TAMPA -- Johnny Damon gave Manny Ramírez his best sell. For $5.1 million, the Chestnut Hill house Damon bought for $4.75 million, and the pool house he added for $375,000, would be Ramírez's. Damon did not want actual value for the place, which he pegs at $6 million. He simply wanted the return on his investment.
At cost, Damon told Ramírez, he could have an actual home and be done with the Ritz, a place, Damon said, ''where sometimes it all becomes too much for him.
''There are people taking his picture when he gets into his car, people talking to him. It's a difficult ride to the park.
''But," Damon said, ''he didn't want it because he was convinced he was leaving Boston."
With Ramírez initially uninterested, and now poised to reinhabit his Ritz penthouse, Damon is selling his Massachusetts home back to the builder, as he prepares to shift to his new April-to-October coordinates -- a place, incidentally, that Ramírez would love. The 3,000-square-foot, 39th-floor condo at One Beacon Court on Manhattan's Upper East Side has it all: an urban panorama (the view includes the Chrysler Building), green grass (Central Park unfolds below), and, perhaps best of all, relative anonymity.
In Boston, Damon was iconic.
''I was me," he said. ''I was the voice. I was the face."
In his new home, he merely will be a face.
Damon, when he steps on the elevator, is liable at any time to encounter singer/songwriter/designer/actress Beyonce Knowles. Or, her paramour, rapper Jay-Z. Or Brian Williams, on his way to the NBC studios to anchor the nightly news. Or former
''I'm trying," Damon said, ''to get the full New York experience."
An old friend As Damon talked inside the clubhouse at Legends Field, springtime home of the Yankees, he sat at his locker, bordered to the right by Jason Giambi's.
When Pedro Martínez spiked septuagenarian Don Zimmer during Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS, and the benches cleared, Damon raced to Giambi. Not because Damon wanted anything to do with the enormous slugger, whose arm veins rise, in serpentine paths, above his skin. Damon did so because he had suffered a concussion four days earlier in a sickening collision with Damian Jackson, and he knew that Giambi, who in 2001 in Oakland became his all-time favorite teammate, would protect him.
