George Steinbrenner was a badass before it was cool to be one. He said what he meant, meant what he said and held back nothing. The words "universally liked" never applied to him during his lifetime, but he was and always will be "The Boss."
He once said, "I will never have a heart attack. I give them." Though it was a heart attack that ultimately claimed his life on Tuesday, there's not a chance in the world that he regrets that statement.
Obviously, Steinbrenner's mark on baseball and sports ownership is impossible to quantify. He was an innovator, a motivator (granted, with some alternative styles) and, above all else, a winner. Simply put, there will never be another George Steinbrenner.
That's not to say there's nobody trying.
The landscape of sports ownership these days is rather strange. You've got your flashy Texans in Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban, your pinnacles of class like the Steelers' Rooney family or the Giants' Mara and Tisch families, your richer-than-rich guys like Dan Snyder and your potentially unstable masterminds in Al Davis, but you don't have George Steinbrenner. Not even Hank or Hal can compare.
Think about it: Who in the world of sports, in any job, could walk around with a nickname like "The Boss" and get away with it?
Jones wishes he could, but he can't. He may be the most comparable among Steinbrenner's contemporaries, but Jones' fire to win and willingness to spend money is always slightly offset by his inability to conquer the league in the salary cap era. True, a cap is something George never had to deal with, and he screwed up his fair share of free-agent signings (Raul Mondesi, anybody?), but all too often, Jones seems to lose control of his team, both on and off the field. He's entertaining, controversial, important and often fined by the league, but no, Jerry Jones is not the boss.
Another potential "Boss" resides in Miami, and he goes by the name of Bill Parcells. He's a guy who loves winning, loves competing and loves being the man. As a coach, he led his teams to three Super Bowls, winning two. He clashed with owner Bob Kraft in New England, once going so far as to run practice on a different field, just so that Kraft could not stroll through with business partners. He is gruff and blunt, he's almost immediately turned the Dolphins from a 1-15 joke to a contender and he may be the closest thing to "The Boss" that the sports world has today.
But being the closest doesn't make you close.
Right in our own backyard, we've got a man with some Steinbrenner-esque qualities. You see, most Red Sox fans hated Steinbrenner for "ruining the game" when he threw endless heaps of money to sign the best players in the game. Was it great for baseball? Of course not, but Steinbrenner wasn't ruining the game — he was simply manipulating a flawed system. And really, who does that better than Bill Belichick?
After getting burned by the Falcons, who listed Michael Vick as probable before downgrading him to questionable the day before their game with the Patriots in 2005, Belichick decided to list Tom Brady on his injury report each and every week. Belichick, quite famously, is a fan of video scouting, bending the rules to the point of his video assistant getting booted from the sideline in a game against the Jets. He never reveals any more in his news conferences than he has to. He is a master of knowing the rules and testing their limits.
Still, he is a man with no flash, and though he can occasionally get fired up, temperance might be his middle name. He's polarizing, but he'll never draw the kind of attention that Steinbrenner did.
In the 24/7 world of sports these days, owners, coaches, GMs and other executives have the ability like never before to gain fame — you can ask Dan Gilbert if you don't believe me. In part, that's due to the fact that Steinbrenner has been the most famous member of the Yankees since 1973.
"In my [first] year covering the Yankees, most of spring training was spent chasing George down hallways. He was bigger than any player," former Yankees reporter and current Boston Globe reporter Pete Abraham wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. "Every NYC paper back in the day had a reporter on 'Steinbrenner Watch' after games he attended to get comments. [I] did it in '99 and '00."
Sure, maybe an ambitious reporter or two spends much of his or her time trying to track down a high-profile owner, but it's just not the same. When it came to George Steinbrenner, it was hard to find a proper parallel. Though he's no longer running the Yanks from his luxury box, he'll forever be the leading force in everything the Yankees do.
They didn't just call him "The Boss" for nothing.
