I covered the last game at the old Yankee Stadium for SI. Spent almost the entire time trailing Ray Negron, who at one point, gave a two-hour private tour of the place to a party of four headlined by Richard Gere. The filmmaker Barbara Kopple was part of the media swarm and she followed Ray and his group with her camera crew, hoping to get some footage of Gere. For his part, Gere was gracious and allowed her to film him some.

Well, Kopple’s ESPN documentary will air soon but it seems that Yankee president Randy Levine doesn’t much care for it. Which means, it might be pretty good, after all.

I was at the final game at Yankee Stadium and wrote a bonus piece for SI.com on what the night was like for Ray Negron:

It was just before one o’clock in the morning on Sept. 22, but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, Sinatra had finally stopped singing New York, New York, and organist Ed Alstrom was playing Goodnight, Sweetheart. The home team had won 7-3 in a game that meant nothing in the standings but everything in a deeper, gut-felt way. The Yankees would not be going to the postseason for the first time since 1993, yet they had drawn 4.3 million fans, including another capacity-plus 54,640 on this night. And now, as the last of them drifted out of the ballpark, it felt like closing night for a hit Broadway show.

Now it was just the clean-up crew swinging into action and a select group of others clinging to the night — players and their families, reporters, radio and TV personalities, cameramen, front office workers, the grounds crew and cops, lots of cops. People hugged and slapped hands and talked and laughed. Players scooped up dirt and grass and put them in paper cups and Ziploc bags. Grown men had their pictures taken at home plate, on the mound and sliding into second. It was like Never-Never Land — everyone was a child. Why would anyone want to go home, knowing they were the last precious few to soak in the Stadium? They stayed, stuck between history and the wrecking ball, until the head of security announced that it was time to leave.

Ray Negron was out on the field, right where he belonged, with the players and sportswriters. Ray had seen them all — from DiMaggio and Mantle to Reggie and A-Rod. He was there when they came to play at the Stadium and he was still there when they left.

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."

It wasn’t until he got a minor acting gig in Francis Coppola’s Cotton Club that Negron heard from his father again. "That meant something to him," says Negron. "All those years with Reggie and I never heard from him. But movies were different. Now, he thought I had money." Negron spent six months working on the Cotton Club at Astoria Studios in Queens, hanging around actors like Richard Gere, Gregory Hines and Nic Cage. "It was the greatest six months of my life. I thought I was going to be a star. But when the movie finally came out all of my scenes were left on the cutting room floor. There were a lot of cuts and edits with that movie, remember? You see me—don’t fucking blink—cause you see me walk from Richard Gere’s table for a second. Thank God they still had that shot."

Negron moved to L.A. briefly, had a small part in an early Andy Garcia movie, Liquid Sky, and the baseball movie, The Slugger’s Wife. He auditioned for the Spanish boyfriend in the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle, Easy Money, and the Tubbs role in the Miami Vice TV show. "When I did the reading with Don Johnson, who was just out of rehab, I couldn’t remember a line. He was so pissed off. It was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. I completely froze."

In 1984, Negron segued out of acting into the agent business. With a child on the way, he needed to find a way to earn more money. Negron’s first client was veteran outfielder Juan Beniquez, who was teammates with Jackson in California. He later represented Jose Rijo, Junior Ortiz and Ruben Sierra, and a handful of others. But Negron was small potatoes, the Broadway Danny Rose of Latin agents, unable to compete with the high rollers.

"I wasn’t the typical attorney-agent," says Negron. "The big agents had what I couldn’t offer. I didn’t have any money, I was poor. I didn’t have cars, I didn’t have the luxury offices on 5th Avenue. I was winging it. I was representing players out of my basement."

"Ray would get these guys started," recalls childhood friend, Jimmy Madorma. "Then they’d split for the big money."

But Negron did not begrudge Rijo when the pitcher left him after four years for a more prominent agent. "He just wanted to create a bigger life, one that I couldn’t give him," says Negron, "We are friends to this day."

In 1986, Negron took a job with the Yomiuri Giants, and served as a scout and a coordinator for the Japanese team. Negron would compile scouting reports of big league players—mostly veterans looking to extend their careers—who the Giants wanted to recruit. For the next seven years, Negron worked for the Giants, making two, two-week-long visits to Japan each year, where’d he’d escort players, including Lloyd Mosby, Jesse Barfield, and Mickey Brantley, and get them acclimated to the new culture.

By the late ’80s, Negron was a general manager in the short-lived Senior League in Florida when he met Brenda Bonini, a waitress at a country club. He moved to St. Petersburg, and the two were married. They had three children and though they are now divorced, they still speak regularly. Negron says, "I love the game more than the aspect of true romance. I’m a bachelor. I need to be a bachelor. With all my projects I don’t have the time. Girls want you to sit down and watch TV with them. I ain’t got time for that."

A few years later, Negron was introduced to Darryl Strawberry when the troubled slugger was suspended by the San Francisco Giants for substance abuse. Negron soon became involved with Strawberry, then later, Dwight Gooden, as they tried to rehabilitate their images and remain sober. "I was like their older brother," says Negron, who spent an entire year with Gooden in Florida, making sure he attended his A.A. and N.A. meetings.

"Dwight was difficult," recalls Negron, "he was much tougher than Darryl. He had a beautiful façade, but the disease had a strong hold on him. Whenever he’d call me a ‘motherfucker’ or a ‘cocksucker,’ or ‘I’ll beat your ass,’ or all that kind of shit, I never took it personally, because I knew that was the disease talking that wasn’t the person."

Negron acted as Dwight Gooden’s representative, but since he had never become an officially credited agent, the Players Association protested his role. When Gooden signed the contract papers in Steinbrenner’s suite at the owner’s Florida Hotel, however, Negron was right there with him. After the deal was completed, Steinbrenner turned to Negron and said, "Well, what are you going to do? You are a Yankee, and I think you should be a Yankee." And with that, Negron’s troubles with the union disappeared as he went back to work for the Boss for the first time in fifteen years.

Much had changed since Negron had last been in New York, but he was still important to Steinbrenner and he kept close tabs on Gooden and Strawberry. Today, Negron wears his World Series ring from 1996 (he also has one from 1978), which reads "Negron: Courage, Heart" on the side. "This ring represents the pain of that year with Darryl and Doc which was my true comeback from the standpoint of life."

Gooden and Negron lasted two seasons in the Bronx. When Gooden signed as a free agent with Cleveland, Negron was part of his contract, Tom Giordano made sure of that. A longtime scout of great distinction, Giordano got to know Negron while he scouted Gooden during a few minor league re-hab games at the end of the ’97 season.

"After the second time I saw Gooden pitch," said Giordano recently, "I was just so impressed with the way Ray talked about Doc. Then I saw them together and Doc absolutely trusted Ray, wouldn’t do anything without him. When I went to my boss John Hart and told him that Doc could help us as a back-of-the-rotation pitcher, I told him the catch was that we had to have Ray Negron included in the deal. As a matter of fact, I wanted Ray almost more than I wanted Doc."

"Ray had a reputation as a guy who got things done," says John Hart. "But the Yankees are different from other teams so people weren’t sure about him when he first came over. But once I got to know him, I got to trust him quickly. I like to be pro-active and Ray was a guy who knew a player had issues before anyone else. That was his defining quality for me. He was able to pick up problems before anyone else so we could address them quickly."

"Ray was somebody who had a good intuitive sense of what major league players were and what they needed," says Charlie Maher, the Indians team psychologist, who eventually made Negron part of his staff. "Ray was helpful not only in giving me feedback about which players might need help but also helping the players prepare for meeting with me."

Maher schooled Negron in his working methods—teaching athletes how to be comfortable being uncomfortable, how to separate themselves from their performance, etc—and Negron responded in kind. "He was particularly valuable with Latin minor leaguers. If there was a kid having trouble and I couldn’t get to them, Ray would go to Kingston, North Carolina or Columbus, Georgia and give me a report."

"Ray had been there," says Giordano, who goes out of his way to mention that Negron had an impact on all the players, white, black and Latin (as do Hart and Maher). "He knew what it was like to be a young kid just starting out in the game with nobody to look out for him. I think he took his own experience, his own failure as a player and used it as motivation to give young players some guidance. And they loved him. He saved a lot of guys who might not have made it otherwise, like Danys Baez."

"I consider him a baseball guy," says Hart. "He has a feel for baseball, a feel for people, a feel for the troubled player. There are so many dynamics in pro sports, and only a portion of it is connected with a player’s talent."

Negron worked for several seasons in Cleveland before moving with Hart and Giordano to the Texas Rangers where he served in a similar capacity with Don Kalkstein. He was especially close with Robbie Alomar, whom he had known since Robbie visited his father, Sandy, in the Yankee clubhouse in the mid-’70s. When Robbie Alomar was traded to the Mets in 2002 he lobbied the Mets to bring Negron in as a liaison capacity but was rebuffed.

Negron flourished under the guidance of Hart and company and earned the respect and trust of his employers. He also proved that he could succeed away from the Yankees. Still, Cleveland and Arlington were a long way from New York. "When he was with Cleveland," says Maher, "he was professional. I supervised him and he did everything I asked him to do. He never talked about the Yankees. But he’s a New York guy at heart. Hey, he grew up with the Yankees." It was impossible for Negron not to pine for the Yankees, no matter how productive or successful he was elsewhere.

In the summer of 2003, Negron was at the Stadium with the visiting Rangers. He had his youngest child Rickey with him and uncharacteristically let the boy slip out of his sight while they were in the press box. Ray found his son in Steinbrenner’s office wearing a new Yankee jacket.

"Boss, I can’t have him take that jacket," says Negron.

"He doesn’t work for the Rangers, you do!"

After the 2003 season, when Negron’s contract with the Rangers had expired, Negron went to visit the Boss one day in Tampa. According to Negron, Steinbrenner said, "When are you coming back to work for me?" And with that, Negron returned home once again.

Photographs appear courtesy Ray Negron.

Part Four, tomorrow

 

Ray Negron was only supposed to work a couple of games to re-pay his debt, but then one of the regular bat boys got sick, and in no time, Negron had himself a steady job. He moved on the field with the languid movements of a professional, his uniform fitting tightly, his stirrups pulled up just so. At 145 lbs, Negron was too skinny to be confused with a big leaguer though the players occasionally tried to pass him off as one of them when he was on the road with them, to get him laid. "You said it, not me," Negron squeals with delight, remembering today.

When the Yankees took batting practice, Negron was busy with the daily clubhouse chores, but he would sneak in a couple of swings in the batting cage or hang around at shortstop and take ground balls while the visiting team came to hit. One day, the Texas Rangers were in town and Negron was playing short against live bp when he made a couple of good fielding plays. Billy Martin, the Rangers manager, a man rarely without a fungo bat in his hand, was standing on the third base side of home plate. He turned his attention to the boy, motioned with his hand and then tossed a ball up and cracked a hard groundball at him.

"Billy noticed that I could play," Negron recalls. "Later, he introduced me to two of his middle infielders, Lenny Randle and Davey Nelson. Every time Texas came to town, I would ball boy down the right field line so I could hang with them. They taught me and to this day, I can honestly say that I’m still friends with both of them."

"I was impressed by his etiquette and his manners," recalls Lenny Randle today. "A lot of kids are annoying at that age, they just want stuff from you. But Ray wasn’t pushy, he was honest and had an innocence and genuine enthusiasm about him. He was the kind of little brother you wanted to have. Hey, when he was a teenager he was booking us to speak at the Y, at local Little Leagues for a couple of hundred bucks here and there. He had moxie."

The Yankees kept Negron when they moved across town the following year; the team played their home games at Shea Stadium while Yankee Stadium was being refurbished. Like their ballpark, the ’74 Yankees were a team in transition. Steinbrenner, general manager Gabe Paul, and field manager, Bill Virdon, were busy changing the culture of the organization. Flowers were no longer permitted on the secretaries desks in the front office. When Paul traded four well-liked pitchers in May to Cleveland for first baseman Chris Chambliss and two relievers, Yankee players moaned. Tough. Virdon drilled the outfielders mercilessly—the Yankees ran more in spring training that year than they had in years. The message was clear: the country club is closed.

By the middle of the summer, the Yankees, dubbed "The Band on the Run" by outfielder Elliott Maddox, were making a run for the division. The team adopted Negron as a good luck charm; Steinbrenner sanctioned the move. Ray was to travel with the team on all road trips. When Steinbrenner learned that Negron missed a trip to Chicago, he found the kid, got him to the airport and on the next flight out of town. It was the beginning of a relationship where Steinbrenner trusted Ray’s ability to ingratiate himself with the players and report back to him. In turn, Ray felt wanted, and was pleased to help the Boss.

Second baseman Sandy Alomar, picked-up in June from the California Angels, immediately took Negron under his wing. Ray regularly made diving plays for foul balls during the game, and was noticed in the broadcast booth. Bill White interviewed Negron several times on the Yankee pre-game show.

Old Timer’s Day was held at Shea that year and Negron arrived early. "My hero and my god was Mickey Mantle," recalls Negron. "Remember Old Timer’s Day was gigantic back then. DiMaggio was alive, so were Mrs. Ruth and Mrs. Gehrig, Casey Stengel." Mantle arrived late, with his cronies Martin and Whitey Ford. Some of the young players on the team were too shy to ask Mantle for an autograph so they sent Ray over instead. Mantle was telling stories in the auxiliary clubhouse, which was the Yankees home at Shea, and he signed a couple of balls for Negron. But the third time Ray approached, holding out a baseball, Mantle barked, "Get the fuck out of here with these baseballs."

Negron ran into a back room, devastated. "I was there crying," he remembers. "All of a sudden I feel a hand on my shoulder. It was Billy Martin. He said to me, ‘I saw what happened out there. Mick doesn’t mean it. Sometimes it’s tough because everyone is on him for autographs. Come back out here with me. We’re gunna talk to the Mick and you’re gunna apologize. Because if you don’t, you know what? Mickey will always have a hard-on for you.’ So he took me back over there and said, ‘Hey, Mick, this is the kid you told to get the fuck out of here.’ So Mickey laughs, cause Billy was saying it in a you-shouldn’t-have-done-that kind of tone. Remember, Billy was the leader. If Mantle, Ford and Martin were the Rat Pack, Billy was Frank Sinatra.

Negron mimics Mantle’s Oklahoma drawl. "’Well, damned Billy, how many times are they going to come up to me with baseballs?’ I said, "I’m sorry, Mr. Mantle." He smiled and that was it. And after that we always had a very nice relationship. I won’t say that we were friends per se. That’s a powerful word. Friends is a powerful word, you understand? But we were always very cordial to each other."

Negron, 18 now, had been an average high school student, and only applied himself in his senior year when he was faced with an ultimatum by Steinbrenner that he graduate or else not work for the Yankees. "I had a fear of taking tests," says Negron, who failed the written portion of his driving license exam four times before he finally passed. But he continued to play baseball in three different leagues, one in Long Island, one in Queens and the other in Brooklyn.

"I’m practicing with the New York Yankees and then I’m going to my league games and playing with a bunch of chumps, hey, you know I’m thinking I’m fucking Joe DiMaggio," says Negron. "I’m Bobby Murcer, I’m Lou Piniella. That’s why I hit so well in all the leagues I played in, and that’s why the scouts came to see me in those leagues, because I was a very confident kid."

Negron showed enough promise to be signed in the second round of the amateur free agent draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates in January, 1975. Dutch Duetch, the Pirates scout who had inked a thin kid from Brooklyn named Willie Randolph several years earlier, also nabbed Negron, a slick defensive infielder. "I had really good hands," says Negron. "I could really field."

Negron reported to spring training with the Yankees first, to work out before he joined the Pirates. His mother and step-father, his sisters and his girlfriend saw him off at the airport. "Everybody was crying," Negron told New Yorker writer Roger Angell that spring, "I’m not afraid of what is going to happen. I know I can pick it in the infield, so the only question is whether I can hit the pitching." The question was answered soon enough; Negron was cut from the Pirates Rookie A team in August, hitting just .143.

"I played terribly," he recalls. "I was scared. Defensively, I held my own. I just didn’t hit. I didn’t blow-out my shoulder, I didn’t break my dick, I didn’t twist my tongue, I just didn’t hit. No excuses. Guys always have a reason why they didn’t make it. I just couldn’t hit. Dutch Duetch later said to me, ‘You weren’t the same kid that I saw in those leagues in New York.’ And he was right. I was insecure in my ability. In my mind, I was like, ‘Who the fuck am I?’ A lot of times I’ve said to myself, ‘If I had psychologically prepared myself better I could have hit.’ But back then, it was always, ‘Who are you?’ Deep down, I didn’t think I was shit."

For the first time since he was 11, Negron knew that he was not going to be a major league ball player. It was, a "revelation, a kick in the ass." When he returned home, there was a letter from the Texas Rangers inviting him to join their A club. But instead of being encouraged, Negron became more anxious. "I got nervous to the point of ‘Why?’ I’m only going to go there an embarrass myself some more."

Negron stayed with his mother in Queens, too mortified to show his face back at Shea, where Billy Martin had replaced Virdon as Yankee manager. But Sandy Alomar had kept tabs on Negron’s minor league career and when it fell apart, he approached Martin, "He’s back in New York, and hasn’t left the house in two weeks."

Alomar managed to get a hold of Ray’s number. Then Martin called and said, "You little cocksucker, get down here tomorrow, I got something for you to do."

"Billy had a punching bag in his office," says Negron. "He taught me how to hit the bag. I decided to train so that I could try playing again. I figured if Texas wanted me, I could get my head in shape. When I went to spring training in ’76, the Yanks were going to give me a shot to stay on with the club. I had to make a choice: I could go to A ball with Rangers as a player or I could stay with the Yankees and work for them. I didn’t want to take the gamble, I wanted the sure thing. In my mind, I didn’t ever think I was going to be a major league hitter, so I stayed with Billy and George. Billy saw himself in me. The fact that I relied on my mom the way I did, that’s the way he was. ‘You are a nicer kid than I was,’ he’d tell me. ‘I don’t want you to get into the kind of trouble I got into. Even if I’m not with the Yankees you can always go wherever I am.’ And one day, the Boss and I were driving, and he saw that I was down. ‘I have plans for you,’ he tells me. ‘You never have to worry about a thing, not as long as I own the New York Yankees.’"

* * * *

When the ’76 season began, Negron tried to pitch batting practice, but he was so inept that back-up catcher Rick Dempsey threw a bat at him one day. Then he cursed Negron out to manager Billy Martin. "The next day, when I walked into the clubhouse," recalls Negron, "Pete Sheehy told me, ‘Don’t put on the uniform, you gotta go see Billy.’ I’m thinking, ‘I’m done.’ So when I walk in there, he says, ‘Take these boxes in the back—its video equipment. Learn how to use it, and when you learn how to use it, start filming the hitters and start filming the pitchers and show it to them.’" According to Negron, the Yankees were the first team to videotape their hitters. Though there was no art to it, no plan, it fit in perfectly with Steinbrenner’s football mentality of gaining advantages through technology.

"You could see that Ray was an attentive young man that wanted to learn about the baseball business." Lou Piniella said recently. "He was quiet. He listened well, and Mr. Steinbrenner had a particular liking for Ray."

Negron taught himself how to use the machinery. "I had to learn to be creative. I was always into the arts’n’ shit. I loved movies. I just made believe I was a film producer. We had one camera. I would go to different guys, like if a guy was slumping, or Lou Piniella, Lou would tell me what he wanted. And I would get it. Behind the plate, third base, whatever. Then I would show it to them the next day."

The Yankees won the pennant that year, on a thrilling ninth-inning home run by Chris Chambliss against the Kansas City Royals in the fifth game of the American League Championship Series, but were quickly dispatched by the defending World Champion Cincinnati Reds in four games. That winter, the first free agent draft was held and the Yankees got their first choice of pitchers, Don Gullet, a left-hander from Cincinnati, but lost out on their number one position player, infielder Bobby Grich. Martin pined for Oakland’s left fielder Joe Rudi. But Steinbrenner wanted somebody with more star appeal and he found his man in Rudi’s former Oakland teammate, Reggie Jackson.

Jackson’s arrival in New York began The Bronx Zoo years in New York, which brought championship rings and tabloid sensation. Martin immediately resented Jackson and the attention and money that Steinbrenner lavished on his new star. Thurman Munson, the Yankees’ rugged catcher and team captain, wasn’t thrilled about Jackson either. By the time spring training concluded, hardly any of the Yankee players even spoke to Jackson, with the exception of back-up catcher Fran Healey, a laconic guy who was not threatened or put-off by the superstar.

"I had very few people to talk to," remembers Jackson. "I just kind of gravitated towards Ray. He was Latin, I was part Puerto Rican; he spoke the language, I spoke the language. I’ve always spoken a broken Spanish. Talking to him helped me learn a little bit. We just hit it off. I guess we were two peas in a pod."

By the middle of the ’77 season, with Steinbrenner’s permission and Martin’s blessing, Negron became Jackson’s gopher away from the park.

"Reggie always liked a valet type of person to attend to his needs," Piniella recalls with a smile. "He chose Ray and Ray handled it very well."

"I knew that was my value to the owner," says Negron. "The Boss knew I was going to get a positive reaction from his superstar. The manager used me properly. I was a tool for him."

Jackson and Martin used Negron as a kind of salve, a buffer. "They trusted Ray," says Billy Martin Jr. "They would say things to him in confidence." Negron used to pick up Billy Jr. when he came to town to see his dad. "He was able to help put out those fires or at least keep them at low embers."

“Ray was the kind of guy who thought that everybody should get along,” says veteran New York sportswriter, Phil Pepe who covered the Bronx Zoo Yankees for the Daily News. “He tried to make peace as best as he could without being overbearing about it.”

When Martin wanted to convey something to Jackson, he’d send word through Negron. As awkward as the situation was, Negron handled it well; he was used to keeping his composure amidst antagonists.

Jackson provided Negron with extra cash and the opportunity to hang out with a real star. He paid Negron $500 a month, which is what Negron also received from the Yankees. "Financially I barely made ends meet," says Negron, "but," he raises his finger, "but, Reggie, for instance, had an endorsement deal with Volkswagen. Now you know Reggie ain’t driving no Volkswagen Rabbit. So I would have a Volkswagen Rabbit to drive around. When Reggie hit a home run and he’d get a package of Getty coupons. That would pay for my gas. Reggie was more than generous. A lot of the guys were more than generous with me. In essence, they took care of me, cause I took care of them.

"For instance, I always had Thurman in check. If I knew he was going to the airport, I’d offer to drive him. I’d offer to park his car. If it was a cool night, we’re in the dugout during the game and Reggie said to me, "Hey Ray, go get me a coffee.’ I’d get Reggie’s coffee and then I’d bring Graig Nettles back a coffee. I knew exactly how Nettles liked it, exactly how much sugar he liked, and that’s without him asking me. If you ask Ron Guidry, who was from that time, about Ray Negron, he’d say, ‘You know why I really love Ray, because if I grabbed him and threw him in a garbage bin, he knew how to take it.’ He threw me in the garbage plenty of times. Plenty of times. Cause we-were-hav-ing FUUUUN. We knew how to have Fuuun. In those days guys hung out better than they do today. On the road, a lot of times guys wouldn’t have to leave the hotel they’d just go room to room, and guys would be five, six in a room, playing cards, watching TV. I would be the guy who, in turn, would get the food and stuff and I loved doing that too, I’m not going to bullshit you, because it was a nice tip."

Negron provided Jackson—a new comer to New York—a streetwise perspective of the city. "He helped me with things that I needed," says Jackson. "I needed a cook, I needed to know where to park, I needed to know where to go eat. He took care of the phones, he took care of a lot of miscellaneous things to help me out. He took care of my house. After mid-season, it became kind of a big brother/younger brother kind of relationship because I was only nine, ten years older than Ray."

Jackson, in turn, showed Negron how to carry himself with care and respect. After the ’77 World Series, Negron bought a car with the bonus money given to him by Jackson. One day during the off-season, Reggie was headed to the Vertigo club to work out with his friend, Ahmad Rashaad, the star wide receiver. But Jackson didn’t feel like driving either of his cars–the Mercedes or the Rolls—so he asked Negron to drive him.

"He got into my car, which was parked outside on the street, and he saw it was dirty. He said, ‘Ray, if you want me to ride in your car, you’d better clean this motherfucker.’ He looked into my eyes and I saw that he meant it. He was the first guy I knew who made me care about my appearance, how I dressed, how clean I kept my house. He showed me the importance of caring about how you look."

Saturday Night Fever was released that summer and Negron was living his own version of the Borough-Kid-Making-it-Big-in-Manhattan fairy tale. "’If I’m the King of New York,’ Reggie would say to me, ‘then you’re the prince of the city.’ And I was."

Jackson lived on the corner of 79th Street and 5th Avenue. Negron was friendly with the neighbors, who included Cicely Tyson, Mel Brooks, and especially, Anne Bancroft, who used to chat with him in the lobby during the afternoons when she wasn’t working. Negron had the keys to Jackson’s place, which he looked after when the Yankees were on the road. He brought friends like Jimmy Madorma and Omar Minaya, a fellow infielder from Stan Musial baseball, to Jackson’s pad and the Yankee clubhouse, even got them out on the field shagging flies during bp.

The summer progressed and Ray was in the middle of the Martin-Jackson feud. On Saturday afternoon, June 17th, the Yankees were playing a nationally televised game in Boston when Martin pulled Jackson from right field in the middle of an inning after he felt that Jackson had not hustled after a ball. Negron was sitting on the bench next to Martin when the manager sent Paul Blair out to right to replace Jackson. Negron braced himself for the confrontation that was about to ensue, picked up a white towel and placed it over the dugout camera (a photograph of Negron covering the camera appeared the following day in The Boston Globe but not the New York papers). The center field camera filmed Martin and Jackson having to been restrained from throwing punches. Negron kept the towel over the dugout camera as the operator screamed at him.

"I knew in my heart and in my soul, without Reggie having to tell me, that he didn’t see that ball when he was in right field right," Negron says about the play in question. "Billy thought he was loafing. He played it the way he did because he couldn’t see it. But I couldn’t tell Billy that. Because if I told him that, I know his temper, he’s going to jump my ass. I was scared to death that either he or Reggie would be angry at me like I was talking one side over the other."

"Later in the dugout," Negron told Inside Sports four years later. "Billy explained to me why he had to do what he did, and that night Reggie talked to me just to get it out of his system." Negron went back and forth between both of their rooms. That night, Jackson would answer his phone, "Raymond Negron," to fend off the barrage of calls from reporters. "Between the two of them, all I could do was keep my mouth shut and listen," Negron recalled. Jackson spoke at length about his Christianity and about how the New York sports fans were being hurt. Martin, whose job was hanging by a thread, spoke about not being pushed around or shown up by anyone.

But Negron did have moments of insecurity, like the time he was sitting with Jackson in the locker room, talking in Spanish and laughing. Martin walked past them and shot them a look which caused Negron to panic.

"I just had a moment, a bad moment within myself. The next day I remember waiting for Billy in his office and when he walked in I asked him about the look." Negron now speaks slowly and clearly and acts out the scene. "He got up from his desk and he walked over to me and said, ‘If I ever find out that you decide not to be Reggie’s friend because of me, Ray, you and I will not be friends.’ He said, ‘You always treat a person the way they treat you. As long as I know that he’s good to you, I’m happy for you.’ As I was walking out of the office, he said this to me—one of two times he told this to me, the other being after Thurman died. He said, ‘Don’t ever forget something, Ray. Even if you were Italian, I couldn’t love you anymore.’" Negron pauses. "Now, how big was that dude?"

For his part, Jackson wasn’t always as understanding.

"There were moments that bothered him," Negron says. "And one moment in particular." When Billy got canned in ’78—officially, Martin resigned—Ray was at the Stadium picking up Reggie’s mail. He was approached by a New York Times reporter who commiserated with him about divided loyalties. "You’re Ray Negron, right? This has got to be a very difficult day for you, isn’t it?"

Ray told the reporter, "Yes it is very tough. I cry for Reggie and I cry for Billy."

"So that came out in the Times the next day and Reggie is reading the Times and then looks at me and he reads it again and then just stares at me. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘You know, you’re the only friend that I have that is his friend too.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ And I got up and walked out of his apartment because I didn’t want to say something. It never came up again, but I knew every once in awhile it bothered him."

The Yankees flourished despite—or perhaps because—of the tension that enveloped the team. In the end, they won the World Series in ’77, and then won it again the next year, though by that time Martin had been fired. Jackson’s three home run performance in the deciding game of the ’77 Series cemented his reputation as Mr. October. After his third home run (he swung the bat just three times all night), Jackson’s teammates congratulated him in the Yankee dugout. Negron embraced him, and went to sit back down, but then turned back and whispered something in Jackson’s ear. Ray nudged Jackson out of the dugout for a curtain call. It was the most thrilling moment of Negron’s life but he had the presence of mind to push Jackson out for the money-shot photo op.

The high times didn’t last long. "Remember in that movie Boogie Nights when everything in the seventies is rockin and then you get into the eighties and everything turns to shit?" says Negron. "That’s how I felt. Without the drugs. I never reached that high again—’76-’77-’78. Never again. Riding the wave and having a blast. In ’79, I had a T-shirt made up, ‘One more time in 79.’ I thought we’d win every year. Then Thurman died, and you get to the eighties and everything was tense and uptight. It wasn’t smooth anymore."

When Jackson signed with the California Angels after the Yankees lost the ’81 World Series to the Dodgers—a turn of events that Steinbrenner later characterized as the biggest mistake during his ownership—Negron left the Yankees and baseball altogether to pursue an acting career. Negron had appeared in a half-dozen commercials with Jackson—for Panasonic, Volkswagen and Old Spice—had good looks, and a way to get his foot in the door. He had wanted to be a movie star since he was a kid staying up late watching the Late Show every night. Besides, he had exhausted his run with the old Yankees. Without Reggie there, Negron couldn’t go back to being a gopher to just anybody.

"When it was clear that Reggie would not be a Yankee in ’82," says Negron, "the stadium manager said to me, ‘Now that Reggie won’t be here next year, you won’t be needed to pacify him anymore.’ I said, ‘The Boss knows about this?’ ‘He sure does.’ But he was lying. The first call to me in spring training in ’82 was George. ‘Where are you? You are supposed to be here.’ The little people per se always have to deal with that kind of abuse. That was my insecurity with the Yankees. ‘Do you belong?’ After 34-35 years, I still worry about that. That’s not right. I’ve left my heart and soul in this stadium. But George Steinbrenner has always said, "I appreciate you, what you do for my club." He’s the only one, with the exception of Billy Martin, who said, "You are a Yankee." That means the world to me because not everybody can be a Yankee. Doesn’t matter how long you are working here. It’s a matter of your heart and soul."

Photographs appear courtesy of Ray Negron.

Part Three, coming tomorrow

[Author's Note: This story was written last summer. It covers Ray Negron's life from the spring of 2006 through the spring of '07. Some of the basic facts stated in the piece have changed: Joe Torre is no longer the manager of the Yankees; Hank and Hal Steinbrenner have taken control of the team; Negron has just completed his seventh children's book for Harper Collins. But, despite these events, the essence of Ray's story remains true. I hope you enjoy.]

Part One

"Let me show you the Boss’s suite," says Ray Negron. It is a cool evening in early May, 2006, and Negron’s boss, George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the New York Yankees, is out of town. Several hours before game time, Negron, 51, is walking down the outer corridor of the loge section at Yankee Stadium, his head cocked like an upper classman with the run of the school. He exudes an insouciant confidence, the kind of man who is used to keeping his cool in hot situations. Negron has short black hair and skin the color of café au lait. His large, liquid brown eyes and long eyelashes are almost feminine; his cheeks sag–the sign of a thin man growing older—and lend a sense of gravity to an otherwise boyish countenance. As usual, Negron looks crisp. He is wearing a gray, patterned suit and slim brown shoes. On his right ring finger is a massive gold World Series ring from the 1996 Yankees.

"I can’t wait for the new Stadium," Negron says. "Maybe I’ll get an office."

"The ubiquitous Ray Negron," a veteran New York sportswriter calls him. Negron is a gypsy, constantly on the move, from the executive suites through the press box down to the locker room. He does not even have his own desk; instead, he totes everything he needs in a leather-bound book with a Spaulding logo embossed on the cover: Negron serves as a director of community relations for the sporting goods company, one of his many jobs. The book is filled with notes scribbled in different colored inks–reminders, phone numbers and addresses.

Negron knows everybody and stops to say hello to security guards and executives, retired sportswriters, scouts, and current players. Negron works for the Yankees as a special advisor to Steinbrenner and is primarily employed as an all-purpose utility man. He represents the club at the Kip’s Bay Boys and Girls club, the Hackensack University Medical Center, and grass roots community centers in the Bronx. Like a greeter in a casino, he escorts business men and their children through the corridors of the Stadium, giving his own private tour, and he schmoozes with celebrity visitors, like Patti Labelle, Regis Philbin and Richard Gere, making sure they are comfortable in their seats. Negron, of Puerto Rican and Cuban ancestry, is an avuncular figure to the team’s young Latin players like Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera. This summer, Negron will enlist the two, along with other Yankee players, to visit classrooms, hospitals and boys and girls clubs around the tristate area, as he promotes his first children’s book, The Boy of Steel, a story about a young boy with cancer who becomes bat boy for the Yankees for a day.

Few people know Yankee Stadium as well as Negron and few people have been around Steinbrenner’s Yankees longer. And it all happened by chance. In 1973, Steinbrenner’s first year as team owner, the Boss caught Negron, a skinny kid with an afro, spray painting an "NY" logo on the outside of Yankee Stadium. But instead of handing him over to the police, Steinbrenner made Negron a bat boy, issuing the kind of punishment that is the stuff of a boy’s wildest fantasies. So began a career in baseball that has lasted more than thirty years. Negron has done everything from shine the players’ shoes and collect their dirty jockstraps, to bring them food from their favorite restaurants and park their cars. He has been an agent, an actor, an advisor, and a liaison; a confidant, a sounding board and a whipping boy to some of the biggest egos in the game. He is whatever he needs to be.

Negron has founded a career off his serendipitous meeting with Steinbrenner and everything that has happened next—from Billy and Reggie to Doc and Darryl. "The Boss essentially saved my life and I’ll never forget that," says Negron, touching my arm. He likes physical contact, and occasionally touches his listener in a jocular, reassuring way to make sure you’re listening. He speaks in a measured, cautious manner, his raspy voice tinged with an unmistakable Brooklyn accent. Ray speaks so often in public that in private his conversation sometimes feels rehearsed, like he’s an actor repeating the same lines over and over in a play. Yet he is so sincere that it feels as if he’s telling you something for the first time, even if it’s a variation of something he’s said countless times before.

Negron pauses and then adds, "Not saved, really, he gave me a life."

Negron leads me through a cramped office into Steinbrenner’s suite. In the corner of the room Joe Scafidi, a middle-aged bald man is tidying up behind a small bar. It is a large place, with a comfortable-looking brown chair in the shape of a baseball glove in the middle of the room. The walls are crammed with framed photographs and paintings of famed Yankee legends, including Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Ford, Jackson, Jeter and Rivera. Some of the images are famous, while others are drawings and paintings that were given to Steinbrenner as gifts by fans and well-wishers over the years. Many look like Leroy Neiman knockoffs, which, from a distance, are hard to differentiate from the original Neiman’s on the wall. A large plasma screen TV hangs in the middle of the back wall of the room; above it is an enormous set of bull’s horns. Straight ahead, glass windows look out onto the field at Yankee Stadium, and just outside of the windows is Steinbrenner’s private box, which can seat as many as forty guests.

Negron walks me through the front door onto the ramp overlooking the owner’s box. To the right, the narrow ramp leads to the press boxes.

"This regime," says Negron, who has been with the Yankees on four separate occasions over thirty-three years, "Brian Cashman, Lonn Trost, and Randy Levine are the most loyal to the Boss, the Yankees and to the brand than anyone that I’ve been around in all my years with the team. Make sure to put that in."

Negron and Scafidi, a blunt yet amiable New Yorker, discuss the current state of the team.

"Ray, how come you always walk in the door after Giambi hits a home run," asks Scafidi narrowing his eyes. "When he’s oh-for-three you are nowhere to be found and I gotta get yelled at." Negron’s stares blankly out at the field and smiles.

It’s all in the timing for Negron, who has a talent for sizing up a situation and instinctively knowing when to make his presence known and when to quietly disappear. "He’s able to get in everybody’s business and not be in the way," says his old friend Reggie Jackson.

"Ray knows how to dodge his enemies," says the sportswriter Bob Klapisch, who is godfather to Negron’s youngest son. "He knows when to be invisible."

Ray Negron is one of George’s Guys—he’s an inner circle guy, a made man. This doesn’t mean he’s had it easy. Being close to Steinbrenner means enduring the Boss’s abuse. There have been fights and angry breakups, always followed by forgiveness and reconciliation.

"One minute he can tell me, ‘Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’" says Negron. "Ten minutes later, he’s complimenting me." Negron was chiefly responsible for brokering the deals that brought Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden to the Yankees in the mid-’90s, and acted as their caretaker once they returned. After Gooden threw a no-hitter in the spring of ’96, he enjoyed a rush of good publicity as a redemption story, and was reportedly in talks to sell the story of his life to Hollywood. But after a disastrous performance in mid-August, a livid Steinbrenner called the clubhouse and asked for Negron, who was consoling Gooden at the pitcher’s locker.

"That was a fucking disgrace out there," Steinbrenner yelled without introducing himself. "If I have to hear one more thing about that fucking movie, you’re both gone!"

Negron did not say a word as Steinbrenner hung up on him. When Gooden asked him who it was, Negron replied, "Ah, nothing. George just wanted to know how your arm felt."

"This is a tough organization," says Vic Ziegel, longtime columnist for the Daily News. "It’s difficult to navigate the rapids with so much constant change, but he takes care of staying Ray Negron. That’s not easy."

But the Old World Order under the Boss is in a state of flux. Steinbrenner doesn’t speak directly to the media anymore. Instead, all communication is handled by his publicist, Howard Rubenstein. And he rarely makes public appearances these days. When he has been seen, he has looked frail and diminished. It is the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about—not even the press. There are whispers that he is sick.

There is a sense of impending loss that hangs over the organization, beyond Steinbrenner’s weakened vitality. Joe Torre’s contract expires at the end of the year. Mariano Rivera’s and Jorge Posada’s deals are up at the end of the season. Alex Rodriguez can opt out of his contract and go elsewhere. The House that Ruth Built is being replaced with a newer Stadium a block away after the 2008 season. For George’s Guys, it is a time of great uncertainty, and for no one more than Ray Negron, who owes his entire career to the Yankees owner.

"He’s the only one who understands me," says Negron. "He’s the only one. What makes me tick, that I’m not for sale. A lot of people sell their souls. My soul belongs to God. Hey, I’ve missed the Yankees when I wasn’t here but I’ve missed the Boss more. I come from a family of addictive personalities. My two brothers are junkies. The Yankees are my drug."

"Thirty years ago when I met Ray Negron he was a scrappy kid on the streets of New York City living without purpose or focus," Steinbrenner offered in an e-mail when I asked Rubenstein for an interview with the Yankee owner. "Today, he’s a highly respected and integral member of the New York Yankee organization. He’s also a published author, father and esteemed member of his community. He’s accomplished all this on his own – he’s created his own success story!"

Negron’s future with the team may be in doubt but he’s never been busier. He and his title are vague. Everybody knows Ray Negron and yet nobody knows him. It is not that he’s duplicitous; he’s just always on the make. Negron is a hustler, a survivor, and a success story. "I know he’s a success because he’s still here," says Ziegel. Negron is not rich or famous; he’s almost famous. He’s made a career of hanging around, making himself useful, creating a niche for himself that nobody expected of him when he was a skinny kid from the streets spray painting Yankee Stadium for kicks one day.

* * * *

When Ray was four years old, his father, Jose Valdez, a volatile young Cuban-American who was enlisted in the Air Force, once struck his mother so badly that he feared he had killed her. Valdez dragged her into a closet of their 13th street apartment. Panicked, he grabbed Ray and fled to Cuba while his wife lay unconscious. "When he got to Cuba, he called New York," says Negron, "to find out what the scenario was. He talked to a cousin of ours and she told him that my mother was okay. Being the kind of person he was, he left me in Cuba with his family and reported back to base. I don’t remember much, other than moving around a lot, from house to house, and being told that my mother would come to get me soon. It took her six months to raise the money to get a couple of fares to come down, get me and come back. This was just as Castro was about to take over, so it was some heavy shit down there."

Ray’s mother later married, Cirillo Negron, who owned a bodega in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They had two daughters together, and Negron adopted Ray.

Valdez didn’t object. "He didn’t have to pay child support. That was my father."

Negron was a good provider but rarely at home. "My mother was the one," says Negron. "She was the anchor, a typical Latin mother. She ironed our clothes and cooked wonderful Spanish food—we never lacked for good food." But she too was distracted, raising two daughters and taking courses at Hunter and later, Queens College, on her way to earning a teaching degree. Ray learned to fend for himself from an early age.

By the time he was in high school, Negron would meet up with his two younger half-brothers at Yankee Stadium to hang out. They would play hand ball or paddle ball in the courts alongside the Stadium, then sneak in and watch the game. "It was easy," says Negron. "Sometimes the guards just let us in. There were 3,000 people in the park. Nobody gave a shit.

"My mother was in denial of my brothers in the Bronx," Negron continues, "and she had a hatred of my father. Remember, this is the man who kidnapped her son. She didn’t want me talking to him, I couldn’t say anything about him. I had to act like he was dead around her."

But Ray had an aunt who kept in touch with his father and would pass along news about him to Ray—where he was staying, what he was doing–information that he had to keep to himself. "I’d call him sometimes. He was an artist, a painter—not that he ever made any money. Sometimes he didn’t have any job and he lived off people. He chased woman, he drank. More than anything I think he was embarrassed around me, but he never apologized, never offered anything. There were no promises. Sometimes you like the false hope, so at least you can bullshit yourself. But there was nothing. When we talked it was strictly about how fucked up my mother was. He would trash her and I would take it. ‘I had to do what I had to do,’" he says, his voice scratchy and shrill like his father’s. "’Your mother didn’t understand things; that is the way it was…’ Just raving like a jerk."

Ray had not seen his father for more than a year on the hot July afternoon in 1973 when he and his brothers met their cousins Edwin and Christopher Perez, at the Stadium. Jimmy Madorma, a friend of Ray’s from Queens, was there too. At the time, Yankee Stadium was a year away from an extensive overhaul, the South Bronx was a war zone, and the Yankees hadn’t mattered in a decade.

Ray’s brothers were tough street kids from Hunt’s Point, a neighborhood rife with violence, burning buildings and junkies. Ray’s cousins were from East New York and they were even tougher than Ray’s brothers. "For me, going to the Stadium was just about being with my brothers and my cousins, and act like bad asses," says Ray. "Even though I knew I wasn’t tough, I liked the sexiness of my brothers being dickheads per se. I don’t mean that in a bad way either; we cared about each other."

On that July night, it was early, well before game time when Ray and his crew arrived uptown. The boys played paddle ball for a while, then wandered over to the Stadium. Later they would sneak in and watch the game. Ray was the oldest, a gaunt teenager with delicate features and a big afro. He was sporting bell-bottom jeans and Converse sneakers. One of his cousins had a can of white spray paint. Ray was a jock, not a graffiti artist, but everywhere you turned in New York, public property was covered with tags like Taki 183; the subway lines were decorated with car-long murals, and inside, they were littered with chaotic scrawls. Ray grabbed the can and started spray painting on the wall of Yankee Stadium, outside what would be the third base line.

A black limousine pulled up behind the boys as Negron painted the "NY" logo. The boys scattered like buckshot, leaping over the limo. Negron heard his brothers’ shout, "Look out," but he got a late jump and before he could get far, a hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. When he turned around, he saw his brothers and cousins a safe distance away. Then he looked up at a stout, angry man wearing a white dress shirt and a navy blue blazer. A security guard stood next to him. It was George Steinbrenner, a man Negron had never seen let alone heard of before. The Yankee owner grabbed Negron by the arm and marched the vandal into the bowels of the Stadium, directly to a small holding cell, which served as a police outpost. Negron pleaded with the man, "Cut me a break, will ya? I swear, I’ll never do anything like that again. Give me a chance, please."

Steinbrenner replied, "No. You are going to learn. You’re going to pay the price for this. I’m going to make sure you learn."

He shoved Negron into the cell and left. Negron was terrified. One of the cops taunted him.

"You know what?" Negron remembers today. "It was just, the team was bad, the stadium was corroded. It was just about doing an ‘NY’ on the wall as far as I was concerned. It was innocent. It wasn’t about writing ‘fuck you’ on the wall or anything."

Less than ten minutes later, Steinbrenner returned. "Get him out of there." Steinbrenner escorted Negron around the corner to the Yankee clubhouse and brought him to Pete Sheehy, the team’s clubhouse manager since the Babe Ruth days. Steinbrenner told Sheehy to get Negron a uniform. "He’s got damages he’s got to work off."

Jimmy Madorma couldn’t believe that Ray had gotten caught. He played ball with Ray and looked up to him. Most of all, he was panicked about how he was going to find his way back home to Queens. Ray had gotten him to the Bronx, and Ray was his ticket home. Jimmy’s mother would be furious if she knew he was in the Bronx. With no recourse, Jimmy snuck into the park with Ray’s two brothers and cousins. They sat in the upper deck for a few innings, watching the game. But Jimmy could not enjoy himself, even as they crept down closer to the action.

More than an hour later, Jimmy looked down at the field with binoculars between innings when he saw Negron. He couldn’t miss the afro. Jimmy made his way down close to the field. Negron was wearing former back-up infielder Jerry Keaney’s uniform and had borrowed Jimmy Ray Hart’s glove. He was having a catch with Yankee right fielder Ron Bloomberg.

"Ray, what are you doing?"

"I can’t talk now, I’m working."

"You’re working? I’m glad you’re alive. What working?"

"I can’t talk to you now. I’ll tell you about it later."

Negron laughs now when he thinks about how seriously he took first job from the start.

"When I was hanging with my brothers, it was the time that they were ready to let fucking go," Negron says to me. "You talk about kids that grew up in Hunts Point. At that time, I’m telling you, the game kept me from that. Once I got into the Yankees that was everything to me."

Part II, coming tomorrow

Photographs appear courtesy of Ray Negron