For Yogi Berra, It Still Ain’t Over, and That’s Refreshing News

Yogi Berra is a breath of fresh air. I don’t think I ever quite appreciated that before.

He’s a relief from the lies and the posturing and the greed of today’s sports. If there were no escape, there would be no fun in the games.

Like Yogi Berra telling about lying in bed in Kissimmee, Fla., last week and reading his new book until a quarter to 2 in the morning. “At quarter to 3, Larry calls and wakes me up and says Carla’s having a baby,” Yogi Berra said. “So I got up and went to the hospital.”

It was Yogi Berra’s seventh grandchild, and he can give you the ages of all seven. So can a lot of grandfathers. The man remains a monument to some things we’ve lost.

Carmen, who married him Jan. 26, 1949, and the children always came first. He was the first person I heard say, “Why have hamburger on the road when you have steak at home?” and mean it.

Integrity is an uncommon part of his image. How many other people do you know who have said no to George Steinbrenner and not backed down?

I didn’t always think so much of the man. I was a young reporter traveling with the Yankees in Kansas City during the time of the Dynasty, when Ban-Lon was the new fabric sensation. I had been advised that Berra was a suspicious churl and not to expect a cheerful gnome dropping clever lines all about.

Anyhow, he came over in the lobby and squirted blue ink on my new white Ban-Lon shirt. I thought, “How could a Cro-Magnon be so stupid?” But I held my tongue. Yogi laughed. In about a minute, the ink disappeared and we both laughed.

I never heard of Yogi doing anything cruel to anybody. The book “Yogi -- It Ain’t Over ...” doesn’t say much harsh in these times of kiss and smear, but there’s some interesting insights and a lot of warmth.

“He does have an ability to blow his stack and in two hours -- while I’m still seething -- he’s forgotten about it,” Carmen Berra said. “What’s more amazing is that he doesn’t accept insult. Somebody says something I think is insulting and he doesn’t even hear it.”

The exception in the book is the tale of the meeting with Yogi, his coaches and Steinbrenner in 1984, when the owner insisted on keeping four or five players Yogi didn’t want. As Yogi and writer Tom Horton tell it:

“This meeting got so bad that I called the owner some bad names and threw a pack of cigarettes at him ... He said, ‘Nobody ever talks to me that way’ ... He was mad, I was mad, and nobody said a word. I mean nobody said a word after the bad names I used and, ‘You can’t talk to me that way.’ It was like a movie. After we left, several of the coaches said, ‘Atta, boy, Yogi. Stand up to the bastard,’ but it was quiet in the meeting. Not a surprise to me. I wondered if the thrown pack of cigarettes came back my way the next year.”

Berra was fired 16 days into the next season. “No one ever wrote about that meeting because only a few knew about it,” he said.

Steinbrenner has since put up a bronze plaque to Yogi, but Berra has never seen it. He’s never come back for Oldtimers Day. “I don’t want to go,” Berra said.

It would take a change of heart for him to go back while Steinbrenner is owner. Berra, in fact, turned down an offer to be a coach for Lou Piniella, a job that likely would have become an annuity. Yogi preferred to coach at Houston.

Still, he says he can’t hate Steinbrenner, and I believe that.

Those funny lines weren’t all Yogi’s. But you know what he said to Allie Reynolds when Yogi fell and dropped Ted Williams’ foul pop that would have ended Reynolds’ second no-hitter of 1951? He told Reynolds, “You stepped on my finger.”

Berra then called precisely the same pitch and Williams popped it to precisely the same place and Berra caught it.

But he did say things. Like about Charlie’s, a splendid restaurant in Minneapolis: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” He meant that none of “us” goes there, which was the only thing that mattered to him.

“We’d sit at the dinner table,” Yogi said, “and one of the kids would jump up, ‘There, he said another one, Mom, a Berraism.’ I don’t know I say them; they just come out.”

In 1973, the Mets were a bounce out of last place at the turn into September and Yogi was asked if it was over. Manager Berra knew the teams the Mets still had to play, the teams they had to jump over. “It ain’t over till it’s over,” he said.

He had rephrased and applied the eternal truism. Berra never lost heart or patience and the Mets won the pennant. In the champagne splashing I asked Tom Seaver what Berra’s contribution had been.

Berra was too earthy, too intuitive, for Seaver. “Nothing,” Seaver replied.

Hemingway would have called it grace under pressure.

I like the story Yogi told when he was under fire in June, 1984, about being under fire on June 6, 1944, on a 36-foot landing craft at the invasion of Normandy. He was 19 years old with shot and shell whizzing overhead, but instead of keeping below the armor plating, Berra watched. “The officer told me, ‘Better get your head down,”’ Berra said. “I wanted to watch. I wasn’t scared; I don’t know why. It was amazing to see all those ships there.”

Anyhow, it was the craft’s mission to provide anti-aircraft fire and to bring in downed German fliers for interrogation.

“Only guy we fished out, the only plane that came down in our sector, we shot it down,” Berra said. “It was one of our guys.

“When we got there to him in the water, he was cursing like hell. I would have been angry, too. We fished him out and he’s yelling, ‘If you shot down as many of theirs as you shoot down of ours, the war would have been over a long time ago.”’

He isn’t afraid of making himself the butt of a story. “This is our 40th year,” Carmen Berra said. “And it ain’t over.”

Thanks. We needed that.