Mike Celizic

Stop waiting for the owner formerly known as Mount St. Steinbrenner, the Mad Shipbuilder, George III and The Boss to erupt all over the back pages of New York’s tabloids. Stop asking why he doesn’t fire Joe Torre and Brian Cashman, accuse the whole ding-danged team of spitting the bit, punch out a punk in an elevator and hire someone to spy on A-Rod.

It ain’t gonna happen. Not now, not ever again. It won’t because that guy we knew by all those names and all the Sturm und Drang he generated doesn’t exist anymore.

Oh, a man who answers to George M. Steinbrenner III, who celebrates his 77th birthday on the Fourth of July, can still be seen hanging around Legends Field in Tampa and occasionally taking in a Yankees game when they come to town. But it’s been several years since he’s been The Boss or anything close to it.

The body is there, but the mind is fading. He isn’t going to drop the axe on anyone because he can’t. He’s not going to rip anyone because he can’t remember their names.

I’ve been saying for several years that he’s not the same man he once was. I never used the word “dementia” because I didn’t know what the reason was. I only knew what I heard privately from people, and that was that the Boss had lost his fastball.

I still don’t know what the medical term is. No one on the Yankees has ever issued a statement with a doctor’s diagnosis. Steinbrenner is like an emperor who is protected by his loyal subordinates. So the image of a still-involved owner has been promoted, but he doesn’t talk to the media anymore, doesn’t hang out in the back of the press box in Yankee Stadium waiting for the writers to congregate as he once did. When something needs to be said, his spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, lobs a softball to the press. Usually, it’s something about how on top of things Steinbrenner is.

He’s not. Let’s face it, the old George, the George who launched a thousand headlines, would have fired Torre three years ago when he blew a 3-0 lead in games to the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS. He would have fired Cashman six times by now. He would have said a hundred scathing adjectives about a team that has become the Bronx Bumblers with hardly a peep of protest out of him.

There’s only one reason that would be so: he’s no longer capable of being himself; he no longer is himself.

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Michael Geffner of The Record of Middletown, N.Y., wrote a great column about it back in February. Here’s an excerpt:

“. . .we in the media have never been offered an official announcement about what exactly is wrong with the man, of how bad it his health is, whether he has Alzheimer's or dementia or simply is deteriorating from the process of age . . . All we've ever gotten are rumors, including some pretty wild ones and sad ones, like the Boss coming face to face with Reggie Jackson and not recognizing the guy, or not remembering Alex Rodriguez's name.”

Geffner’s column went virtually unnoticed. Middletown is just an hour from the Big Apple, but as far as the New York media pecking order goes, it may as well be in Iowa. Instead, it took two paragraphs in Phil Mushnick’s New York Post column on Monday to bring the issue to the fore:

“While many in the media continue to suggest The Boss is still a lurking and fearsome presence, there has been little-to-no-evidence the last two years to believe Steinbrenner has the capacity to run the Yanks in the same manner in which he had run the team since the 1970s.

All reasonable signs indicate that his dementia . . . is now so profound that he is being carefully hidden from public view, appearing only in occasional, circumspect quotes issued by his longtime personal public relations man, Howard Rubenstein.”

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