The age-old question for Lasorda: Why slow down?

Tommy Lasorda won’t be preaching the gospel of Dodgers baseball to a captivated crowd Saturday.

He won’t dig into his trove of stories to solicit donations for a charity. Won’t fly somewhere to get -- or give -- an award.

It’s a rare day he won’t be “One-Take Tommy,” the performer who utters incisive sound bites in English or Spanish and knows how long to milk applause during speeches.

On Saturday the former Dodgers manager, now special advisor to the chairman, will be 80. He will spend the day with his family and his thoughts, wondering why the man he sees in the mirror -- the one with a surgically repaired heart, sparse white hair and titanium knees that give him a rolling gait -- doesn’t reflect his youthful spirit.

“I can’t believe it, really. I don’t believe it,” he said in his Dodger Stadium office, where photos of Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles and U.S. presidents bump frames with a crayoned Father’s Day card from his granddaughter, Emily.

“I do the things exactly like I did when I was 40 except managing. I’m saying to myself, ‘I can’t be 80, you know?’ ”

His wife of 57 years, Jo, said he doesn’t dread this milestone.

“I’m just glad we’re still here,” she said. “I’m thankful he’s as healthy as he is and can do the things he enjoys doing, like being at the stadium.”

He delivers more than 100 speeches a year to schools, civic groups and military academies. He goes to spring training, mingles with sponsors and spends hours on the phone cheering the sick and despondent. Last week, a fan showed him a 1977 letter Lasorda had sent him and said it had changed his life.

“You don’t slow down because you have a lot of things to do. People want me,” Lasorda said.

General Manager Ned Colletti, watching Lasorda work the room at an employee’s birthday party last week, joked that Lasorda had several clones.

“There’s probably one right now giving a speech someplace, one in an Italian restaurant and one here,” Colletti said.

At each place he would have critics and admirers.

Lasorda has inspired conflicting emotions throughout a Hall of Fame managerial career in which he won two World Series, four National League pennants and eight division titles. In 2000, he emerged from retirement to lead the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal, calling it “the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

You can appreciate his passion and patriotism but deplore his self-promotion. Respect that he picks up restaurant checks for nuns, police officers and firefighters and is sincere when he urges kids to get a good education, but cringe at his raunchy side, well chronicled over the years.

He is many things but, above all, a survivor.

He is the second of five living brothers. His father, Sabatino, an Italian immigrant who drove a truck in a quarry in Norristown, Pa., died at 66. His mother, Carmella, died a few years later.

Fond of saying he will someday join “the big Dodger in the sky,” he has a tombstone in his office. It was a gift from former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley, inspired by Lasorda’s joking wish that his marker should read, “Dodger Stadium was his address but every ballpark was his home.”

Inscribed with those words -- and his likeness, birth date, and a heart bleeding a Dodger-blue drop -- the slab sits beneath his cluttered desk.

He may not need it soon, but the passings of his contemporaries remind him of his mortality. In March he attended a funeral Mass for former Dodgers pitcher Clem Labine.

“When you get old you attend more funerals than you do weddings,” he said. “I have a saying: Any man or woman who really and truly loves their job, old man sickness and death gets tired of chasing him because he knows he ain’t got no chance. I told him, ‘Go somewhere else, buddy.’

“I want to be 100. I’ve got six honorary doctorate degrees. The last one I want is for giving the commencement speech at my granddaughter’s graduating college.”

Emily Goldberg, daughter of his daughter, Laura, is 11. “That would be about 12 years and that would get me up to 92, then I’ll coast in the rest of the way,” Lasorda said.

“Old man sickness and death, he’s got no chance.”

His son’s death, however, is a topic he won’t discuss.

Tom Jr., known as Spunky, was openly gay, which Lasorda never acknowledged. His death at 33 in 1991 was attributed to pneumonia and dehydration but was speculated to have been caused by AIDS, which Lasorda denied.

Only when asked if he has any regrets did Lasorda approach anything that could be taken as an oblique reference to his son.

“I wish I could have spent more time at home,” he said. “But when you reach a level in life, you reach the top of the mountain so to speak. You can’t stay home and get it done.”

Jo Lasorda laughed at that.

“You always hear athletes use that line, saying they wish they could have been home more. They could have been, but that’s just who they are,” she said.

“My husband has always been dedicated to his work, and that’s not all bad.”

Not for his first 80 years.

“I’ve done everything,” he said. “I am still in awe and I can’t believe all of this has happened to me.

“When I stand up for the national anthem, my first words are, ‘Thank you, God, you made it happen.’ ”

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Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.