The Boss and the Bronx: Remembering George Steinbrenner's Turbulent Reign

In January 1973, a Cleveland shipping magnate named George Steinbrenner and a group of partners purchased the New York Yankees from CBS for 8.8 million dollars. What followed over the next three decades was the most spectacular, volatile, and compelling ownership tenure in American sports history, and Mike Vaccaro's new book, The Bosses of the Bronx, tells it with the knowing voice of someone who was sitting courtside for most of the drama.

Vaccaro, who spent over two decades as the New York Post's lead sports columnist, had a uniquely close vantage point from which to watch the Steinbrenner dynasty unfold. The book opens with a memorable anecdote: a 3:30 in the morning phone call from Steinbrenner himself while Vaccaro was covering the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego. Steinbrenner was driving to the Yankees' spring training base in Tampa, three time zones away, and still called his columnists directly for a chat. He was, by most accounts, quite a character to deal with.

The book recounts Steinbrenner's remarkable ability to bounce back from self-inflicted wounds. He was suspended from baseball for two years in 1974 after making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, then given a lifetime ban in 1990 for paying a gambler to smear Dave Winfield, one of his own star players. Both times he found his way back into the sport, and both times he picked up exactly where he had left off, running the Yankees with the same relentless, micromanaging intensity.

The central relationship of the Steinbrenner era was the one between George and his manager Billy Martin, who served five separate spells at the Yankees helm. Theirs was a partnership built on mutual contempt and an absolute inability to tolerate losing. They both hated losing more than they liked winning, Vaccaro writes, and it was their driving fossil fuel. Martin reportedly came within one conversation of a sixth stint before his death in a Christmas Day car crash in 1989.

One of the book's most revealing moments concerns a Burger King promotion from the 1980s. The fast-food chain had produced Yankees player cards featuring a Whopper, fries and shake, but had omitted Lou Piniella from the lineup. Twelve-year-old Hal Steinbrenner, George's son and future Yankees owner, spotted the error, contacted Burger King, and the resulting Piniella card became a collector's item. Steinbrenner Sr took note of his adolescent son's commercial instincts on the spot.

Vaccaro handles the sheer scale of the Steinbrenner era with skill, moving from the early struggles through the Reggie Jackson years, the Bernie King era, and the Derek Jeter-led dynasty that closed out the Boss's time in charge. Under Steinbrenner's watch, the Yankees won seven World Series championships. The team became the most valuable and recognisable sports franchise on the planet.

The book is at its best when Vaccaro leans into his journalist instincts. His editor advised him to write each chapter like a newspaper column: conversational, interesting, and fun rather than a dry recitation of dates and results. It is advice he takes thoroughly to heart, and the result is a book that captures not just what happened in the Steinbrenner era, but what it felt like to cover it from inside the storm.