Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig
By Jonathan Eig
Illustrated
Simon & Schuster
420 pages
HE remains the elusive hero. In a city where sports superstars have rarely tried to hide their light under a bushel, Lou Gehrig assiduously ducked publicity throughout his truncated life. And yet in the end the tragic circumstances of his death, along with a few words from the heart, would etch his legend across the firmament as indelibly as any other’s in the history of American sport. Standing before more than 61,000 hushed fans in Yankee Stadium on a muggy Fourth of July afternoon in 1939, Gehrig—who had been forced from the game only two months earlier, his once formidable body already wasted by the cruel progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—had to be coaxed into saying anything at all at a ceremony in his honor.
“For the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break,” he began haltingly, his voice cracking. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” A star was finally born, secured three years later by The Pride of the Yankees, one of the few memorable baseball movies, starring Gary Cooper, Gehrig’s cinematic doppelganger, and the incandescent Teresa Wright as his wife, Eleanor.
Jonathan Eig, a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, has done a superb job of digging out the real Gehrig from behind the legend, and the mask of his own modesty. What he uncovers in Luckiest Man is a personality much more shaded than Cooper’s uncomplicated all-American boy. Gehrig’s was a rags-to-riches story; the same, almost uncannily repeated tale of so many Yankee greats: Joe DiMaggio, son of a humble Italian fisherman; Mickey Mantle, from a family of Oklahoma miners; Babe Ruth, Gehrig’s Rabelaisian teammate, brought up in a Baltimore orphanage. Unlike the others, Henry Louis Gehrig didn’t have to come to the big city to make good. He was born here, the son of struggling German immigrants. His father was a sometime ironworker who maintained a lifelong preference for beer over industry. His mother was an imposing woman who would exercise an overweening influence on her only surviving child well into his adult life.
Ma Gehrig may be forgiven her domineering ways, considering the harshness of her world. She spent much of her life cooking and cleaning for other people, to support her family in some of the shabbier tenements of Upper Manhattan. In five years surrounding Lou’s birth in 1903, she lost three other children before the age of 2. She compensated by stuffing her son so full of her heavy German cooking that Lou soon had a physique that earned him the sobriquets Fat, from his childhood pals, and Biscuit Pants, from his Yankee teammates.
His response, then as ever, was relentless hard work, turning the fat into muscle at his father’s turnverein, or German gymnastics club. More muscled than many players in our steroidal age, he had almost freakishly strong legs—Each thigh was bigger than many a man’s waist, each calf the size of a Christmas ham.”+His body was low-centered, his devastatingly compact swing pivoting off those overdeveloped thighs, and while his later nickname, the Iron Horse, referred mostly to his reliability, Gehrig does indeed look like a locomotive in close-up photos and film, infinitely powerful and unstoppable.
For all of his work ethic, Gehrig was a great natural athlete.+He excelled in every sport he tried his hand at—soccer, basketball, football; at the age of 11 he swam the Hudson River to New Jersey. He first came to national attention when, still in high school, he hit a grand slam out of Wrigley Field in Chicago. Not long after, a Yankees scout spotted him playing ball for Columbia University, where he was pursuing his mother’s dream for him to become an engineer. (Following class, Lou would help her wash dishes at her job in a rival fraternity’s kitchen.)
Within two years he had become a fixture at first base for the Yankees. He would not miss a day for nearly 14 seasons, his famous record of 2,130 consecutive games bested by Cal Ripken Jr. only in 1995. Once again, hard work and persistence were the keys. He played through bouts of lumbago, broken fingers, bone chips and a beaning that left his head so swollen he had to wear Babe Ruth’s cap. As happened with Ripken, some of the bright boys in the press box would periodically suggest that Gehrig was hurting himself and his team by not taking a day off, but his record was difficult to argue with. Gehrig scored more than 100 runs, drove in more than 100 more and batted .300 or better in 12 consecutive seasons. Out of the 34 World Series games he played, he drove in the winning run a remarkable eight times. Before he was struck down, he was on a pace to claim most of the game’s batting records.
Yet Gehrig spent much of his life in other men’s shadows. When he hit an amazing .545 in the 1928 World Series, Ruth hit .625. When Gehrig hit .529 in the 1932 Series, Ruth hit his famous “called shot” home run. Even when Gehrig hit four home runs in one game, robbed of a possible No. 5 by a circus catch, it was the same day the legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw announced his retirement. There is every indication he preferred it that way. Eig suggests that his mother’s domination may well have arrested his emotional development. Lou was curiously childlike, a man who lived with his parents— and may well have been a virgin—until he was nearly 30. A sensitive, unfailingly considerate person, he spoke out against the color line in baseball and helped his teammates whenever he could. Yet he had few close friends. Acquaintances described him as “worried” and “harassed” even in high school; Eig writes that they felt he was “carrying with him a sense of his own worthlessness.” He possessed a mind agile enough to pass a rigorous university course in Western civilization and weep at Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. But he often seemed lost away from a ball field, riding the roller coaster at Rye Beach for hours by himself on off days. “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.”
Eleanor Grace Twitchell, the woman he married in 1933, was the daughter of a former racetrack tout and a “circuit girl” during the Yankees’ trips to Chicago—more of a groupie, or “baseball Annie,” than Teresa Wright’s girl-next-door. But she finally pried Gehrig out from under his mother, and nudged him into blowing his own horn at least a little. He became the Yankees’ captain, signed endorsement deals, even enjoyed playing a small role in a Hollywood western.
Then, around his 35th birthday, came the disease—Lou Gehrig’s disease, as it would be called ever after—and the true mettle of the man shone through. Eig’s account is heartbreaking. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis gradually snuffs out the nerve cells, destroying its victims’ physical capacities one by one. Gehrig had to endure the steady, baffling erosion of the muscles he had done so much to build. For once, all his hard work was to no avail.
A visit to the Mayo Clinic in 1939 at last provided a diagnosis, but Gehrig’s doctors purposely or naïvely gave him the false hope that his chances of recovery were 50-50. His letters to the clinic reveal a nearly pathetic desire to still be the good son, alternately pleading with the doctors to “PLEASE reveal to me the honest opinions” and hoping they wouldn’t think him “a crybaby.” He kept a stiff upper lip to the end, when, not yet 38 years of age, his vocal cords shut down by the disease, he ironically mouthed the phrase “50-50” to his wife.
Eig’s triumph lies not only in illuminating the man, bringing out his full, human tragedy, but also in framing the America Gehrig lived in—both a harder and a more innocent place, where ballplayers were considered barely a notch above carnies, but would sing “The Sidewalks of New York” after winning a World Series and give a teammate a trophy with a poem inscribed on it. Eig is obviously knowledgeable about baseball, and doesn’t slight the game, but nonfans will find this story captivating nonetheless. Luckiest Man stands in the first rank of sports biographies.