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George M. Steinbrenner III, the principal owner of the New York Yankees, was born and brought up outside Cleveland, Ohio, where his family owned a shipping business, but for the past twenty-five years he has lived in Tampa, Florida, and that is where he spends most of his time. His main office is at Legends Field, the Yankees' spring-training complex, which is at 1 Steinbrenner Drive, a couple of miles east of Tampa International Airport. Steinbrenner isn't overburdened with false modesty, but he isn't without a sense of humor, either. In the hallway outside his office, there is a fake poster for the movie "Analyze This," with him in the Robert De Niro role of the mafioso seeing a shrink. "Imagine This," the poster says. "You're analyzing the Boss of the Yankees. His forty-five minutes is up, and you've got to tell him to go." I was pondering this predicament one day a few months ago when Steinbrenner came out and shook my hand. He is about six feet tall and his broad shoulders and barrel chest give him an imposing presence. He was dressed Palm Springs circa 1964: shiny leather shoes, pressed tan slacks, a blue-and-white oxford shirt, and a navy-blue windbreaker with the Yankees' "NY" emblazoned on the left breast. A big diamond-encrusted World Champions ring obscured his wedding-ring finger, and his gray-brown hair was combed back. Despite the sharpness of his own attire, he seemed disconcerted by my jacket and tie. "We dress down around here," he said, almost apologetically. "Take your tie off. Relax."
Legends Field is a mini-replica of Yankee Stadium. It opened in 1996, with space for ten thousand spectators and a dozen luxury boxes. Hillsborough County paid about thirty million dollars to lure the Yankees from Fort Lauderdale, their former pre-season base. The taxpayers' money allowed Steinbrenner to create a Yankees theme park in his adopted home town, featuring palm trees, a duck pond, and a memorial garden commemorating the club's heroes, from Babe Ruth to Don Mattingly, which, in a fitting marriage of tradition and commerce, is next to a Yankees-merchandise store.
Steinbrenner, who has just turned seventy-two, keeps track of everything that happens at Legends Field. "I just got this put down," he said, pointing to a green baize carpet that led from the locker room to a practice field. "Before, we had guys walking along here in spikes on concrete. One slip and they'd be out. Now they won't be in danger of injuring themselves." We walked to Steinbrenner's dark-blue BMW sedan, which was parked under the grandstand. As he drove us out into the sunlight, we passed a frail, elderly figure in a wheelchair. Steinbrenner opened his window.
"How you doing today?" he asked.
"Not so good," the man replied. "I'm waiting to go see the doctors."
"Why, you look like a thousand dollars. I'll see you this afternoon when you get back."
The man stared at us forlornly. "If I get back," he said.
"That's Cliff Lewis, one of the first quarterbacks of the Cleveland Browns," Steinbrenner said, closing the window. "He's just had some heart trouble. He almost died, but we got him back. We got him a pacemaker put in, and he got out of the hospital a few weeks ago." Lewis has worked in the Yankees' insurance department for many years. He once tried retiring, but he didn't like sitting around, and his wife called Steinbrenner and asked if he could return to work. Steinbrenner readily agreed. "When you send guys home and tell them to take it easy, that's like saying, 'Your days are numbered,' " he explained.
At Malios, an Italian restaurant frequented by Yankees officials and players, the owner and several patrons crowded around to shake Steinbrenner's hand. "I just want you to know that I do not seek the publicity," Steinbrenner said once we were seated in a corner booth. "I really am trying to retire and let the young elephants into the tent—get semi-retired, anyway." For years, Steinbrenner has talked about handing over the running of the Yankees to his two sons and his son-in-law, but nobody takes much notice. During the off-season, he committed more than two hundred million dollars to strengthening the Yankees' already formidable roster. Still, he appeared to be serious. "I think that any guy who is going to retire finds it very difficult," he continued. "But there's a time when you have to do it." This is Steinbrenner's thirtieth year in charge of the Yankees, so it is not surprising that he is thinking about the future. "I just want what the kids are going to inherit to be in good hands, and what my partners have to be in good hands, if I start to tail back a little," he explained. "Instead of coming in at seven-thirty in the morning, maybe I'll come in at nine-thirty or ten." Steinbrenner's talk of retirement has prompted rumors that he might be ill, but he appears to be in good shape. He rarely drinks and doesn't smoke; he works out three times a week; and he watches his weight, which, at two hundred and four pounds, is just four pounds more than he weighed in college.
If Steinbrenner were to retire now, he would leave behind an immensely valuable bequest. In the past six years, the Yankees have won the World Series four times, and reëstablished their position as the leading club in baseball. At the same time, Steinbrenner has extended his sporting interests to encompass hockey (the New Jersey Devils), basketball (the New Jersey Nets), and cable television (the new YES Network), combining these assets in a powerful regional sports conglomerate, YankeeNets. He also is something of an elder statesman. Earlier this year, as vice-president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, he helped preside over the American team's triumphant efforts in Salt Lake City.
New Yorkers can resist anything except success, and the Yankees' success has done wonders for Steinbrenner's public image. When critics attack him today, it is usually on account of the Yankees' dominance. With an annual payroll of a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, almost three times the payrolls of clubs like the Kansas City Royals and the Oakland Athletics, the Bronx Bombers are tough to compete against. Growing financial disparities are an important issue in baseball, but they don't trouble Yankees fans, most of whom are overjoyed that Steinbrenner has restored the regular parades up lower Broadway that they regard as part of their birthright.
For Steinbrenner, it is an astonishing turnaround. Just a decade ago, he was widely regarded as a loathsome tyrant, whose endless management reshuffles had degenerated into a bad joke. He was even featured on "Seinfeld," where he terrorized George Costanza, who had taken a job with the Yankees. In July, 1990, when he was forced to resign from baseball temporarily after admitting that he had paid a professional gambler for damaging information about one of his own players, the Yankees were in last place in the American League East; they hadn't made it to the post-season in nine years, and the Mets had displaced them as the most popular team in New York. News of Steinbrenner's departure prompted cheers from the Grand Concourse to Sheepshead Bay.
Many factors went into Steinbrenner's redemption: gifted managers and players, savvy trades, money, luck, and his own long-overdue maturing. Although he can still act capriciously from time to time, he is calmer than he used to be, and less likely to fly into a rage. A few days before we met, he had gone into the locker room and found David Wells, the pitcher whom he signed in the off-season, and who was supposed to be on a diet, eating a doughnut. Instead of berating Wells, as he might well have done in the past, Steinbrenner went to a Krispy Kreme outlet the following day and picked up a paper hat. He wore the hat into the locker room and presented it to Wells, saying, "Wear it, but remember—don't eat them when you're wearing it."
While we were talking, the owner of the restaurant brought out a cholesterol-packed fried-crabmeat salad that he had made himself. Steinbrenner protested halfheartedly, but then tucked in, saying, "Jesus, this is good." A little later, he spotted a friend and called him over. "I want you to meet the monsignor," he said. "He used to be a great soccer player." Monsignor Laurence Higgins, a ruddy-faced Irishman in his early seventies, works at St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church, just north of Legends Field, and Steinbrenner does a lot of charity work with him. The two of them chatted excitedly about the World Cup and the possibility of setting up a professional soccer team for Tampa, using Legends Field as its home stadium, an idea that Steinbrenner has been considering for a while, although he has some doubts about its commercial appeal. "Americans want knockdowns, hits, knockouts," he said. "That's why soccer never took off. It's too subtle for us."
By the time we left the restaurant, it was midafternoon. Steinbrenner wanted to show me the Yankees' minor-league complex, which is a couple of blocks from Legends Field. On the highway, an attractive young woman passed us in a Mercedes convertible, with the top down. Steinbrenner, who has been married for forty-six years and has four grown children, gawked at her through his shades. "One thing we have down here is a lot of blondes driving around in convertibles," he said.
Every spring, hundreds of young men descend on Tampa, hoping to be selected for one of the Yankees' six farm teams. Steinbrenner's attitude toward young talent has changed sharply over the years. In the past, he often used to trade it away for big names who turned out to be either overrated or past their prime. As a result of his impetuousness, the Yankees gave up perennial All-Starslike Fred McGriff and Willie McGee in return for busts like Steve Trout and Ed Whitson. No longer. Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada are all products of the Yankees' farm system, a fact that Steinbrenner frequently repeats when people accuse him of buying success. "Nobody picks up on that," he told me. "They make it sound like 'Here comes moneybags.' "
As we walked through the minor-league clubhouse, Steinbrenner stopped in a conference room with a whiteboard at the front, on which somebody had written a checklist of ways to prepare for a game. He read the points out loud: " 'A. Physical: stay flexible, fit. B. Mental: know yourself; game plan; confidence.' Most organizations don't spend five seconds on this stuff," he said. "We work on it year-round. They have to understand that playing for the New York Yankees is different. That's the pinstripe mystique."
Just in case the players fail to get the message from their trainers, there are signs throughout the clubhouse featuring some of Steinbrenner's favorite aphorisms, such as "Winners never quit. Quitters never win"; "Second place is really the first loser"; and "If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes." These bits of wisdom are supplemented by uplifting quotations attributed to famous writers that Steinbrenner selected. Emerson: "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Wesley: "Cleanliness is next to godliness." (Steinbrenner hates dirt. In one of the few interviews that his wife, Joan, has ever given, she revealed that he liked her to vacuum their home several times a day.)
Steinbrenner's literary interests date back to Williams College in the late nineteen-forties, where he wrote his senior thesis on Thomas Hardy's romantic heroines. The sportswriter Steve Wulf, now with ESPN Magazine, once tried to catch Steinbrenner out by asking what he thought of Eustacia Vye, the beautiful seductress in "The Return of the Native." Steinbrenner responded that he thought Eustacia was one of Hardy's most successful female creations, supporting his case with details from the book. Today, he reads a lot of military history. He recently finished "Five Days in London: May 1940," John Lukacs's account of the British government's decision to fight on against the Nazis. "It gives a side of Hitler that you don't see," he told me. "He was an evil, bad man, but I think Churchill realized he was brilliant in some ways. If it hadn't been for Churchill, I hate to think what would have happened to this world."
Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner is a great admirer of Churchillian rhetoric. He likes to deliver rallying speeches to his players, especially when they are doing badly. (Back in the nineteen-seventies, Sparky Lyle and Ed Figueroa were reportedly fined a hundred dollars each for sleeping through one of these perorations.) He also likes to encourage the young players. " 'To thine own self be true'—that's what I tell them," he confided. "It comes from 'Hamlet.' " The few tyros who were hanging around the clubhouse didn't look as if they would be receptive to Shakespeare. One, a baby-faced boy destined for the Staten Island Yankees, was so overcome by running into Steinbrenner that he could hardly speak. Another, who was getting his hands treated by a trainer, managed a couple of words.
"Blisters?" Steinbrenner asked.
"A lot of hitting?"
"Well, keep at it."
In 1952, Steinbrenner joined the Air Force, and he coached basketball and baseball at Lockbourne Air Force Base, in Columbus, Ohio. After leaving the military, he studied for a master's degree in physical education at Ohio State, and coached basketball and football at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Columbus. Then he coached football at Northwestern and Purdue. The year he was at Northwestern, the team lost every game, but his experience in the locker room stayed with him. "These days, there are not many sports owners who have ever worn the jockstrap," he said, with a dismissive shake of his head. "If you've never worn the jock, you don't know. What hurts? What works? And if you don't know, that's a problem."
Outside on the practice field, dozens of young men were doing fielding exercises, led by a tall, much older man. "That's Frankie Hondo Howard," Steinbrenner said. "He was a basketball All-American at Ohio State when I was at Aquinas. He still holds the rebounding record. He played for the Washington Senators. We brought him in this year. Look at him—he never stops working." Another Ohio State star, Howard (Hopalong) Cassady (who won the Heisman Trophy in 1955), also works as a minor-league coach for the Yankees. Howard and Cassady are in their late sixties, but, like Cliff Lewis, the former Cleveland Brown, they have been admitted to George's world, a place where age is no barrier to productive service. "Those kinda guys never retire," Steinbrenner said, with a certain awe. "I'll take them any day. They're my type of guys."
In 1957, a year after he married Joan Zieg, a student at Ohio State, Steinbrenner returned to Cleveland and became the treasurer of his family's company, Kinsman Marine Transit, which transported coal, grain, and other commodities on the Great Lakes. Over the next twenty years, Steinbrenner tripled Kinsman's revenues, partly through merging with a bigger local rival, American Ship Building, and adopting its name. (During the early nineteen-nineties, foreign competition forced American Ship Building into bankruptcy.)
He entered the shipping industry at the behest of his father, Henry Steinbrenner, a stern and imperious man, who in 1927 had become M.I.T.'s first N.C.A.A. outdoor track-and-field champion, winning the two-hundred-and-twenty-yard low hurdles. Henry Steinbrenner had a poor opinion of his son, who for years struggled to impress him. During a high-school track meet, Steinbrenner won two hurdles races, only to be berated for losing a third. His grades weren't good enough for M.I.T., and he never matched his father's success as a hurdler. When he took over the Yankees, in January, 1973, his father told a Cleveland newspaper that it was "the first smart thing he's ever done."
Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS, which had paid more than thirteen million dollars for the team back in 1964, hoping to attract viewers. But the Yankees entered a long slump, the ratings were disappointing, and William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, eventually put the team up for sale. Steinbrenner, who had already tried and failed to buy the Cleveland Indians, was determined to make a bid. As a child, he had often gone to the Cleveland Hotel to watch Joe DiMaggio and other Yankee legends arrive in town. He got together ten million dollars, of which rather less than two hundred thousand was his own. Six million was borrowed from the bank. A motley assortment of limited partners—including Nelson Bunker Hunt, the oil magnate; Tom Evans, a partner in Richard Nixon's law firm; and John De-Lorean, the auto-industry executive—put up the rest of the money. Some of these men subsequently found themselves accused of various forms of financial chicanery, but Steinbrenner didn't care. He just wanted their money to buy the Yankees. "Nothing else in the world mattered to me but to have them," he recalled.
The day he met Paley is still vivid in Steinbrenner's mind. "He had his face turned away from me, and he said, 'I understand you're here to buy the Yankees, or to make a proposal.' I was scared shitless. I said, 'Yes, sir, I am.' He said, 'I like that "sir." ' I said, 'Well, that's the way I've been brought up.' He said, 'I know where you've been to school, and I know all about you.' He had a full bio. He said, 'Tell me, do you want to give me Chinese paper for this team?' I said, 'Sir, I don't know what Chinese paper is.' He says, 'It's just plain paper that you can't take to the bank.' I said, 'No, sir, I'm here with cash. I got as many of my friends as I could to put up the money to come in.' He turned around—it was the first time I saw him face to face. He says, 'You got a deal.' I almost died. I could've fainted right there."
At the age of forty-two, Steinbrenner had the provincial's awestruck attitude toward New York, which he retains to this day. "Coming to New York was like a different world," he told me. "It was, like, 'Whoa! Look at the tall buildings.' But, once you become a part of it, it is really something—something that you are really proud of." When Steinbrenner was introduced to the New York media, most of the local journalists had never heard of him. He called the Yankees "the best buy in sports today" and added, "I think it's a bargain." His other statements proved less prescient. "I won't be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all," he said, vowing to remain in Cleveland and continue in the shipping business. He kept his promise not to move to New York, but that was all. Within a year, he had fired the club president, Mike Burke; the manager, Ralph Houk, and the general manager, Lee MacPhail, had both resigned.
Steinbrenner's lack of experience turned out to be an advantage in some respects. In the early nineteen-seventies, baseball was run by a coterie of like-minded skinflints, the most influential of whom was Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Los Angeles (née Brooklyn) Dodgers. The owners kept the players in a form of indentured servitude, and most of the money that the game generated stayed in their pockets. This situation started to change when the players' union, led by Marvin Miller, a former negotiator for the United Steel Workers, mounted a successful challenge to the "reserve clause" in players' contracts, which had kept them tied to the same club for their entire careers unless the owner agreed to a trade. Many owners never reconciled themselves to the resultant era of rising salaries and "free agency," but Steinbrenner, who wasn't wedded to the old system, moved quickly to sign up players like Jim (Catfish) Hunter, Andy Messersmith, and Reggie Jackson. "He was the first baseball owner to understand how free agency would change the game, and the first to utilize free agency to build winning teams," Miller wrote in his 1991 memoir, "A Whole Different Ball Game."
Steinbrenner's political moves were less adroit. On April 5, 1974, the first day of the baseball season, a grand jury in Cleveland indicted him on fourteen counts, including making illegal political contributions to Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President and obstructing justice. Steinbrenner has always been an Independent, and his main motivation in supporting CREEP was commercial: he hoped to curry favor with the policymakers who controlled government shipbuilding contracts. (He also raised a lot of money for congressional Democrats.) On August 23, 1974, two weeks after Nixon resigned, Steinbrenner pleaded guilty to one felony count and was fined fifteen thousand dollars. Three months later, Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, banned him for two years on the ground that ignoring his illegal actions would "undermine the public's confidence in our game."
Steinbrenner's critics seized on the conviction. Red Smith, who was then at the Times, regularly referred to him as "convicted felon George Steinbrenner." More than twenty-five years later, Steinbrenner hasn't forgotten how it felt. "Maybe people say, 'Oh, it means nothing. It was a petty felony.' Not me," he said. "I missed the right to vote until President Reagan, bless his soul, gave me a pardon. It was very tough for me. I am very patriotic. I believe in this country."
Kuhn eventually reduced Steinbrenner's ban to fifteen months. In 1976, the year that Steinbrenner returned to baseball, the Yankees won the American League pennant, but the Cincinnati Reds swept them in the World Series. The morning after the Series ended, Steinbrenner and his senior executives were meeting in his office when a reporter looked in and asked what was going on. "We just got our asses kicked, and it's not going to happen again," Steinbrenner replied. The following year, the Yankees again reached the World Series, where they faced the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the decisive sixth game, at Yankee Stadium, Reggie Jackson hit three home runs off three different pitchers on just three pitches. Steinbrenner still regards that night as his proudest moment in baseball—the moment he finally impressed his father.
The owner's box at Legends Field is directly behind the home dugout. When I arrived there on a sunny afternoon this spring to watch the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the first inning was already under way. Steinbrenner was sitting with Phil McNiff, a former F.B.I. agent, who is in charge of running Legends Field, and Monsignor Higgins. "This is Tammany Hall," the Monsignor joked. "This is where things get done."
Steinbrenner was in a good mood, at least to begin with. He was preparing for the launch of the YES Network, which was only ten days away. The preparations had been marred by a highly publicized disagreement with Cablevision, the cable company that serves three million potential Yankees fans in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, New Jersey, and Long Island, but Steinbrenner was still pretty confident that the two sides would reach an agreement. "I hope like hell we can get them together," he told me.
The Yankees and Cablevision have been doing business together for years. In 1988, Cablevision agreed to pay the Yankees four hundred and eighty-six million dollars over twelve years in return for the right to broadcast most of the club's games on its sports network, MSG. The contract, which was by far the most valuable in baseball history, ran out at the end of 2001. Before it expired, Chuck Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision and an old Cleveland friend of Steinbrenner's, tried to buy the Yankees outright in order to guarantee that their games remained on MSG. The two sides failed to reach an agreement, partly because Steinbrenner had television ambitions of his own. The success of MSG, as well as of ESPN and Fox Sports Net, had shown that sports networks could prove extremely lucrative. In June of last year, the Yankees paid Cablevision thirty million dollars to satisfy any remaining legal obligations and went ahead with plans for their own network.
By that time, Steinbrenner had already merged the Yankees with the New Jersey Nets and the New Jersey Devils, in the YankeeNets holding company. The combination of the three teams, which was initiated by the financiers Raymond Chambers and Lewis Katz, who were part owners of the Nets, was completed in August, 2000. Steinbrenner remained in operational control of the Yankees, and the merger raised about two hundred and twenty million dollars for him and his limited partners. It also provided the prospect of winter programming for the new network once the Nets' and the Devils' current television contracts expire. Last September, YankeeNets hired Leo Hindery, a veteran cable executive, to run YES, and took a sixty-per-cent stake in the network; Goldman, Sachs put up more than three hundred million dollars to become a minority partner.
The formation of the YES Network had gone smoothly, but now Cablevision was refusing to make the channel available on the terms that the Yankees were demanding, and negotiations had broken down. Steinbrenner was monitoring the situation, but he had stayed out of the negotiations. "I have nothing to do with it, because I know nothing about the television business," he said.
For the moment, he was more concerned with spring training. Two of his new signings, Jason Giambi and David Wells, were in that day's lineup, but at the start of the sixth inning the Devil Rays, an expansion team with no recognized stars, were leading by 2-0, and the Yankees were facing their fourth defeat in a row. "Can't you get me some hits, or at least a prayer?" Steinbrenner said to the Monsignor. "You know what I always say, George," the Monsignor replied. "Prayer is good, but only when you work hard." In years past, Steinbrenner would get furious if the Yankees played badly in spring training. These days, he tries hard not to care, but he doesn't always manage it. During the seventh inning, he went inside and started making phone calls. At the start of the ninth, with the Yankees yet to score a run, he left. "I've got a conference call, and I don't want to miss it," he said.
Between 1980 and 1994, the Yankees made it to the World Series only once (losing to Los Angeles in 1981), and Steinbrenner switched managers fifteen times. He fired Dick Howser after a season in which the Yankees won more than a hundred games, telling reporters that Howser wanted to enter the real-estate business. (This came as news to Howser.) He promised Bob Lemon that he would manage for the entire season, "no matter what," and then fired him before the end of April. He fired Yogi Berra by telephone—and had somebody else make the call. Most notorious of all, Steinbrenner fired Billy Martin five times, the last time in 1988, after Martin got into a brawl in a topless bar in Texas. The dysfunctional relationship between Steinbrenner and Martin came to symbolize all that was wrong at Yankee Stadium. "It was pathetic," Bill Madden, of the News, who has covered the Yankees for nearly thirty years, told me. "Billy kept coming back, and, especially the last couple of times, he was burned out as a manager. George should have seen that. I mean, Billy had just been whipped and beaten down so long that he couldn't function anymore as a manager." Martin died in a car accident on Christmas Day, 1989. There were rumors at the time that Steinbrenner had been about to hire him yet again, although Steinbrenner denied it. "Billy Martin was a brilliant baseball man and a good pal," he told me. "He just wanted the booze too much. I used to have conversations with him. I said, 'Billy, you've gotta stop it. You've gotta stop the drinking.' And then something would happen, and I'd have to fire him, or give him another job."
Steinbrenner quarrelled with his players almost as often as he did with his managers. Instead of confronting them privately, he attacked their performances in front of reporters. Although he would never admit it, he seemed to resent the publicity that some of his expensive imports received, especially Reggie Jackson and the slugger Dave Winfield. He also complained about players' salaries, conveniently ignoring his own role in promoting the inflation. The Yankees' winning percentage during the nineteen-eighties was better than most people realize, but they kept missing the playoffs. To make matters worse, the scrappy Mets won the 1986 World Series and captured the hearts of many New Yorkers. Steinbrenner could do little to arrest the Yankees' decline. His incessant trading had stripped the farm system of its top prospects, and stars like Winfield and Don Mattingly didn't have enough support.
The one thing he could do was switch managers. At the start of the 1989 season, Steinbrenner appointed as skipper Dallas Green, a six-foot-five bear of a man who, in 1980, had led the Philadelphia Phillies to their only World Series victory. Steinbrenner granted Green the right to bring in his own coaches, an unprecedented concession. It soon became clear, though, that he didn't have the patience for the changes that Green wanted to make. "We got to sniping at each other," Green recalled. "He started sniping at my coaching staff through the media, and I returned the salvos doubly hard from my end of the media." In the middle of August, with the Yankees eight games out of first place, Steinbrenner fired Green and hired Bucky Dent. "We fell apart," Green said. "But I always did, and I still do, respect his—well, it's just an athlete's desire to win. He exudes that."
For four years in a row, from 1989 through 1992, the Yankees fell below .500, and many fans gave up hope. Looking back on this unhappy era, Steinbrenner is philosophical. "It's very difficult to stay at the top all the time," he said. "You gotta build. If it gets torn apart, with age or retirement, you gotta rebuild." At the same time, he freely admits that he made a lot of errors—beginning with allowing Reggie Jackson to sign with the California Angels after his contract with the Yankees expired. For many Yankees fans, the low point came in 1985, when Steinbrenner fired Yogi Berra. "That was a mistake, to relieve Yogi when I did and to have Clyde King, who was my general manager at the time, call him and not do it myself," Steinbrenner conceded. "It was poor judgment. Clyde called him in the middle of a lake or something, and that wasn't right to do. I don't pretend to be perfect, and I'm not. You could sit and write a huge volume about the mistakes I've made."
Steinbrenner's worst decision was agreeing to pay a shifty gambler named Howie Spira forty thousand dollars for what was purported to be damaging information about Dave Winfield. Winfield's agent had infuriated Steinbrenner by obtaining a contract with a big cost-of-living adjustment, which Steinbrenner hadn't fully understood. "George just got had," Fay Vincent, then the commissioner of baseball, recalled. "So he got very angry at Winfield, and he went after him in a vicious way." Eventually, Steinbrenner paid Spira, who then tried to extort him for more. After the News broke the story, Vincent launched an investigation, which ended with Steinbrenner's reluctantly agreeing to have his name placed on a list of people ineligible to own a baseball club.
Steinbrenner rarely talks about his two bans. His spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, asked me not to bring them up, but I did anyway, and he was surprisingly contrite. "A lot of what happened to me, I admit I deserved," he said, adding that he doesn't blame either Kuhn or Vincent. "Both men did what they felt they had to do. So I hold nothing against them—in fact, I like Fay Vincent. He's a Williams man. That was the irony—a man from Williams putting me out of the game."
In retrospect, Fay Vincent did Steinbrenner a big favor. His absence in 1991 and 1992 allowed Gene (Stick) Michael, who was then the general manager of the Yankees, to remake the club without constant interference. "I get along well with George," Michael once remarked. "I say, 'Yes, sir,' at all the meetings, and then I go out and do what I think is best for the team." Michael assembled a core of veteran players, including Paul O'Neill, Jim Abbott, and Wade Boggs, filling out the roster with home-produced young talent, such as Bernie Williams. He hired as manager Buck Showalter, a workaholic who sometimes spent the night in his office.
In March, 1993, when Vincent allowed Steinbrenner to return to the Stadium, the Yankees had a new look to them. Steinbrenner, too, had benefitted from his enforced rest. "I had time to sit out and think where I'd made mistakes and what I would do differently," he told me. After twenty years of rash behavior, Steinbrenner finally began to take some notice of what Michael and others told him. "That was a problem for him before," Dallas Green said. "He stopped creativity because he wanted to make all the decisions." When Michael and his colleagues reportedly resisted the idea of trading Bernie Williams to the Montreal Expos for Larry Walker, Steinbrenner deferred to them, a decision that preserved a homegrown All-Star who could appeal to New York's growing Latino population. The decision to keep Williams established a precedent that is still paying off. A couple of seasons ago, Steinbrenner suggested trading a prospect named Alfonso Soriano to Anaheim for Jim Edmonds, but he didn't get his way, and Soriano is now a star player.
Yankees past and present notice a big difference in how the club is run these days. "They have a meeting now, and they go over things," Yogi Berra told me. "Two heads are better than one. Four or five heads are even better." Although Steinbrenner has the last word, he listens to contrary views. "He doesn't want people to tell him what he wants to hear," Buck Showalter said when I spoke with him recently. "Believe me, if you are in a meeting and he thinks that is what is going on he will devour you."
In 1995, the Yankees made the playoffs for the first time since 1981, and the Seattle Mariners defeated them by three games to two. At the end of the season, Showalter's contract was up. Steinbrenner offered him a new one, and a pay raise, but insisted on making some changes to the coaching staff, which Showalter refused to go along with. "I didn't feel like I could go back in the locker room with coaches that had been picked for me and fire guys that I knew were capable of doing the job, and then look the players in the eyes and talk to them about loyalty," he said.
It was Arthur Richman, a former newspaperman who served as a senior adviser to Steinbrenner, who first suggested replacing Showalter with Joe Torre, a manager who had already been fired three times—by the St. Louis Cardinals, the Braves, and the Mets. Steinbrenner's initial reaction was "Torre? He never won anywhere." Eventually, however, he agreed to speak with Torre, whom he now praises lavishly. "My relationship with Joe is the best I've had," Steinbrenner said during one of our talks. "Wonderful guy. I understand his points, his philosophies, and I give him credit for understanding me. I think he's a lot like Joe McCarthy"—the legendary Yankee skipper whose team won the World Series seven times between 1931 and 1946. A few days after we had this conversation, Steinbrenner sent me a newspaper article, on which he had highlighted some passages: "McCarthy knew all there is to know about the mechanics of baseball. . . . But he had another and more important gift: an understanding of human nature, a high talent for dealing with miscellaneous personalities and temperaments."
I spoke with Torre recently and asked him about his relationship with Steinbrenner. "One thing I learned a long time ago—if you are going to take somebody's money, you gotta take their abuse, too," he replied. "You can't pick and choose the stuff you like about people." Torre doesn't take everything Steinbrenner says personally. "Sometimes it bothers you more than other times," he said. "But you understand that, first off, he's the boss and he has the right to do whatever he wants to do." Torre paused. "I think our relationship has been on a very high level," he went on. "Not only do I respect him but he respects me, and I think that is why it has lasted so long and been as consistent as it's been."
Both Steinbrenner and Torre expect the Yankees to reach the World Series every season. These expectations place great demands on the team. Torre, who grew up on Avenue T in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, is able to handle the pressure, and his biggest achievement has been in helping his players to handle it, too. "One thing I try to do is keep distraction out of the clubhouse," he said. "It's tough enough to play baseball. On top of that, it makes it even tougher to play in New York."
Before the start of this season, a potential distraction arose when Ruben Rivera, an outfielder who was trying to make the Yankees' roster, admitted stealing Derek Jeter's glove and passing it to a memorabilia dealer. Twenty years ago, Steinbrenner would have got involved, and the tabloids would have feasted on the story for weeks. But Torre consulted with Brian Cashman, who has been the Yankees' general manager since 1998, and they decided that Rivera would have to go. Torre informed some of the senior players, including Mariano Rivera, who is Ruben Rivera's cousin, of the decision, and Cashman obtained Steinbrenner's approval for the payment that Rivera received in return for leaving immediately. The story lasted for just two days, after which the back pages returned to Andy Pettitte's sore elbow and Roger Clemens's bruised ankle. Steinbrenner stayed in the background. "He doesn't interfere with what I do," Torre said. "We talk about things at times, about certain players and stuff, but he's never mandated what I do here—who to play and who not to play. He'll say, 'This player, I think he's good,' or whatever. But he's never said, 'You play this guy.' "
When tension arises between the owner and the manager, it is usually prompted by the glowing media coverage that Torre receives. Steinbrenner occasionally reminds Torre about his previous managerial stints, saying, "Joe, what the hell happened in Atlanta, St. Louis, and the Mets that they didn't see the greatness in you that I have seen? Could it be the organization?" When Torre's contract came up for renewal last year, Steinbrenner refused to discuss it with him until the season was over, claiming that he was too busy with the launch of the YES Network and other business. Torre ended up dealing with Randy Levine, the Yankees' president, who is a former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration. When the contract, which guaranteed Torre more than five million dollars a year, was finally signed, last November, the Yankees didn't issue a press release, an omission that some interpreted as Steinbrenner's putting Torre in his place.
With two such strong-willed men running the Yankees, the thirty-five-year-old Cashman fulfills the essential roles of intermediary and buffer. "I talk to a lot of people in all areas of the club, including the owner, and I try to reach a consensus," he told me. Whereas Steinbrenner and Torre both look as if they had stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel, Cashman has the appearance and demeanor of a bright young internist at Columbia Presbyterian. He has worked for the Yankees since he graduated from college, and he was just thirty-one when Steinbrenner made him the second-youngest general manager in baseball history. "I owe the Boss a lot," he said. "Everything I am today is attributable to my father and mother and to him."
I spoke with Cashman one afternoon during spring training when he was getting ready to meet with Steinbrenner. He knew that the principal topic of conversation would be the Yankees' record of four victories and eleven losses. He opened a laptop computer and read from a column of figures detailing the team's spring-training record for the past six years, which he had put together for Steinbrenner. "Since 1996, the best spring-training record we had was in 1997, 20-11, and that's the only year we didn't go to the World Series," Cashman said. "What it all means I can't really tell you. I'm just not overly concerned about it. But you try telling him that."
Although Steinbrenner has mellowed somewhat over the years, he is still remarkably driven. "You are never satisfied," he told me at one point. "Assume nothing. I have that on my desk, and I have it all over my locker room." Steinbrenner also retains an almost pathological distaste for defeat. On an intellectual level, he knows that baseball teams play a long season and can't hope to win every game, or even nearly every game. But whenever the Yankees hit a losing streak he feels cheated and angry, and he tends to lash out. (A few years ago, he publicly labelled one of his pitchers, Hideki Irabu, a "fat, pussy toad.") "I call him Jekyll and Hyde," Dallas Green said of Steinbrenner. "Because if he comes into a room full of people he charms everybody. He's a great conversationalist, he's a friendly guy, he's a very charitable guy. But when he got to the ballpark he seemed to turn into the other guy."
Steinbrenner's approach is reminiscent of that of the famous British soccer coach Bill Shankly, who once remarked, only partly in jest, "Football is not a matter of life and death. It's much more important than that." People like Shankly and Steinbrenner may not be easy to deal with, but to stay on top in any major sport it is essential to maintain the true fanatic's warped sense of reality. Insecurity and paranoia are also big advantages. "We've had a fantastic five years, but I also learned this," Steinbrenner said. "When you least expect it, you look over your shoulder and they are gaining on you. They're all gaining on me right now."
This claim is dubious. At the end of June, the Yankees moved into first place in the American League East. Even Mike Lupica, of the News, who came up with the "Boss Steinbrenner" moniker and has been lashing Steinbrenner for twenty-five years, recently described the current lineup in the Bronx as "the greatest Yankee team in history." Far from endorsing such comments, Steinbrenner regards them as seditious. "How good is this team going to be?" he told me during the spring. "I can honestly say we'll have to wait and see. It's up to the organization."
Organization, discipline, and teamwork are Steinbrenner's mantras. At most ball clubs, players wear jerseys with their names on the back; the Yankees wear only their numbers. These days, Steinbrenner said, "conditions are different in baseball. But the conditions of the Yankees will never change, we hope. We believe in wearing your uniform neat. They wear coats and ties when they get on airplanes. I don't want them looking like a bunch of softball players that just got off the bus. Joe [Torre] buys that, just like I do." When Jason Giambi arrived from Oakland at the start of the year, there was a lot of speculation about whether he would trim his biker-dude locks and shave his goatee. He did both, winning Steinbrenner's instant approval. Steve Karsay, a relief pitcher whom the Yankees picked up from the Atlanta Braves, didn't make as good an impression. "Gee, you're such a good-looking kid," Steinbrenner told him. "I bet you'd look even better with shorter hair."
Steinbrenner divides the world into two types of people: those who work for him and those who don't. For years, he complained that he couldn't get through to his executives by phone quickly enough. Eventually, he ordered many of them to have hot lines installed. "If I was away from the red phone, I could never relax," Marty Appel, a former Yankees public-relations director, recalled in his book, "Now Pitching for the Yankees." "I thought he was looking for me." Appel's successors didn't have it any easier. "He gets upset about something, anything, and he says, 'Look, if this happens again, you're gone,' " Rob Butcher, who is now the media-relations director of the Cincinnati Reds, told me. "I'm sure he says that once a day to somebody. His way of managing people is through intimidation." Steinbrenner fired Butcher on December 21, 1995, after he had had the temerity to go home to Wilmington, Ohio, for his first vacation in a year, just as the team was signing David Cone. Butcher offered to fly back to New York if the deal went through over Christmas, but that wasn't good enough for Steinbrenner. "Don't bother," he told Butcher. "We don't really need you."
The Yankees are the only team in baseball that doesn't close down for a week at Christmas. When Brian Cashman was renegotiating his contract last fall, he insisted on a clause guaranteeing him time off over the holidays. Steinbrenner honored the clause in his fashion. On Christmas Eve, he took David Wells to lunch and offered him a two-year contract. Cashman is supposedly responsible for trades, but he didn't know anything about the Wells deal until Steinbrenner interrupted his vacation to tell him about it. "He is always in charge, and you have to respect that," Cashman said. "He will give you some autonomy at some moments, but you also have to be prepared to be stripped of that at any time." For his part, Steinbrenner defines his role as overseeing the work of others. "I've got a favorite saying that I tell them they should remember," he told me. " 'The speed of the pack is determined by the pace of the leader.' "
Steinbrenner's rule, like those of many despots, is marked by surprising acts of kindness. In recent years, he has made a concerted effort to win over his former enemies. Yogi Berra didn't speak to Steinbrenner for fourteen years. Then, in 1999, Steinbrenner went to see him, apologized, and made a contribution to his baseball museum. Berra is once again a regular visitor to the Stadium, where he often sits in the owner's box. ("You get a good view to watch the game," he said.) This year, he and Reggie Jackson both attended spring training as guest instructors. Steinbrenner has even settled his differences with Dave Winfield, devoting a special day to him at Yankee Stadium in 2001, after Winfield was elected to the Hall of Fame. "I've tried, in the past ten years, to go back, and when I've done wrong, tried to make it right," Steinbrenner said. "I haven't succeeded everywhere, but I've tried."
Steinbrenner also realizes the commercial value of preserving his club's history. The Yankees are a brand, and having the old-timers on hand helps to preserve that brand. But it isn't just a matter of money. If Steinbrenner's motivation was purely pecuniary, he would hardly have persevered with Dwight (Doc) Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, two recidivists who tarnish the Yankees' wholesome image. Earlier this year, Gooden was placed on fully paid leave after being arrested for drunk driving. He recently pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving, and he is now back with the Yankees as a minor-league instructor and "special adviser" to Steinbrenner. Strawberry returned to prison this spring after being thrown out of a Florida drug-treatment program. He has been promised a job with the Yankees if he finishes his sentence and stays clean. "I won't turn my back on Doc, and I won't turn my back on Darryl, and I'll tell you why," Steinbrenner declared. "These fellas—it's a sickness. Drugs are a fucking sickness. And if we don't go at the root of the thing and cure that, how can you blame the user? How can you blame the kids who get put upon and don't have the will to resist?"
Despite Steinbrenner's domineering ways, it remains an open question how much of the Yankees' success during the past few years is due to his actions. Bill Madden praises Steinbrenner for resurrecting the Yankees; Mike Lupica, his colleague at the News, says the owner's contribution was limited to an open checkbook and the fortuitous hiring of Torre. "It wasn't even his idea," Lupica told me recently. "He just ended up with the guy who is going to go down in history as the greatest ever manager of the New York Yankees. That changed everything for George."
Nobody would dispute the fact that Torre has done an excellent job, but ultimately it is Steinbrenner who is responsible for assembling and retaining the most talented collection of players, coaches, and baseball executives in the country. "George finds winners, and he's a winner," Roger Clemens told me. "The guys that he hires under him, they are winners—Mr. Torre, Mel Stottlemyre, Don Zimmer, the whole staff." Clemens, who has won the Cy Young Award six times, was thirty-six when he joined the Yankees. He said that Steinbrenner is able to "look at people and see how much will and desire they have, no matter how young or old they are." Buck Showalter agrees with this assessment. "I think his baseball knowledge is underrated," he said. "He understands the type of guy who can prosper in New York and who can't."
Of course, money has also played a crucial role in the Yankees' revival. Last year, the club generated local revenues, from sources including gate receipts and television-rights payments, of $217.8 million; the Expos had local revenues of $9.8 million. In football and basketball, teams are forced to share the bulk of their revenues in order to insure that clubs in small cities remain competitive, but baseball teams kick in only twenty per cent of the local revenues that they bring in, and they can spend as much of the remainder as they choose on players. Rising economic inequality is the main reason that no team with small revenues has won a single World Series game since the Minnesota Twins, in 1991. Twenty-five years ago, the Cincinnati Reds were a major force in baseball. Today, they struggle to compete at the top level. All the same, to ascribe the Yankees' success solely to a bulging treasury may be, in the words of Rupert Murdoch, "to greatly underestimate George." In 1998, Murdoch's company, the News Corporation, bought the Los Angeles Dodgers. Since then, the Dodgers have spent heavily on players, but they are still struggling on the field, and so are the big-spending Orioles and Mets. "You can put together a lot of expensive players and get nowhere," Murdoch told me. "Somehow, George makes it work." (Murdoch's son James is on the board of YankeeNets.)
From the beginning, Steinbrenner saw baseball as part of the entertainment business. During the nineteen-sixties, he invested in Broadway shows that his friend Jimmy Nederlander produced. When Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, Nederlander, who was one of the limited partners, gave him some advice that he never forgot: "Remember, we are a star-vehicle town. New York loves stars, worships stars, so you've got to have some stars to draw the people." Steinbrenner flew to Chicago for Thanksgiving in 1976 to sign Reggie Jackson, making him one of baseball's first millionaires; this past winter, with a new cable-television network to promote, he agreed to pay a hundred and twenty million dollars over seven years to Jason Giambi. But being a star on Steinbrenner's Yankees also involves responsibilities. "Those you build into stars, you make sure they are team players," he told me. "When you start letting the inmates run the prison, you are lost. A lot of teams have done that."
Steinbrenner also established early on that any profits the Yankees generated would be spent on new players. "A lot of owners give lip service to wanting to win, but this guy worked at it," Dallas Green told me. "And he was willing to put his bucks where his mouth was." For almost three decades, Steinbrenner's limited partners received hardly any dividend payments from the Yankees, and they could not realize a profit unless they cashed in their shares. Many did sell—usually to Steinbrenner and his family, who gradually increased their stake in the Yankees to almost sixty per cent. In following this reinvestment policy, Steinbrenner was anticipating a major trend in American business: during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, most major corporations slashed their dividends in order to invest in future growth. The strategy has paid off. In 1972, fewer than a million people went to Yankee Stadium. Last year, the total attendance for the season was more than three million.
If the Red Sox franchise is worth seven hundred million dollars, which is what it sold for earlier this year, YankeeNets must be worth well over a billion. Steinbrenner's stake alone is probably worth several hundred million dollars—not a bad return on an initial outlay of less than two hundred thousand dollars. "He made a brilliant investment, and he's turned it into a big success," Fay Vincent said. "I'm no fan of his in some ways, but I respect him for that."
Eventually, the Yankees will probably be forced to share some more money with poorer teams in order to make the game more competitive. Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, has proposed upping the amount of revenue-sharing to fifty per cent of local revenues, and he clearly expects Steinbrenner to coöperate on the issue. "Can George be difficult?" Selig said to me. "Yes. Very. So can I. But, in the end, he loves the game as much as I do, and that's why we've always been able to fashion solutions to our problems."
Whatever happens on the revenue-sharing front—and any change has to be approved by the players, who would like to retain the current system—the Yankees' financial well-being seems assured. Even the fate of Yankee Stadium, an issue that has long stirred up hostility toward Steinbrenner, has been resolved, at least temporarily. Steinbrenner's repeated threats to move his club to New Jersey, or elsewhere, unless New York taxpayers coughed up money for a new stadium, were a big reason for his unpopularity. Last December, in one of the Giuliani administration's final acts, the city and the Yankees agreed to split equally the cost of constructing a new Yankee Stadium next to the old one. It remains to be seen whether Mayor Bloomberg will follow through on this pledge, which could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, but Steinbrenner is hopeful. "We found a great way to do it," he said. "I don't feel like we got a Cleveland deal or a Milwaukee deal, but it was a good deal for both sides. We didn't get a steal."
Steinbrenner's hero is George Patton, who commanded the Third Army during the Second World War. He has watched "Patton," which stars George C. Scott, many times, and a few years ago he wrote the preface to a book entitled "Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare," in which he praised Patton as a "go-to guy" and "the ultimate warrior"—a phrase he also uses to describe his favorite ballplayers, such as Paul O'Neill and Roger Clemens. Steinbrenner is also a big fan of Sun-tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist and the author of "The Art of War." "It's like a Bible to me," he said. "I give it to some of my people. I say, 'This is what you must remember when we go forward.' Because we basically go to combat—whether it's baseball, basketball, or whatever it's in."
Steinbrenner still likes to play the role of field marshal, as I discovered when I met him a few weeks into the season. "These are busy times for me, pal," he said, getting up from his table in the restaurant of the midtown hotel where he stays when he is in New York. "Getting the team going. Getting 'em started. We have a few weak spots. We've gotta work on fixing them up." One thing Steinbrenner wanted repaired quickly was the health of the Cuban pitcher Orlando Hernández, a.k.a. El Duque, who had pulled out of that night's game, forcing Roger Clemens to replace him. "El Duque has a little stiffness in his neck," Steinbrenner explained. "I'll give him a little stiffness behind his ear when I see him." Shane Spencer, whom Torre had named as his starter in right field, was another worry. "Last night, Spencer made a terrible error," Steinbrenner said with an anguished look on his face. "From third base, trying to go home on that ball. That might have been the ballgame, and he goes home. It's a cardinal rule in Little League that until the ball is past the pitcher you don't run. You've got no chance."
He conceded that some things had gone well, especially the return of David Wells, who had slimmed down and was pitching strongly. "That was a smart move by the team to get him," he said. (It wasn't "the team" that signed Wells, of course; it was Steinbrenner.) He was also confident that Jason Giambi was settling in after a shaky beginning, which had earned him one of Steinbrenner's "Hamlet" pep talks. During the previous night's game, Giambi had hit two home runs. "He's getting rolling," Steinbrenner said. "He's starting to enjoy himself.''
The Yankees weren't the only thing on Steinbrenner's mind. The Nets and the Devils were both preparing for the playoffs. Back in the early sixties, when he was still a shipbuilder, Steinbrenner bought the Cleveland Pipers, who played in the short-lived American Basketball League. The Pipers and the league both went bankrupt, and it took Steinbrenner years to pay off his fellow-investors. Almost forty years later, he was finally enjoying some basketball success. That morning, he had called Lou Lamoriello, the Nets' chief executive, to congratulate him. "I put him in there. He's just like me," Steinbrenner said of Lamoriello. "They say it's down to Rod Thorn"—the general manager of the Nets. "Rod's a very good basketball guy, but he needed a rod up his ass. Lou gave him that."
Steinbrenner hadn't failed to notice that the Knicks and the Rangers, two teams owned by Cablevision and whose games are shown on MSG, had not made the post-season. "To have two teams on the New Jersey side of the river in the playoffs—that's not good for the Garden teams," he said gravely. Far from being resolved rapidly, as Steinbrenner had hoped, the dispute between the Yankees and Cablevision had escalated into a legal and public-relations battle, with both sides running television and print advertisements to make their cases. Several columnists had called on Steinbrenner to step in and settle the matter, but he was still refusing to get involved. "They're saying, 'Get in the middle of it, George. Take charge!' " he told me. "No way. I've got a good man in Leo Hindery"—the chairman of the YES Network—"and he's brought us this far." All the same, some of the media criticism was starting to irritate Steinbrenner. "The Times hit me pretty good," he complained. "And the Times is a wonderful paper. It's a great paper. But they also own part of the Red Sox, and the Red Sox are my archrivals. Nobody ever talks about that."
Steinbrenner's protests that he had nothing to do with the Cablevision stalemate ought not to be taken at face value. Hindery gives him someone to hide behind, but by refusing to intervene Steinbrenner has condoned Hindery's brinkmanship, which has helped prevent a settlement. A banker who played a part in raising the money for YES told me that everybody involved in the formation of the new network was aware of the danger that Cablevision might refuse to give it channel space. The banker believes that Hindery and Steinbrenner took a calculated gamble that, if this were to happen, public outrage would quickly force Cablevision to fold. Unfortunately, from Steinbrenner's viewpoint, they underestimated how much they had already alienated Chuck Dolan and his son James, Cablevision's chief executive. "I think Cablevision will stay out unless they see themselves losing a lot of customers," Rupert Murdoch told me recently. "So far, they've lost about five thousand out of three million. It's nothing. Even if they lose twenty thousand or thirty thousand, they'll sit it out. I think if they lost a hundred thousand they'd have to cave."
At the end of May, Steinbrenner visited New York again, for a three-game series against the Red Sox, who had started the season in scorching fashion. He flew in on Friday night, when the Red Sox won, 5-2. The Yankees won easily the following day, setting up a rubber match on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the Bronx. Steinbrenner had invited General Tommy Franks, the commander of the American forces in Afghanistan, to throw out the first pitch, and before the game the four-star General and his wife chatted with Steinbrenner and some of his cronies in the owner's spacious office, on the fourth floor of the grandstand. Franks presented Steinbrenner with an ornate Bowie knife, a fitting gift from a Texan soldier. In return, Steinbrenner gave Franks a blue Yankees jacket, which the General pulled on over his civvies. Somebody asked Franks if he was a Yankees fan. "Of course," he replied. "All America is a fan of the Yankees."
More than fifty-five thousand people had packed into Yankee Stadium, an unusually high number of them Red Sox fans, and the atmosphere was building. Shortly after one o'clock, Franks delivered the ceremonial toss to loud applause. Then Bob Sheppard, who is in his fifty-second year as the Yankees' announcer, asked the packed house to direct its attention to center field, where a group of West Point cadets presented their colors during the national anthem. Steinbrenner, who had moved outside to the owner's box, stood as upright as a flagpole, his right hand on his heart, his eyes hidden behind aviator shades. His pride was on open display, and not just his pride in the Yankees. A couple of nights previously, the Nets had reached the N.B.A. finals, thus completing a remarkable season. "It's too much for an old man," Steinbrenner said when I asked what it felt like to be involved with two winning teams, but he clearly didn't mean it.
On this day, however, his beloved Pinstripers disappointed him. The Boston hitters shelled Ted Lilly, the young Yankees pitcher, for four runs, and then meted out similar treatment to the reliever, Ramiro Mendoza. By the bottom of the sixth, the home team was losing 7-1, and Steinbrenner was getting frustrated. "Lilly didn't have anything," he complained. "That's the problem with putting kids in there. When Pettitte and Hitchcock come back from the disabled list, he'll go to the bullpen. But Mendoza didn't have anything, either." While Steinbrenner was talking, Bernie Williams grounded out and Jason Giambi popped out, both on big swings. "They're all trying to hit home runs," Steinbrenner complained. General Franks tried to make light of the situation, offering to go down to the bullpen and warm up, but Steinbrenner remained distraught. "Some of our players just aren't delivering," he said testily, singling out Derek Jeter, the Yankees shortstop, who had been outplayed throughout the series by his opposite number, Nomar Garciaparra. Steinbrenner is normally a big fan of Jeter, but he also pays him nineteen million dollars a year and he expects him to perform on big occasions.
He tried to console himself by saying that the Red Sox couldn't sustain the blazing pace they had set early in the season. During the seventh inning, Rudolph Giuliani and his girlfriend, Judith Nathan, arrived. Steinbrenner hugged the former mayor. Then he disappeared inside, and he didn't come back. Most of the Yankees fans in attendance seemed to empathize with the Boss. By the time Shane Spencer grounded out to end a brief Yankees revival in the bottom of the ninth, the stands were almost empty, although Franks and Giuliani were still there, hoping for a minor miracle. When it didn't materialize, they headed for the exit, bemoaning the Yankees' performance along with the rest of the crowd. Their mercurial host had vanished.
Steinbrenner is an easy man to lampoon, but he has demonstrated that, in professional sports, at least, there is still a place for a fanatical, pigheaded rich guy who wants to show the world. "What drives people into sports ownership is ego, ego, ego, including myself," he told me during one of his more introspective moments. "Nothing is as important as ego." Egomania may be an unattractive trait, but attempting to reduce sports to just another business line rarely works, as the News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, and Cablevision have discovered. Athletes are emotional creatures who respond to the human touch, even if it occasionally feels more like a cattle prod, and perhaps it takes a Steinbrenner or a Ted Turner to bring out the best in them.
Yankees fans, who once spent most of their time wondering how to get rid of Steinbrenner, now worry what will happen if he makes good on his threats to retire. They look at the Atlanta Braves and see signs of decline now that Turner is no longer in a position to protect the players and coaches from the accountants at AOL. It is not out of the question that the same thing could happen to the Yankees. "Sooner or later, George isn't going to be here," Bill Madden muses. "And what's scary is what will be here in place of him."
How long will Steinbrenner continue? "I see pals of mine that have retired, and I don't envy them their lives," he said during one of our last conversations. "But I want to get there. I'm way over the mark. I had to be sure that my kids had the same hunger for it that I have—for winning and having great teams. I am now sure that they are of the same ilk." If that is indeed the case, Hank Steinbrenner, Hal Steinbrenner, and their brother-in-law Steve Swindal are keeping their ambitions well hidden. Hank, who is forty-four, looks after the family's stud farm; Hal, who is thirty-three, oversees its property interests. Neither of them has much to do with the Yankees. Swindal, a Tampa native who is married to Steinbrenner's older daughter, Jennifer, works full time for the ball club, but few expect him to take over. I called all three of them to ask about the future of the Yankees, and none of them got back to me. Still, despite the doubts about who or what will succeed him, Steinbrenner insisted that he is thinking about setting a date for his retirement. "Now, of course, you may find there are members of the family that don't want you home the whole time," he added. "So I've gotta find some new interests. I'm not a hunter or a fisherman who could spend the rest of his life that way." ♦


text:
A commentary by Jose Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace laureate and Gaia Discovery honorary advisor
Rio de Janeiro, 27 June 2012. We gathered in Rio from 190 countries, to review what we have done since the historic Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and what our world should look like in the coming decades. There was no cause for celebration and much to regret and fear as we continue to lack vision and leadership.
I did not travel to Rio with much optimism. Actually I must have been the only Head of State who did not attend the previous conferences in Copenhagen, Monterey and Durban which as I had feared had not reached a substantial, binding agreement that could meet the challenges of climate change.
We are still in the midst of an unprecedented financial, economic and social crisis that began in the U.S. in 2008, spread into Europe, and is still affecting countless world economies.
Again as I feared we emerged from the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 20-22, with a Declaration entitled "The World We Want," and lacking in substance and solid financial commitments.
We all knew it would be impossible to bring all parties to agree on a binding international agreement entailing deadlines and costs. So pragmatism and realism cautioned U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil that to avoid abject failure we must lower our expectations to the lowest possible common denominator.
The truth is that the financial, economic and social crises that affect the U.S. and almost all of Europe have tempered the political willingness of the rich countries of the North regarding substantial contribution to any bold sustainable development program to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
Even before the 2008 crisis, most rich countries were never able to mobilize the political and human will to allocate 0.7 percent of their GDP for development aid.
Aid pledges made in international conferences have been rarely kept. When they are, the funding has not always been effective in achieving the intended benefit for the receiving countries.
The path taken over the past decades in the relationship between rich and poor countries, between North and South, had ups and downs, with much waste and mismanagement, programs based on wrong concepts, wrong assumptions and wrong policies. The mistakes were not only on one side of the relationship. Donors and recipients shared in the mistakes, and share the responsibility for the lost decades.
So where do we go from here? I believe that rather than attempting to forge the one agreement that will change the course of the world, or being satisfied with one without much substance, it may be more realistic, practical and effective to think of agreements and plans on a regional level.
For instance, shouldn't Asia consider an Asian Road Map for 20-30 years for an integrated, equitable, sustainable Human Development, targeting eradication of poverty, illiteracy, TB, malaria, HIV/Aids, etc. and restoration of our forests, rivers and seas?
Asia, with half the world population, extracts a lot more from our planet to satisfy our needs of survival and development than any other region in the world. For our own survival, and in solidarity with our brothers and sisters from other parts of the world, we must act with vision and determination. We must do more to free our people from extreme poverty and save our common planet.
China, India, Pakistan, Japan, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, together have an unparalleled pool of know-how. They have enough financial resources to transform Asia into a prosperous, peaceful and happy region for our four billion citizens.
Africa, the Middle East and Latin America should and could do the same. Each region in the world should adopt its own road map for sustainable, equitable, integrated development, adapted to the conditions of each region and sub-region, and mobilizing regional resources and seeking additional funding from other partners if and as needed.
The U.S. and Europe still lead in science and technology and they should invest even more on education, research and new technologies for the benefit of their own peoples and the world.
The U.S. and Europe should contribute with know-how, technology and financially to the programs in each region or sub-region. But Asia should create its own fund, the Asian Fund for Sustainable Development, that can be managed by an existing institution such as the Asian Development Bank, in partnership with U.N. Specialized Agencies such as UNDP, UNICEF, WHO or NGO's with solid regional or international reputation such as OXFAM.
Each country should mandatorily contribute to such a fund, according to its GDP. The leading Asian economies can easily mobilize $100 billion to be invested during the next decade. Asia's industrialized nations such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, India or natural resource-rich countries, i.e. the oil, gas, gold, and diamond producers should lead by example and contribute 0.7 percent of their GDP to this fund. The Asian private sector would also be invited to contribute.
Asia's poor, low income countries with little or no mineral resources, vulnerable to climate change, would qualify to benefit from this fund, to develop programs targeting extreme poverty, illiteracy, TB, malaria, HIV/Aids, etc. and reforestation as well as cleaning up their rivers, lakes and seas.
Asia, the most populous region in the world, represents half of all mankind. The largest, oldest, richest civilizations appeared and met in Asia. Fifty years ago the region was extremely poor. Today it is emerging as a center of world power. But the challenges it faces are immense and complex. The region is the most dangerous in the world, the most militarized, the most nuclearized, with complex land and maritime border disputes, regional rivalries, ethnic and religious conflicts that have exploded frequently in and among states.
It cannot, however, continue to demand from the aging and impoverished Europeans and from today's less powerful U.S. to come to our rescue and lead or to continue the blame game.
If it is an established and obvious truth that Europe and the U.S. have contributed the most to the environmental degradation of our planet in the last 100 years, it must also be noted that they also contributed the most towards advances in medicine, science and technology, to the benefit of all humanity.
It is now Asia's turn to unite and act responsibly to correct the mistakes inherited from the past and those of the present, and adopt a road map to build the future we want.
My country, Timor-Leste, although young and with modest resources has given examples of solidarity. In the past 5 years we have contributed a total of about 10 million dollars in aid to some countries affected by natural disasters such as Cuba, Brazil, China, Portugal, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Myanmar, and to some U.N. specialized agencies.
Our people have shown that we are and will be ready to contribute as much as possible to make the Asian Road Map a reality, through a Fund for Sustainable Development.
Meanwhile, as we have waited with great expectation for a Global Agreement and Plan to come out of Rio +20 or any Regional Agreement and Plan, in Timor-Leste we are already implementing our Strategic Development Plan 2011-2030.
We are determined to achieve all of the Millennium Development Goals and become a high-income country in the next 10-20 years with a per capita income of $10,000.
Since independence in 2002, Timor-Leste has ratified the three Rio Conventions: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
We have produced three strategies and Action Plans in response to these conventions, namely, the National Adaptation Plan of Action for Climate Change (NAPA) approved by the Council of Ministers in 2011, the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) approved by the Council of Ministers in February 2012, and the National Action Plan for Sustainable Land Management (SLM), currently awaiting approval of the Council of Ministers.
We have established a new Directorate to support and strengthen the traditional custom of Tara Bandu to protect and conserve natural resources in order to achieve environmental sustainability, as well as a means to build trust within communities, and resolve conflicts.
A green and sustainable development model, based on peaceful cooperation from the local communities up, enables economically viable growth that works hand in hand with environmental sustainability, protecting the inheritance of future generations.
It is our hope that this young country and new democracy may well become a model for sustainable growth that can be emulated in other parts of our region, and other parts of the world, as we all seek the compassion, wisdom and courage necessary to face the challenges of the 21st Century.
José Ramos-Horta is the former President, Prime Minister, Foreign Minister of Timor-Leste. He is the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner. This article was first posted on Huffington Post.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Yellow Clam Key Fob - MIFARE® Ultralight EV1
- Colour: Yellow
- Style: Clam
- Memory Size: 48 byte
- Operating Frequency: 13.56 MHz
Product Description
This Yellow Clam Keyfob is perfect for access technology. Many organisations want the convenience and safety of RFID technology when it comes to access, however, desire a product that is a little more stylish and appealing visually. These Yellow Clam Keyfobs offer pure style and functionality, plus with the option to personalise you can't go wrong.
Pre Print: Yes - CMYK - 1 Colour Print
Inkjet Print: Yes - Black
Engraved Number: Yes
Should you want to personalise this fantastic Yellow Clam Keyfob please contact us and we will be happy to help and discuss artworks for the best design and print quality.
We do offer these keyfobs containing other technologies including: MIFARE 1K EV1, EM4100, Temic 5567, HITAG 1 & HITAG 2, iCODE SLI and Legic MIM256.
*Please note that the images shown may not accurately represent the colour of the key fobs you may receive.
Specification & Datasheet
|Memory Size
|48 byte
|Operating Frequency
|13.56 MHz
Write Your Own Review
Why Buy From USC?
- Supplying Organizations with Smart Products for over 17 Years
- Knowledgeable & Friendly Staff
- Fast Worldwide Delivery by Courier
- 144.6 Million Smart Products Shipped...and Counting!
Delivery Information
Delivery is a key part of Universal's service. View our Delivery Information for more details.


text:
Generations 2010
Major trends in how different generations of Americans use the internet
Social Media and Young Adults
This presentation covers recent findings on wireless, mobile internet use, social networks, content creation, blogging, Twitter and sexting among teens and young …
Social Media and Young Adults
Social media and mobile internet use among teens and young adults.
Generations Online: Charts
This is a series of charts related to the "Generations Online in 2009" report released on Jan. 28, 2009.
The financial crisis online
Online activists and concerned citizens are using the internet to learn about the financial crisis, share their views on the proposed bailout, and organize their friends.
New numbers for blogging and blog readership
Because blogs have been in the news lately with the Netroots Nation and BlogHer conferences recently wrapping up, it seemed like an opportune time to post our latest figures for blogging and blog readership.
Old media and new media blur just a little more
In what could be considered a further blurring of traditional media and new forms of digital media, this weekend's cover story in the New York Times Magazine features the intimate autobiographical account of Emily Gould, blogger and former Gawker …
Online Boys: Not Just Wallflowers
Teen girls have already laid their claim to many corners of the creative Web. So what are the boys up to?
Erase me…wait, don't erase me!
Recent events have highlighted an interesting set of consequences connected to the persistent presence many of us enjoy online.
Teens and Social Media
More teens are creating and sharing material on the internet. 28% of online teens have blogs, up from 2004 with growth fueled almost entirely by girls. "Super communicators" rise as email fades as a tool for teens.


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Next Slow Food Seattle Books Meeting: March 10
Join us for our next Slow Food Seattle Books meeting on March 10, 2011 at Roy Street Coffee and Tea on Capitol Hill!
Our March book club selection is Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg describes how four fish--salmon, tuna, bass, and cod--"dominate the modern seafood market." He takes a culinary journey around the world and examines how the wild fish industry has become increasingly industrialized over the last 30 years. He also shows how we can heal the ocean and make sustainable seafood the rule rather than the exception. This book is sure to generate great passion and discussion, so join us! This will be an active, open conversation and all are welcome - please join us even if you haven't had a chance to finish the book! We'll be meeting from 6-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 10. Roy Street Coffee and Tea is located at 700 Broadway East. Limited free parking is available in the lot below.
Read or listen to an interview with Greenberg on NPR here
Check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch here and we can discuss your thoughts.
See Dan Barber's funny and thoughtful presentation, "How I Fell In Love with a Fish," here
Support wild salmon & the food, jobs, and economic benefits they provide by sending a letter to President Obama.
RSVP to firstname.lastname@example.com
Want to pick up a copy of Four Fish? Here's a list of local booksellers, also available via our Amazon store.


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Celeb Twitter accounts were hacked yet again over the weekend, this time targeting pop singer Britney Spears and talk show comedian Ellen DeGeneres.
The unidentified pranksters broke into both Spears' and DeGeneres' Twitpic accounts and blasted out fake messages, including one outlandish claim that Spears was dead, according to MTV.
"Britney has passed today," one of the forged messages read. "It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come."
Twitpic, a Web-based messaging system that is not owned by Twitter, allows users to tack on photos to their Tweets. Twitpic shut down their services temporarily on Sunday after discovering what online company called a "vulnerability" in its mobile posting service.
In a note to users, Twitpic said to disregard the false message about Spears' alleged death. The service promised to fix the glitch immediately.
Pranksters have preyed on Spears before. Back in January, her Twitter account was logged into, and messages were sent out declaring that her vagina was four feet wide "with razor sharp teeth."
Spears' camp responded to the recent hack by posting a follow-up message on the microblogging site reassuring followers and fans that the pop star is alive and well.
"Britney's Twitter was just hacked," the post reads. "The last message was obviously not true. She is fine and dandy spending a quiet day at home relaxing."


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Thunder Bay Resort
Thunder Bay Resort is a beautiful, all-season resort poised on 400 acres in the heart of Northeast Michigan. Known for its award-winning Elk Viewing Dinner Ride and Wine Tasting, Thunder Bay Resort also boasts deluxe lodging, an RV Park, championship golf, and an array of outdoor entertainment and activities. Additionally, the resort hosts a variety of exceptional events and its central location makes it the ideal place to stay while exploring the many exciting nearby area attractions on the "Sunrise Side of Michigan"!
Accommodation Type:Campsites / RV Parks


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The Three Dimensions of Learning
A large part of my job is explaining things to people. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but if you can't explain to people why it is important, and how it will make a difference in their life or their business, then you have only done half the job.
That is why I am interested in different learning styles. One of the more widely-known models to describe different learning styles is Neil Fleming's VAK/VARK model. Fleming postulates that there are three different types of learners: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. To vastly over-simplify Fleming's work, some people learn best by seeing, others by listening and still others by touching and doing. While this might seem self-evident, understanding a student's learning style can be a vital tool for teachers. Moreover, knowing your own learning style can significantly increase the amount you can learn and retain.
Of course, the model doesn't have to be restricted to classroom education. For example, for the last several months, I have been talking about the benefits of the Cisco Unified Workspace as part of a mobility strategy. For you visual learners, I could tell you that the Cisco Unified Workspace strategy transforms the traditional concept of a workplace into a workspace that moves with employees. It unifies mobility, video, collaboration and any business applications an employee needs, and then makes them securely available on any device, with an uncompromised user experience. This, in turn, enables innovative new business models. I could then point you to our Cisco Unified Workspace webpage, where you could download whitepapers, case studies, analyst reports and all the other goodies that visual learners love.
Now, auditory learners prefer to sit back and absorb information. They like podcasts and lectures and discussions. For the auditory listeners, let me point you to this Cisco Unified Workspace demonstration video featuring my colleague Jiwan Grewal:
That leaves us with the kinesthetic learners. You are the folks that like to touch and poke and prod and do. I'll admit it's difficult to do that in a blog post. But, if you come to San Jose, California, we have a Cisco Unified Workspace live demonstration set up in our Executive Briefing Center. Or, if you are in Orlando in February, come see and interact with the Cisco BYOD and VXI Smart Solutions (key components of the Cisco Unified Workspace strategy) at the Gartner ITxpo 2012.
I'll leave you with one interesting parallel between the VAK model and the Cisco Unified Workspace. The VAK model attempts for maximize learning by recognizing that different people have different learning styles; The Cisco Unified Workspace attempts to maximize efficiency and productivity by recognizing that different people have different work styles. Whether learning or business or life, one size does not fit all.
In an effort to keep conversations fresh, Cisco Blogs closes comments after 60 days. Please visit the Cisco Blogs hub page for the latest content.
1 Comments
Dr. Jose A. Wong - Perez
…I agree 100% with your keynote…with all the devices available, our classrooms are not limited to a close space…is wide open and with the total mobility wherever we are…thanks for sharing, regards from PR.


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Neurotechnology customers can use this form to get access to developers area forums, which are closed to other forum participants.
The customers will need to provide their forum username and their SDK Reference ID. The submission will be reviewed at the same or next business day.
Open the request form for Neurotechnology customers.


text:
>> Map
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text:
Take your table to the next level by adding place cards and poison wine labels! We created free downloadable templates so you can print your own matching cards and labels!
Try using a plastic bug as a place card holder. We spray painted ours black, but you can also find them black to cut out a step!
We recommend you print your wine labels on sticker paper found at most craft stores, or simply cut out using the markers and stick on using double stick tape!
Print your free place cards here!
Print your free wine labels here!


text:
Steve Henderson necesitaba un nuevo diseño de página web y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 29 diseños de 4 diseñadores freelance.
Prickly Moses Handcrafted Beer
Prickly Moses Handcrafted Beer is a range of craft beer products produced at Otway Estate Winery and Brewery.
http://www.dogfish.com - love the rotating banner and the navigation.
http://www.murraysbrewingco.com.au - love the rotating banner concept on the home page.
Currently, http://www.otwayestate.com.au and http://www.pricklymoses.com.au go to the same website. This project will see the sites split. Initially this project will only see the Prickly Moses site spun off and later, the Otway Estate website will undergo the same revamp as a follow up project by the winning designer of this contest.
Please see the Web Site Specification PDF for the functionality that will go into the web sites but please focus on the Prickly Moses site only for now.
Two page layouts are required. They are:
1 - Home Page. The home page will have the common menu navigation menu, rotating banner image outlining initially 4 items. The home page will need a section for twitter social media widget. Twitter widget - http://twitter.com/about/resources/…et_profile
2 - Content Page. This is a skeleton of the home page with the common navigation, a page heading/title and some content. Each content page should have the Facebook Social Like Button widget.
I do not need content as this template will be ported into Joomla at a later stage. So just dummy content is required for now.
We're looking to have a new, fresh interesting dynamic website!
Our old website must die the painful death it deserves.....yuk!
I have attached the following files to this project:
- The specification of what will go into this web site with regards to menu items required. Please just refer to the http://www.pricklymoses.com.au section only for now. The other site will be a separate job.
- The Prickly Moses master logo in JPG and EPS formats.
- The brand typography for the logo - DAX Light.
- The Prickly Moses and Otway Estate 'ants' OE_Ants.zip. This must be used in the design. You will need to chop this up so the ants follow each other in a row...see OE_Ants_Pattern.zip for numerous examples - and our website too.
- OE_Ants_Pattern.zip - perhaps this may make a nice background image? Your call. I have this in EPS as well but I could not upload it as it's 32MB. Let me know if you want it in EPS and I'll YouSendIt to you.
Our target market is the 'beer geek' market so it's mostly male between the ages of 25 - 45 at 70%. The other major market at 30% is female - same age bracket.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Good luck everyone and HAVE FUN!


text:
SAIL Magazine Review
Edited by Charles Mason
Delivering a new level of performance is a tall order, especially for a first design.
But, Al Johnstone learned the trade well from his father, Rod, and the J/32, the first J Boat with Al's name on it, promises to be a valued addition to the J Boats family.
The boat is fast and easy for two people to sail.
Construction of both hull and deck utilizes the SCRIMP® resin infusion system; the laminate schedules include unidirectional, biaxial, and triaxial fibers. Baltek balsa core is used in both the hull and deck; a floor grid is fused directly to the hull to create additional strength.
Johnstone has resisted the urge to jam a lot of bunks belowdeck. The single stateroom/single head aft combination, with two settees in the main cabin for kids or visiting firemen, is a nice blend.
I had the opportunity to spend four days sailing the boat, and what fun days they were. Although the J/32 might be considered stiff by some, I liked this characteristic, because it allows the boat to accelerate out of a tack efficiently.
Part of the secret- the cockpit is efficient, and visibility from the helm is good even with the dodger up. The mainsheet tackle system is double-ended and easy to handle.
No 32 footer without davits can solve the dinghy-stowage problem perfectly, but there is more than enough locker space in the cockpit for an inflatable, scuba tanks, or other gear.
The J/32 will fit your needs for weekend-plus cruising.
-Robby Robinson


text:
Journal Article
Assessing the Levels of Knowledge Transfer within e‑Commerce Websites of Tourist Organisations in Africa pp59-66
© Dec 2005 Volume 4 Issue 1, Editor: Charles Despres, pp1 - 90
Look inside Download PDF (free)
This paper reports research to investigate how tourist organisations based in Africa acquire, disseminate and apply knowledge through their websites. Interactivity is the key to put information into context to become knowledge. A survey found there are some interactive knowledge‑transfer tools provided on the websites of African tourist organisa‑ tions, but only on the few, fully‑fledged e‑commerce websites was knowledge transfer being effectively utilised. The au‑ thors recommend that organisations incorporate more tools to acquire and apply knowledge as it is fundamental for e‑ commerce success.
Keywords: knowledge transfer, e-commerce, tourism, Africa
Journal Issue
Volume 4 Issue 1 / Jan 2006 pp1‑90
View Contents Download PDF (free)
Keywords: Active learning, Africa, Business intelligence, Case study, Cognitive diversity, CommonKADS], Communication, Complexity, Complexity representation , Complexity theory, Complexity thinking, Cross-functional teams, e-Commerce, Enterprise semantic web, First order reflection, Group dynamics, Human capital, Intellectual capital, Knowledge acquisition, Knowledge acquisition, Knowledge capital, Knowledge cooperation, Knowledge co-production, Knowledge creation, Knowledge flows, Knowledge learning, Knowledge sharing, Knowledge transfer, Knowledge transfer cycle, Lightweight ontologies, Organisational practices, Performance measurement, Predictive maintenance, Relational capital, Second order reflection, Semantic information retrieval, Semantic interoperability, Social networks, Social Software, Software development, Structural capital, Tourism, Value creation, Weblog, Wiki


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If you haven't yet heard about all the great benefits of olive oil, then you've probably been living under a rock. Olive oil has many advantages when it comes to cooking, but there are other creative uses for olive oil outside of the kitchen. Because of its high content of polyphenols and oleic acid, extra virgin olive oil provides more benefits than you might think.
1. Cut Cholesterol: Swallow a tablespoon of olive oil a day to manage bad cholesterol.
2. Oil Garden Tools: Clean garden tools with olive oil to keep them flexible any without buildup.
3. Treat Diaper Rash: Gently rub a small amount of olive oil into rash to get baby's skin feeling smooth again.
4. Remove Gum: Rub olive oil around area where gum is stuck and slowly work it out.
5. No More Sticky Dough Hands: Lube hands with olive oil to keep dough from sticking to skin.
6. Prevent Hairballs: Squirt a few drops of olive oil onto pet food to help prevent hairballs.
7. Treat Cracked Paws: Rub a little olive oil onto cracked paws to ease Fido's discomfort.
8. Apply to Flea Bitten Skin: Ease tenderness by applying some onto the flea bites.
9. Shine Shoes: Use a few drops of olive and a clean rag to make shoes shiny again.
10. De-Lice Naturally: Coat lice infestation with olive oil, comb out agitated lice and then let oil sit for 6-8 hours under a shower cap before rinsing with vinegar.
11. Face Moisturizer: Mix 1/4 teaspoon of olive oil and 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice for a DIY face moisturizer.
12. Soften Cracked Feet: Massage olive oil into the bottoms of feet and slip on a pair of cotton socks until the oil is absorbed. This makes for an instant at-home spa.
13. Remove Stickers: A drop of olive oil is all it takes to remove stuck on wall stickers when the time comes to change the decor.
14. Stop Frizzy Hat Hair: Comb a small amount of olive oil into hair before wearing a winter hat for a look that will stay in place without flyaways.
15. Remove Ear Wax: Soak the corner of a washcloth in warm olive oil and carefully clean ears to remove hardened wax.
16. Remove Dead Skin: Rub a fair amount of olive oil onto dry areas of skin followed by sugar to slough off dead skin. This can be coupled with dry brushing to exfoliate.
17. Smooth Shave: Prevent razor burn and get a closer than ever shave with olive oil.
18. Stop Snoring: Try moisturizing the throat with a little olive oil before sleeping to help stop snoring.
19. Remove Paint from Hands: Vigorously rub olive oil onto your soiled hands and easily wash the paint away.
20. Acne Fighter: Make a paste out of olive oil and salt and apply to face. Add a little brown sugar for a great body scrub.
21. For Better Nails: Rub a dab of olive oil into cuticles for instant softness.
22. Oil Zippers: Rub a little olive oil on stuck zippers to make them work like new again.
23. Remove Tarnish: Wipe away tarnish with a little olive oil and a clean rag.
24. Leather Conditioner: Use a few drops of olive oil and a clean rag to keep leather conditioned. This works for clothes, furniture and other items.
25. Improve Gum Health: Rinse mouth for 15-20 seconds with olive oil for healthier gums.
Image Source: Olive Oil Excellence