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or dishabille from an otherwise elegant and reputable individual—I always believed that unless Patrick Shields (no matter how tall he was) soon began wearing a more appropriate chapeau to Yankee Stadium, the two of us would unavoidably end up in the bleachers.
    The six-foot-one-inch Steinbrenner was in essence taller than anybody in our midst. And as he had already demonstrated in the way he ran his team—by haggling over tiny matters in big contracts, by impulsively rotating his managers (he would hire and fire Billy Martin no fewer than four times within a dozen years), and by insisting that his players trim their beards and have close-cropped hair and
definitely
eschew such Afrobouffant styles as a few black outfielders had tried to contain within their Yankee caps—he cared deeply about many things that were not always rational, reasonable, or predictable. But saying this is saying nothing that will explain why the reputedly tyrannical boss of the Yankees would continue for years to welcome a Red Sox idolizer into his private box in the Stadium; in fact, the relationship between them would rapidly develop into a warm and openly expressed bond of fraternalism. My guess is that Steinbrenner privately respected Shields’s stubborn and stalwart allegiance to the Boston team that in Patrick’s mind represented (no less than the Celtics or the Kennedy family that he also adored) the hub andsoul of the immigrant Irish work ethic and Catholic suffering. Absolute loyalty in good and bad times had been one of the mandates of Steinbrenner’s military school upbringing; and even when he himself deviated from such principles, for example, in his dealings with ex-Yankee players who became his managers—Yogi Berra refused to speak to him for fourteen years because, after being told that his managerial job was secure, he was inexplicably fired by Steinbrenner and learned of it through secondary sources—the Yankees’ owner was nonetheless capable of being enamored with and affected by manifestations of loyalty when he saw them demonstrated by such adherents as Patrick Shields. It is perhaps true as well that in condoning Shields’s fidelity to the Red Sox, the Yankees owner was able to refute the media’s image of him as an intolerant martinet. On the other hand, Steinbrenner’s affiliation with Shields might also be comparable to that of a missionary man seeking to reform an infidel, for he presented Shields with gifts that might have been proffered in the hope of Shields’s conversion, such as a Yankee uniform that was tailored to fit, and also pregame passes that allowed Shields into the Yankee clubhouse and dugout, and along the fringes of the field and behind the batting cage, where he was free to converse with the players. As a result, Shields became friendly with many of them, so much so that he admitted he favored them over all other players except those on the Red Sox team. At the same time, he pressed Steinbrenner to allow him to demonstrate his presumed talent as an Irish tenor by selecting him to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” one night before a game in the Stadium.
    Steinbrenner responded with what he thought was an even better idea: He would (and did) rent Town Hall for a single evening in order to sponsor Patrick Shields’s debut as a concert soloist. All the tickets were issued gratis to Shields’s friends from Le Club and elsewhere in the city; and one of Steinbrenner’s corporate colleagues, whose sister was a nun, enlarged the size of the audience by having busloads of parochial school students transported to the hall in midtown Manhattan. Before the program and during it, Patrick Shields received generous rounds of applause, which testified less to Shields’s skills as a singer, which were barely evident, than to the persuasive Citizen Kane-like response of George Steinbrenner and the rest of the claque in the front rows. Later that night