NEW YORK — When Oscar Gamble arrived at Yankees spring training in 1976, it was up to Marty Appel to deliver the bad news. It was simple: If Gamble wanted to work out the next day, he needed a haircut.
Gamble was sitting in his room at the Fort Lauderdale Inn. Appel, the Yankees’ PR director, felt sheepish. It wasn’t as if he was asking, say, Lou Piniella to trim a few inches off the top. This was Gamble, the owner of the coolest hair in baseball, a billowing afro that had made him a cult figure and netted him a nice endorsement deal.
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Rules, however, were rules, and The Boss was laying down the law. Four days earlier, on March 17, the Yankees had begun trickling into a spring camp delayed by a labor fight, only to to see a sign tacked on the clubhouse bulletin board. It contained four rules: “No beards, No muttonchops, No long hair, No high stirrups.” At the bottom were the signatures of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin.
The rules, of course, had been an unofficial edict since Steinbrenner bought the club in 1973. But enforcement had grown lax while Steinbrenner served an MLB suspension for making illegal campaign contributions in 1974 and 1975. Now The Boss was back, and maybe the Yankees were, too, but first there had to be discipline. At least, that’s how Steinbrenner thought. So he summoned equipment manager Pete Sheehy to relay the message: No uniform for Gamble, an outfielder in his first season with the club, or any other player until they cut their hair and shaved their beard.
This is how Appel found himself tracking down Gamble on a Sunday at the team hotel. There was only one problem: The Fort Lauderdale Inn had a barbershop on the first floor but no barber. So Appel tracked one down, dragged him across town, paid him $30 for one haircut, and Appel and coach Elston Howard looked on as Gamble’s fro ended up on the floor of the shop.
“There was black all over the floor,” Howard would say. “They carted the hair away in bushel baskets. There was so much of it I’m making myself a wig.”
Gamble, observers said, handled the moment like a pro. He felt no choice. “I feel like I’m naked,” he told a reporter a few days later. Still, the story of Steinbrenner’s rules would dominate camp for the next few weeks. Players playfully protested. The New York papers took their shots. Steinbrenner believed there was a deeper reason for the rules.
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“I have nothing against long hair, per se,” he said. “I’m trying to instill a certain sense of order and discipline in the ball club because I think discipline is important.”
Six months later, Chris Chambliss dug into the box against the Royals’ Mark Littell in a pivotal Game 5 of the American League Championship Series at Yankee Stadium. Littell hurled a fastball. Chambliss took a swing. And if there ever was a chance for the appearance policy to die — for The Boss to reconsider — well, you might say it ended that night in the Bronx as Chambliss rounded the bases and the Yankees won their first pennant in 12 years.
The Yankees’ policy on hair is now in its sixth decade, as much a part of the franchise brand as pinstripes and championships. It vexed Don Mattingly, among others, and sent Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Gerrit Cole to the barber. This is the story of the spring the Yankees went fully clean cut.
Sparky Lyle sounded pissed. It wasn’t just the hair rule, he said. It was that it was coming from the owner’s box. “Do you ever remember when an owner made the rule?” he asked. Lyle, a colorful lefty reliever, was in his fifth season with the Yankees; a year later, he would win the Cy Young Award with a sterling year in relief. But when he showed up to spring training in 1976, he was simply annoyed.
“Personally, I think the rule stinks,” he said.
Lyle was not the only aggrieved player. If not an all-out revolt, there was a simmering discontent in the clubhouse. Lou Piniella joked that he trimmed his hair and Elston Howard’s wife didn’t recognize him. Other players began hanging signs with references to military orders, a passive aggressive protest. (“K.P. detail for the week: Lyle, Tidrow, Munson,” one said, a reference to the abbreviation for kitchen patrol.) When Steinbrenner walked through the clubhouse, players would subtly troll The Boss, yelling “At ease” or “Attention!”
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It was, in some ways, their only recourse. One by one, the players complied, heading to the barber. “It’s kind of hard to play ball without a uniform,” Lyle admitted. “So I’ll probably cut it Tuesday. Or maybe I’ll just get drunk and let somebody bite it off.”
All across the country, the hairstyles of protest and counter-culture had gone mainstream. Young men were letting their hair flow. Baseball players started looking like the Beatles. In the early 1970s, the A’s won three straight World Series with a clubhouse full of mustaches and shaggy looks. When Oakland played the more conservative-looking Reds in the 1972 World Series, the media dubbed the series “The Hairs vs. the Squares.”
Steinbrenner, you might say, was fully in the camp of the Squares. When he purchased the club in 1973, Appel told me, Steinbrenner had sat in the stands in Cleveland on Opening Day and famously wrote down the number of each player who needed a haircut. The owner’s list ended up in the hands of manager Ralph Houk. The story — and others — soon began spreading across the league.
When Steinbrenner attempted to hire Dick Williams as manager in late 1973, a reporter with UPI asked Williams — who adopted a shaggy look in Oakland — if Steinbrenner’s view on hair would lead to a problem. “I haven’t met Mr. Steinbrenner yet, but I had short hair in Boston and we won, and I had longer hair in Oakland and we won, so I don’t think hair has anything to do with it.” A few months later, in early 1974, Steinbrenner softly confirmed his stance to the Daily News, though he said it was more about rules than hair. “There’s a great trend to nostalgia, to tradition,” he said. “You see it all over.”
Steinbrenner was talking, in part, about the Yankees’ glorious history, but he did believe in the power of tradition, branding and discipline. He had joined the United States Air Force after his years at Williams College. He served three years. Once he bought the Yankees, he wanted his players to feel devoted to the uniform. “I want to develop pride in the players as Yankees,” he said.
When Steinbrenner served his MLB suspension in 1974 and 1975, however, some of the rules began to bend. Appel says that catcher Thurman Munson sported a beard for part of the 1975 season. And when Steinbrenner returned in 1976, some questioned whether the policy would be strictly enforced.
“The answer,” Appel says, “was clearly yes.”
As Steinbrenner told The New York Times during the first week of spring training, “The Yankee system isn’t what it used to be and we’ve got to get it back to what it was.”
In the days after Gamble cut his hair, reporters in Florida began jumping on the story. The Times published an article with the headline: “Steinbrenner Rule on Hair Splits Yanks.” Newspapers across the country ran before and after photos of Gamble’s hair. On Friday, March 26, the Daily News printed a package from cartoonist Bill Gallo that featured a normal headshot of Steinbrenner and four cartoons, depicting different hair styles on The Boss’s head. They ranged from Oscar Gamble to Joe Namath, actor Telly Savalas to pitcher Catfish Hunter. The newspaper asked readers to vote.
In the clubhouse, Munson said that he wasn’t worried about losing his hair, because his stomach was his strength. “I ain’t ever going to lose my stomach,” he said. Piniella, meanwhile, joked that he had trimmed his hair once, but that wasn’t good enough, so now he was going back. “I told George to paint a white line around my head,” he said. “I’ll go to the barber and tell him to cut the line and the hell with it.”
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“They can joke about it as long as they do it,” Steinbrenner responded. “If they don’t do it, we’ll try to find a way to accommodate them somewhere else.”
The truth was, of course, that most players just wanted to stay in pinstripes. The Yankees had not made the playoffs in 12 years, and they spent the previous two seasons toiling away in Shea Stadium. But there was a different feeling about ’76. The club was moving back to a refurbished Yankee Stadium. Yogi Berra was back as a coach. The front office had spent the offseason re-tooling the roster, sending Bobby Bonds to the Angels for Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa, and pitcher Doc Medich to the Pirates for Dock Ellis, Ken Brett and a young infielder named Willie Randolph. As The Boss said, it was time to get back to being the Yankees.
“It was joyous,” Appel said. “This was what the Yankees were supposed to be all about. We had lost our footing for a long time there, but we’re back.”
On March 31, eight days before Opening Day, the Daily News published the results of its Steinbrenner hair poll. Eighty-nine out of 155 respondents said they preferred the normal Steinbrenner. Another 20 voted for the Savalas look. A few readers even mailed in their own homemade cartoons. One, sent by a man named Carl Baer, featured Steinbrenner with a mustache that made him look like Hitler. “I (actually) really agree with Mr. Steinbrenner,” the man wrote, “and wish he’d tell my oldest son to get a haircut.”
If you want to know how seriously Steinbrenner took his appearance policy, consider the story of the 1976 Yankee yearbook. In the month before Opening Day, Appel, the PR man, had spent hours putting it together. But the late start to spring training meant that he had to use a number of old headshots for new players. When the yearbook was published for the first home series of the year, Steinbrenner was upset with the photos of players with long hair. “We had to re-do the yearbook for the second homestand, which was costly,” Appel said.
Whether the discipline was responsible or not, the Yankees were really back to being the Yankees. They opened the 1976 season with 15 wins in their first 20 games. They waltzed to an AL East title. They won their first AL pennant in 12 years when Chambliss hit a walk-off homer against the Kansas City Royals in a dramatic Game 5 in the Bronx. The next year, they won their first World Series under Steinbrenner.
More than four decades later, the appearance policy remains. The early ban of muttonchops disappeared, and mustaches above the lip were always allowed. But the policy survived momentary tests from Munson and pitcher Goose Gossage. It resulted in a controversial suspension for Mattingly in 1991. (Mattingly and the policy were lampooned on an episode of The Simpsons in 1992, but the script was actually written before Mattingly’s suspension.) And when Cole, the new ace, arrived in New York in December after signing a nine-year, $324 million contract, one of the first things he did was sit down for a shave at his hotel in Manhattan. “I have experienced razor burn now for the first time in the last 10 years,” he said.
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Before Steinbrenner died in 2010, he had a few different go-to stories about the policy. The first involved Piniella, who once challenged The Boss by invoking his Christian faith and, well, the fact that Jesus had a hair and a beard. “If you can walk across the water in that pool,” Steinbrenner said, recalling a day during spring training, “you don’t have to get a haircut.”
The other included Gamble and the infamous spring of 1976. There may or may not have been a bet involved, and Steinbrenner reportedly gave Gamble money to cover his lost endorsement cash. But this much we know for sure: Steinbrenner actually felt terrible.
“They brought this guy in and he butchered him,” he said in 1991. “Absolutely butchered him. I was sick to my stomach. I told Oscar, ‘It looks good,’ but I thought to myself it was absolutely the worst.”
(Top photo of Piniella and Gamble: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty Images)
