Growing up, Billy Martin had a simple directive beaten into his head by his mother, “Don’t take shit from nobody.” That mantra set in motion a life both on and off the diamond which was fraught with success and disappointment, and chronicled with perfect pitch by Bill Pennington, a man who covered Martin as a Yankees beat writer for Bergen County’s The Record in the mid-to-late eighties.
Baseball fans recall Martin’s World Series heroics as a scrappy second baseman, managerial brilliance and failures and of course the fights at the Copacabana not to mention with Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner. However, there was so much more that drove Martin to incredible highs and lows, not only on the grand stage of our national pastime ...
