Cito Gaston ... what's he really like?

It may be safe to say most of us are curious about celebrities ... What's he really like?

In 1983 I got a call from a friend,
"You wanna go to Florida with me for a week?" 

"We'll stay with Cito Gaston. He's the Blue Jay's new hitting coach, just hired by the manager, Bobby Cox."

I'm not much of a baseball fan. As a kid, my team was the Brooklyn Dodgers ... Campanella and "Duke" were my guys and yes my mother threw out all my baseball cards. When my "Bums" moved to Los Angeles and I grew older I lost interest in baseball.

The 1983 pre-season camp was about to start in Dunedin, Florida near Clearwater and spending a week with one of the coaches sounded like fun.

It was February.

"Cito" met us at the airport in Tampa and we moved to a local Mexican restaurant 
for happy hour. I knew little about Mexican food and less about Mexican drinks but you go with the flow at happy hour -- the waitress brought us a huge platter of something spicy along with margaritas served in gigantic fish bowls.

We quickly got to know each other. The Mexican restaurant was appropriate. 

My Florida host's real name is Clarence Edwin Gaston. He copied the name "Cito" from a Mexican pro wrestler who visited his Texas town when he was a kid. 

You know when you meet someone and something clicks ... you become friends?

That's the way I felt about him. 

Nice.
Unassuming. 
Friendly. Happy ... 
and for some reason willing to have me as a guest for a week.  Following dinner, we moved to his rented condo. My new friend claimed that he didn't like to stay by himself. 

We were doing him a favour? I became the houseguest who wouldn't go away. Apparently, Cito connected with me as a friend as well.

My subsequent "visits" for 17 consecutive years created some fabulous stories and memories -- some hilarious and some unmentionable. 

One night, after a pre-season game that the Jays lost by an astronomical score, 
I thought he needed a distraction. We went to the dog races. We each lost 13 races in a row - never cashed a ticket and afterward, we got on the wrong highway, me driving, taking an extra hour to get home.

As a player, Cito had some great numbers during his major league career. The Blue Jays thought he'd be able to translate what he knew about hitting. They were right. 

Following seven years as hitting coach, team president Peter Hardy and Paul Beeston
appointed him the 5th Blue Jays' manager in 1989- the same year the team moved to its new $900 million dollars retractable roof stadium, Skydome.

Incidentally, in 1988, there was a contest to name Toronto's spectacular new stadium. I sat on the naming committee board and we met once a month, eventually reviewing 10,000 entry names to arrive at "Skydome". 

I thought that name would last a lifetime.

Money talks. In the '80s ownership didn't know they could sell the naming rights to the building for millions. How many millions? Canada's Scotiabank just bought the naming rights to the building where the Toronto MapleLeaf hockey team plays ... for $800 million!

Anyways ... it's now called the Rogers Centre. Twenty years later, I still call it Skydome.

MLB debut
Sept. 1967

Cito had a terrific playing career.
His full resume of success is described better in Wikipedia than anything I could attempt to do here. 

As a manager, he created a buzz in the city for his players and their success that hadn't been experienced for decades.

He led his team to 7 playoff appearances, including 4 division titles plus Canada's first World Series win in Atlanta, GA on Oct. 14, 1992.

Bobby Cox was the Blue Jay manager
who originally hired Cito -- they'd played together.

I'd met Oklahoma-born Bobby several times
and liked him a lot. A very thoughtful coach,
he'd learned Spanish so he could communicate with his Hispanic players.

Student and Teacher

Today, Bobby is recovering from a stroke. The HOF manager worked the bench for 29 years and won over 2500 games.

Bobby was Cito's mentor, his friend, and the guy who gave him his big break. But Bobby left the Jays before 1992 and was the newly appointed manager of the Atlanta Braves, Cito's opposition for the World Series.

Is that the definition of Karma? 
Or the definition of irony?

I called Cito the day the Jays left for Atlanta and Game 6 against his buddy. 
The Jays had already won 3 games by one run. I left him a voicemail --

"When you get up by a run, don't forget to step on Bobby's throat!" 

Apparently, my advice proved helpful.

As every Canadian and zero Americans know, the Toronto Blue Jays won the 
World Series in 1992.

A month later I was volunteering at the Sports Celebrities Festival Dinner for the benefit of the Canadian Special Olympics. I invited him to join 30 other international sports stars who'd agreed to participate.

The annual black-tie dinner in Toronto attracted 1,000 guests. A celebrity was assigned to each table including the Prince of the City ... my nick-name for Cito
... copying a popular movie title of the time.

I was concerned he wouldn't have a chance to actually have dinner. Guests might rush to his table and interrupt him looking for autographs or photographs of our city's new champion. 

I watched carefully.
Nobody approached him.
I thought it was good but I also thought it was odd.

After an hour he stood up and started to make his way across the convention floor to the men's room.

I noticed people in the room on the move. They looked ready to pounce. They knew where he was going and they went to the far side of the room to intercept him.

They got there before he did. They'd lined up.
They were in a single file ... these folks in evening gowns and tuxedos.

They were orderly.
They were grinning, all of them.
I wondered what was wrong ... what were they doing?

They didn't ask for autographs. They didn't ask for photos. All they wanted to do was shake his hand and thank him for bringing the World Series Championship to Toronto.

Respect.

I thought that one event, that one polite, Toronto-like gesture was Cito's baptism.
He may have been raised in San Antonio/Corpus Christi Texas but he became a Torontonian that night.

I was so proud of my fellow citizens.

On Saturday, October 23, 1993, very late in the evening at Toronto's Skydome for Game 6 of Cito's second World Series. My wife and I, our daughter and her husband were sitting in left field, about 6 rows back from the fence.

A Million fans went to
the streets in Toronto
World Series Joy!

Bottom of the 9th.

Two out. Two on.

Joe Carter is at the plate.

Swing.

Gone.

The ball dropped over the fence in front of us.

It was the first time in Major League Baseball history that a team hit a come-from-behind, walk-off homer to win the World Series.

Tom Cheek screamed,  "Touch 'em all, Joe!" 

  

Incidentally, during the same week, Canada elected Jean Chretien as the country's Prime Minister. Chretien and his wife were posed on the cover of the country's national news magazine, Maclean's. The publication did something it had never

done in its 100-year history. It removed the advertiser from the back page

and in its place created a second front cover featuring Jay slugger, Joe Carter 
rounding the bases following his historic homer.

Cito showed everyone his 1992 World Series win wasn't a fluke -- by doing it again the following year. 

Back-to-Back Championships hadn't happened since the 1977-78 Yankees.

If you need further proof of his importance to the team, he didn't have 11 of his 1992 players for his 1993 championship run ... Gruber, Winfield, Key, Cone and Steib had moved on.

He again volunteered for the Special Olympics Sports Celebrities Festival 
dinner following his 1993 World Series win.

When he was introduced he received a standing ovation. In 26 years we'd had several hundred international celebrities join us for this event. There'd been only one other standing ovation in all that time...for hockey legend, Rocket Richard.

I've never played a professional sport. Don't know what a pro athlete goes through and less about what a coach does. However, I've noticed an interesting difference between hockey and baseball.

In an important game, a hockey coach can go down the line of his bench and plead for specific players to contribute their specialty, maybe even take it up a notch. 

Ask the scorers to score, the hitters to hit, the tough guys to be tough and so on.

In baseball, a coach can't say to a slugger ...

"Hey, we need a home run, now!"

Or say to a catcher, "Make sure nothing gets by you!"

In baseball, a coach needs to be able to connect to his players face-to-face using an easygoing demeanour. The most successful Mary Kay Cosmetics salespeople call it "soft talking". Cito was especially expert in this style and, if he'd been with the cosmetics company, he would have earned one of those pink Cadillacs after just one day on the job.

He used his "soft talking" when dealing with his players who had enormous egos and paycheques to match. He'd build their confidence, and provide an atmosphere for each player to do his best while making game-changing lineup decisions every few minutes for a full 9-inning game that could easily morph into a 15 or 18-inning game. 

Cito Gaston was a psychologist. He was a master of balance.
He was like an F1 driver ...

 

knowing precisely when to hit the peddle and when to ease off. 

He was a very special manager of baseball players who guided the Toronto team to championships. Perhaps he picked up some pointers during his first year in Major League Baseball when Henry Aaron was his roommate.

Super Bowl-winning football coach Vince Lombardi said, 
"Winning isn't everything ... it's the only thing."

If you believe in his philosophy, it's great to win games but, in baseball,
the real prize/the only prize is the World Series. 

For that reason alone, Cito may/should be considered for induction to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Earl Weaver and Whitey Herzog are both former managers who have been selected to the Hall and each only earned one World Series championship. 

And, yes, it's undeniable, that he is the first and only black manager to earn the World Series -- it's part of Baseball history. Never happened before.

Following the '92 win, I recall listening to a Toronto radio commentator interview legendary Toronto Star Sports Editor, Milt Dunnell. The Jays had just offered Cito a multi-year contract. Team policy was always to offer only one-year contracts to coaches. The interviewer was questioning the team's logic for Cito's multi-year deal. Dunnell simply explained that he'd earned the special treatment. He asked, 

"How long has it been since this city has had a championship team?"

Dunnell had reported on Toronto sports for more than 50 years and he had a doctorate in baseball. He seemed annoyed by the interviewer's question. He let him off lightly without reminding him that the last Toronto championship win was in 1967.

In 1973, soon-to-be superstar, Dave Winfield, signed his first contract with the San Diego Padres for multi-millions. Cito Gaston was Winfield's first-year roommate. In 1992, as a Toronto Blue Jay, after all his years in the Majors, Winfield finally produced his very first extra-base hit in postseason play -- a 2-run double to beat Atlanta for the World Series.  

How did the coach deal with his former roomy? How did he have meaningful conversations with a player who was still getting millions and had an ego the size of the CN Tower? How did he coax the best out of a 41-year-old Winfield? And what about the 25 other delicate egos and coaches and trainers and company suits and the media?  How did he ever find the time in the day to deal with it all? Not to mention the pressure of satisfying the two million+ annual Toronto fans who set aside their affection for hockey while their Jays became top-of-mind and top-of-the-sports pages. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Cito helped make my town a really fun place to be a baseball fan.

Do you remember the excitement CFL football coach, Leo Cahill, created in the
1960's -'70's for the Argonauts and Toronto?

Ya, he made it like that, times 10! 

But the pressure did get to him. He developed a bad back. It may have been the location on his body where the stress of his job ended up. He was holed up in his condo every evening. I'd deliver homemade pasta, with hot sauce, while a team of chiropractors tagged teamed him searching for a relief pressure point. They didn't help and his back problem got worse. He was admitted to hospital.

The first day I visited him at Mount Sinai I found him zapped on morphine, 
on a gurney, in a hallway beside an elevator with a group of people standing around him ... "Hey! Isn't that Cito Gaston?"

I pleaded with the nurse supervisor to get him some privacy - she wasn't a baseball fan and admitted she didn't know who he was. He was quickly moved to a private space.

He's arguably the most famous, beloved Blue Jay since the team began in 1977.
The University of Toronto presented him with an Honorary Law Degree in 1994,
he received the Jackie Robinson Award in 2008 and was selected to the
Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. His name and number (43) were raised to the Rogers Centre/Skydome Level of Excellence in 1999. 

Most recently he received the Henry Aaron Humanitarian Award.

And in 2002, something stupendous happened.
When he was selected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Mary's Ontario, he included me
and our friendship in his acceptance speech.

I'm often asked ...
"What is Cito Gaston really like?"
I'll answer that in a story that happened when he was a child. But before I do, I need to tell you one more thing about him.

When Cito Gaston won the 1992 World Series, then won again in 1993 he wasn't asked to pose for a photo with either World Series trophy. You'd think there would have been some interest -- the first time the World Series was won by a team, not in the USA -- the first time the World Series championship had been earned by a black manager -- the first time in almost 20 years that a team won back-to-back.

Nobody asked. 
Not Sports Illustrated.
Not Baseball Today, or any sports magazine or Ebony Magazine 
or even Toronto's four daily newspapers.

Nobody asked but me.

I suggested to him that I would like to create a special World Series portrait, 
have him personally autograph and number each of 50 copies & donate all of the proceeds to his fellow athletes at Special Olympics Canada. He loved the idea.

I showed up on the appointed day at the Blue Jay clubhouse. Famous Canadian portrait photographer, Kevin Birch, donated his time and equipment and created a fabulous, beautifully lit photo set with the Toronto skyline in the background. 

I positioned the trophies and covered the foreground with bags and bats and balls to make the photo look like the team just got back off the road.

Then I went looking for our subject.

It didn't take long to find him. He was having a disagreement with a player in his office ... something about the player wanting to move up in the batting order. 
The coach was using his stern-dad voice and could be heard in the hallway.

It didn't take long for the young man to realize the silliness of his request. He opened the office door, and smiled at me as he passed me and Cito joined me in the hallway. I explained we were all ready for his photo.

He had no idea what I'd planned.

When he saw the way we'd presented his gleaming World Series trophies
he beamed like an eight-year-old. Usually, it's necessary to take 15 or 20 shots of a portrait to make sure you have one really good one. The picture here is the only one we needed. He had that beaming-like-a-kid-look and we didn't think we could get anything better than that.

His 50 World Series beautifully framed, autographed portraits sold at auction over a period of 10 years for an average of $800 each, delivering a remarkable $40,000 donation to the charity. All for a picture that nobody else seemed to be interested in taking.

Ya, but what is Cito Gaston really like?

When outfielder Raul Mondesi joined the team in 
2000-2002, Cito returned to the club as a hitting instructor. Mondesi was assigned Cito's #43 jersey. Mondesi presented him with a designer watch that had the same value as a new Buick for the privilege of using his number.

Respect. 

Way back when I was staying with him at his training camp condo in Florida he mentioned that when he was a teenager in Corpus Christi, and a Southern Baptist, 
he was sent to a Catholic Jr. high school. He said his teacher was Sister Cabrini.

Isn't it interesting that we all can remember a teacher's name? 
Especially the ones that have a lasting effect on us?

During class, if an ambulance or fire truck went by with the siren screaming the nun asked her students to bow their heads, make the sign of the cross and say a prayer for the person who may be in trouble. 

To me, that nun's suggestion sounded very Christian, very Irish.

Today, more than 60 years later, every time Cito hears a siren he bows his head, makes the sign-of-the-cross and says a prayer for someone who may be in trouble. 

Numbers and trophies and awards aside,
this tells you everything you need to know about 

Clarence Edwin “Cito” Gaston.

Cito was born on Saint Patrick's Day, Mar. 17, 1944.