LUCKIEST
MAN
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LOU GEHRIG
By Jonathan Eig
New York:
Simon & Schuster
432 pp. $26.00
Kevin Baker is the author of the novels Dreamland
and Paradise Alley.
He remains the elusive hero. Gazing wistfully
out of some old black-and-white photo taken on a ballfield, his
smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s. In a city where sports
superstars have rarely tried to hide their light under a bushel,
Lou Gehrig assiduously ducked publicity throughout his truncated
life. This only enhanced the aura of mystery that surrounds the
man; to be a modest, retiring champion in New York seems to miss
the whole point.
And yet in the end the tragic circumstances of
Gehrig’s death, along with a few words from the heart, would
etch his legend across the firmament as indelibly as any other’s
in the history of American sport. Standing before more than 61,000
hushed fans in Yankee Stadium on a muggy, Fourth of July afternoon
in 1939, Gehrig—who had been forced from the game only months
earlier, his once formidable body already wasted by the cruel
progression of amyothropic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—had to
be coaxed into saying anything at all at a ceremony in his honor.
“For the past two weeks, you’ve been
reading about a bad break,” he began haltingly, his voice
breaking. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the
face of the earth.”
A
star was finally born, secured three years later by The Pride
of the Yankees, one of the few memorable baseball movies;
starring Gary Cooper, Gehrig’s cinematic doppleganger, and
the incandescent Teresa Wright as his wife. Even so, a baseball
player known mostly as the soul of self-effacing consistency is
hardly the most promising biographical subject. But Jonathan Eig,
a senior writer for the The Wall Street Journal, has
done a superb job of digging out the real Gehrig from behind the
legend, and the mask of his own modesty.
What he uncovered was a personality much more
shaded than Cooper’s uncomplicated, all-American boy. Gehrig’s
was a rags-to-riches story; the same, almost uncannily repeated
tale of so many Yankee greats: Joe DiMaggio, son of a humble,
Italian fisherman; Mickey Mantle, from a family of Oklahoma lead
miners; Babe Ruth, Gehrig’s Rabelaisian teammate, brought
up in a Baltimore orphanage.
Unlike the others, Henry Louis Gehrig didn’t
have to come to the big city to make good. He was born here, the
son of struggling German immigrants. His father was a sometime
iron worker who maintained a lifelong preference for beer over
industry. Lou’s mother, Christina, was an imposing woman
who would exercise an overweening influence on her only surviving
child well into his adult life.
Ma Gehrig may be forgiven some of her domineering
ways, considering the hardness of her world. She spent much of
her life cooking and cleaning for other people, to support her
family in some of the shabbier tenements of upper Manhattan. In
five years surrounding Lou’s birth in 1903, she lost three
other children before the age of two. She compensated by stuffing
her son so full of her heavy German cooking that Lou soon had
a physique that earned him the soubriquets “Fat” from
his childhood pals, and “Biscuit Pants” from his Yankee
teammates.
His
response, then as ever, was relentless hard work, turning the
fat into muscle at his father’s turnverein, or
German gymnastics club. More muscled than many players in our
steroidal age, he had almost freakishly powerful legs—“Each
thigh was bigger than many a man’s waist, each calf the
size of Christmas ham.” His body was low-centered, his devastating,
compact swing pivoting off those overdeveloped thighs, and while
his later nickname, “The Iron Horse,” referred mostly
to his reliability, Gehrig does indeed look like a locomotive
in close-up photos and film, infinitely powerful and unstoppable.
For all of his work ethic, Gehrig was a great
natural athlete. He excelled in every sport he put his hand to,
soccer, basketball, football; at the age of 11 he swam the Hudson
River to New Jersey. He first came to national attention when,
still in high school, he hit a grand slam home run out of Chicago’s
Wrigley Field. Not long after, a Yankees scout spotted him at
Columbia University, where he was playing ball and pursuing his
mother’s dream for him to become an engineer. (Following
class, Lou would help her wash dishes, at her job in a rival fraternity’s
kitchen.)
Within two more years he had become a fixture
at first base for the Yankees. He would not miss a day for nearly
14 seasons, his famous record of 2,130 consecutive games bested
by Cal Ripken, Jr., only in 1995. Once again, hard work and persistence
was the key. He played through bouts of lumbago, broken fingers,
bone chips, and a beaning that left his head so swollen he had
to wear Babe Ruth’s cap. As happened with Ripken, some of
the bright boys in the press box would periodically suggest that
Gehrig was hurting himself and his team by not taking a day off,
but his record was hard to argue with. Gehrig scored over a hundred
runs, drove in over a hundred more, and batted over .300 in 12
consecutive seasons. Out of the 34 World Series games he played,
he drove in the winning run a remarkable eight times. Before he
was struck down, he was on a pace to claim most of the game’s
batting records.
It
didn’t hurt that Gehrig played on some of the greatest teams
in major-league history, batting for almost his entire career
behind either Ruth or DiMaggio. But Eig presents convincing evidence
that Gehrig contributed at least as much to their success on the
field as they did to his. What his charismatic teammates really
provided was psychological cover. When Gehrig hit a remarkable
.545 in the 1928 World Series, Ruth hit .625. When Gehrig hit
.529 in the 1932 Series, Ruth hit his famous “called shot”
home run. Even when Gehrig hit four home runs in one game, robbed
of number five—five!—only by a circus catch…it
was the same day legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw
announced his retirement.
Gehrig
spent much of his life in other men’s shadows, and there
is every indication he preferred it that way. Eig suggests that
his mother’s domination may well have arrested his emotional
development. Lou was curiously childlike, a man who lived with
his parents—and who may well have been a virgin—until
he was nearly thirty. He was a sensitve, unfailingly considerate
person, who spoke out against the color line in baseball, and
helped his teammates whenever he could, yet he had few close friends.
Acquaintances described him as “worried” and “harassed”
even in high school, and felt he was “carrying with him
a sense of his own worthlessness.” He possessed a mind agile
enough to pass a university philosophy course, and weep at Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde. Yet he often seemed lost away from
a ballfield, riding the roller coaster at Rye Beach for hours
by himself on off-days. “He loved baseball so much that
he sometimes went home after a game, rounded up a few of the kids
from the neighborhood, and played in the street until dark,”
records Eig.
Eleanor Grace Twitchell, the woman he married,
was the daughter of a former racetrack tout, and a “circuit
girl” during the Yankees’ trips to Chicago—more
of a groupie, or “baseball annie,” than Teresa Wright’s
girl-next-door. But she finally pried Lou out from under his mother,
and nudged him into blowing his own horn at least a little. Lou
became the Yankee’s captain, signed endorsement deals, even
enjoyed playing a small role in a Hollywood western.
Then came the disease—Lou Gehrig’s
disease, as it would be called ever after—and the true mettle
of the man shown through. Eig’s account is heartbreaking.
ALS gradually snuffs out the nerve cells, destroying its victims’
physical capacities one-by-one. Gehrig had to endure the steady,
baffling erosion of the muscles he had done so much to build.
For once, all his hard work was to no avail.
A visit to the Mayo Clinic at last provided a
diagnosis, but Lou’s doctors purposely or naively gave him
the false hope that his chances of recovery were fifty-fifty.
His letters to the clinic reveal a nearly pathetic desire to please,
alternately pleading with the doctors to “PLEASE reveal
to me the honest opinions,” and hoping they wouldn’t
think him “a cry baby.” In the meantime, he worked
seriously at his new job on New York City’s parole board,
and gathered up used gloves and balls from the Yankee clubhouse
to send to the boys of Rochester. He kept a stiff upper lip to
the end when, not yet 38 years of age, his vocal chords shut down
by the disease, he ironically mouthed the words “fifty-fifty”
to his wife.
It
was an iconic death, one that has embalmed Lou Gehrig in amber,
and celluloid. Eig does a tremendous job of bringing out the full,
human tragedy of the man, and of framing the America Gehrig lived
in—both a harder and a more innocent time, when ballplayers
were considered barely a notch above carnies, but would sing “The
Sidewalks of New York,” after winning a World Series, and
give a teammate a trophy with a poem inscribed on it. Eig is obviously
knowledgeable about baseball, and doesn’t slight the game,
but non-fans will find this story captivating nonetheless. Luckiest
Man stands in the first rank of sports biographies.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
