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Too Soon? Guardian (UK) Columnist Absolutely Tears Into George Steinbrenner

Generally, when people write about the recently deceased, they’re inclined to speak of them in relatively positive terms – maybe even more positive than they deserve. But not always. Sometimes, someone is just annoyed by all the good will toward someone they feel is an undeserving recipient, and rebel with brutal takedowns of legacies.

Such is the case for longtime Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who died Tuesday at 80 and inspired a few too many kind words for Muhammad Cohen of the UK paper The Guardian, who used the occasion of Steinbrenner’s death to equate him to everything wrong with not only sports, but America.

Here’s the crux of Cohen’s argument:

Steinbrenner, who died on Tuesday at age 80, was a bully and a brat, devoid of humility, class, and civility, born on third base, deluded that he’d hit a triple, and convinced he had to tell the whole world how he’d done it. Famed for his bombast and for making himself bigger than his players and team, tolerated only because he had money and power, this Yankee Doodle Dandy born on the Fourth of July paved the way for America to become a loser by his example.

There’s some truth (fine, a lot of truth), of course, in the “bully/brat/devoid of humility” stuff, but we also think it’s a bit much to paint him as being in some way responsible for inspiring the deterioration of America’s image around the world.

It’s also a little much when Cohen seems to mock the idea that Steinbrenner made frequent charitable donations (“He was a generous man whose many donations we never heard about – as anyone who follows baseball has heard about constantly for the past 35 years – who was breathtakingly cruel and petty”), when first-hand accounts prove that, yes, Steinbrenner had a giving side.

Then there’s:

Believe me, if there is a heaven, George Steinbrenner won’t be there.

Cohen also makes the rather extreme claim that he thought Dave Winfield “would be America’s first black president,” followed by some deserved shots at Steinbrenner for spying on him. It should be noted, though, that most examinations of Steinbrenner since his death are not ignoring these glaring faults.

Cohen talks about the Yankees laying the groundwork for those late ’90s-early ’00s championship teams in Steinbrenner’s absence, yet The Boss “was there front and centre to take credit for success while blaming others for failure.” Fair points, but then, this ending:

Over four decades, Steinbrenner embodied and popularised the values of America’s culture of arrogance seen in the banishment of civility and fact from political discourse, the Iraq invasion – a US victory, according to much of the press – obscene executive pay, and the 2008 economic meltdown. Yes, George, you really were a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

This is just too much. Of course Steinbrenner was brash, extremely self-centered and unlikable if you weren’t a Yankees fan, but connecting him to the rise of blowhard pundits (who probably enjoy much more widespread popularity than Steinbrenner in his heyday, for whatever that’s worth) and war itself? To answer the question posed in the headline, yeah, too soon. And too far.

H/T Deadspin

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