freezer at the hotel. But the rabbit stew, can’t let that out of my sight, or it’ll all be gone. So the rabbit stew, that stays in mine.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t tell you about who I am without giving you a taste of where I’m from. Louisiana made me who I was, who I am, who I will always be. My two nicknames—Gator and Louisiana Lightning—are fitting because they pay tribute to my Cajun upbringing and my home state. It’s a region of the country with a unique culture, historically and today: the cooking, the dialect, the terrain, the values. And it has never stopped being part of me. I have played home games at Yankee Stadium my entire career, but Lafayette has never stopped being my home.

  * * *

  —

  My baseball career began in secrecy during the summer of 1958 in Lafayette. I was seven. I had never played. I didn’t know yet that I loved the game. But I had taught myself how to throw, just throwing rocks by myself. Throwing a baseball isn’t too different from throwing a good-sized rock.

  The local team practiced at a playground on my street, about five blocks from my house. My mom wouldn’t let me go farther than the next block. I kept telling myself, “One o
f these days, I’ll just go find the field myself and not say anything.” And that’s exactly what I did. I told my mother I was going to my grandmother’s house. She and Pop, my grandfather, lived in the house next to ours. Then I told my grandmother I was going to the grocery store at the end of the block. I walked all the way down the street, then cut back and kept walking until I found the playground.

  I saw a bunch of kids fielding and a guy hitting balls to them. I kept walking until I passed all of them. I walked across the back of the field. My plan was to walk around them, then go back to where I’d started and head back home. All I wanted to do was check it out. But as I crossed the back of the outfield, the coach hit a ball to an outfielder, who missed it. The ball rolled to my feet.

  Everyone screamed. “Throw the ball back!”

  So I threw it back, past the kids in the field, past where the coach was standing. The coach started jogging toward me. I figured I had done something wrong, so I took off running away from him. He hollered after me to stop, then he asked me if I wanted to play ball. I told him who my dad was, and it turned out he knew my dad. The coach called him, they talked, and later I told Dad the story.

  A couple of days later I was practicing. I didn’t have a glove, so my dad bought me one. It cost fifteen dollars, which wasn’t cheap back then. The only thing was, we didn’t tell my mom. She didn’t want me playing, because she thought it was dangerous. Her brother, my uncle, had gotten seriously hurt playing as a kid. So I slipped out for our practices and kept quiet about playing. I finally had to tell her on the day of the first game. She wasn’t too happy.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how far back you’d have to go to find the first Guidrys in Louisiana, who came from Nova Scotia. To my knowledge, we’d always been here, in Louisiana, in Cajun country. Cajuns trace their roots back to France. French Catholics left for Canada in the early 1600s and, a little over a century later, some made their way to Louisiana. At some point, that included both my parents’ families. And beginning on August 28, 1950, that included me.

  To so many, Cajun culture means food. Boudin. Gumbo. Jambalaya. Étouffée. Fried frog legs. Po’ boys. The foods I grew up on and learned how to cook are the same foods I eat and cook today. But I learned at an early age that Cajun culture isn’t just about the food. It’s about the people. It’s about families—large families—and how they spend time together and depend on one another. Everything we knew, we taught one another.

  My paternal grandfather, Gus, was one of eleven children. Like a lot of the families down here, ours was large and close-knit. Those eleven children had a lot of children, and a lot of them lived in Lake Arthur, a parish not far from us in Lafayette. We would have family gatherings at my great-grandfather’s place, and there might be easily fifty people or more. Everybody brought food. They’d make a big jambalaya; there was always enough.

  Most of my family were farmers. A lot of them farmed rice, some sugarcane. They didn’t have a lot of money, and they lived off the land. They hunted. They trapped. And even though I didn’t grow up on a farm, I learned to help when we visited. That’s how it was. We all pitched in. My second cousin, also Ronald Guidry (we called him Joe) was three years my senior and taught me the ropes. When we were small, he showed me how to drive a tractor and how to work the combine, a machine that harvests the crops. You learn it because you have to. That was their livelihood and their way of life. And because you’re part of the family, it’s part of you too.

  When Pop, my dad’s dad, was young, he decided farming wasn’t for him. He wanted to be a truck driver. When he was older, he became the dock foreman at the trucking line, running the shop. Dad worked on the railroad tracks, so he was gone every other day.

  Pop and my grandmother lived next door in a small, two-bedroom house with a wooden frame and a little porch out front. Beneath the garage was a wooden swing where we’d sit and talk. In the backyard, family would come over and barbecue.

  Pop taught me to hunt, which for us was not sport but a way of life. During the winter, during hunting season, we lived off the land, hunting duck, rabbit, dove, and quail. As a baseball player, I came back to hunting every off-season.

  I was eight years old the first time Pop and I went duck hunting. We were at one of our relatives’ places, out in a sunken blind in a rice field. It was early in the morning—some animals, like ducks and geese, he told me, are better to hunt in the morning. They go to feed and fly better for hunters. I had shot before, practicing in the woods, but never actually hunted. He gave me a crack-back barrel .410, a small-gauge shotgun. Small as it was, it was about as big as I was at that age.

  Pop pointed into the misty air and told me to get ready. When the geese fly over, he said, I’d be able to hear them. “There’s going to be a shadow in the fog,” he said. “You pick one out and you shoot.” Then we saw a bunch of silhouettes in the air. I fired. He fired.

  I saw the bird I aimed at fall, but it wasn’t dead. So I had to chase it for an extra twenty to thirty yards. By the time I got back to the blind, I noticed he had two in his hand. We shared a good laugh, because I only heard him fire once. Then, all of a sudden, we heard a couple more geese. He told me to take the one on the left and he would take the one on the right. Mine started to come right toward us. I fired, and it fell right by us in the blind. “At least I don’t have to go chase it this time,” I said.

  It was a small moment that made both of us laugh. For us, hunting wasn’t just for the practical purpose of feeding ourselves throughout the winter. In fact, you don’t even have to shoot anything to have a meaningful experience. It’s a shared experience. You go with your father or grandfather, your son or family members. You see a beautiful sunrise. You might see ten thousand ducks, or you might see just one. Who knows? A flock of ducks is pretty in and of itself. There’s no 100 percent certainty you bag anything. But it’s how memories are made, and for us, how a tradition gets passed on.

  * * *

  —

  Once I picked up hunting and baseball, the two activities neatly divided my year. Winter meant hunting. Summer meant baseball. If you had looked at me in my hunting gear, you might not have guessed I was one of the better players in baseball. Simply put, I was small. It’s one of the reasons my mother was so nervous about me playing.

  But I was always one of the better pitchers. The coaches would only pitch me against the other good teams in the league, and the league was small. This was the 1950s and 1960s, and the population of Lafayette was maybe forty thousand. There were maybe six to eight teams in each age group, and you played with the same kids every year.

  For a long time, baseball was just something to look forward to in the summer. I mean, I loved watching baseball on television, and was a big Yankees fan even as a kid—they were the best team in baseball. The Mick, and Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Roger Maris were my heroes. But I didn’t think about playing baseball in college or the big leagues myself. Our parish didn’t even have high school ball at the time, so I didn’t play in high school.

  I started playing American Legion when I was sixteen. I reached five feet eleven inches, the height I still am to this day, but I was rail thin. I might have weighed only 125 pounds. But the most important thing at this level was that I got first-rate coaching for the first time. I’d always been a good pitcher, but now I started to learn the intricacies of how to pitch.

  I was one of the best players in the area, and that started to change my outlook. Baseball had always been just a game. But now it was starting to open doors that would’ve never been open to me. My dad never graduated from high school, and here my arm was about to take me to college. When I went to play baseball at the University of Louisiana Lafayette (then known as the University of Southwest Louisiana), for the first time I began to dream of something bigger. Maybe, I thought, I’ve been looking at this all wrong.

  3

 
FORTY-SEVEN DAYS IN HELL

  I had driven down this highway many, many times before. I was on I-80 in Pennsylvania, not far from Harrisburg, in my brown Pontiac Grand Prix. There’s a sign that says five miles to the turnoff for I-81. If you turn right there, you head north to Syracuse. If you turn left, you head south. I was supposed to go right, to Syracuse, where the Yankees had their Triple-A team. Turning left meant going back home to Lafayette, Louisiana.

  Earlier that day the Yankees had split a doubleheader with the Kansas City Royals. Technically, I was still a New York Yankee, so I should say we. But it’s difficult to feel like you’re part of a team when you never play. For the forty-fifth and forty-sixth consecutive games, I sat on the bench, pulling splinters out of my ass. Why put me on the roster if I wasn’t going to play?

  When the second game wrapped up, I grabbed my jacket and headed back into the stadium. Our pitching coach, Bob Lemon, saw me and called me over. “Listen, I just have to tell you: When you get back in the clubhouse, they’re going to send you down to Triple-A.” Back to the minor leagues.

  “Why?”

  “You’re not pitching,” he said.

  Well, shit. That wasn’t up to me. It’d been forty-seven days since I last got put in a game. I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that I wasn’t pitching. I wasn’t even getting the chance to go out there and pitch badly. I just wasn’t pitching at all.

  There was no use in getting mad at Lemon. He had been a pitcher, a Hall of Famer. He knew what it was like. He was just doing his job. The guy who was managing, Billy Martin, he was the one who didn’t want me around. He just didn’t like me.