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No MLB team comes close to sniffing the 27 championships the Yankees have racked up since playing their inaugural season in 1903. Seven of those World Series titles were secured when the legendary George Steinbrenner owned the team, and nothing sums up his infamously fiery spirit quite like a fight that supposedly unfolded in an elevator during the Fall Classic in 1981.
The New York Yankees were far and away the most dominant team in baseball in the first half of the 20th century, but they found themselves facing a lengthy (at least by their standards) championship drought after winning it all in 1962.
CBS officially purchased the franchise after they fell to the Cardinals in the 1964 World Series, but it was clear something needed to change after the team missed the playoffs for eight consecutive years following the acquisition.
On January 3, 1973, a new era began in the Bronx when Steinbrenner and a group of investors purchased the team in a $10 million deal. He wasted no time making his mark, as he was heavily involved in day-to-day baseball operations and rubbed plenty of players the wrong way by instituting a policy banning beards and long hair.
While his methods rubbed some people the wrong way, it’s hard to argue he wasn’t an effective MLB owner. It took the Yankees a few seasons to find their footing, but they won back-to-back titles in 1977 and 1978. The franchise did hit a bit of a rough patch in the 1980s, but they bounced back in a big way thanks to the dynasty Steinbrenner helped construct in the mid-90s.
As I mentioned above, Steinbrenner was an incredibly hands-on owner—to the point where he may have taken that label a bit too literally during an incident that supposedly unfolded in 1981.
George Steinbrenner claimed he beat up a couple of Dodgers fans who attacked him in an elevator during the 1981 World Series
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The Los Angeles Dodgers earned the right to face off against the Yankees in the 1981 World Series, but they found themselves facing an uphill battle after falling into a 2-0 hole after losing their first two games on the road.
However, the tides turned in a big way when the teams headed back to the West Coast. Los Angeles capitalized on home-field advantage by winning three consecutive one-run contests in the same number of days, and it’s easy to understand why Dodgers fans were feeling a bit cocky after their teams jumped out to a 3-2 lead in the series.
Following Game 5 on October 25th, Steinbrenner headed back to the Hyatt-Wilshire Hotel and found himself sharing an elevator with a couple of members of the Dodgers faithful on his way down to the lobby. According to his account, one of the men recognized the owner, and after confirming his identity, he supposedly quipped, “You’re going back home to those animal fans with that choke-up team of yours, aren’t you?’
Steinbrenner understandably took exception to that barb, and after snapping back, one of the guys swung at him with the beer bottle they were holding. The 51-year-old owner said he quickly dispatched his assailant with three punches before turning his attention to the second guy, and when they arrived on the ground floor, “one of the youths was on his knees and the other one was huddled in back of the elevator.”
The owner shared that tale with a group of reporters he called to his room shortly before midnight for an impromptu press conference where he sported “a bump on his head, a swollen lip, a right hand with a bandage over his cuts and an apparently broken left hand with a bandage over the cast.”
Steinbrenner claimed the two men fled the scene before he had the chance to track any security or law enforcement down, and while he suggested they might come forward to sue him, the identity of the assailants remains unknown to this day.
When you couple that with the lack of eyewitnesses, there were plenty of people who speculated he’d made up the entire story and injured himself to try to motivate the Yankees, although there’s also no evidence to prove that was actually the case.
If the entire thing was, in fact, an elaborate ruse, it didn’t have the intended effect, as the Yankees ended up losing the World Series by falling to the Dodgers in Game 6.