<Begin Segment 33>

AH: In 1974 you won it all, right?

WY: Right.

AH: And was that the high point of your career even though it wasn't a playing, you know, you weren't a player anymore, you were a manager, and you won this championship. You've won championships as a player, but we're in, this is in a different situation. Now you're in charge of the whole ball of wax. Was that more satisfying or less than?

WY: That's the best thing happened, you know. I mean, I was with the Giants, we won the championship eight times. But when you're a manager and you can win a championship like this, the feeling is altogether different. When I was in Nagoya, the team didn't win the championship for twenty years. So that year when we won the championship, they had about 700,000 people in the street that day. We had a parade. And actually, I would, the fans would come shake your hand. The first half an hour you can shake their hand, but after that, my hand started getting swollen. After that, you couldn't shake their hand. It hurt you so much. But you just... something, something that it's hard to explain, because it's just great when you win a championship, you're the manager. And I love managing because when you're a coach in Japan, I might tell the manager something. If you want to use it, usually... but lot of times, you tell a manager something, they might not use it, or sometimes we have a meeting. A meeting can last twenty minutes and it's all over. But Japanese-style, sometimes that thing last for hour-and-a-half, two hours, because nobody want to take the responsibility. But when I became a manager, I can tell in the meeting with the coaches, they discuss something, said, "Let's do this, do this..." so in ten, fifteen minutes, we're all done. That's the reason why I love to be a manager because I'm the boss. [Laughs]

AH: What finally got you out of managing?

WY: Well, see, I was with the Dragons six years. And after six years, they fired me. Then being a Japanese American or a Nisei or whatever, they would not give me a chance to manage again. That's the thing, I was very fortunate that I had a chance of managing in Japan. But usually, you're a foreigner, you have a hard time managing. Now they Valentine or Albert Hugh. They're getting a chance to let them manage, if you're going to do something different. They have these guys as manager. But in my days, my early, in the '50s, '60s, '70s, you can't even think of an American being a manager.

AH: You were the first foreigner to ever manage a baseball team.

WY: After the war. Before the war, they had a guy by the name of Bozo Wakabayashi. He was there before the war. He was a good ballplayer from Hawaii, and he managed a couple years with the Mainichi Orange or something like that.

AH: So you were the first, actually, foreign baseball player after the war, and you were the first foreign manager after the war?

WY: Right, right.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2003 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.