You're supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things, Man, that's hard to do, And if you don't, they'll screw you, And if you do, they'll screw you too. - Warren Zevon, "The Ballad of Bill Lee".
When some of the participants in today's Eamonn Coghlan-Neil Cusack Marathon Golf Classic gathered for dinner in Boston the other night, the chairman of the boards, who had just arrived from Dublin, was still opening his stateside mail.
A fan had sent to be autographed an old photograph of the youthful Coghlan leading the 1,500 metres at the 1976 Olympics. After glancing at the picture, Bill Lee fished from his wallet an old baseball card dating from his days with the Montreal Expos. "Look, Eamonn." He handed it across the table. "We both played in the same stadium."
Twenty-five years ago, Lee, then a member of the Boston Red Sox, had returned from Mainland China, which he had visited as a member of a delegation of radical American athletes, a trip frowned upon as much by the US State Department then as a similar exercise would be this week.
Nearly two decades after he pitched his last major league game, Lee has been back in the news this week, largely as the result of his intemperate response to the just-published autobiography of New York Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who had been Lee's last manager at Fenway Park.
The re-awakening of the dispute after all these years has been a godsend to sports writers across the country, who have been only too happy to fan the flames of the re-kindled Spaceman-versus-Gerbil wars.
All you need to know about Lee and Zimmer could probably be gleaned from their respective book jackets. On the cover of Lee's 1984 new-age paean The Wrong Stuff, he is throwing from the pitcher's mound clad in a bulky astronaut's suit.
On the cover of Zim: A Baseball Life, published last week, the pudgy little ex-manager's Yankee togs are topped off with an infantryman's combat helmet, and from the bulge in his cheek it is apparent that he is happily indulging himself with a plug of chewing tobacco. The Spaceman and a few like-minded Red Sox had their philosophical differences with Zimmer, although, contrary to popular belief, it was Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins and not Lee who christened Zimmer "Buffalo Head".
"The buffalo is the dumbest animal known to man," explained Jenkins. "The Indians used to hunt them by driving one off a cliff. All the rest would follow."
Lee's sobriquet for his manager, on the other hand, was, he now claims, not even maliciously intended. John Schulian, now a Hollywood producer but then a Chicago Tribune columnist, had described the diminutive New York manager Billy Martin as "a mouse practicing to be a rat," and Lee recalls that the question was put to him: "If Billy Martin is a rat, what is Don Zimmer?"
"Hmm." Lee recalls thinking. "Zim has a fat face, he's always smiling and chewing on something, and kids love him. He's a gerbil."
I have to this day a 1976 group portrait of the Buffalo Head Gang - Lee, Jenkins, Rick Wise, Jim Willoughby and Bernie Carbo. They had instructed the photographer to shoot the picture in a hurry, because they'd never be in the same room together again.
The Red Sox had won a pennant the year before Zimmer was installed as manager, but, prophetically, over the next three years he presided over the dissolution of the Buffalo Heads, scattering them all over the American League before he himself was fired.
On the spring day Wise was traded, Lee left a candle burning in protest on the manager's desk. When Carbo was sold to Cleveland, Lee tore off his uniform and stormed out of Fenway Park, announcing a retirement that lasted all of two days.
The Spaceman-Gerbil feud reached its zenith, though, in 1978, the year the Red Sox blew a 12-game lead and then lost to the hated Yankees in a one-game playoff for the pennant.
The monumental collapse was effected after the manager had banished Lee to the bullpen, even though the eccentric lefthander's 12-4 lifetime record is to this day the fourth-best among the thousands of pitchers who have faced the Yankees over the last century.
Zimmer went on to manage the Cubs, Padres, and Rangers before slipping into his current sinecure as "bench coach" for the Yankees.
All of which was more or less ancient history until "Zim" appeared on the bookshelves a couple of weeks ago. In his new book, the Gerbil described Lee as "a jerk," and said he was the only man he'd ever met in baseball he wouldn't allow into his home.
Lee responded on ESPN radio suggesting Zimmer intentionally lost the '78 pennant race and had been rewarded by a "cushy" lifetime job with the Yankees as a result of the "fix".
"Bill Lee is a scumbag, the scum of the earth," sputtered Zimmer upon hearing of Lee's comments. "He's saying I'm taking shots at him? He's got guts saying that. I'm full of bullets from all the shots he's taken at me."
Does Lee actually believe that Zimmer intentionally threw the season? "Of course not," he said in the light of day. "For one thing, he's not smart enough to do that. But I do think he blew the pennant by allowing personal differences to dictate the way he ran the ball club."
Many astute Red Sox fans of the era would subscribe to that theory as well. In the meantime, even as the Spaceman and the Gerbil are back at one another's throats after all these years, Lee has probably accomplished something no one would have thought possible just a couple of weeks ago.
Zim: A Baseball Life is headed for its second printing.
