Frankly, Torres Have Two Champs Joe’s Ailing Brother, Frank, Continues To Recuperate

Frank Torre used to dream of a life that bore simple fruits: a conversation with his grandchildren with anyone, really that didn’t exhaust him. Reading the paper or watching TV without constantly feeling sick. Just one full day without someone asking, “How are you feeling, Frank?”

Ask him today, and … well, no one has to anymore. Because of a new heart that was successfully transplanted on Oct. 26, the brother of Yankees manager Joe Torre has the only gift he’s ever wanted: a new life, a real life, free of illness.

“This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had, all this energy that I have again,” says Torre, who, slowly but surely, is settling into a routine of any healthy retiree. He and his wife, Anne, live in a high-rise condominium in Fort Lee, N.J., weaning themselves from a dependency from the heart specialists at Manhattan’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who saved Torre during the World Series.

He’s walking three miles a day, exercising his upper body, and appears nothing like the pale, bed-ridden patient who had all but surrendered to his deteriorating heart. Torre, who admits, “There were times I’d just about given up,” is now planning an April return to his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. But first, he’s celebrating a normal Christmas with his wife and children, which, just a few months ago, seemed all but impossible.

“Talk about a Christmas blessing,” says Joe Torre. “Now when the phone rings, I don’t worry about some doctor telling me something’s wrong with Frank. It’s so good to know that he’s feeling better. To me, that’s the best holiday present we could’ve asked for.”

The Torre brothers wern’t actually together Wednesday; Joe was visiting his in-laws in Cincinnati, and Frank, because of an immune system that is only now gaining strength, must remain indoors in Fort Lee. Still, Joe will be in New Jersey on Tuesday for Frank’s 65th birthday, when the brothers will sit and reminisce about what matters most to baseball men.

Not doctors. Not illness. But baseball, just as it was supposed to be.

“To be honest, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through the summer without the Yankees,” Frank Torre says. “I was lying in a hospital bed, and to be honest, I was frightened. At least the Yankees kept my mind off things. I watched them on TV, or listened on the radio, kept up any way I could. But they kept me going. Once the World Series started, though, I was starting to get worried, because I knew baseball was about to end, and I thought it would still be another few months before I’d get a new heart.”

Frank didn’t know what his future would bring, but he certainly knew he couldn’t return to his past. After three heart attacks, his heart was so badly damaged it was no longer delivering sufficient oxygen to the rest of his body.

By the spring of 1996, Torre felt weak all day, every day, not to mention the relentless pain in his stomach. Florida heart doctors said it was his stomach. Internists said it was his gall bladder, and removed it. Still, Torre’s system was faltering so rapidly, he recalls, “I couldn’t walk out to my driveway to get the paper without being exhausted.”

“Things looked pretty bad,” says Anne. “Frank had his first heart attack in ‘84, and to be honest, it seemed like he’d bought his 10 years. We were waiting …

” … for the last stone to drop,” Torre says, uttering the words his wife could not.

How bad was it? After months of pleading and begging from his brother, Frank finally agreed to come to New York for treatment. Joe was at LaGuardia Airport the day Frank was taken off the plane in a wheelchair, and admits he was stunned at his brother’s condition.

“It was like I was looking at a 90-yearold man,” Joe says. “Frank was slumped over, with a handkerchief pressed to his face. He couldn’t even sit up, that’s how bad he was. And that’s when it really hit me, how sick Frank had become.”

It was the beginning of a long, emotionally draining summer for both Torres.

Doctors at Columbia Presbyterian were able to stabilize Frank, but to resume his life - a real life - he’d have to wait for a new heart. And Joe reached bottom on June 22, when, between games of a doubleheader against the Indians at Jacobs Field, he received a phone call from his wife, Alice.

“I have bad news, Joe,” she said. “Are you sitting down?”

Torre held his breath, bracing himself for the worst: Frank. It had to be Frank. Instead, Torre learned his other brother, Rocco, a former New York City police officer, had died of a heart attack. Torre left Cleveland for the funeral, devastated in the realization that, “I just lost Rocco today. Tomorrow it could be Frank.”

Small wonder the two brothers will always cherish October ‘96. It’s already part of baseball lore now, the Yankees’ resurrection from a two-game Series deficit against the Braves, and how Frank finally inherited a heart from a 28-year-old Bronx man.

Frank remembers regaining consciousness in the first few hours following the operation, unable to speak or even move, but sensing his brother’s presence in the room. No words were spoken, but Frank knows Joe took his hand and kissed it. And he knows Joe was crying.

Although not deeply religious, Frank Torre believes, “Someone upstairs was looking out for me.” Too many coincidences, he says, to believe otherwise. His way of repaying the fates is to immerse himself in the organ-donor program.

Every interview Frank agrees to - and there have been too many to keep count - is a vehicle to deliver the message. Every year, 50,000 people in this country wait for organ transplants. Only 2,200 receive them.

Maybe that’s why Frank Torre is planning to meet the mother of his heart donor. Already, there was one scam artist, a woman who claimed to be the donor’s wife, needing money for her husband’s burial. Frank was ready to pay, until her con was discovered.

But this time, the Torre family is sure the real mother has come forward. “When the time is right, we’ll get together,” he says.

It isn’t hard to know the words Frank Torre will utter. It is what he says today, and every day that he wakes up without pain. Every time he finds the energy to play with his grandchildren. Every time he thinks of the World Series, and how he was alive to see Joe hugging the Yankees, each and every one of them.

When Frank Torre says, “I’m the luckiest man in the world,” you know he means it.

After all, it comes from the heart.