He earned fans’ love in the end

Lou GEHRIG is one of those rare heroes every American has heard of and scarcely anyone knows much of anything about -- at least apart from the 1942 movie “The Pride of the Yankees,” in which Gary Cooper recites the most famous farewell speech in American sports. Though Gehrig died 64 years ago, Ray Robinson’s “Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time,” published in 1990, has been the only serious biography until now. Jonathan Eig’s “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig” is comprehensively researched and richly detailed. It justifies its length by presenting a wealth of new information on Gehrig’s life and times, retrieving the real Gehrig from the mists of legend while showing us why legend claimed him in the first place.

The reason that more hasn’t been written about Gehrig is obvious: To most baseball fans, he is still an appendage of Babe Ruth. “For all his accomplishments, his movie-star looks, and his gentlemanly manner, fans, somehow, had never shown overwhelming enthusiasm for him,” writes Eig. “Sportswriters said he lacked color. He was no Babe Ruth, they complained.” Except, that is, on the field, where he was virtually Ruth’s equal, on Yankee teams that were so dominant that journalists around the country were crying, “Break up the Yankees!” with a fervency that makes similar complaints about today’s Yankees seem tame. But even on the field, Gehrig was always the costar; Ruth’s “numbers” -- his 60 home runs in a season and his career 714 -- excited fans, while Gehrig’s most famous statistic, 2,130 consecutive games played, was “the dullest record in the book.” Apparently not everyone considered it particularly noteworthy: One columnist suggested that Yankee manager Joe McCarthy yank Gehrig from the lineup before the streak “becomes a worry to Lou.”

Gehrig was probably the most respected player in the game, but that didn’t translate into popularity: “He made little effort to get to know his teammates or the reporters who covered the team,” Eig writes. “When members of the Yankees teased him, he shrank. When ... the media lobbed questions, he froze.” He had “no gift for dissembling, which might help explain why the local newspapermen felt they could live without him in the first place. Gehrig took things seriously -- too seriously, sometimes.”

That, however, was only in his professional life. Eig gives us a private Gehrig who, though he had no taste for celebrity, derived enormous satisfaction from the game itself. (“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.”) Nor did Gehrig take himself so seriously that he couldn’t fantasize about becoming a movie star. When another athlete, Johnny Weissmuller, stepped down as Tarzan, Gehrig proposed himself for the role and hired a photographer to take pictures of him in various jungle get-ups, including a leopard-skin loincloth; they ran in newspapers across the country. The photos were impressive (“His torso formed a perfect V. His shoulders and forearms were as taut as rope”), but Tarzan’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, sent him a telegram announcing that “having seen several pictures of you as Tarzan ... I want to congratulate you on being a swell first baseman.”

Raised almost entirely by his thrifty, hard-working German immigrant mother, Lou was shy around girls and not known to carouse and womanize with his teammates. He made an interesting choice of life partner: Eleanor Gehrig was no typical baseball wife. “If Gehrig wanted his meat and potatoes and mulled wine for dinner,” says Eig, “he would have to walk down the block to his mother’s.” Eleanor was always careful to introduce herself as Mrs. Lou Gehrig, and she regarded herself as her husband’s business agent decades before the job existed, ignoring the disdain of the other players’ spouses, who “applauded politely from the box seats and then faded into the background.” Under Eleanor’s tutelage, Lou blossomed, developing a taste for opera and becoming more open with fans and the press, though he never became the reader of Nietzsche and Voltaire that some sportswriters made him out to be. He did read some philosophy, says Eig, but he preferred “a good ten-cent western.”

Eig knocks down several other myths about Gehrig’s life and career. It isn’t true, for instance, that he simply stepped in to replace first baseman Wally Pipp, thus beginning his famous streak, just because Pipp had decided to take a day off. Pipp had been slipping as a player, and Gehrig was slated to replace him.

It’s tempting to wonder how we might remember Gehrig today if he had not contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- which would be known ever after as Lou Gehrig’s disease -- in 1938, when he was 35. Ruth had left the Yankees only a couple of years earlier. The disease began to ravage Gehrig at a point in his career when he might have been poised to assume the role of baseball’s elder statesman in a way that Ruth never did.

Amazingly, no complete text of Gehrig’s courageous, heart-wrenching goodbye speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, survives, though much of it has been pieced together from different newspaper accounts. The sportswriters were not prepared for how touching Gehrig’s words would be and did not start jotting them down in time. Only four sentences of the original address survive on tape. The most famous line, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” was indeed spoken by Gehrig, but at the beginning of the speech rather than at the end as Gary Cooper has it in the movie. Whatever Gehrig’s exact words, or their order of delivery, they finally won for him the unconditional love that always eluded him as a player. Eleanor later recalled that the speech “brought tears to the thousands in Yankee Stadium” -- as it would to millions more the next day, however sketchily it was reproduced in hundreds of the nation’s newspapers.

Eig boosts Gehrig’s historical reputation without diminishing Babe Ruth’s. Wisely, he understands that they were not rivals but twin idols, who each might lay claim to a decade of baseball history as their own -- Ruth the roaring ‘20s, Gehrig the hardscrabble ‘30s. “If Babe Ruth was the perfect hero for the glorious days of prosperity,” Eig concludes, “Gehrig -- durable, dependable, and dignified -- was the man for hard times.” *

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From Luckiest Man

Gehrig liked to smooth the dirt around first base with his toe cleats before each pitch. He liked to spit on the palms of his hands between swings. When he drew a walk, he didn’t drop his bat at home plate but tossed it gently in the direction of the dugout to make it easier for the batboy to retrieve. He believed in eating a big breakfast and getting a lot of fiber in his diet.... He [had] no elaborate pre-game rituals.... Only the gum was an obsession. He wouldn’t chew more than one stick a game, wouldn’t accept a stick from anyone but [trainer Doc] Painter, and insisted on paying for it himself.