Steinbrenner. The name says it all.

"I realize it's a great responsibility," Hal Steinbrenner said yesterday, after it was officially announced that control of the most famous sports franchise on planet Earth — all due respect, Manchester United — had been transferred to him. "My dad, needless to say, is a tough act to follow."

He is, in truth, an impossible act to follow, because of everything he was and everything he did in his time here. He came in promising absentee ownership and became instead the most hands-on owner sport had ever seen.

He came in promising to restore a franchise (which was in shambles when he bought it) and put in place the pieces that won six championships. He hired and fired managers and pitching coaches with abandon, blitzed through PR men like a frat house goes through beer kegs, got himself suspended twice from baseball, made commercials, hosted "Saturday Night Live," became a recurring character on "Seinfeld."

"One thing they'll never have to wonder about me is if I enjoyed my time here," Steinbrenner told me once, about five years ago. "I can tell you that right now: I've had a hell of a time. It's a hell of a thing to own the New York Yankees."

And it was a hell of a thing to be George Steinbrenner, too. There were times he was a model of how not to run a sports franchise (or a 7-Eleven franchise, for that matter), and there is an army of ex-employees who'll tell you he was a model of how not to be a boss, too. And yet, players who spent years raging at him would invariably be welcomed back as coaches and instructors after their playing days were over. There are a thousand tales of quiet kindnesses Steinbrenner administered through the years.

And perhaps the most staggering thing of all is to know that in the short course of his stewardship, public opinion about him managed to do the impossible: it did a complete 180. This was a man whose banishment from baseball in July 1990 was greeted with a standing ovation and a vulgar chant at Yankee Stadium. And yet less than a decade later, those same fans would serenade him with a chant of "Thank you, George!"

New York has long been the place where men come to find their destinies, and Steinbrenner found his here. It has long been a city that welcomes men to re-invent themselves, and Steinbrenner did that, too. We will never see another like him, and who ever would have thought, back in the day, that this would be a sad thing?

So the name of the boss, lower case, changes. Even as everyone knows that the Boss, upper case, will be forever.

New York Yankees News News » There'll never be a Boss quite like him
There'll never be a Boss quite like him
Maybe it won't ever again be possible to be the way George Steinbrenner was once upon a time, when he managed to be the biggest, brightest, brassiest star in the New York sporting universe without ever shedding his sports jacket, when every time he opened his mouth the words tumbled straight onto the back page of the newspaper. If that's so, maybe it's how it should be. Remember Steinbrenner this way: as an original, as a guy who showed up in 1973 with neither fame nor a name, and now, almost 36 years later, hands off the Yankees to his youngest son as the most famous man to ever own a sports franchise in this city, with a name whose very essence instills distinct feelings — be it fear, be it loathing, be it joy or empathy or exhilaration — just by uttering it. More from the New York Post Giants' Jacobs expects to be OK Favre mum on plans for next year Greenberg: Titans 10-0 and under radar More from The New York Post