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Overview
For seventeen seasons, Lou Gehrig was the heart and soul of the New York Yankees. The power-hitting first baseman donned the pinstripes for 2,130 consecutive games, a streak that earned him the nickname “the Iron Horse” and went unbroken for more than five decades. World Series champion, All-Star, American League Most Valuable Player, Triple Crown winner—the list of Gehrig’s on-field achievements is spectacular. But he is best remembered for the grace and the strength with which he faced an insurmountable challenge off the field: the disease that ended his career and which now bears his name.
When he retired on April 30, 1939, Lou Gehrig called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” His words continue to resonate more than seventy-five years after they were spoken. In this heartfelt biography, which was the basis for the Academy Award–winning film The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper, legendary sportswriter Paul Gallico tells the story of how a son of German immigrants rose to the pinnacle of greatness in America’s pastime and inspired the nation as no other athlete ever has.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504009492 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 143 |
| Sales rank: | 602,888 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Born in New York City to an Italian father and an Austrian mother, Gallico left the United States in 1950 and lived the rest of his life abroad, with stops in England, Monaco, and Antibes, France, among numerous other locales.
Read an Excerpt
Farewell to Sport
By Paul Gallico
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1938 Paul GallicoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0949-2
CHAPTER 1
MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY ...
From the summer day thirteen years ago when as a wide-eyed, open-mouthed novice, a rank cub who had never seen a prizefighter before, I was sent to Jack Dempsey's camp at Saratoga Springs, New York, to write stories about his training for the defense of his title against the challenge of Luis Angel Firpo, to another summer evening not long past, when in the vast Reichs Sports Stadion in Berlin the Olympic flag crept down the masthead and the perpetual flame died and vanished from the great black tripod, my last assignment—this is the first time that I have had a chance to stop for a moment and think over the things that I have seen and reported in the wildest, maddest, and most glamorous period in all the history of sport. I am able to do this, because I am saying good-by to sports-writing.
It was an incredible period, this dizzy, spinning, sports reel of athletes, events, records, personalities, drama, and speed, a geared-up, whirling, golden world in which a lifetime was lived in five years, or sometimes it seemed even overnight, as heroes and heroines, champions and challengers burst upon the scene, shone like exploding star shells, and often vanished as quickly.
I have for these past years had a ringside seat where men and women have, with their bodies, performed the greatest prodigies ever recorded. I saw the abysmal, unreasoning fury of Dempsey and Firpo fighting like animals and sat in a blinding cloudburst and watched Gene Tunney annihilate an unbeatable Dempsey. I saw Red Grange weave his twisting patterns up and down football fields, and followed in the galleries of Bob Jones as he played his smooth, superb golf shots that have never since been matched.
Bill Tilden banged his unreturnable cannon-ball service across the net, and Jim Londos stood brown and glistening with oil and sweat under the hot candelabra of the wrestling pits. Tex Rickard was a bland, thin-lipped, Stetson-hatted gambler and an organizer of prizefights on a gigantic scale, and again Tex Rickard was a painted corpse on a bier lying in a state far beyond his worth in the center of Madison Square Garden, which he built.
Babe Ruth stood up to bat on his thin, match-stick ankles, his head characteristically cocked a little to one side, slowly waving his bludgeon, and old Grover Cleveland Alexander, his oversized cap comically perched on top of his weatherbeaten head, prepared to pitch to him. Gertrude Ederle rode up Broadway standing in the back of a car with her arms outstretched with joy and happiness, into a blizzard of torn ticker tape and newspaper and telephone-book confetti. Primo Carnera, 278 pounds, fought Tommy Loughran, 183 pounds, under a Miami moon, and Giorgetti and Brocco and Spencer rode their flimsy bikes eternally around the wooden saucer of the six-day races.
What a world! What heroes and heroines! How the black ribbon streamers of the celebrating headlines poured from the high-speed presses! The death wagons roared around the Indianapolis speedway track at two hundred and twenty miles an hour, and Helen Wills was something leggy with two long brown pigtails tied with bows that bounced and shook as she ran, and then she was a grown woman, cold, calm, commanding, absolute queen of her tennis world.
Army played Navy at football before a hundred thousand people, and Paavo Nurmi dog-trotted around and around the oval running-track, in his methodical and devastating assaults upon Time, assaults that created records that no one would ever break until one day a dark-haired miler from Kansas named Cunningham ran a mile race at Princeton, not against opponents who were left far behind, but against the moving finger of a giant electric split-second clock set up at one end of the stadium. This then was to be the most dramatic foot-race ever run, and so it was until the day two summers ago when a black-shirted New Zealand medical student with straw-colored hair and a skinny body ran that same Cunningham and the greatest field of runners ever assembled into the ground in the Olympic equivalent of the mile.
Dynasties fell, nations collapsed, politics changed, dictators appeared, countries were torn apart by revolution, there were distant wars, but all I saw were the eight-oared shells glistening in the late afternoon sun at Poughkeepsie, shattering the shining surface of the water with their blades, crawling like enormous water-spiders down the reach of the Hudson; prizefighters lying twitching on the canvas while their opponents waited for them to get up, their arms following the spread of the ropes out from the ring-posts in the corners; horses streaming in gay, changing patterns around the dirt tracks, their heads bobbing in rhythm and counter-rhythm, with a million dollars and more riding on their velvet noses. In my world there were only ball games played in the hot, sweating Indian-summer days, when every move made by the figures in white and gray outlined against the brown and green diamond was greeted by nerve-shattering, hysterical roars from seventy thousand people, or there would be eight naiads in black silk swim-suits threshing the blue waters of a pool between cork-roped lanes, and lovely bodies arched from high platforms into the cool water below. Hockey-players wheeled like birds in flight on the silvery ice, armored football-players crashed their heavy bodies against one another or kicked the ball spinning up into gray sky; fencers slashed and lunged, runners threw themselves at the tightly stretched bit of string at the finish line, jumpers scissored over bars set at unbelievable heights—it was a world at play, a fantastic competitive cosmos in which nothing ever seemed more important than who won, what was the score, who did it, and how.
Moments of beauty are remembered inseparably with athletes performing in the arenas. There were Herb Pennock's pitching motion, and the gleam in the eyes of Helen Wills looking up at a tennis ball in the air during her service, and her lovely neck line, and the smooth swiveling of Dempsey's shoulders as he punched a rataplan on the light bag. I find myself suddenly thinking of Maxie Hebert and Ernst Baier skating the pair at Garmisch, in a snowfall that made the scene resemble an old print, or of R. Norris Williams's backhand half-volley, or the six-round bout between Jimmy Slattery and Jack Delaney, the most brilliant and graceful prizefight ever boxed between two men.
There were Georgia Coleman poised on the springboard, her yellow hair, capless, shining in the California sun, and Dorothy Poynton's magnificent and graceful swan dive off the high tower, in which for a moment she became an exquisite white bird poised on some unseen current of air; the tremendous and awe-inspiring flotilla of vessels of every description that dotted the Atlantic Ocean off Newport, seen from the air, as they followed the America Cup races, and Aldo Nadi, the world's greatest fencer, himself a living rapier in brilliant darting movements of attack and parry. The most perfect thing in human locomotion ever to please the eye was the foot-running of Ben Carr of Pennsylvania until one saw Jesse Owens running, not on the track, but over the top of it. Or I see Eleanor Holm Jarrett, herself a lovely creature, swimming the back-stroke, her fresh young face wreathed in green and white foam; Tommy Hitchcock leaning under the neck of his mount in full gallop to make a polo shot, Benny Howard rounding a pylon at two hundred and fifty miles an hour in Ike, one of his tiny white form-fitting racers, Pepper Martin sliding into second base....
They were queer fascinating folk who peopled this weird world and who became my temporary companions as the seasons brought them round, each in turn, almost as though they were papier-mâché figures pasted on a slowly revolving cyclorama. It seems as though I never knew days, weeks, months, winter, spring, summer, and autumn, but only sports seasons. The baseball season opened April 14, moved steadily through the summer, and then merged, via the world series, into the football season. There would be the indoor and the outdoor boxing season, the indoor track meets with their regular performers, the hockey season, the winter golf circuit and the summer tournaments, the indoor and outdoor tennis periods, the racing meets apportioned off by the jockey clubs in batches of three weeks to a track, the spring and fall six-day bicycle races, all coming round year after year regularly, as if driven by clockwork, with their costumes and paraphernalia, their lingo, their camp followers, and their famous characters.
I have to think of course of Jack Kearns, smart, dapper, the perfect wise guy, groomed and scented, the finished modern type of fight manager; and the late Leo P. Flynn, old, white-haired, leathery-faced, one corner of his mouth exhibiting a small permanent orifice from talking and spitting out of it, calluses on his under forearms from leaning on the ropes and side-talking advice into the cauliflower ears of the fighters he used to call his bums—he was any casting director's vision of the perfect old-time fight manager. Then there were curious egg-headed Humbert Fugazy, the little Italian banker who fancied himself a fight promoter and who was always building dream stadiums that never materialized except on paper; and tough, cocky little Gene Sarazen, the enfant terrible of golf, and his running-mate when the white-flannel troupe came round, gay, smart, cynical, Vinnie Richards, the bad boy of tennis. Knute Rockne, bald, quizzical, had a magnificent sense of humor, and Bill Duffy, dressed up like a tailor's model, had strange eyes and was a dangerous man. Fat Harry Mendel, the perennial press agent of the six-day races, appeared as surely as death and taxes twice each year, and one was glad to have known small, quiet Miller Huggins, who always seemed patiently tired from the strain of managing the Yankees when they were the greatest slugging club in the history of modern baseball. And there were men of mystery such as Hugo Quist, the secretive manager of Paavo Nurmi, or men of romance, flamboyance, and ballyhoo like C. C. Pyle, inventor and promoter of the great coast-to-coast foot-race, nicknamed by W. O. McGeehan "the Bunion Derby."
All the things they did and said over that exciting period were news. The names come crowding back again—Jim Farley, chairman of the New York Boxing Commission, always playing his bland political game, the late John McGraw, with his gnarled face and bulbous nose, and the lean, ascetic-looking (but tough) Connie Mack; good-natured buoyant Helen Hicks, the husky girl golfer, and the great ball-players of the era, Cobb and Speaker and Sisler, Walter Johnson and Lefty Grove and the famous Dean boys, Dizzy and Daffy. There were more fighters than I can think of—the dark, shuffling, pawing Paul Berlenbach of the numbing punch, the hysterical Sharkey, Baby-Face Jimmy McLarnin, who always managed to look like a choir-boy while he was knocking you out; the brilliant, bounding Johnny Dundee; weird unorthodox Harry Greb, and the brave Mickey Walker; Tunney, the enigma; Camera, the misfit circus freak who became heavyweight champion; Schmeling, the only German who ever learned how to fight with his fists; Harry Wills, the perpetual championship contender; and Joe Louis, one of the finest and deadliest fighting machines ever developed. It seemed that never at one time had so many great performers and fascinating people been gathered together under one tent.
The breathless rapidity with which the scene would shift left you little or no time for thought or reflection upon this mad, whirling planet of play. One afternoon you might be at the tennis tournament at Forest Hills, between matches drinking an iced tea at little iron tables set out on the close-clipped green lawn, beneath gay, colored umbrellas, surrounded by beautifully dressed women and soft-spoken men in summer flannels; and the next you might find yourself sitting at a spotted, rickety wooden table in a frowsy, ribald fight camp, gagging over a glass of needle beer and eating a steak sandwich, surrounded by lop ears, stumble-bums, cheap, small-time politicians, fight managers, ring champions, floozies, gangsters, Negroes, policemen, and a few actors thrown in for good measure.
It would be a ball game one day and the Kentucky Derby the next. You had hardly got the sound of the galloping hoofs, the paddock trumpet-call, and the muffled, unforgettable "They're off!" out of your ears, not to mention the gambling fever cooled in your veins, when you were standing in a gallery on a hillside, overlooking green, scrupulously manicured fairways, pitted with irregular white patches, listening to the soft "snick" of the cleanly hit golf ball. And hardly were you used to the jargon of the golf tournament—"Jones has gone crazy, he's even threes for five holes ... What did Hagen turn in? ... Diegel has to birdie the last two to tie ... Sarazen's two under coming into the eighth, but they say Cruickshank's burning up the back nine"—when you find yourself perhaps at Indianapolis, wandering about the beehive-busy motor pits with the heavy stink of gasoline and burning oil always in your nostrils, and your head ringing with the constant thunder of exploding motors.
It was a wonderful, chaotic universe of clashing colors, temperaments, and emotions, of brave deeds performed sometimes against odds seemingly insuperable, mixed with mean and shameful acts of pure skullduggery, cheapness, snide tricks, filth, and greed, moments of sheer, sweet courage and magnificence when the flame of the human spirit and the will to triumph burned so brightly that it choked your throat and blinded your eyes to be watching it, and moments, too, of such villainy, cowardice, and depravity, of such rapaciousness and malice that you felt hot and ashamed even to find yourself reporting it.
The swimming of the English Channel by Gertrude Ederle in the face of the most awesome handicaps of wind, weather, sea, and human hatred and jealousy was as matchless and wonderful a triumph of courage and indomitable will—uselessly applied, if you must, but beautiful, nevertheless, as the building of Primo Camera into the heavyweight championship of the world was a dark, foul, noisome thing, infamous from beginning to end, completely sordid and corrupt.
I have seen the coming of the million-dollar gate, the seventy-thousand-dollar horse-race, the hundred-thousand-dollar ballplayer, the three-hundred-thousand-dollar football game, the millionaire prizefighter, and the fifty-thousand-dollar golfer. I have witnessed an era of spending in sport such as has never been seen before and which may not be matched again, when the box-office price for a single ringside seat for a heavyweight championship prizefight was fifty dollars, and fetched as high as two hundred and fifty dollars a pair from speculators. In my time more than a million dollars passed through the betting windows at a racetrack in a day. Babe Ruth drew a salary of seventy thousand dollars a year, and Gene Tunney was paid a million dollars for a single fight lasting half an hour. Non-champions were paid as high as thirty thousand dollars for a six-round bout, and a horse could win four hundred and forty thousand dollars in a single year, and did. And I have seen the bubble collapse as sharply and completely as did the great stock boom, and watched prizefighting go downhill from a million-dollar industry back to the small-time money from which it came.
Too, I witnessed the amazing growth of American football from a game that was always popular and well attended, to the greatest money industry and gate attraction of all sports, greater than prizefighting, baseball, hockey, or any professional sports, the total football receipts for one season far surpassing those of any other sport. And I watched the game degenerate into the biggest and dirtiest sports racket the country has ever known, far sootier even than prizefighting, which has never pretended to be on any level higher than a pigsty.
Somehow or other, all of these things managed to happen in those years between 1923 and 1936, years which saw not only the greatest champions that our games have ever known, but an astounding plethora of men and women challengers and runners-up who were nearly as good as the champions.
At one time, for instance, fighting for the tennis supremacy held so long by Tilden as an amateur, there were such players as Little Bill Johnston, Dick Williams, Frank Hunter, Vinnie Richards, Manuel Alonso, Borotra, Cochet, and Lacoste. Contemporary with Helen Wills Moody was Suzanne Lenglen, perhaps the greatest of all the women players at the peak of her form, as well as Molla Mallory, Mary K. Browne, Helen Jacobs, Betty Nuthall, Dorothy Round, and Kay Stammers.
Bob Jones was such a stand-out in the golfing world that he made people forget the greatest troop of professional and amateur golfers that ever lived and played at one time, headed by Walter Hagen and including such players as Gene Sarazen, Mac Smith, Tommy Armour, Chick Evans, Frances Ouimet, Johnny Goodman, Billy Burke, George von Elm, Leo Diegel, Bobby Cruickshank, Olin Dutra, Horton Smith, and dozens of others.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Farewell to Sport by Paul Gallico. Copyright © 1938 Paul Gallico. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Contents
- 1. The Time, the Place—and the Man
- 2. Youth of a Hero
- 3. The Making of an Athlete
- 4. “There Was a Man Named Ruth”
- 5. A Career Ended and Begun
- 6. Those Fabulous Yankees
- 7. The Bitter Impatient Days of Trial
- 8. Lou and Babe and the Yanks—Onwards and Upwards
- 9. “Strike Out You Big Goof”—It Was Love!
- 10. The Course and the Obstacle
- 11. Happily Ever After
- 12. The Full Measure of Success
- 13. “What’s the Matter with Gehrig?”
- 14. Portrait of Courage
- 15. “The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth”
- 16. Pass to Valhalla
- About the Author
