Who

The famously volatile owner of the New York Yankees, Steinbrenner has been the terror of rivals and underlings for over three decades. His increasing senility and detachment from the day-to-day affairs of the team have raised questions about who will take over when he's gone.

Backstory

After graduating from Williams and serving in the Air Force, shipbuilding heir Steinbrenner tried his hand at coaching football, first at Northwestern and later at Purdue. When that didn't work out, he joined the family business, Kinsman Shipping, and later took over the company. But his abiding passion for sports led him back soon enough. In 1960, he made his first foray into the world of sports ownership, buying the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League and trying in vain to make them an NBA franchise before the league was shuttered two years later. He moved on to baseball in 1971 when he tried unsuccessfully to buy the Cleveland Indians. He had considerably more success in 1973, when he organized a group to buy the then-ailing Yankees from CBS for $10 million. A bargain arguably on par with the original Dutch purchase of Manhattan, the team is now worth an estimated $1.2 billion.

Of note

Intense, demanding, combative, temperamental, and, in his own way, brilliant, Steinbrenner has seen the Yankees earn 10 pennants and six World Series titles over the course of his three decades as owner. He was the first team owner to sell TV cable rights (to Chuck and Jim Dolan's MSG), and he was one of the first to negotiate endorsement deals with blue-chip advertisers, too. Of course, he'll also go down as one of the most difficult sports teams owners to work with in history: During his career, he's fired 20 managers and 11 general managers, lashed out at members of the media who dared criticize him, and caused an untold number of people to seek treatment for high blood pressure.

But ol' George hasn't been the same lately. He's become increasingly detached from the team as rumors have swirled about his health and mental state. He's fainted on multiple occasions, is believed to have had a stroke, and by all accounts is increasingly senile—and he rarely speaks to the public anymore, instead releasing clipped statements through his spokesman Howard Rubenstein. While the question of who would succeed Steinbrenner loomed over the Yankees for years, in the past year he has all but ceded control to his sons Hal and Hank. Steinbrenner's decline might explain why Brian Cashman has enjoyed such surprising longevity as general manager despite the Bronx Bombers' unremarkable performance in recent seasons. Of course, he wasn't immune to Steinbrenner's temper in earlier days. A few years ago, long-suffering Cashman was publicly called "horseshit" and "overpaid" by his boss.

Scandal

In 1974, Steinbrenner was indicted on 14 criminal charges for illegal contributions to President Nixon's reelection campaign, and he later pled guilty to two of them. Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball for two years as a result, although that was later reduced to nine months, and his criminal record was wiped clean when he was pardoned by President Reagan in 1989. He got into more trouble the following year, when he was banned for life from actively running the Yankees for paying a gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, his own outfielder. Life for Steinbrenner turned out to be three years, as he was reinstated in 1993.

Grudge

Nearly all of Steinbrenner's professional relationships have been turbulent, but his relationship with the late Yankees manager Billy Martin was particularly rocky. Steinbrenner hired him in 1975; he resigned in 1978, was re-hired in 1979, then got the boot after the 1979 season for getting into a barroom brawl with a marshmallow salesman. Steinbrenner then proceeded to hire—and fire—Martin three more times in the '80s. Their squabbles have been revisited in the recent ESPN miniseries The Bronx is Burning, featuring John Turturro as Martin and Oliver Platt as the Boss himself.

Personal

George married Joan Zieg in 1956. She filed for divorce in 1962 but the couple later reconciled and have been married ever since. They have four children: Jennifer, Jessica, Hal and Hank. Although the Steinbrenners have a home in Connecticut, they now spend much of their time in Tampa, or at Steinbrenner's race-horse breeding estate, Kinsman Farm.

No joke

When Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973, he said he wouldn't be involved in running the team: "We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned, we're not going to pretend we're something we aren't. I'll stick to building ships."