A Modest Star Who Just Played and Walked Away

Where have you gone, indeed.

Joe DiMaggio was the rarest of class athletes, for reasons that have nothing to do with athletics and everything to do with class.

He was a giant superstar who never wrote a giant book.

He was a celebrity who never hosted a talk show.

He was a soulful competitor who never publicly bared his soul.

He was a commanding presence who suddenly disappeared.

Perhaps more than any other hero in any other sport, we remember Joe DiMaggio as he used to be.

Because in retirement, he made certain we had nothing else to remember.

In the wake of his death Monday at age 84, this seems like a good thing.

He died with a body ravaged by lung cancer, and privacy that had been attacked by overeager obituary hunters.

But he died with his aura. Even the glare of a world hungry for heroes could not penetrate his aura.

He died still looking like that 25-year-old New York Yankee slugger with the impossibly fast bat, forever swinging, forever young.

He died still gliding around center field with refined grace, one who first taught us that our sports heroes do not have to be angry like Ty Cobb or excessive like Babe Ruth.

Joe DiMaggio truly died as he lived.

In the end, this was his gift.

He reminded us that for sports to continue to do what it does best--make myths and capture imaginations and give hope--we need athletes willing to just play and walk away.

Athletes who not later ruin it for us by showing up on TV every night in suits or Hollywood Squares.

Athletes who will not tarnish a lifetime of achievement with a 10-minute sales pitch.

Sports needs heroes whose feats can stand untouched by the winds and rain of time and scrutiny.

Usually, these are only those athletes who die young.

Joe DiMaggio managed to pull it off for 84 years.

In a time when our stars often measure their worth in appearance fees, DiMaggio succeeded with a different approach.

By remaining so remote, he made his accomplishments grow ever more vivid.

Because of his quiet modesty, his legends only became louder.

His biggest commercial endorsement--if anybody could give dignity to a coffee maker, he could--didn’t start until 22 years after his final game.

Otherwise, he rarely showed his face.

Why else would we get a sudden and unexplainable lump in our throats when we saw a video clip of him walking across the diamond to throw out a first pitch, or waving from a box seat?

And certainly he never talked about any of it.

Did you, like others, hear recordings of his voice on radio or TV clips Monday?

Did you, like others, say, “Oh, so that’s what he sounded like.”

No wonder what he said held such weight.

A Yankee teammate once asked him why he was hustling so hard in a Florida spring training game.

“Because there might be people here who have never seen me play,” he said in a quote that has been repeated like something from Churchill.

Marilyn Monroe once told DiMaggio that he’d never heard cheering like she’d heard from troops in Korea.

“Oh yes I have,” he replied, and who has never heard that one?

His play was typically understated.

In fact, despite his 56-game hitting streak and 37-14 record in World Series games, DiMaggio’s most memorable moment was an out.

It was his fly ball that was caught in the corner by the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Al Gionfriddo in the 1947 World Series.

For some, watching what happened next was like watching man walk on the moon.

DiMaggio skipped and kicked the dirt as he rounded second base.

In his 13-year career, that was the only time anybody can remember him showing any emotion.

It was so rare, no highlight of DiMaggio is shown without that grainy film clip.

Today, if the game is on national TV, some athletes kick the dirt every inning.

There was so much we wanted to know. There was so much he refused to tell.

Fifty-six consecutive games. Can you imagine?

The hitting streak has become sports’ most imposing record, not only because we don’t think it can happen again, but because he never really told us how it happened in the first place.

Marilyn Monroe. Can you imagine?

His marriage to the star didn’t last even one year--barely nine months, to be exact. By the time she had committed suicide in 1962, they had been divorced for eight years.

Yet he planned the funeral, giving her a dignified privacy in death that she never had in life. And for the next 20 years, every week, he placed roses on her grave.

He never talked about that, either.

Perhaps the best metaphor for his career occurred at the end, at a retirement news conference that would have been stunning today. It happened only two seasons after he had hit 32 homers and driven in 122 runs, and when he was still only 37.

But then, Joe DiMaggio was never one to linger.

Near the end of the news conference, there was a power outage. When the lights came up a few minutes later, DiMaggio had disappeared.

He’s done it again. Where have you gone, indeed.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

An audio analysis of Joe DiMaggio’s impact on baseball and American life from Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke is on The Times’ Web site at:

https://www.latimes.com/plaschke

* THE PITCH: DiMaggio was adept at promoting products. C1

* THE PLAYER: Life and times of the baseball great. D1