Charity can be all-consuming for next Sox pilot
Bobby Valentine has spared no effort to help Jamie and Matt Conroy,
whose father was killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
Bobby Valentine has spared no effort to help Jamie and Matt Conroy,
whose father was killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
By Bob Hohler
Globe Staff / December 1, 2011
The next Red Sox manager has a social condition: a charitable impulse
he sometimes can't control.
After 9/11, Bobby Valentine reached out to Matt and Jamie Conroy,
newly fatherless. Valentine, then a stranger, over the years became
the primary man in their lives. The bond endures: On the eve of his
big interview at Fenway Park, he treated the Conroys, now Bostonians,
to dinner.
The night before, Valentine emceed a charity event, helping to raise
more than $215,000 to fight childhood cancer.
And no sooner did Valentine, 61, finish his day-long interview with
the Sox than he bolted to Japan to help the nation's earthquake
victims. Sox executives asked him to return early so they could
present him today as the 45th Sox manager.
For all the enemies Valentine has collected in his professional life -
two national sports publications have cast him as "the most hated man
in baseball" - the Sox have entrusted their underachieving team to a
leader who has devoted decades to giving so much to so many that at
times he has risked allowing his good works to interfere with his job
performance.
It happened in his last turn as a major league manager, with the New
York Mets in 2002. Grieving for a friend who died in the terrorist
attacks - "He was like a man possessed after that," Mets spokesman Jay
Horwitz said - Valentine so immersed himself in helping those
shattered by the disaster that his managerial focus blurred as the
Mets tumbled into last place in the National League East and became
the laughingstocks of baseball.
"He ran himself ragged," Horwitz said. Valentine was fired after the season.
"You could tell he was distracted," said Jim Duquette, the Mets
assistant general manager at the time. "It was pretty clear he took
his eye off the ball a little bit because of how much he put his
heart, soul, and energy into the aftermath of 9/11."
Valentine is a baseball lifer, a former high school and college star
who appeared bound for major league success before he mangled his leg
trying to make a catch for the Angels in 1973. He persevered as a
bench player for six more seasons before he retired in 1979 at 29.
Six years later, the Texas Rangers made him the youngest manager in
the majors, launching a 20-year managerial career - eight with the
Rangers, seven with the Mets, and five with Japan's Chiba Lotte
Marines - in which he rarely reached the postseason. His best finish
in the majors was losing to the Yankees in the 2000 World Series; he
guided Chiba Lotte to a Nippon Series title in 2005.
Along the way, Valentine established himself as one of baseball's
sharpest intellects, most gifted baseball technicians and charismatic
leaders, though his provocative temperament colored his legacy.
Much has been made of Valentine's powerful personality, his clashing
with owners and general managers, his purported Machiavellian
tendencies, his playing mind games with players and sportswriters.
Tabloid headlines have described him as toxic and phony. Rivals have
called him arrogant and smarmy.
But the beneficiaries of his generosity know Valentine as someone else
altogether. Friends described his greatest attribute - and potential
weakness - as his inability to reject a request for help or to walk
away from a stranger in need.
"He tries to do too much," said Larry Rocca, who covered the '02 Mets
as a sports columnist, then served in Chiba Lotte's front office when
Valentine managed there. "I say this in a positive way, but he's on
the move from the moment he wakes up. He never stops."
To Matt and Jamie Conroy, two children from Brooklyn who lost their
father, Kevin, in the attack on the Twin Towers, Valentine was a
godsend. Matt, a security system salesman who graduated last year from
Northeastern University and has been an usher for several years at
Fenway, calls Valentine his guardian. To Jamie, a senior captain and
starting point guard for Northeastern's women's basketball team,
Valentine is an uncle.
"When you're a 12-year-old kid and your dad gets killed and some pro
sports manager steps into your family, you wonder if this is just some
kind of publicity stunt," Matt said. "But we've been blown away by
everything Bobby has done, and it hasn't changed one bit in the last
10 years. That's just who he is. We couldn't have asked for anything
more."
Valentine flew Matt to the 2001 World Series in Arizona. He showed up
unexpectedly at Jamie's youth basketball games. He gave a shout-out to
Matt on ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" when his Northeastern club team won
a national baseball title. He flew Matt and his friends to Japan for
at least two weeks every year he managed there, the children living in
his apartment. And he continues to speak or text with the Conroys
several times a week.
"I can't imagine what our lives would be like without him," Jamie
said. "Everything he has done for us over the last 10 years has really
been remarkable."
Valentine began his charity work as the student council president of
Rippowam High School in Stamford, Conn. He has described learning
about giving from his father, Joseph, a carpenter, and his mother,
Grace, a Catholic churchgoer who reminded him of the responsibilities
that come with being an elite student-athlete; he turned down an
academic scholarship to Yale and a football scholarship to succeed
O.J. Simpson at the University of Southern California before the
Dodgers selected him fifth overall in the 1968 draft.
In Texas, Valentine is remembered for helping to raise hundreds of
thousands of dollars for a youth scholarship fund. He also provided
free meals at his restaurant for children in the Big Brothers/Big
Sisters program.
In Japan, he is remembered for small acts of kindness - he donated a
tree to the community for each team victory - as well as his efforts
for victims of the earthquake.
New Yorkers will never forget Valentine's response to 9/11, his
serving around the clock as de facto commander of a emergency staging
area at Shea Stadium, his frequent, unpublicized visits to the
disaster site, his comforting the crew of a Queens firehouse that lost
19 members in the rescue effort, his quietly reaching out to countless
grieving children.
"It was impossible to go to sleep," he recently told USA Today. "How
many funerals can you go to? How many times can you hold a hand and
look into empty eyes that show you nothing but a broken heart?"
The mayor gave Valentine a key to New York City. Major League Baseball
gave him its Branch Rickey Award for community service. He has been
honored by hundreds of charitable organizations, and his good works
are the stuff of legend in Stamford.
"I don't take days off," Valentine once said. "I just want to help."
He arrives in Boston with the potential to revitalize a torpid team on
the field and add a powerful dimension to the Red Sox Foundation's
charitable initiatives. His challenge off the field, friends said,
will be resisting doing so much good that it hurts.
Bob Hohler can be reached at hohler@globe.com.
Leading citizen
The new man at the helm of the Red Sox is a larger-than-life figure in
his hometown of Stamford, Conn. - an athletic and civic icon
Now that he's become manager of the Red Sox, patrons of Bobby
Valentine's bar in Stamford, Conn., will see less of Valentine - for a
while, anyway. Now that he's become manager of the Red Sox, patrons
of Bobby Valentine's bar in Stamford, Conn., will see less of
Valentine - for a while, anyway. (File/Paul Desmarais/The Stamford
Advocate)
By Amalie Benjamin
Globe Staff / December 1, 2011
STAMFORD, Conn. - This is home. This is the place he loves, the place
that loves him. This is the place where, no matter what happens, the
controversies and failures, the enmity and injuries, Bobby Valentine
can be the person, the star, he was always meant to be. The awe still
lives here, the wonder, the adulation.
This is home. This is where Bobby Valentine is - and always will be -
everything.
He is who he is because of Stamford. Here he is deified, always has
been. His star has been bright as long as anyone can remember, from
the first days he showed athletic promise, in baseball and football
and track. It is the foundation of everything he is, including the
parts that don't win him favor, the brashness, the bluster.
When asked if there's anything at which Valentine doesn't excel, if
there's a place where his talents fall short, his friend of 30-plus
years, Frank Ramppen, begins to chuckle.
"I'm glad you asked,'' he said. "He has a terrible sense of direction.''
And? Could that be it?
It's not, of course. And yet, here, where the newly named Red Sox
manager remains a friend to everyone, where the hands extend to him
before the mayor, his place is simple, assured, unchanging. As
Stamford Chief of Police Robert Nivakoff said, "He's iconic here.''
"I've only known him as this big person,'' said Ramppen, the current
president of Bobby Valentine's Sports Academy in Stamford. "I don't
think he's arrogant, I think he's incredibly smart and talented and
confident. Is that something that people perceive as arrogance?
Probably.
"It's just where he lives, it's the life that he's so used to. I think
it's where he likes being, he's comfortable there.''
It is where he can shake off the injuries that cost him his career as
a player, the criticisms and mixed opinions of those inside and
outside of baseball, the sometimes stormy relationships with those
around him.
Here he is Bobby Valentine, bright and shiny, hero and friend, the guy
who buses food and tries his hand at cooking at the neighborhood bar -
the one that happens to be owned by him - the guy who pushes out stuck
motorists during a snowstorm and gives back in time and dollars and 3
a.m. texts to the mayor about communications in the fire department.
"Bobby is Bobby,'' said that mayor, Mike Pavia. "He's big as life.
He's out there, and what you see is what you get.''
Quite an impression
As you drive around the city, every ball field attracts your
attention, every one a potential site of the feats that seem to grow
to legendary status. Valentine is arguably the best schoolboy athlete
ever to come out of the state of Connecticut, a man destined for
greatness on a diamond, and even better on the gridiron.
Even the statue of a young ballplayer near City Hall provokes the
question: Is that Bobby? Could it be?
(It is not. The statue is of Jackie Robinson, who called Stamford home
from his playing days with the Brooklyn Dodgers until his death.)
He was, in some ways, a legend even before anyone had seen him play.
His name came up, over and over, at varsity football practice when he
was still on the freshman team at now-closed Rippowam High School. The
coach seemed enamored, comparing his varsity players to this
Valentine, and they often suffered in the comparison. They didn't
understand. They had never seen him play.
Until he got a chance at a punt return, seven or eight games into that
freshman season. He caught the ball on the 20-yard line, ran up the
middle, cut right, fast to the outside, and kept going, 80 yards for
the touchdown.
"We all look at ourselves and say, 'So that's who Valentine is,' ''
said Dennis Eveleigh, then a senior on the team, now a Connecticut
Supreme Court justice.
"My initial impression was he was the best athlete I'd ever seen and
one of the fastest runners I've ever seen, who could cut on a dime,''
Eveleigh said. "He was remarkable.
"He never quit. He was in every game. He never took an at-bat off. He
was hustle all the way through. There was only one way he would play
the game and that's all-out.''
He was good enough to be recruited to play tailback at Southern Cal,
good enough to be considered the heir to the spot held by a pretty
darn good back, O.J. Simpson. He opted instead for baseball and the
Dodgers, for a career that would never quite follow through on all
that promise and all that talent, injuries robbing him of what
everyone back in Stamford had expected.
The talent, though, is not the enduring image for Eveleigh. It's something else.
The captain of the baseball team was responsible for bringing all the
gear out to the field before practice, responsible for packing it up
after. It was his job, and his alone. Valentine, though, was always
there, before and after.
"That always struck me,'' Eveleigh said. "Everybody knew he was going
to be a star and most everybody knew he was going to play pro, even at
that time. But here he was helping me pack the balls and the bats and
lugging the equipment back.''
And nearly 50 years later, it seems that hasn't stopped in Stamford.
Valuable and visible
There is so much of him here, in his restaurant, in his sports
academy, in his position in the mayor's cabinet. He is no figurehead.
He is the one talking to Little Leagues, attending dinners, tending
bar, the one who takes pressure off Pavia in the community.
"Everybody wants you at their event,'' Pavia said. "They want you at
ribbon cutting, they want you at a child's graduation, they want you
at a play. They want to see you.
"Fortunately for me, he likes to be out in the public, so we've been
double-teaming. He's doing things for me when I can't make it. And
people are happy - in fact, they're more happy to see him than they
are to see me.''
And Bobby Valentine always has been happy to be seen.
There will be less time for him here, though, less time to be part of
the everyday life of Stamford. The city will have to say goodbye to
its director of public safety, health and welfare, a position
Valentine has held since January, an appointment that brought with it
criticism, as he came without experience in running a police
department or a fire department or a health department. And yet, he
has won most everyone over, his management abilities smoothing over
his lack of relevant experience.
"He makes people who live in Stamford very proud to know him or to
have him associated with the city of Stamford,'' Pavia said. "He's the
kind of guy, he has celebrity status, but yet he'll walk the
streets.''
They will see less of him at his bar, at Bobby V's, a place that, like
Valentine himself, is hardly of the corporate variety. It's a little
dingy, a little tarnished, a little battered. It is covered in
memorabilia - very little of it from Boston - much of which includes
Valentine's face.
It is a place that, as much as any in Stamford, has been home to
Valentine, where he has pitched in at just about every job, from
bartender to busboy, a place where he has made some of his craziest
ideas come true. (Like, for instance, the Super Bowl Sunday when
Valentine insisted they move the actual bar from another restaurant he
owned in Queens to the one in Stamford. It was installed by the time
they opened.)
The bar is home. The ball fields are home. The city is home. Because
wherever he goes - Los Angeles, New York, Japan, now Boston - he never
stays forever. In the end, he always returns.
"I think Bobby means a tremendous amount to the city of Stamford,''
Ramppen said. "As big as he's gotten and as far as his career has
taken him, he always came back home.
"There's no doubt about it that Stamford, Conn., is more vibrant and
alive when Bobby's in town. There's no doubt.''
Amalie Benjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com.
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