Profiles in Leadership by Walter Isaacson

Author:Walter Isaacson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

MR. MCGRAW

Kevin Baker

THEY CALLED HIM THE LITTLE NAPOLEON, AN ODDLY REDUNDANT nickname that was nonetheless apt. He led his teams with a passion that might—literally—leave your city razed to the ground before he was done. They called him Mickey Face and Muggsy, names that reflected the America in which he lived and the vast ethnic tides that swept across it. And they called him Mr. McGraw for the immeasurable respect they always had for him.

In the long history of baseball, there has been no one else like John Joseph McGraw. No other great player in the modern game went on to become a great manager. In addition, he was the outstanding scout, general manager, and part owner—all at the same time—during most of his thirty years with the New York Giants. No one else ever ran his team with so much calculation or was so given to uncontrollable rages—until the calculation, and the rages, became all but impossible to tell apart. No one ever got into so many fights, fistfights, with opponents, teammates, friends, fans, sportswriters, umpires. No one ever did so much for his players or rode them so hard and so unfairly. No one ever lived so close to scandal and disgrace for so long yet came away from it all so universally admired.

Ferociously loyal, he was capable of betrayal. Blunt to the point of rudeness, he could dissemble with the best of them. Able to do everything there was to do around a ballpark, simultaneously filling jobs that it would take an entire front office to do today, he played a key role in the blunders that eventually doomed his beloved team.

It is impossible to think that anyone like him would be allowed to walk around free—and unmedicated—today, much less manage a major-league baseball team. He had an anger problem. He had impulse control problems. He had an eating problem and a drinking problem. He liked to bet on anything that moved, and he consorted with gamblers and known underworld figures. All was forgiven, if it was not simply overlooked in the first place.

“The idea is to win,” he liked to say, and in the end he did, 2,763 times, more than all but one other man who ever managed. That man was Connie Mack, who also bested McGraw head to head in two of three World Series. Yet Mack himself offered the ultimate tribute: “There has been only one McGraw, and there has been only one manager—and his name [is] McGraw.”

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