Daily Archives: January 17, 2008

Soul Survivor

It is a cold, gray December morning. Ray Negron pulls up in front of Yankee Stadium in a white GMC, a leased car he uses when he’s in New York. He is fifteen minutes late. The car is messy—Reggie Jackson would not approve.

With him is Aris Sakellaridis, a stocky, square-jawed retired corrections officer in his mid-forties. He is originally from Washington Heights. “I’m a ghetto Greek,” he says with a laugh. Aris is wearing a gold Georgia Tech baseball cap and a white jump suit with a thick navy blue strip with gold trim down the side. Around his waist is a black fanny pack. Sakellaridis lives on a pension; he wrote Retired Yankee Numbers, a glossy picture book illustrated by the caricaturist, John Pennisi. Sakellaridis hands me his card, which features an illustration of himself by Pennisi. Sakellaridis is smiling broadly wearing a baseball uniform with the number 69.

Negron is on his way to speak at a community center and has agreed to make a slight detour to show me his old neighborhood in Hunt’s Point but he’s not sure exactly how to get there. “Outside of Yankee Stadium I don’t know shit about the Bronx,” he says. Negron tells me that a niece that he’s never met—the daughter of one of his estranged half-brothers—had recently contacted him through the Internet. He talks about future book projects and how he approaches his work with humility and sincerity, and he is annoyed that there is a perception that his intentions aren’t always genuine.

“You know what worries me honestly,” says Aris cocking his head to the side. “Steinbrenner, he ain’t in as good a health today from what you read. What happens when he goes? They going to get rid of Ray? But hey, Ray lives, man,” Aris continues. “He’ll be alright. Ha-ha-ha.”

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Real Life

When Reggie Jackson left New York, Ray Negron’s glory days came to an end. Now, he had to adjust to a more mundane reality, and a greater challenge—how to advocate for himself. Negron had defined himself by what he could provide to other, more famous men.

"Growing up is hard," says Negron. "In baseball, you are a kid forever. When I left the Yankees, I didn’t have the players to protect me anymore." Negron married his longtime girlfriend Barbara Wood in 1981; they got an apartment in Far Rockaway, had a son four years later, and were divorced before the end of the decade. "It was hard to give my heart and soul to a situation when I didn’t really want to be there," he says.

While he was with the Yankees, Negron gradually lost touch with his half-brothers who were caught up in the street life, junkies while they were still teenagers. "It wasn’t until the eighties that we got back together again," says Negron. "To them, I was wealthy. When they reached out it would be out of desperation or need. Then my brothers started having kids all over the place, and I couldn’t handle it, I couldn’t handle it." Negron is shy when talking about them because he doesn’t want to embarrass them. "They think that I think that I’m bigger than them. I mean, it becomes very tough because they are still your blood, you understand?"

Negron’s two cousins who had been with him the day he first met Steinbrenner, Edwin and Christopher Perez, died within a year of each other during the mid-eighties; Edwin, in what Negron calls "a gang-related incident," and Christopher, from AIDS, which he got through a dirty syringe. Negron was with Christopher the night Edwin was murdered in Brooklyn. They drove to the Perez home in Brooklyn and were greeted outside of the house by Christopher’s father, and a group of cousins and neighborhood friends.

"My uncle had a cardboard box in his arms filled with guns. He said, ‘Take one, let’s go.’ That wasn’t my style, so I stayed at the house with my aunt. ‘She’s going to need somebody to be with her,’ I said. I wasn’t going to get caught up in that. That wasn’t me. I loved Billy the Kid," he says remembering Martin, "but I wasn’t that Billy the Kid."

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