Francona: The Red Sox Years by Terry Francona, Dan Shaughnessy

players offended club officials by betting on one another’s croquet strokes. Two decades later, he was on his way to a job interview with a man who lived near the stodgy club. He felt a little like Groucho Marx, who famously said he would never want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
    Francona’s anxiety increased when the car went through not one but two security gates on the Henry property. When he finally got inside Henry’s home, he was seated in a front room with a lot of windows, then waited nervously for almost an hour. He was all alone except for the servant who brought him an iced tea and told him that Mr. Henry would be right down.
    Francona kept checking the crib sheet in his pocket. He wanted to be prepared. But he kept thinking,
What’s up with this guy? Is this some kind of test?
    Finally, Henry came into the room, looking typically frail and pale, and he was also hunched over. Henry explained that he’d recently suffered a back injury.
    The conversation was brief. Ten minutes. Francona didn’t know what to make of it. He wondered if he’d offended Henry. Then, as Henry was walking Francona to the car, he almost committed a major faux pas. Henry’s six-year-old daughter ran up to the two men, and Francona started to say, “What a cute grandchild,” then caught himself. He was no longer the young wiseguy who got admonished at the Palm Beach International Polo Club. In a quarter-century of professional ball, he’d learned never to ask a dome-bellied young woman, “When’s the baby due?” So he held back on the “granddaughter” compliment, perhaps changing the course of Red Sox history.
    Still, he wondered why the interview was so brief.
    “I wasn’t sure if he was hurt or if I offended him, but Theo called me later and said, ‘I heard it went great.’” Henry later told people it was the single best interview he’d ever had in baseball.
    Francona had cleared every hurdle, but the announcement was still on hold while Theo attended to the matter of bringing Schilling to Boston.
    The Red Sox did not hire Francona as their 44th manager in order to lure Schilling to Boston. It doesn’t work that way. A manager is too important to the overall well-being of a franchise. It’s not like college basketball where a school might hire a coach if said coach can induce a once-in-a-lifetime recruit to come with him to study and play. This happened to Holy Cross College in the mid-1960s when the small Catholic institution hired Power Memorial High School coach Jack Donahue, hoping that Donahue could convince his star center—Lewis Alcindor—to follow him to Worcester. It never happened, of course. Donahue went to Holy Cross, where he never won an NCAA tournament game, and Alcindor went to UCLA, where he won three national championships for John Wooden and the Bruins.
    By late November 2003, Henry, Lucchino, and Epstein all knew they wanted Francona to be their manager, and having him waiting in the wings certainly did not hurt their chances of getting Schilling to agree to a trade to Boston. Schilling, a World Series co-MVP with Arizona in 2001, had veto power over any trade, and when the Diamondbacks were looking to deal him, the big righty at first said he would only accept a deal to the Yankees or the Phillies. Schilling didn’t know that Epstein was already working on a deal with D-Backs general manager Joe Garagiola.
    Epstein told Schilling that Terry Francona was going to be the Red Sox manager. He also wrote (with Lucchino) a letter to Curt and Shonda Schilling.
    “There is no other place in baseball where you can have as great an impact on a franchise, as great an impact on a region, as great an impact on baseball history, as you can in Boston,” wrote the Sox executives. “. . . The players who help deliver a title to Red Sox Nation will never be forgotten, their place in baseball history forever secure.”
    It worked. Schilling immediately started lobbying for Francona