And New York howled with laughter.

Revisionist history has Steinbrenner making the most adept move of his extraordinarily varied three decades as Yankees owner, welcoming back into the city’s bosom the Brooklyn boy who had gone off to star in Milwaukee and St. Louis, and who had earned respect if not championships as the manager of the Mets and Cardinals. In fact, Torre’s hiring was greeted with the kind of disbelief and contempt last seen when the Yankees had selected as manager one of the game’s greatest clowns, Casey Stengel, in 1949. The idea that Torre The Failed could succeed Buck, the man who had brought the Yankees back to the postseason for the first time in 14 seasons, seemed to confirm Steinbrenner’s return to lunacy.

The reaction so unnerved Steinbrenner that within a week he had swallowed his pride and arranged a secret meeting with Showalter. At it, sources then and now insist, Steinbrenner offered Showalter his old job back — even though he’d given Torre a multiyear contract to fill that job. He reassured Showalter that wouldn’t be a problem; Torre could go into the front office, or become a scout, or, hell, George would just pay both of them.

Showalter, who has since honed his reputation for control freakiness to Hall of Fame proportions, knew enough to recognize an involuntary “manage à trois” when he saw one. Instead of taking George up on this most bizarre of offers, he went on to build the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks in his own image, choosing everything from the team colors to much of the roster to the exact way players should wear their ties while deplaning after a road trip.

This is all mentioned because a month ago, long before the Yankees’ stunningly rapid descent from modern dynasty to instant also-rans, things were already pretty tense in the Bronx. Privately — and sometimes not privately at all — various Yankees executives moaned about the rise in the Steinbrenner Tension Index. The old warning signals were all there: Steinbrenner was incensed when he learned some employees were not at their desks at 9 the morning after a long night game. He yelled at midlevel managers for the insufficiency of their shaves. He responded to baseball’s new luxury tax system, which will cost him Money in increments of a million dollars, by threatening to eliminate the team’s alumni newsletter, which is produced as a labor of love by various departments, and costs perhaps $5,000 a year to maintain — including stamps.

And then the Yankees lost the American League Division Series in four games.

Since the team’s elimination in Anaheim on Sunday, forests have been harvested just to print the words about how Steinbrenner, Torre and general manager Brian Cashman will rebuild the Yankees for 2003. Nowhere in any analysis has the assumption been challenged: Who says Torre and Cashman will be back next year?

The attempted Showalter Redux notwithstanding, Steinbrenner has been pretty stable since he was reinstated in 1992 from what was to be a lifetime banishment from baseball. It can be argued, however, that he maintained a low profile the first two years out of fear of going back on the enemies’ list. In 1994, the Yankees had the best record in the American League before a player strike truncated the season; in 1995 they reached the playoffs — not too much for George to get angry about there. Then came 1996′s renaissance, the world championship under the unlikely genius of Torre, and its prophylactic qualities for the failure to repeat in 1997. This was followed by three World Series victories, the first two by sweep, and last year’s epic seven-game loss to the Diamondbacks to which Steinbrenner could respond by reloading with the likes of Jason Giambi and David Wells.

In short, for the last decade, George hasn’t had very much to complain about. But this is different. These are the Yankees’ first back-to-back postseason failures since the 1980 team was swept by Kansas City in the American League Championship Series, and the 1981 edition won the first two World Series games against Los Angeles only to lose in six. Steinbrenner didn’t take it too well — and what he did then could be very instructive about what he may yet do now.

Think “French Revolution.”

In the fall of 1980, despite a 103-victory rookie season, manager Dick Howser was demoted to scouting duties. General manager Gene Michael was demoted to succeed Howser. Steinbrenner immediately dropped six members of his 25-man playoff roster, and by mid-season of 1981, seven more veterans had been lopped off. Three of the six starting pitchers — including veterans Gaylord Perry and Luis Tiant — were gone by May 20, 1981.

After the debacle against the Dodgers, George really got mad. Five more players, including Reggie Jackson, were immediately cut adrift. Seven more — Bucky Dent, Tommy John and Bob Watson among them — were offed during the ’82 campaign. Though Steinbrenner spent the winter of ’81-82 making overtures towards ex-ex-manager Billy Martin, manager Bob Lemon survived, only to be fired on April 25, 1982, and replaced by Gene Michael, who had been fired the previous September. Then Michael was fired again on Aug. 4, 1982.

For a time in ’81 Michael was listed as both manager and G.M., but the Yankees stopped mentioning the second position at all in the middle of that season. Steinbrenner had in reality become his own de facto general manager, and begun his reign of personnel terror. He would trade obscure minor leaguers like Willie McGee (2,254 career hits — 0 for the Yankees) and Fred McGriff (478 career homers — 0 for the Yankees) for pitchers named Bob Sykes and Dale Murray. He would sign a speedy free agent outfielder named Dave Collins and then tell him he was becoming a first baseman. And he would eventually rehire Billy Martin in time to start the 1983 season.

In short, of all of the Yankee stars of 1980, only two — Ron Guidry and Willie Randolph — would last longer than three more years with the team. Of all of the changes in 1981, only two of that year’s additions, Dave Righetti and Dave Winfield, would last beyond 1983. It was chaos, and it sentenced the Yankees to a dark age that lasted until Don Mattingly’s final season as a player in 1995.

Baseball’s history is riddled with owner petulance that has ranged from throwing the baby out with the bath water, to Steinbrennerian self-destructions. The mild-mannered Connie Mack was so unhinged by the World Series sweep against his fabled 1914 Philadelphia A’s, and so threatened by rising salaries, that he sold or traded off five future Hall of Famers. The A’s went from first place in an eight-team league in 1914, to 58-1/2 games out in 1915, to 40 games out of next-to-last in 1916. Their next pennant came in 1929.

Even today, the San Francisco Giants, despite their victory over Atlanta in the opening round of the playoffs, could open next season with a new manager and a new general manager because of the whims of owner Peter Magowan, who has just enough Steinbrenner in him to make you want to avoid him during full moons.

Back in the Bronx, an on-field purge is inevitable. Roger Clemens, Mike Stanton, Orlando Hernandez, Robin Ventura, and Ramiro Mendoza are all free agents. The club has an option on Andy Pettitte. Raul Mondesi was a washout, Nick Johnson a promising disappointment, Rondell White a cipher, Shane Spencer a corrosive. Some will return; others will not. If the Yankees can trade White and Mondesi — even if it means paying parts of their 2003 salaries — they will, and will spend the remainder on our friend Godzilla, the Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui. The defection of another Cuban would-be émigré, pitcher José Contreras, is of great interest in the Bronx.

But who’ll do all the paperwork? Within management, the easiest target would be Cashman, the general manager. Steinbrenner grows ever older; Cashman is 35 and still looks 24. Steinbrenner had to buy his way into New York’s respect; Cashman sprang fully grown from the ground as an intern in the Yankees’ minor league department 16 years ago; Steinbrenner signed David Wells over the protestations of his “baseball people” (read: Cashman); Cashman traded for Jeff Weaver, whose first inning as a Yankee was so horrific that Steinbrenner shouted, in my presence, “Jesus Christ Almighty!” Since the loss to Anaheim, Steinbrenner has repeatedly referred to Cashman’s “promise” that this Yankees’ team would win the World Series.

It seems improbable that Cashman would be fired outright; he has two years to go on his contract and would instantly be knee-high in offers from other clubs. But the Steinbrenner history books show entry after entry for vice presidents who suddenly discovered they were working for new executive vice presidents. Somebody could be brought in as Cashman’s boss, or built-in nemesis.

Simply firing Torre, this season, would probably be too much of a public relations disaster even for George, at his angriest, to be unable to anticipate it. Then again, that didn’t stop the Showalter exodus at the height of his success and popularity. Steinbrenner twice fired the similarly popular and avuncular Bob Lemon. In the 1974-1988 epoch, he didn’t seem to worry that he had divided time into two parts and two parts only: those days when Billy Martin was about to be fired as manager of the Yankees, and those days when Billy Martin was about to be hired as manager of the Yankees.

Still, the likeliest threat to Torre is a slow on-field start in 2003 (Steinbrenner used that excuse on Lemon in 1982, then promised never to do it again, then did it again to Yogi Berra in 1985), or the hypothetical sudden interest in the job by yet another ex-Yankee skipper like Lou Piniella, or a Bronx folk hero like Mattingly or better still Paul O’Neill. However, were Cashman to be fired or superseded by an extremely dominant baseball figure who were to have Steinbrenner’s ear, he could make things intolerable for not just Cashman but also Torre.

And that takes us back to the mid-winter meeting in 1995-96 when Steinbrenner offered Buck Showalter his old job back, even though Torre had already been signed to take it. Showalter, now two years removed from the palace coup that toppled him in Arizona, is once again one of the hottest managerial candidates as a remarkably fluid off-season begins. Six jobs are already open and as many as 10 more could become so, and Showalter’s already been mentioned in Boston, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay and Texas, for the Cubs’ job in Chicago, and, most ominously for Torre and Cashman — he was interviewed Tuesday for the manager’s job with the Mets.

Serious interest in Showalter from his hated cross-town rivals could be the nudge that pushes George to revisit his Robespierre days. Imagine your sexy ex suddenly dating your lifelong rival, or worse, your nerdy cousin. Whether it would be logical or suicidal, serious or fleeting, you might think of upping the ante and immediately proposing marriage. Remember, at all times, that George Steinbrenner is not the kind of man to sit around and act rationally when a situation calls for panic. He’s the one in a million of us who wouldn’t just think it; he’d pick up the phone and book the cathedral.

How does William Nathaniel “Buck” Showalter III — executive vice president and/or field manager of the 2003 New York Yankees — sound to you?

*One of my favorite pieces of art was a New Yorker cover from 1976 — Saul Steinberg’s view from 9th Avenue. If you click on the link, you will begin at 9th Avenue, then there’s 10th, then the Hudson River, and then way beyond that is New Jersey and then the rest of the country — with Kansas City in the middle. Then beyond that is the Pacific Ocean and China and Russia. I’m not certain if that really is the view of all New Yorkers — but that is certainly the view Kansas Citians have of New Yorkers.

Cleveland’s relationship with New York, though, always seemed just a little bit different to me, it always seemed that of a little brother or sister who wanted to wear the same clothes. Growing up, I can remember hearing about New York every week in one way or another. Someone would mention that, for many years, the Terminal Tower was the tallest building in America* …  you know, outside of New York. Playhouse Square was (and is) the second largest performance arts center … after Lincoln Center in New York. There’s a big fashion week in Cleveland, one of the biggest in the country, probably THE biggest outside of, well, New York. The Cleveland Orchestra has always been one of the best in America, right there with the New York Philharmonic. Little Italy in Cleveland had food about as good as you could find outside of Little Italy in New York. And I cannot even tell you how many times I heard growing up that the collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art was as good as anything you might see in New York City.

*It was actually the tallest building outside of New York until the year I was born, 1967. Then Chicago started building skyscrapers.

Yes, the New York comparisons were all-consuming, but the weird part is I just never felt the same bitterness from Cleveland toward New York. Sure, Clevelanders hate the Yankees because, well, you HAVE to hate the Yankees, it’s a law. But beyond that, Cleveland always seemed perfectly content to be sort of a little New York, to have good things that were just about New York quality, to dream about moving to New York for a business deal someday.

It’s not out of character that LeBron James, who grew up in Akron, is a Yankees fan and seems utterly fascinated by New York. There’s something very real there. I remember when I was a kid, when everything in Cleveland was going to hell, there was a semi-bizarre tourism campaign to start calling Cleveland a “Plum.” Radio and television commercials were played. Only it wasn’t bizarre really — it was another chance for the city to try and connect with New York. T-shirts were made: “New York may be the Big Apple but Cleveland’s a Plum.” I don’t recall that the T-shirts sent Cleveland tourism skyrocketing, but I’m not sure it was the point. The point might have been to have a T-shirt with New York and Cleveland on it.

And it seems to me that the Cleveland-New York relationship is close to the heart of the story of George Steinbrenner. He grew up in Cleveland. And in a way I’ve always thought that defined him. He has to be the most famous New Yorker who never really lived in New York. It’s the Cleveland in him.

——

The story of King George is fascinating to me because, at the end of the day, the story goes wherever the narrator wants it to go. Do you want a hero? Do you want a scoundrel? Do you want a tyrant? Do you want a heart of gold? Steinbrenner is what you make him. He is the convicted felon who quietly gave millions to charity, the ruthless boss who made sure his childhood heroes and friends stayed on the payroll, the twice-suspended owner who drove the game into a new era, the sore loser who won a lot, the sore winner who lost plenty, the haunted son who longed for the respect of his father, the attention hound who could not tolerate losing the spotlight, the money-throwing blowhard who saved the New York Yankees and sent them into despair and saved them again (in part by staying out of the way), the bully who demanded that his employees answer his every demand and the soft touch who would quietly pick up the phone and help some stranger he read about in the morning paper.

As Steinbrenner walks away from the New York Yankees — and as rumors about his failing health grow louder — everyone looks for his epitaph, for the few sentences that sum up his messy career. Is George Steinbrenner essentially good or bad, a Hall of Famer or a scourge on the game, a decent man who simply had to win, or a callous bully who showed a little decency in his spare time? The answer to all of that, I suspect, is “Yes.”

He did grow up in Cleveland, son of a shipping magnate and a bit of a legend. He is George Michael Steinbrenner III, but his father was called Henry, and he was an NCAA hurdles champion while at MIT in 1927. There is something precise about hurdlers, and Henry Steinbrenner was a precise man. He demanded something like perfection from George, and George failed him time and again. He could not cut it at MIT. He could not become a world-class hurdler. He was sent off at 13 to military school.

At different times in his life, George told the most famous story about his father differently — most often, the story goes that when George put together the consortium to buy the New York Yankees in 1973 (putting in $168,000 of his own money), Henry told the newspapers it was the “first smart thing he’s ever done.” At other times, though, George says it wasn’t until his Yankees actually reached the World Series in 1976 that Henry said, “It’s the first smart thing he’s ever done.” Either way, it’s clear Henry did not have much regard for his son’s intelligence.

And George never hid from the idea that he was just a son trying to prove his worth to his old man. That’s another funny part of the story: Nobody has spent more time psychoanalyzing George Steinbrenner than … George Steinbrenner. He has lived such a public life, and has come across so many opinions about himself (“If I believed half the things said about me, I wouldn’t go home with myself,” he has said), that he cannot help but develop his own theories about himself. He seems to believe that his father’s hard distance is the key to his own story, the reason he has been so driven to win, the reason he has never been able to tolerate weakness or ineptness in others — even if the weakness and ineptness were only imagined in his mind.

——

First, he tried to buy the Cleveland Indians. That was 1971, when the Indians were in so much trouble there were rumors that the team would begin playing roughly half its games in New Orleans, in a new domed stadium, beginning in 1974. Things were getting bad in Cleveland then, and Steinbrenner offered $6 million for a team that had been valued at about $8 million. Then he denied making any offer at all. Then when it looked like he would lose the bidding he brought in Cleveland Indians legend Al Rosen (the 1953 MVP) and pushed his offer to $9 million. Already, you could see the Steinbrenner mind at work, his reluctance to lose at anything. As it turned out, his final bid still wasn’t enough — Nick Mileti, who already owned the Cleveland Cavaliers and NHL Cleveland Barons, got a group together and offered $10 million, a foolish bid. Mileti, best I can tell, was already leveraged up to his eyeballs, and the Indians were a bad investment then. There is no guessing how much different baseball would have been in the 1970s and beyond had Steinbrenner bought the Indians.

Then, it’s also true that the New York Yankees were hardly a bargain in the early 1970s. They were owned by CBS, and they were terrible in just about every way imaginable. In 1972, for the first time since the end of World War II, the Yankees drew fewer than a million. They had not won a pennant since ’64, which was BY FAR the longest gap for the Yankees since the years before Babe Ruth. Truth is, things had become stale in the Bronx — aging Ralph Houk was the manager, Mickey Mantle was retired, the Mets had won over the city, and it just seemed like the Yankees would never again be the Yankees.

Steinbrenner, though, saw it all differently, and I feel certain this was the Cleveland in him. He still saw the Yankees as the team he remembered from his childhood, the Yankees were still the Yankees of DiMaggio and Ruth and Gehrig. To him, New York was still New York, it was all so glamorous and thrilling and, yes, big time. “Coming to New York was like a different world,” he told the New Yorker three decades later. “It was like, ‘Whoa, look at the tall buildings!’”

He and his group paid $10 million for the Yankees — though Steinbrenner has long said it was only $8.8 million because he sold some parking lots and land that came with the deal back to the city for $1.2 million — and Steinbrenner famously said that he would stay in Cleveland and not be active in the day-to-day operations. People who knew Steinbrenner understood there was no chance of this — but nobody in New York knew Steinbrenner then. They would very soon.

The Yankees were lousy again in 1973, and before that season got going, he fired president Mike Burke. At the end, he nodded when general manager Lee MacPhail became league president, he accepted Ralph Houk’s resignation and he tried to steal Oakland manager Dick Williams away from A’s owner Charlie Finley. By the end of that eventful year, he was also lying to the FBI about a scheme in his shipping company that was sending money to Richard Nixon’s “Committee to Re-elect the President” — the famous CREEP from “All the President’s Men.”*

*Steinbrenner would later be indicted on 14 counts of making illegal contributions and obstructing justice. The odd thing is that Steinbrenner was neither a Republican nor a particularly strong supporter of Nixon — his closest political friend at that time was probably Ted Kennedy and he raised millions more for Democrats than Republicans. No, the contributions were not about politics, they were about business. He was lobbying against restrictions in the shipping business, and Nixon was obviously the man in charge. Steinbrenner pleaded guilty to one felony count of obstructing justice, was fined $15,000 and was suspended by baseball for 15 months. Because of the felony conviction, Steinbrenner was not allowed to vote until 1989, when Ronald Reagan pardoned him in exchange for Steinbrenner admitting to the crime.

Point is that by 1974, Steinbrenner was already Steinbrenner, fully formed, fully obsessed, fully determined to be a star. “Although I was born in Cleveland, I can remember as a boy how much appeal the Yankees always had,” he told Milt Richman at UPI. “They are important to New York and the whole nation.”

He talked about how he had seen “Pride of the Yankees” at least 15 times.

In early 1975, with Steinbrenner serving his suspension, the Yankees spent millions to steal Catfish Hunter away from Oakland — a move that changed the landscape of baseball. In June, while still on suspension, Steinbrenner and Charlie Finley tried to get Bowie Kuhn thrown out of office. In August, while still on suspension, the Yankees fired manager Bill Virdon and hired a pit bull named Billy Martin, leading the great columnist Red Smith to write this classic droll lead: “A fellow can’t help wondering how George Steinbrenner will react when he comes back to the Yankees and discovers that Gabe Paul has fired his manager-of-the-year behind his back and hired somebody else’s manager-of-the-year.”

Well, George could not help himself. He never could help himself. “George is an overbearing, arbitrary, arrogant SOB,” his longtime friend and Cleveland businessman C.L. Smythe told reporters. “There’s no denying that. But I just love him. “That from one of his best friends.

——

Steinbrenner never stopped telling people about the importance of the New York Yankees. It was that word: Importance. Steinbrenner always loved axioms, sayings, quotations, a few collected words that speak to the larger truth. He can quote a hundred of them — and in virtually every interview he will quote at least a half dozen. Plutarch said that the measure of a man is in the way he bears up under misfortune. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” John Wesley said, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Shakespeare, through Polonius (in “Hamlet”), said, “To thine own self be true.” And so on — Steinbrenner never tires of memorizing these quotes. It seems to be how his mind works … he sees things as IMPORTANT and SWEEPING and SIGNIFICANT and HISTORIC. It’s probably the old football coach in him — Steinbrenner for a time was a graduate assistant under Woody Hayes at Ohio State, and he served as a full-time assistant at Northwestern and Purdue in the ’50s. And with football coaches, every game is for world domination.

Point is, Steinbrenner has never been much for the tedium of the everyday, no, he needed constant victories in his life, he needed perpetual action in his life, he needed to believe there was something momentous going on. He never saw the Yankees as a baseball team or even THE baseball team. No, he saw the Yankees as the American way of life. He expected his players to be clean-shaven, he made sure patriotic songs like “Yankee Doodle Boy” were played at games, he had his legendary announcer Bob Sheppard talk endlessly about the “Yankee Way.” When a player turned down his money, Steinbrenner saw that as a failing in the player’s character, a sign that the player did not have the right stuff to wear the pinstripes and be a New York Yankee. To be against the Yankees, in the mind of George Steinbrenner, was to be anti-American.

That attitude seeped into everything. When the Yankees lost, Steinbrenner did not just see it as a loss, he saw it as an affront, a sign that someone was not living up to the Yankee Way, someone had failed the team, the city and, yes, America too. You better believe he had 16 managers from 1979 to 1995*. The Yankees weren’t winning. Somebody had to pay. Somebody had to suffer. “Do your job or you will be gone,” Steinbrenner said to someone pretty much every day; Steve Jacobson in his hard-hitting Newsday column reminded everyone that Steinbrenner had fired an electrician when the loudspeaker malfunctioned and fired a secretary for bringing the wrong sandwiches. You live up to his impossibly perfect image of the New York Yankees or Steinbrenner would exact retribution. Joe Torre went to the playoff every year from 1996 to 2007. They won four World Series. But did they Yankees win every game? No. Did they win every World Series? No. Every year, there was tension and rumors that Torre was finally gone.

*Not 16 DIFFERENT managers — Bob Lemon, Billy Martin and Gene Michael kept reappearing in the early 1980s.

Of course, at the same time Steinbrenner punished himself too. He poured his baseball profits back into the ball club, sometimes foolishly, sometimes recklessly, but always with the unmistakable intent of winning championships and glorifying the New York Yankees (and if he got a little credit along the way, well, why not?). Sure, it is true that the Yankees made more money than any other team — hundreds of millions per year more than some small-market teams — but Steinbrenner did not have to spend so much of it on baseball. Only he did. In the 1980s, when the Yankees were floundering, he had to get every washed-up Ron Kittle, Mike Easler, Jack Clark, John Candelaria, Rich Dotson, Jesse Barfield, Claudell Washington and Andy Hawkins. Then, after he was suspended by baseball for a second time and the Yankees became the most dominant team in baseball, he STILL had to get Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina and A-Rod and Jason Giambi and Hideki Matsui and Gary Sheffield and any other superstar who might help the Yankees win every game one season.

There are different theories about how much the second suspension was responsible for the 1990s Yankees dynasty. In the late 1980s, Steinbrenner paid gambler Howard Spira (usually referred to as “shifty gambler” or “scheming gambler” or “small-time gambler” in the various newspaper stories) to give up some incriminating information on outfielder Dave Winfield. Steinbrenner felt like he had been cheated by Winfield and his agent, who had put a stipulation in the contract that ended up costing Steinbrenner a lot more money than he expected. Anyway, Steinbrenner had never forgiven Winfield for going one-for-22 in the 1981 World Series. He lashed out in the most vicious way, and he got suspended. The general consensus seems to be that his suspension gave the Yankees the freedom to let their own players develop, and those young players — Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams — were the nucleus of the reborn New York Yankees.

This is true, though I don’t think it’s the whole story. King George’s money was still good around baseball. Plenty of multimillion-dollar signings — David Cone, Chuck Knoblauch, David Wells, Roger Clemens, Hideki Irabu, David Justice, Jimmy Key, Kenny Rogers, John Wetteland and others — played real roles on those World Series teams. The lovable 1996 Yankees, the team that supposedly represented a new way for the Yankees to do business, still had by far the highest payroll in baseball, a payroll that was 10 percent more than the Baltimore Orioles, a payroll twice the league average and three times larger the bottom six or seven teams. By 2000, the last year of the World Series dominance, the Yankees had the first $100 million payroll in baseball history — and they rushed right by that to $113 million. The Yankees may have been smarter then, and they have been a bit more reserved, but the idea that George had learned restraint or that the Yankees were somehow fundamentally different seems a bit off. Steinbrenner was still out there, still spending, still promoting life, liberty and the Yankee Way. He still could not help himself.

——

There’s a wonderful three-word expression that is often used when talking about George Steinbrenner. The expression is: “Nobody can deny.” Think how often you hear those words put in front of a Steinbrenner trait. Nobody can deny that George wants to win. Or: Nobody can deny that he has done a lot of good things for people. Or: Nobody can deny that he was a terrible boss. Or: Nobody can deny that he made the Yankees the dominant team again. And so on.

I love that expression because, really, it doesn’t mean anything. If nobody can deny it, why even bring it up in the first place? You wouldn’t say, “Nobody can deny that the Magna Carta was issued in 1215″ or “Nobody can deny that Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine.” That doesn’t go anywhere. The reason it is so effective with Steinbrenner is because, honestly, every single thing about him is deniable. Good guy? Deniable. Bad guy? Deniable. Man who made the Yankees great? Deniable. Man who should have been given a lifelong ban? Deniable.

You can deny anything when it comes to George M. Steinbrenner III — even hard facts. That’s because he really has been one of a kind. You know how at the end of certain movies the screen will go blank and then words will appear, words that tell you how the story REALLY ended up — like at the end of “Walk the Line,” it said: “John and June were married in 1968. In fall of 1969, John sold 250,000 copies per month of his Folsom Prison and San Quentin albums, more than any other artist including the Beatles … John and June shared their artistry, compassion, wisdom, humor, lives and love with the entire world.”

Well, what words could you put at the end of George Steinbrenner’s movie? I’ve read a bunch of columns and stories about the man — some of which make him out to be a hero, some of which make him out to be a bum, some of which make him out to be a complicated character, some of which make him out to be as predictable as San Diego weather. I’ve enjoyed all of them, because it seems to me they all have truth. He IS the “Seinfeld” character. He IS the humanitarian. He IS the felon. He IS the driven perfectionist. He fits every theory.

My theory is simply this: Steinbrenner is a Cleveland man who wanted to be a star. Cleveland has always been filled with those people. Steinbrenner needed parades, he needed fireworks, he needed something to be remembered by. You may know the story of King Mausollos, whose reign has been somewhat forgotten, but whose large tomb was one of the seven wonders of the world (and the inspiration for the word “mausoleum”). There are men and women who come along who simply need to be stars. And whatever else, Steinbrenner was a star. Nobody can deny that.

Joe Posnanski writes for Sports Illustrated. 

That deprives the government of billions of dollars in annual revenue but represents an unexpected bonanza for those who inherit wealth.

“If you’re super-wealthy, it’s a good year to die,” said Jack Nuckolls, an attorney and estate planner with the accounting firm BDO Seidman. “It really is.”

The death of the 80-year-old Steinbrenner, who had been in poor health for years, highlights a quirky tax situation that has drawn much scrutiny among the moneyed but little on Main Street. Only those with estates valued at more than $3.5 million had to pay under the old law.

Without knowing the exact details of Steinbrenner’s holdings and estate plan, it’s impossible to say how much money will be saved. But estate planners and tax experts say it’s likely that the estate benefited hugely by the timing of his death.

A glance at some numbers suggests roughly how it may work.

Forbes magazine has estimated Steinbrenner’s estate at $1.1 billion. The federal estate tax in 2009 was 45 percent, with the $3.5 million per-person exemption. If he had died last year, his estate could thus have faced federal taxes of almost $500 million, depending on how the estate was structured.

That doesn’t mean his heirs permanently escape all taxes related to his assets. They will still have to ultimately pay a capital gains tax if and when assets are sold. And due to a change in tax law this year, the tax would be applied to the amount by which the assets have appreciated since Steinbrenner acquired them.

Even if the Steinbrenners sold the assets right away, the top capital gains tax rate is 15 percent. Worst-case scenario, depending on how much the assets appreciated after Steinbrenner acquired them: a $165 million tax bill.

That’s a tax break of about $328 million. A-Rod’s 2010 salary: $32 million.

The Steinbrenner family has not suggested any sale is planned.

“There are no succession issues, and the team will not be sold,” Yankees president Randy Levine said.

The Steinbrenners therefore are expected to avoid what happened to the family of Chicago Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley after he died in 1977. The family was forced to sell the Cubs to the Tribune Co. four years later to pay the taxes on Wrigley’s estate.

As Steinbrenner’s Yankees transformed into Yankee Global Enterprises, which includes the cable TV operation YES Network and Legends Hospitality, estate planning issues for a transfer to his children were dealt with, according to a Yankees official who spoke on condition of anonymity because those details weren’t released

Estate taxes can be reduced through certain planning measures — such as gifts and asset sales to family members at discounted values. However, except for the unusual circumstances of 2010, they cannot be eliminated unless you give it all to charity.

Some wealthy families use trusts to lower estate taxes. But even transferring assets to family trusts wouldn’t have significantly lessened Steinbrenner’s federal tax liability unless he gave vast amounts of assets to relatives as gifts before he died. Those would have been subject to a large gift tax.

That’s unlikely since very few people choose to pay a large tax anount sooner than necessary, according to Richard Behrendt, senior estate planner for Baird Financial Advisors in Milwaukee and a former estate tax attorney for the Internal Revenue Service.

The estate tax is scheduled to return in 2011, with a top rate of 55 percent. The House passed a bill last year that would have extended the estate tax at the 2009 rates, but it stalled in the Senate. Many Republicans want to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether, while many Democrats want to extend it at the 2009 rates.

There had been talk on Capitol Hill of reinstating it retroactively, to the start of the year. But as the year progresses, lawmakers say that is increasingly unlikely.

“If Congress doesn’t go retroactive, then he picked a great year to die,” said Robert Steele, who heads of the trusts and estates department at the law firm of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz in New York. “There will be possibly tremendous capital gains tax, but the capital gains rate is a lot lower than the estate tax rate would have been.”

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Ohlemacher reported from Washington. AP Sports Writer Ronald Blum also contributed to this report.

Salon spoke with Dave Zirin, sportswriter and author of the upcoming book “Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love,” about his thoughts on the passing of an icon.

What will be George Steinbrenner’s legacy? 

His legacy is the first of something and last of something.  He’s the last of the paternalistic owners who took a great interest in seeing how a team could rebrand and reimagine a city, and who saw himself as a larger-than-life, sports version of a city’s political boss. He was also the first of the owners to hold cities up for increased municipal funds, and threaten to move his team if he didn’t get a sweeter stadium deal, which is a common practice now. He was also addicted to the media. In a lot of ways, many of the owners whom I would describe as destructive today learned their trade at the feet of Steinbrenner.

He’s often been characterized as a public bully. Is it a bad idea for an owner to be so much in the public eye?

I think as an owner you are a steward of a team and to a larger degree a steward of the sport. Fans have the right to have a visible and accountable owner, but it’s about how those owners use their place in the public eye. From Dan Snyder to Jerry Jones in the NFL, to Dan Gilbert and the Cleveland Cavaliers, you have owners who think they know more than people who’ve been in baseball their whole lives or know more than general managers and managers. That’s also part of Steinbrenner’s legacy.  But being in the public eye isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks isn’t very popular but is a fantastic owner.  He is very visible, very bombastic, very shameless, but there’s no evidence that Cuban steps on the toes of [general manager] Donnie Nelson, and tells him how to do his job.  He lets the basketball people make the basketball decisions and he’s willing to pour the profits he’s made back into the team itself.  A lot of players want to play for Dallas because of the reputation Cuban has made for Dallas.  There’s a degree to which Steinbrenner did that as well for the Yankees.  The Yankees made him very rich and every bit of evidence shows that he took that money and plowed it back into the team with a long-term perspective that they stay the most important and profitable brand in major league baseball.

But, clearly, he also did a lot of things that were very questionable.

His greatest stain was that he started the idea of looking at the short term at the expense of the long term when it came to player personnel.  A lot of obituaries will talk about how George Steinbrenner made the Yankees into a winner, but their greatest dynastic run, from 1996 to 2000, was done with homegrown talent like Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera.  That talent was allowed to develop because George Steinbrenner was banned from the team at the time. When Steinbrenner was reinstated to the team they had the horrible period in the 2000s where he was signing players like Kevin Brown and Randy Johnson and 30-something pitchers he thought would be quick fixes.  And, as someone like me who grew up in New York, that was reminiscent of the 1980s when the Yankees had the best cumulative record for the decade in major league baseball, but failed to win one division title after 1981. They did not win one World Series in the entire decade.  That’s because Steinbrenner was constantly signing big-name talent and trading off incredible prospects.

How much of the Yankees success can we attribute to Steinbrenner?

He gets credit for building the Yankees into a financial juggernaut.  He bought the team for $10 million, for goodness sake!  And it’s through that crushing financial advantage that they’ve been as successful as they’ve been. But when it comes to the actual winning of the championships I don’t see how he can get credit for that given that the” Steinbrenner Way” would’ve meant trading minor league player Derek Jeter for a 38-year-old former Cy Young award winner.

Was his “high payroll, collect as much talent as possible” philosophy good for baseball?

It’s just part of Major League Baseball’s problem that it doesn’t have a real way to collectivize revenue, so big-market teams have a financial advantages.  You can make the case that the New York Yankees are the only team to fully exploit that advantage — which says something positive about Steinbrenner. There are a lot of teams that make a lot of money, and don’t spend it.  They either stick it in their own pockets or they spend it on pressuring politicians to give them more public subsidies.  Don’t get me wrong, that was a part of Steinbrenner’s modus operandi as well, but within the confines of the horrible financial system under which Major League Baseball operates — regulating teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals to oblivion before a season even starts — George Steinbrenner did what he had to do.

Do you think he was good or bad for New York City?

On the one hand, he really was part of the energy of the city in the 1980s.  The New York Post when I was growing up was Donald Trump on the front page, George Steinbrenner on the back; two egomaniacs who stood astride the city like joint colossuses of ego and excess.  On that level he was one of the most defining human beings of his time. But I also think it’s terribly corrosive to the city.  One of the great problems of our country right now is that professional sports, particularly stadium construction, have become a substitute for anything resembling an urban policy. George Steinbrenner pushed that shifting paradigm. New York was the great testing ground for it.  

Was there a difference between Steinbrenner the owner and Stein the man?

When I was 12 years old a famous sports columnist in New York City, Dick Young, passed away.  He had an open service.  So I thought it was a cool idea to dress up and go to the funeral, thinking there’d be a lot of fans there of this legendary writer.  I showed up at the funeral and I was literally the only person who thought that was a good idea.  I walked in there and everybody looked at me, like, “Who the hell are you?”  And I was practically peeing my pants I was so out of place.  Then I felt this meaty hand on the back of my neck and I look up and it’s George Steinbrenner.  And he says, “Here is the guy we’ve been waiting for.”  And he pushes me into this Park Avenue funeral home, and all I can think is: Wow, George Steinbrenner just pushed me, really hard.  As soon as he did that everyone was suddenly really nice to me.  Now they were asking, “Who were you again? Who are you?” as if they wanted to know me.  It was this little act of mercy by George Steinbrenner on a little kid who certainly didn’t deserve it.

When I researched Steinbrenner for my book “Bad Sports,” which is about owners, it was interesting how that fit with other stories people had about him.  It was this benevolent, Daddy Warbucks kind of figure that he tried to cut for himself.  That’s what I mean by saying he was a throwback and a “throw forward.”  He really coined and patented new ways to squeeze municipalities and exploit the media, which are so much a part of the worst aspects of sports ownership today.  But on the flip side, he had a sense of himself as being a paterfamilias of the city, which I don’t think is a modern title yahoos like Jerry Jones would even want.

Steinbrenner was also an expert at playing the media over the course of his career. 

It was a profoundly different media environment during his time. It was a constant battle for the tabloids, the back page.  Sometimes it seems like George Steinbrenner would fire a manager just to get on that back page.  He fired about 23 managers in a 20-year period.  It was almost pathological.  And when he fired someone he did it with what can only be described as an ugly kind of flair.  These were never handled quietly and never with memos, but, instead, with angry conversations over the phone, the contents of which would be leaked to his favorite sportswriters in the press.  A lot of the New Yorkers in the ’80s were frustrated because it seemed like he cared more about winning the back page than winning the World Series.  Considering his team won more games in the ’80s than any other franchise, their lack of success [in winning the World Series] was inexcusable, and it was a function of his hyper-excessive, almost manic need to sell off good young talent, fire managers and make sure he was the biggest show in town.  He could not share the stage.

So what now for the Yankees?

Well, the Yankees did well when Steinbrenner was gone in the ’90s and they won a championship last year after he became infirm.  They had the space to sign young free agents like CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, and they just opened a new stadium, which, for some reason, the Major League Baseball Network today is saying he paid for largely out of his own pocket as a love note to the city.  That’s a total lie.  The city got soaked for that stadium. Michael Bloomberg was complicit in that process, so it’s unsurprising to hear Michael Bloomberg singing Steinbrenner’s praises.

Looking back, what’s the most positive angle we can take on George Steinbrenner?

For the city as a whole, he was authentic and never boring. The closest we have to George today is Vince McMahon or maybe Mark Cuban.  Steinbrenner did what he liked to do a lot, which he said was inflicting pain and inflicting joy.  The late writer Dick Schaap once said that’s a very odd phrase, if you think about it: to inflict joy. For me, if not inflicting joy, he definitely inflicted a little bit of mercy, and I’ll be grateful for that.

Not that “The Boss” thought of himself as a GOP party man. A decade after his Nixon involvement, one of his associates told the New York Times that, “More than the conviction and the suspension from baseball, George is bothered by being linked with Watergate. Politically, George has always been a Ted Kennedy Democrat. I mean, whenever you’d run into Kennedy, he’d ask, ‘How is Gawge?’ George has a real feeling for the little guy. He hates being seen as part of the Nixon team.”

A quick scan of Steinbrenner’s political contributions to federal candidates offers some support for this claim. From 1980 until now, Steinbrenner gave $83,850 in personal donations to individual Democratic candidates for office. He also gave $50,000 to various national committees, like the Democrats’ House and Senate campaign committees. In that same span, he gave only $28,950 to individual Republican candidates and $30,000 to GOP party committees (and just about all of those committee donations were for the Florida Republican Party).

As you might expect, politicians in New York and Florida (where Steinbrenner lived) received a disproportionate share of his largess. In the past decade, Steinbrenner gave $6,300 to Sen. Charles Schumer and $9,600 to Rep. Charles Rangel. He also donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson was another of his favorites, to judge from his giving.

Other notable Steinbrenner contributions to Democrats include:

• $1,000 to then-New Jersey Rep. Peter Rodino in 1980. Rodino, a long-serving Newark Democrat, chaired the House Judiciary Committee that voted to recommend Nixon’s impeachment in ’74.
• $750 to then-Sen. George Mitchell in 1993. The contribution came just after the lifetime ban imposed on Steinbrenner in 1990 by MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent was lifted — and just after Vincent was ousted from his perch. Mitchell, then the Senate’s majority leader, was rumored to be a potential Vincent successor.

While Steinbrenner’s money tended to go to Democrats in Senate and House races, he may have leaned more to the GOP at the presidential level. He supported George H.W. Bush in the 1988 and 1992 campaigns and during the 2000 Florida recount, he gave $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney recount fund. (George W. Bush, of course, had been a Texas Rangers co-owner.) Steinbrenner also gave $7,500 to Rudy Giuliani’s PAC in the middle part of last decade and another $4,600 to Rudy’s 2008 White House campaign ($2,300 of which was later refunded after Rudy dropped out). And in the fall of 2008, he cut a check for $15,000 to McCain Victory 2008.

He was known for feuds, clashing with Yankees great Yogi Berra and firing manager Billy Martin twice. But as his health declined, Steinbrenner let sons Hal and Hank run more of the family business.

Steinbrenner was in fragile health for years, resulting in fewer public appearances and pronouncements. Yet dressed in his trademark navy blue blazer and white turtleneck, he was the model of success: The Yankees won seven World Series titles after his reign began in 1973

Till the end, he demanded championships. He barbed Joe Torre during the 2007 AL playoffs, then let the popular manager leave after another loss in the opening round. The team responded last year by winning another title.

His death was the second in three days to rock the Yankees. Bob Sheppard, the team’s revered public address announcer from 1951-07, died Sunday at 99.