Yogi Berra’s passing shows us that no life fits within a feel-good headline.
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I have no idea whether Yogi Berra was a good man. Which is fine. After all, I never knew him.
I did know “him,” though. I knew a character on my television who sold Yoo-Hoo and helped a duck sell insurance. I knew a distant speck of pinstriped doubleknit across a hundred yards of grass on Old Timers’ Day. (They ditched flannel before I came along.) I knew a gallery of images captured in black and white, in vertical and horizontal, but never more than two dimensions.
He’d left a 90-year trail of guileless “isms” and elfin grins and one cartoon bear of disputed provenance. Apparently at one point he also played baseball.
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I do know that when he died, headline writers across the country worked in lockstep to eulogize a cherub. He’d left a 90-year trail of guileless “isms” and elfin grins and one cartoon bear of disputed provenance. Apparently at one point he also played baseball.
So I wonder: Were they eulogizing him or “him”? Which is the real measure of his character? Is it any more just to paint too saintly a portrait than it would be to paint one too seamy?
That has me thinking about Berra’s most improbable catch.
This wasn’t a lucky second pop-up off the bat of Ted Williams or a generous high strike from the hand of Don Larsen. This one came in low and fast, more sound than sight. It took a freaky hop, confounded any attempt to predict its path, and found its target in an unprotected part of Berra’s body.
It was August 15, 1944, and Berra had caught a German machine gun bullet. The 19-year-old Navy gunner from St. Louis was bobbing in in the Mediterranean, manning a machine gun of his own, tasked with softening the resistance ashore as troops seized a beachhead in the south of France.
He’d also been at that other, better-remembered landing a couple of months earlier—on another little boat, on the other end of France. Firing rockets that time, not bullets. He was more scared for the second one, he said later. Because after the first one, he knew what he was getting into.
On paper, Berra won the Purple Heart for his singular catch off the shore of Marseilles. He never applied to receive the actual medal, though. That would have made it too plain to his mother what had happened, and that would have upset her.
Just as in later years, when the champion athlete met the former Supreme Commander who had been elected commander-in-chief, he never brought up the crowded day they had shared off Normandy. “It didn’t seem right,” Berra explained.
So there went two people who knew less than they thought about Yogi Berra. There would be more.
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When Berra was at the height of his professional prowess, so were Crick and Watson and Jonas Salk. So were Pasternak and Hemingway and Bradbury. So were Everett Dirksen and Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver.
None of those guys died to a nationwide chorus of “gee, I wish I coulda given him one last hug.” But the balance used to swing the other way.
Berra broke into the majors for good the same spring Jackie Robinson came to Brooklyn. When bile came Robinson’s way, the press wrote about it. When bile came Berra’s way, it was the press dishing it out. Colliers called him a “Neanderthal” with “a body that only an anthropologist could love.” A beat writer called him an ape.
Berra didn’t talk back; he hit back. Not with his fists, with his bat. When the dust settled 19 seasons later, he was the all-time leader in the only stat that matters.
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Berra didn’t talk back; he hit back. Not with his fists, with his bat. When the dust settled 19 seasons later, he was the all-time leader in the only stat that matters.
No one has played in more World Series—14 of them.
No one has played in more World Series games—75 of them. To a more quotidian player, that’s almost half an extra season.
No one has ended more seasons—10 of them—standing atop the sport as a champion.
“I never saw anyone hit with his face,” goes the only other quote of Berra’s I’ll use here today. Because it wasn’t sweet and or guileless or accidental. Because it isn’t apocryphal—he said it—and it actually tells us something about him. Not “him.”
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I never met Berra. But I’ve met his successors in the game. A long time ago, a series of freelance assignments took me into the clubhouses and onto the pre-game fields.
I remember one respected star—one of those guys whose public image was built around quiet but unshakable piety. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. Never closed a fist when teams poured out to brawl.
Once during warmups, this player asked to borrow my pen. He wrote something on a ball, handed back the pen, and fired the ball to a teammate. I’d seen only one of the words he wrote. It described exactly which kind of grin he wore as he launched the secret message.
So what? Did it matter that this player’s public image was just that—public—and that amid the camaraderie of his equals, he behaved in ways that weren’t anyone else’s business? Did it disqualify him as a good man?
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So what? Did it matter that this player’s public image was just that—public—and that amid the camaraderie of his equals, he behaved in ways that weren’t anyone else’s business? Did it disqualify him as a good man?
For almost seven decades, from his brief pre-war minor league stint through the day his body couldn’t drag itself from the assisted living facility for one more visit with the boys, Yogi Berra lived in baseball clubhouses. That’s a singularly intimate atmosphere few people ever experience. A coarse one. And if we ask, was he really the sweet, goofy guy from the back page of the paper? we’re asking the wrong question. Better to ask: How can anyone outside his two families, the blood one and the baseball one, have known who he was at all?
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Is there a coherent narrative line here? I can’t find one. The deeper you look into a life the less it resembles a parable. There is less sense and more richness. And you know what? Good.
I do know that on each of those two terrifying days in 1944, it’s likely Berra killed somebody. Under the circumstances, there’s no moral censure in saying so. But it doesn’t quite fit into the adorable-little-guy language of last week’s headlines, either.
I do know that the guileless mascot everyone thought they knew was also one of the toughest negotiators on the team, emerging from the front office every spring with contract terms people like DiMaggio and Mantle could never extract.
I know that as the manager on a team bus, an irritated Berra once slapped a harmonica out of infielder Phil Linz’s hand. (Or Linz threw it at Berra as the culmination of a shouting match. Reports vary.)
I do know that after a beat writer panned Berra’s off-season, ghostwritten autobiography as treacly and insubstantial, Berra greeted him at spring training with a cold, unironic use of one of the more pungent compound profanities. Not that one. The other one.
And I do know that a succession of Yankee managers learned to keep a bottle of vodka in the desk drawer. Because whenever he visited the clubhouse, the sainted cherub of Montclair, New Jersey liked to sneak a little toot when no one was looking.
You know what?
Good.
Photo—Baseball Collection/Flickr
It’s mighty hard to speak of any man without tarnishing the legend built around him. Thanks for adding to him without leaving a mark on “him”.