Olney roots for best story

Yorktown author tells drama of ‘Yankee Dynasty’ in first book

Chris Serico • The Patent Trader • Sept. 30, 2004 • Photo: Frank Becerra Jr.

Preferring the rolled-up sleeves of a button-down shirt to a cheerleader’s frock or an executioner’s shroud while covering sports, ESPN senior writer Buster Olney hopes journalistic integrity is always in fashion.

According to the Yorktown resident who penned “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty” for HarperCollins, interactions with former New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill and former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda should educate athletes and readers about his rooting interests.

Said Olney: “It was O’Neill who asked me in ‘99, ‘You guys root for us, right?’ and I looked at him and I said, ‘Paul, you know what, last year, when you guys won 125 games and you were getting through that postseason, I wanted you guys to win because that was the best story. But you know what would be a pretty good story in ‘99, after you won all those games? If you guys lost every game you played. That would be a good story, too, Paul.’”

So what happened to the boy who grew up as a self-described “psycho Dodgers fan” and despised the rival Yankees?

“I met Tommy Lasorda on the set of `Hee Haw’ when I was in Nashville and that was the end of being a Dodger fan,” Olney, 40, said. “As time goes on and you cover more teams, you just root for the stories. You don’t root for teams anymore.”

From farm to big leagues

The second oldest of four children, Robert Stanbury Olney was born in 1964 and spent most of his childhood on a dairy farm in Randolph Center, Vt. His paternal great-grandfather, who died the day Olney was born, had referred to young children whose names he could not recall as “Buster.” Thanks to Robert Olney’s mother, the new name would become his primary moniker. Buster Olney kept his father’s last name as his mother, Mary Lincoln, divorced and remarried.

Without television or radio at age 8, Buster developed a love for baseball reading books by George Vecsey and David Halberstam. When Buster was 15, he was inspired when baseball writer Red Smith spoke at the school.

“I always wanted to be a writer,” Buster said while peeling the label off his bottled water in a Mount Kisco bookstore. “After I met (Smith), I said, ‘That would be pretty neat.’”

While studying history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., he crafted humor columns for the college newspaper. After his 1988 graduation, he covered minor league baseball for the Nashville Banner for two years. He then moved to California to follow the Padres for the newspaper now known as the San Diego Union-Tribune, whose offices facilitated a fateful encounter with a sports copy editor by the name of Lisa Davis.

“My parents like to joke that Buster came out West just long enough to take me back East,” said Lisa Olney, a 35-year-old California native who was raised in Arizona and married Buster in 1996.

The couple twice moved to enable Buster to cover the Orioles for The Baltimore Sun from 1995 to 1996 and the Mets for The New York Times in 1997. Snagging the Times job during spring training of 1997, Buster asked his wife to find a New York residence with one prerequisite: “Trees.”

Lisa moved the two to a Harrison duplex for two years before the couple purchased a house in Kitchawan in April 1999.

“It’s just a really good feeling,” she said, referring to the appreciation her family has for the school district, community members and venues. “When we first moved here, we thought, ‘We’ll stay here 10 years and then we’ll look for something else.’ Now, this is where we’re planning on staying.”

A dynasty peaks, fades

Buster covered the Yankees for the Times from 1998 to 2001. During his first three seasons on the beat, the team won as many world championships and four titles in a five-year span.

For the 2001 World Series, he marveled as the Yankees mashed improbable bottom-of-the-ninth home runs in consecutive nights to propel the team to memorable Game 4 and Game 5 victories against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks took Game 6 to tie the series, but trailed the Yankees in the last half of the ninth inning of the deciding Game 7. A throwing error and a string of well-placed hits led to Luis Gonzalez’s looping single off previous World Series MVP Mariano Rivera, defeating the Yankees in the final at-bat of the fall classic.

While Buster trolled the locker rooms for post-game reaction, his wife, a Yankee fan, “fumed for about an hour” while the rest of her family celebrated the outcome.

The following spring training, the reporter realized something about the Yankees’ collapse in the desert.

“The more I thought about it, the more I thought what an important game that was, because that was the end (of that dynasty),” Buster said. “These (current Yankees) might win this year, but they don’t have a shared history. They don’t have the mutual trust because they haven’t really won anything together. (From 1996 to 2001), you could feel it during the postseason that that shared experience and that shared history the players had became this incredible weapon.”

Knowing his 2002 Times assignment - chronicling the New York Giants - would no longer require him to be away from his Yorktown house for about 150 days each year, he pitched the book idea to HarperCollins and agreed to a contract in January 2002. Three months later, he decided the last game of the 2001 World Series would best frame the Yankees’ successes and failures of the previous six seasons.

“It started to become clearer the more that I thought about it: that was really the turning point,” he said. “It was interesting, too, after talking to some of the players (like Derek) Jeter, that they felt the same way.”

Buster Olney’s opus

Last year, Buster left the Times and joined ESPN as a senior writer for the network’s magazine and Web site. Since then, the new schedule has allowed him to devote more time to his roles as author, broadcast journalist and family man. He and his wife have two children, Sydney, 4, and Jake, 3 months.

“Buster was really concerned how (his Times schedule) was going to affect Sydney and that’s why he got off the beat,” Lisa said. “He was scared that he was going to miss out on her childhood. … When he is home, he spends so much quality time with them.”

Todd Radom, a Katonah graphic designer and one of six to help edit chapters of Buster’s manuscripts, said the writer has changed since he joined ESPN.

“I think he’s a little bit less intense now and I think he has a little bit more time to enjoy the rest of his life,” Radom said. “He’s far more sociable now. The beat is sort of a young man’s game and the competition is intense. It’s got to be amazingly tiring: the need to compete against these people, day-in, day-out for this marathon of a season. I think he’s in a much better place now.”

In addition to thanking his wife and Radom for balancing friendship with a critical eye for his work, Buster cites more than 150 people by name in the book’s acknowledgements section.

“What’s it going to hurt?” Buster said. “Some people might look at it and (laugh), but if it made someone feel good, there’s no harm in it … . I was like Sally Field standing up there with the open microphone for two hours.”

The finished product, which debuted at No. 24 on The New York Times Best-Seller List two days after its Sept. 1 release, has received critical acclaim from baseball experts, including Halberstam, whom Buster befriended 10 years ago. Sportswriters Peter Gammons, Mike Lupica, Murray Chass, Richard Ben Cramer and John Feinstein also have praised the book.

Buster said Yankees fans should not interpret the title of his book as a solemn prediction. A new core of clutch teammates could lead to a new dynasty, he said. For example, he said, two of the team’s previous dynasties could be separated into sets of teammates that played in the Babe Ruth era (1923 to 1932), when the team won four World Series, and the Joe DiMaggio era (1936 to 1951), when the Yanks claimed 10 crowns.

Buster said he looks forward to an Oct. 2 book signing, where he plans to share more stories about the Yankees and the writing process. The two-hour event is scheduled to take place at the Yorktown branch of Club Fit, where his wife works as a public relations consultant.

“One of the editors at HarperCollins said to me, ‘Well, book signings might not be worth your time,’ and I said, ‘People buy the book.’ I love talking baseball with (readers). I’ve been doing that my whole life with people. That’s all fun.”

*****

Buster bytes

How did you approach writing the book?

I started work on it in 2002. I did bits and pieces of writing, like (40,000) to 50,000 words. In August and September of last year is when I wrote probably 75 percent of the book. You know, get up early; write for four or five hours; and, through the rest of the day, organize your thoughts for the next day.

Did opponents Derek Jeter and Curt Schilling really make eye contact and smile moments before the first pitch of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series?

I sent Schilling an e-mail, setting up an interview, and I said, “Is this true what happened? Did you guys make eye contact and smile?” and he sent me back a smiley face. And then when I saw him and I interviewed him for the book, he confirmed that and Jeter did the same thing. And I thought that was neat. That was like a private moment that I never noticed, that no one had ever noticed, on national television.

What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

(Yankee manager Joe) Torre was hard to write about, because I wanted to get it right. I wanted to get the right tone and that was actually the last chapter that I wrote. When I would write about Cal (Ripken Jr. for The Baltimore Sun), he was obviously a great player but he was pretty selfish. You want to sort of balance (it) off. You don’t want to make it seem like you’re dumping on the guy. So when I wrote about Joe, I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t saying he was a bad manager; I’m just saying he’s more complicated than what his image is.

What else was frustrating?

The hardest thing was the wait. I turned in the manuscript Oct. 1 and, now, to have waited 10 months for it to come out, that was hard. And there’s a lot of anxiety; you’re not sure how it’s going to be received and you’re not sure how it’s going to do, so there’s a lot of tension. That part I could do without. I almost feel like I’d rather write the books and have everyone else deal with all the rest.

If you agree to write another book, what topic would you most like to address?

I’m a total politics and history junkie. It’s funny; I always tell people that (sports and politics) are probably pretty similar: Covering a campaign would be a lot like covering a Major League Baseball season.