Lou Gehrig Page 6

  In 1935, Lou Gehrig was out from beneath the shadow of Babe Ruth. The Babe was no longer with the Yankee team. The playing days of the Great Man were over. Wear and Tear and Time had tapped Ruth. But actually, Gehrig had begun to emerge even before Ruth’s retirement into the golden pages of baseball history. For towards the end, as the figures indicate, not even the Babe could cast a shadow large enough to blanket the Iron Horse.

  Gehrig’s modesty and self depreciation continued to keep him in the background, but his deeds, his amazing vitality, durability and the quality of his play refused to be submerged any longer.

  Sincere tributes and appreciations of the man began to appear in the columns and the sports pages. The sports writers began to look down from the Olympian slopes of the press box at the piano legs, the broad and honest rear porch which had earned him the name of Biscuit Pants, the powerful, smooth-swinging shoulders, and the young and pleasant face of “that big dumb Dutchman,” with honest and deep affection.

  Success! The Golden Decade was buried in the limbo of beautiful dreams. There was a new era and a new team. The Bronx Bombers had supplanted Murderer’s Row, and was carving out its own record. They won the American League pennant in 1936–7–8. They won three World Series championships in a row, two from the Giants, beating them four games to two and four games to one. And the third they took from the helpless Cubs, four straight.

  Yes, it was a wonderful, gleaming, glittering golden success. Lou was in the thick of it, driving in the runs, clouting the potato out of the ballyard, fielding for position, winning new honors, breaking and setting new records.

  In 1936, Lou was again named the most valuable player in the American League, exactly nine years after he had first achieved this honor. His salary had been mounting steadily too, and in 1938 he signed for the largest sum he ever received for playing ball—$39,000.

  And in the meantime, his consecutive games record was going on and on as though it would never stop. He celebrated his 1,500th game, his 1,800th, his 1,900th and his 2,000th.

  And in connection with the last there hangs a little inside story. Christy Walsh who managed Gehrig’s extra-curricular earnings, told it to me. Christy, you may remember, was the Spook of Spooks, the Father of the Ha’nt or Ghost system of sports writing, operating a sports syndicate from which issued a steady stream of platitudes bearing the 18 karat Hancocks of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, the late Knute Rockne, and dozens of others.

  As the 2,000th game approached, Walsh tried to persuade Gehrig to stay away from it and go fishing. He maintained—and it was a brilliant publicity stroke—that if Lou stopped at 1,999 games, it was a figure no one could forget. Whereas no one would remember how many games past 2,000 he played. And the story would make Page One. The idea of course was to impart some Ruthian vermilion to the somewhat pastel shades of Gehrig.

  They sold it to Gehrig too. Until the day came. And then he couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t let the club down. He couldn’t disappoint the people who would come to see him play his two thousandth game. And besides a pennant race was on. He had to play in every game.

  When Christy Walsh mentioned color again, Lou exploded … “If I have to do nutty things to have color, I don’t want to have any. Why can’t I just be myself?”

  It was Eleanor who said quietly … “Lou, you’re smarter than all the rest of us put together. You just go on being yourself, and never be anything else. Because that’s the guy that people love.”

  “To Thine Own Self Be True,” is a potent motto that hangs on many a classroom wall, but Gehrig demonstrated it, simply and naturally, where a lot of people could see and appreciate it; grown-ups as well as kids. He refused to be anything but himself, a simple, earnest, honest, conscientious soul.

  13

  “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH GEHRIG?”

  Towards the end of the last decade, the name, the figure, and above all, the simple engaging personality of Lou Gehrig became welded into the National scene. Came the baseball season, came Gehrig. Came Gehrig, came home runs, triples, doubles, excitement and faultless play around First Base. And his record ran on. Day in day out he played, sick or well, never missing a game.

  Sick or well. I wonder whether you know what that means to a ball player, and particularly one who plays at First Base where the bumps are many and there is daily physical danger both from ball and man.

  He played with colds. He played with fevers. He played so doubled over with the torture of lumbago that it was impossible for him to straighten up, and bent over at the plate, he still played and he still got himself a single.

  In 1934, the year he won the triple crown, he fractured a toe. He played on. He was knocked unconscious by a wild pitch, suffered a concussion that would hospitalize the average man for two weeks. He was at his position the next day and collected four hits.

  When his hands were X-rayed, late in his career, they found seventeen assorted fractures that had healed by themselves. He had broken every finger of both hands and some twice, and hadn’t even mentioned it to anyone. The fantastic thing about this is that not only was he able to endure the pain of breaks, strains, sprains, pulled and torn tendons, muscles and ligaments, but they failed to impair his efficiency. On the contrary, if he had something the matter with him it was the signal for him to try all the harder so that no one, and least of all his own severe conscience, could accuse him of being a handicap to his team while playing in a crippled condition.

  When in 1939, Lou Gehrig found himself unaccountably slow in spring training, he began to punish his body for a failure that was unaccountable and to drive it harder and more mercilessly than ever before.

  It had begun before that, the slow tragedy of distintegration. Signs and symptoms had been mistaken. During most of 1938, Gehrig had been on a strict diet. Thirty-eight had not been a good year for him. In the early winter of 1939 he had taken a $5,000 salary slash. Baseball players are paid by the records they compile.

  And in the winter of 1939 Lou and Eleanor as usual, went ice skating together. Lou was a fine skater. But, strangely, he kept falling all the time.

  The teams went south for the 1939 training season and the sports writers went along with them. And the boys with one voice began sending back stories that must have saddened them to write. I know sports writers. When you grow to love an athlete the way they did love Lou Gehrig, it isn’t fun to oil your typewriter with his blood and be the first to write the story of the passing from the sports scene of a once great figure.

  It is rather shocking to see all the stories gathered together on two or three of the large pages of Lou Gehrig’s scrapbook compiled by his wife. They ask … “What is the matter with Gehrig?”

  And having asked, they answered it. They wrote that Gehrig was through. They hated to do so, but they owed a loyalty to their papers and to the people who read the papers. An honest reporter writes what he sees.

  What they saw was not unfamiliar to them. The useful playing lifetime of a top flight professional athlete is on the average shockingly short. A sports writer lives through many generations of them. He becomes alert to notice the first symptoms of slowing up. They were obvious with Gehrig at St. Petersburg. He was slow afoot, afield and at bat. And while he fought like a rookie to hold his position there was no improvement evident. Sadly they wrote that Lou was going the way of all athletes. His race was run. He might speed up when they hit the warmer weather of the regular season, but the old Iron Horse was running down.

  But the players on the Yankee ball club were saying something else. The sports writers were looking through the wire mesh of the batting screens. Gehrig’s colleagues were close to him—close enough to touch. They noticed things, strange things that were happening to their captain, things that worried and depressed them. And they had knowledge too, of their craft and of themselves. One of the things they knew was that a ball player slows up only gradually. His legs go, imperceptibly at first, then noticeably as he no longer covers the ground in the field that
he used to cover. But he doesn’t come apart all at one time, and in chunks.

  I talked to Tony Lazzeri at his sweet, neat little home in San Francisco, where he now plays with the Seals. Tony watched Lou in practice in Florida in 1939. Once Lou was up at the plate and ducked back from a close one. And he couldn’t stop himself. He just kept on staggering backwards, unable to regain his balance, until he crased into one of the other players who righted him again.

  Ball players knew that wasn’t right.

  Bill Dickey, Lou’s closest friend, was worried sick. He began to watch over Lou the way a father watches over a child.… And nobody would say anything to Gehrig, because rough and tough the ball player may be, but he is a sensitive fellow and a great respecter of private feelings.

  There are grim tales of things that happened in the locker room, and one is dreadfully macabre with overtones of fine manly nobility. It is of Gehrig dressing, leaning over to lace his spikes and falling forward to the floor to lie there momentarily helpless. And it tells further of tough men with the fine instincts to look away and not to hurt his already tortured soul the more by going to him or offering to help. Quickly they left the locker room leaving him to struggle to his feet alone with no eyes to see his weakness.

  They knew that it wasn’t age that was bothering Gehrig, but that he was sick.

  14

  PORTRAIT OF COURAGE

  Few men can have gone through the hell that Gehrig did during those hideous days.

  If you ask me what are some of the elements that go to make up what the populace terms or selects as a hero, I would say, among other things, the capacity for quiet, uncomplaining suffering, the ability to take it and never to let on, never to let the world suspect that you are taking it.

  This was Lou Gehrig. Not even his wife knew wholly, though she must have suspected, how terribly Gehrig suffered during those days when his speed and skill were deserting him and his once iron muscles suddenly housed a tragic mystery that turned them to useless rags.

  Can you not picture the fear, the worry, the helpless bewilderment that must have filled Lou’s soul as he found that he could not bat, he could not run and he could not field? Life for him took on all the aspects of the most horrid of nightmares. All the fear-dreams to which humans are prone, dreams of shameful failure, dreams of not being able to run when pursued, dreams of performing some well-remembered daily office with most grotesque results, now haunted his waking hours.

  The strain and terror of it lined his face in a few short months and brought grey to his hair. But it could not force a complaint to his lips.

  Gehrig’s most powerful reaction when it became apparent that there was something wrong with him, was to drive himself still further, still harder, to punish his flagging muscles and sick body relentlessly.

  He was certain that it was work he needed that fatal spring training session of 1939. He drove himself furiously, castigated and punished himself. He took it out on the body that had for so long been his willing and sometimes, it must be confessed, abused slave. It never occurred to him that something entirely different might be the matter with him or to blame for his apparent lack of physical condition, something quite outside his own powers to control.

  His performance during the early part of 1939 was pitiful compared to the man who had been. And yet, strangely, so great was the spell that his integrity, his honest attempts to please and his service over the long years, had cast over the baseball world, that that worst mannered, most ill-tempered and boorish man in the world, the baseball fan, forbore to heckle him.

  On Sunday, April 30, 1939, the Yankees played the Senators in Washington. Lou Gehrig came to bat four times with runners on base. He failed to get a hit, or even meet the ball, and the Yankees lost.

  Something else happened on that day. There was a toss ball at first. The pitcher fielded a one-hop grounder, ran over towards first and tossed the ball underhand to Lou, as pitchers frequently do when there is time.

  Lou muffed the throw.

  Monday was an off day. Lou went to Larchmont. He did a lot of thinking. But he did the thinking to himself. He had the toughest decision of his life to make. But he had to make it alone.

  Tuesday, May 2nd, the team met in Detroit to open a series against the Tigers. Joe McCarthy flew in from Buffalo. Lou met him in the dugout and said the fateful words:

  “Joe, I always said that when I felt I couldn’t help the team any more I would take myself out of the line-up. I guess that time has come.”

  McCarthy said: “When do you want to quit, Lou?”

  Gehrig looked at him steadily and said, “Now. Put Babe Dahlgren in.”

  Later, alone in a corner of the dugout he wept.

  The streak ended at 2,130 games.

  The newspapers and the sports world buzzed with the sensation of his departure from the line-up of the Yankees.

  Lou, at the urging of Eleanor, went up to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota, for a check-up.

  There was a lull in the news. The sensation of Gehrig’s withdrawal from the game he had played for so long died down.

  Then out of a clear sky the storm burst again. Black headlines tore across the page tops like clouds, and lightninged their messages. … “GEHRIG HAS INFANTILE PARALYSIS.” … “GEHRIG FIGHTS PARALYZING ILLNESS.”

  The New York Yankees released the report of the Doctors at the Clinic. It was a disease diagnosed as Amyothropic Lateral Sclerosis, interpreted for the layman as a form of Infantile Paralysis, and the mystery of the too sudden decline and passing of Louis Henry Gehrig, perennial Yankee First baseman, was solved.

  The people who loved and respected Gehrig, or who merely knew of him as a great athlete and an outstanding performer, read with sympathy the newspaper stories to the effect that with care and treatment he would have a 50–50 chance to triumph over the disease, and that even running its course it would not affect him too badly, and though his playing days were over, it might be fifteen years before he would come to the use of a cane.

  Before Gehrig came home from the Mayo Clinic, Eleanor went to their family physician, gave him the name of the disease and asked to be told the truth about it. The Doctor knew her well. He said quietly … “I think you can take it. And I think you should know.”

  Then he told her right between the eyes that the disease was incurable and that her husband could not live more than two years.

  Eleanor went home. She closed her door upon herself, shutting out the world. But before she could give in to grief and shock for the first and last time, she made a telephone call. It was to the Mayo Clinic. She had but one question to ask of the doctor there … “Have you told my husband?”

  There is a rule or an understanding at the famous Clinic that patients are advised as to the seriousness of their condition. But in the short time that he had been at the hospital, Gehrig had captivated the staff. They had not the heart to tell him the truth and they so advised Eleanor Gehrig.

  She begged … “Please promise me that you never will. Don’t ever let him know. I don’t want him to find out.”

  They promised.

  Then only did Eleanor permit herself to weep.

  The time of weeping was short. Lou came home. He came home full of smiles and jokes, and the girl who met him was smiling and laughing too, though neither noticed that in the laughter of the other there was something a little feverish. They were too busy to notice. Too busy with their magnificent and gallant deception of one another.

  Lou’s cheer was based, outwardly, on the fact that he hadn’t been an aging ball player, but that his sudden disintegration had been caused by the disease instead, a disease of which he promised Eleanor he would be cured before he learned to pronounce it.

  And Eleanor, her heart breaking within her, chose to see his enforced layoff from baseball as an opportunity for another honeymoon, the chance to be together again.

  The doctors said … “No baseball. Take things easy. You have a 50–50 chance to recover complete
ly. It is not contagious. And there is no danger that your mind will be affected.”

  This was the basis of their intercourse, the common meeting point of their outwardly expressed beliefs. Eleanor knew the truth and fought a constant fight of great valiance and intelligence to keep it from Lou. She had to be on the spot always to answer the telephone, to watch over him that people did not get to him, to look after the mail before he saw it. Ever present, menacing her was the one crackpot who might slip through the shields of love she placed about him, and tell him to his face that his case was hopeless.

  15

  “THE LUCKIEST MAN ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH”

  As to what Lou knew—he never told anybody.

  To all intents and purposes, he went into the battle with his chin up and his determination blazing. He had overcome many obstacles through life, poverty in his youth, clumsiness in his profession, loneliness in his relationship with other human beings. He had taken a life that might have been a very ordinary one, and by dint of persistency, ambition, courage and a beautiful cleanliness of mind, had made something splendid and admired out of it. Now the life stuff itself was attacked. He fought back as he had always fought.

  But this was one fight in which the knowledge was clear within him that the cards were stacked against him and that he would not win. He fought nevertheless. And we know the reason why. It was to keep up Eleanor’s courage, to prevent her from realizing the hopelessness of his situation. He believed that she did not know the truth.

  Gehrig continued to travel with the team for a time. As captain, he appeared at the start of each game and handed the line-up to the umpire, and then retired to the dugout. In every city on the circuit, the fans gave him an ovation when he appeared. The voice and the heart of the people were beginning to make themselves heard and felt.

  His modesty could not bear the fuss and the public sympathy. He withdrew from handing the line-up to the umpire and appeared on the field no more.