When Ron Guidry walked to the mound that night, the routine, at least, was familiar. The New York Yankees’ starting pitcher picked up the baseball. He stood for the national anthem. He turned around to face home plate.

Then it hit him.

The area around home was empty. Thurman Munson was missing.

“It’s the only game that, when I went out there, I didn’t feel like pitching,” Guidry says.

It was Aug. 6, 1979, four days after Munson, the Yankees’ captain, died when the private jet he was piloting crashed near his home in Canton, Ohio.

“I think about him every day,” says Willie Randolph, another Munson teammate during the late 1970s. “Seems like it anyway. After all this time, it’s still hard to believe that he’s gone.”

Friday marks the 40-year anniversary of Munson’s death, an event that seemed to bring New York City and the sports world to a standstill when word transmitted sometime after 4 p.m. ET from Canton. It cast a pall over a team that had just won two consecutive World Series championships but wouldn’t win another for 17 years.

“We’ve had some tough days, but that was the toughest,” Gene Monahan, the team’s head athletic trainer, recalled in 2011, his 39th and final season in the position. “I spent that afternoon, part of that evening upstairs in the office with Mr. Steinbrenner. For a while there, it was just the two of us and the telephone. It was brutal. But we got through it.”

Forty years since it happened, the memory of Munson’s death remains ingrained in the minds of ex-teammates whom owner George Steinbrenner called that afternoon to share the tragic news.

“Losing him in the middle of season, it affected every one of ’em, they tell me today, years later, so they think I should be fine,” Munson’s widow, Diana, said in a February interview at the Thurman Munson Awards Dinner in Manhattan. “And I should be. But they tell me exactly what he did to them. … It changed all of us forever.”

To those who knew him – and even those who didn’t – Munson’s legacy remains powerful. He is remembered as the team’s ultimate leader, for sure, but also as someone whose quiet deeds empowered those around him.

'Still draws a crowd'

The Munson Dinner, which benefits the AHRC New York City Foundation, has raised more than $16 million to assist children and adults with disabilities and toasts current athletes (many of whom weren’t born when Munson was alive) who have given back to their local community.

“I’m pretty sure that Thurman Munson is amazed right now, shaking his head, going, ‘This squatty little catcher from Ohio still draws a crowd,’ ” Diana says.

At this year’s dinner, a collection of fans known as the Munson HOF Committee launched a campaign to have him inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Modern Baseball Committee, comprised of Hall of Famers, executives and veteran media members who consider players from 1970 to 1989, votes in December.

Munson, a seven-time All-Star and the 1976 American League MVP who hit .292 over all or part of 11 seasons, had a rugged style of play that fueled the Yankees to World Series championships in 1977 and 1978. He was gruff to some – even nasty with baseball writers – but to others, he was a trusted friend.

“He could be real hard core, but when you knew him, he was like the greatest guy in the world,” says Ray Negron, a former Yankees bat boy and clubhouse man who befriended Munson and works in community relations for the team today.

Munson would chew players out, but he was more likely to needle a teammate just enough to motivate him to play better.

“How you gonna lose this one?” he might say to Goose Gossage on the mound when his pitcher inherited baserunners.

After his initial shock, Gossage realized Munson was easing the tension of the situation. The Hall of Fame pitcher can’t recall shaking off one of Munson’s pitch calls. The same goes for Guidry, who had arguably the two best seasons of his career pitching to Munson, including one in which he won the AL Cy Young Award.

“I probably made a lot more mistakes on my own,” he says, “thinking about what he would call rather than thinking what I should throw. … I couldn’t think like him.”

Munson was quick behind the plate and collided with anyone who dared challenge him. In turn, his teams began to play with his abandon, a grit that carried them to success even as well-documented controversies involving Steinbrenner, manager Billy Martin and star outfielder Reggie Jackson were surrounding them.

Munson would refuse to sit out games, but by 1979, he was a 32-year-old playing on bad knees. He exited an Aug. 1 game in Chicago early, and he told Jerry Narron, his backup, he might be catching a lot over the next two weeks. He was hurting, and he yearned to be with Diana and his three children – Tracy, Kelly and Michael, who lived in Canton. They had built a dream home there in 1978, the same year he took up flying. In 1979, he bought a Cessna Citation jet that could get him home to Canton almost as fast as a commute home to a suburb in the New York area.

He invited teammates on board, including Jackson and Graig Nettles, who flew with him and an instructor from Seattle to Anaheim, California, less than two weeks before his death. Jackson, with whom Munson had become cordial after a feud in 1977, turned down Munson’s invitation to fly to Canton with him after the Aug. 1 game in Chicago. Jackson was scheduled to tape a television commercial in Connecticut on the team’s off day.

“I almost kind of felt like I was there,” Jackson would say about his reaction to the news of Munson’s death.

Munson ran into two associates, Jerry Anderson and David Hall, the next day at Akron-Canton Airport and the three decided to test out his new plane. On the fourth descent practicing takeoffs and landings, the plane landed a little less than 1,000 feet from the runway, clipping trees and rolling along a field until a collision with a tree stump engulfed it in flames.

The National Transportation Safety Board, whose accident report and other documents related to Munson’s death were tracked down and made available last year by Allan Blutstein, a lawyer and Munson fan, determined pilot error as the cause of crash. According to the report, Munson died of asphyxiation. Anderson and Hall made it out with second- and third-degree burns but they couldn’t rescue Munson, who wasn’t wearing his shoulder harness and was paralyzed.

Remembered forever

That image is devastating to anyone, especially to those who knew Munson as a man who always helped everyone else first.

“Thurman used to talk about his son Michael … and the expression of, ‘I want to see him grow up, I want to see him have this, I want to be able to give …’ ” Negron says, starting to cry. “That was like something that stayed with me. I would always say that I would be a better dad because of those things he said.”

Negron once stopped with Munson at a McDonald’s across the street from Yankee Stadium. They saw two brothers, one of whom had Down syndrome, being picked on at the playground next door by older boys. The captain of the Yankees got out of the car and shooed the older kids away. The boys and their mother didn’t know who he was. That’s the way Thurman always wanted it.

“He did so many hospital visits,” Diana says. “He would go and he would give toys and he would do things behind the scenes that nobody knows about. He used to say, ‘If you tell the press I’m coming, I won’t come.’ He did it from the heart.”

This was the guy who came home to Ohio as frequently as he could, the father whose presence helped his family feel safer. Tracy was 9, Kelly 7 and Michael 4 when their father died.

Teammates knew his gentle side, too. During Randolph’s first year, Munson gave him a fluorescent yellow T-shirt with the words “Rook” written across the front in fluorescent green to help him feel accepted. He wore it for years and still has it.

“It always reminds me of him,” Randolph says. “I’ll always keep it.”

The Munson No. 15 jerseys still pop up around Yankee Stadium, even among fans who never saw him play. The older fans remember Aug. 3, 1979, the day after Munson died when the Yankees hosted the Orioles.

“If we wouldn't have played, Thurman would’ve been (ticked) off,” Narron says.

Gossage could hear fans weeping uncontrollably, as did many of Munson’s teammates.

“It was surreal, odd,” Jackson says. “I don’t want to do it again. It’s too hard. We were all young.”

Home plate was left vacant. Narron remained in the dugout for nearly nine minutes after the tribute ceremony because fans wouldn’t stop applauding.

On Aug. 6, Steinbrenner flew the team to Canton and back on the same day for the funeral. That night, Bobby Murcer, Munson’s close friend who had delivered the eulogy, drove in all five runs of a 5-4 Yankees victory.

Guidry started the game but wasn’t himself. In some ways, anyone who knew Munson really hasn’t been since.

“I’m pitching, but it’s not the same guy that goes out there and dares you to hit the ball,” he says, “because there was something that I was missing, and it was him.”

Borelli reported from Tampa, Florida; New York; Baltimore; and Washington.