Hero Worship
The end of the baseball season is already in view, and teams are scrambling for a place in the World Series. It reminds me that when my parents were married, they lived in an apartment house behind Yankee Stadium, and used to have dinner on the roof, where they could watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play. The Yankees were thus the family team, and when I was a boy, they rarely disappointed me, because they almost won the pennant and then the World Series.
My father took me to see my first baseball game in 1936. It was at Yankee Stadium, and as it happened, it was also Joe DiMaggio’s first game there. Dad had told me glowing things about him all through spring training, and so I was sold on him before I ever saw him. Well, “The Yankee Clipper”-as he was soon to be called-had a wonderful game that day, and he more than fulfilled my glowing expectations. To boot, his name grabbed me, and it stuck in my brain, and so, even though Gehrig was batting after him, probably the best player in the game at that time, DiMaggio became my hero, and I’m afraid has remained so through my glowing memories of his peerless play.
I spent a good part of my youth watching the Yanks, always waiting for DiMaggio to do something spectacular, and he seemed incapable of letting me or the team down. I worshipped my father, and his brilliant mind, his total mental capability, but I wanted to play baseball like DiMaggio, watched myself bat in the mirror, worked for the sort of smoothness in the field that was his trademark, and every day I had to be dragged home for dinner, my glove ever under my arm.
Ironically, I had an offer to play for the Yankees in 1951, DiMaggio’s last year, but to my eternal regret, I never met him. My father had died four years before and I had nothing of his except, “Go to Syracuse University, they have a wonderful dramatic program.” I’m reminded of Yankee catcher Yogi Berra’s naively funny remark, “When you come to the fork in the road, take it!”
In my mind I had been a writer since I was a little kid, and had I not had a real facility for baseball, there would not have been Yogi’s “fork” to confuse me. But, in the end, I listened to my father and went to school with Peter Falk, and a raft of others who have done wonderfully well in show business, and became the writer I suspect my father dreamed I’d be.
The final irony is that Joe DiMaggio died March 8, my dad’s birthday.
As a postscript, let me pass along this story, told to me by Peggy Lee, a wonderful raconteur. It may be apocryphal, but maybe not.
Paul Simon, famous for his lyric “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” had never met the man; he was accosted on the street by a friend, who told him that DiMaggio was eating at a restaurant around the corner. And so Simon found the eatery, and was introduced to the old ballplayer as the man who wrote, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?”
And Joltin’ Joe said, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I was right here all the time making commercials for Mr. Coffee.”