“I never saw a man who could drive a ball as far as the Babe did,” Buzzie Bavasi, a longtime baseball executive with the Dodgers and later the California Angels and San Diego Padres, said. “In those days the clubs had the wooden shafts, and in the backswing you could see the bend in the Babe’s driver.”
Bavasi was 18 years old when he played golf with Ruth. He was a friend of sportswriter Ford Frick’s son. They went to college together at DePauw University. Frick, the father, called to see if Bavasi could sponsor Ruth for 18 holes at St. Andrew’s Country Club in Scarsdale, New York. He also asked if Tony Lazzeri could come along. Babe Ruth? Tony Lazzeri? Frick didn’t have to ask twice. Bavasi invited Frick, the son, to fill out the foursome.
“Just before we teed off, the Babe asked if he could get a highball,” Bavasi said. “No problem. The Babe had two quick ones. We played the first nine and had lunch. Babe had two more highballs, and then we played the back nine. Even with four stiff drinks in him, the Babe shot 78.
“After the game, he had another highball, but was the most pleasant person I had ever been around. Signed autographs and sat around chatting with club members.”
The Babe did have a question. Where were the women? Bavasi told him St. Andrew’s was a men’s-only club. The Babe nodded.
“Buzzie, many thanks for a wonderful day,” he said at the end. “You have a great golf club here, but it ain’t for me. No broads around.”
That was a typical Babe Ruth day.
The public was still fascinated by him, even if the headlines had disappeared. If his name was attached to an event, the event usually drew a crowd. A few months after he retired, he appeared at a water circus staged by Paul Gallico for the New York Daily News at Jones Beach. The circus really was a series of swimming races attached to some events that Gallico thought might be more exciting.
Two shows were held, in the afternoon and evening. They attracted a total of 60,000 customers. The Babe’s role was to stand on the stage and hit baseballs into the water with a fungo bat. For the night show, the balls had been dipped in white phosphorus, so they glowed as they went through the air.
An impromptu wackiness occurred at the night show. Some of the swimming contestants jumped into the water to swim after the balls for souvenirs. The Babe noticed and asked for more balls. He hit them faster and faster, two and three balls in the air at the same time, fireballs cutting through the night toward maybe 1,000 swimmers all in the dark water. The crowd was howling.
The Babe thought it was wonderful. Where had he seen this act before? He looked exactly like Brother Matthias at the end of a long workout at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys.
In November 1937, he played a golf match that set a record for bad crowd behavior. He was paired with Babe Didrikson, the famous woman athlete, and they played 18 holes for charity at Fresh Meadow on Long Island against Mrs. Sylvia Annenberg, a noted women’s amateur golfer, and a character called the Mysterious Montague. No one ever had seen Montague, whose real name was LaVerne Moore, play a competitive round of golf, but he had been built into legend on the West Coast.
Friends with Hollywood stars like Bing Crosby, Oliver Hardy, and Guy Kibbe—he lived at Oliver Hardy’s house—Montague supposedly could play a par-busting round of golf with a rake, a shovel, and a baseball bat. He supposedly could slice and hook the ball as if it were on a string, direct it to wherever he wanted, make it stop or have it roll as if he were playing pool. He supposedly had whipped Gene Sarazen for all three bets in a Nassau in Hollywood, shot 66 at Pebble Beach, refused to play Craig Wood because he didn’t want to make Craig Wood look silly. No buildup ever had been better.
“I was playing in a foursome at the Fox Hills Country Club,” Montague said, not afraid to pad his legend. “At the tenth tee, I said to the other golfers, ‘See those birds on that telephone wire? Watch me pick off the one farthest to the right.’
“I teed up an old ball, took a brassie, and hit a full drive. It struck the bird in the neck, snapping its head off, 170 yards away.”
A crowd of over 12,000 people, at a buck-ten per head, showed up for the match. The fact that Montague’s notoriety had also brought a warrant and his arrest in Jay, New York, for a 1930 armed robbery did not detract from the thrill. (He was acquitted.) He was a show, and the Babe was a show, and the two women weren’t bad either.
The match lasted only nine holes because the crowd was so wild. People came closer and closer to the action with each hole, until they were actually standing on the green. People hung from and fell from all available trees. So many people crowded the tee boxes that often one or two of the competitors couldn’t even get through to tee off. The Babe and Didrikson were declared the winners two-up, but it was an arbitrary score. It couldn’t even be determined whether Montague was as good as he said he was.
Ruth gave Didrikson a ride home from the match and crashed his car. Neither Babe, it was reported, was hurt. Vowing to win the U.S. and British Opens, Montague later shot 81 at Open qualifying, missed the cut badly, and never was an attraction again.
“Shucks, this was nothing,” Didrikson, who came from Texas, said at the end of the strange day. “You ought to see the cattle stampede down home.”
On the Fourth of July 1939, the Babe—the male Babe—had a poignant public moment. The 1927 Yankees team was brought back to Yankee Stadium to honor Lou Gehrig, who was dying. The 36-year-old first baseman’s debilitating, incurable disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, was known to everyone now, including the definite sad end ahead.
The Babe and Gehrig hadn’t talked in five years, and the big man was late arriving. Would he show? When he finally appeared, he was almost as majestic as he ever had been, stuffed in a white suit, wearing two-toned shoes, sporting a dark tan, looking like the somebody he always was. Posed in the middle of a picture of the 1927 returnees, minus Gehrig, he looked like the grand leader of a dour, dark-suited band.
He stood with all of them, Hoyt and Dugan, Lazzeri and Pennock and little Benny Bengough, for the progression of sad moments in the ceremony staged between games of the holiday doubleheader with the Senators. The saddest moment, of course, was when Gehrig spoke. Convinced to talk by Joe McCarthy, he gave a speech that became famous, naming the people he’d known with the Yankees, finishing with the words that made all hearts break in the crowd of 61,808.
“What young man wouldn’t give anything to mingle with such men for a single day as I have for all these years?” Gehrig said. “You’ve been reading about my bad break for weeks now. But today I think I’m the luckiest man alive. I now feel, more than ever, that I have much to live for.”
At the end, he began to cry. Ruth was nudged to the microphone. He walked to his longtime associate, if not friend, his brother in long-ball history, grabbed him around the neck, and broke their five years of silence with a whispered joke that made them both smile. He then told the crowd that he thought the 1927 version of the Yankees was better right now than the present version and intimated that he wouldn’t mind playing against them right now.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’s my opinion, and while Lazzeri here pointed out to me that there are only 13 or 14 of us here, my answer is shucks, we only need nine to beat ’em.”
And so it went. The Babe lived his retired, energy-burning life, came out for these public moments, then went back again to the golf and the bowling and the tracking of wild animals. He was something like a famous retired statesman, a professor emeritus, a president who had been voted out of office. Except he was much younger.
Both of his daughters married. Dorothy, of course, left home when she was 18 after an argument with Claire and ran away to get married. Julia, of course, went the social route, the Babe as the father of the bride in top hat and tails. Col. Ruppert had died at the beginning of 1939, an emotional scene in the last days when he asked to see “Root” and actually called him “Babe” for the first and only time. Ruth cried. A month after the Gehrig Appreciation Day in 1939, he went
to Cooperstown, New York, and was inducted along with Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson as the first class in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Cobb was the leading vote-getter, Ruth second.
He played a publicized series of three golf matches with Cobb in 1941 in Boston, New York, and Detroit for charities. (Cobb won two of the three.) He played himself in Pride of the Yankees, a 1942 movie on the life of Gehrig, who finally had died on June 2, 1941. To look athletic for the part, Ruth lost 47 pounds in 60 days and almost killed himself, ending up in intensive care, but he did look good in the movie. He became so excited in the scene showing the wild train ride back from St. Louis after beating the Cardinals in the 1926 World Series that he punched his fist through a window and cut himself.
The Second World War came along, and he was a fund-raiser on assorted fronts. He played his last actual baseball at the Stadium in a benefit for the Army-Navy Relief Fund. Between the benefit game and the Yankees game, Walter Johnson pitched, and the Babe hit and on the 21st pitch lofted a long shot to right that curved foul at the last moment but clanked into the stands. Close enough. He went into a home run trot. He bowled against New York Giants football star Ken Strong in a series of matches to raise money, umpired softball games, refereed wrestling matches. He went to veterans’ hospitals.
The story came out that Japanese soldiers were shouting, “The hell with Babe Ruth,” or some derivative when they attacked, and he became so mad he destroyed most of the treasures he had brought back from Japan after the big trip. (“I hope every Jap that mentions my name gets shot,” he said. “And to hell with all Japs anyway.”) A friend told him that because of his popularity in Japan, one plan had been submitted that he be flown to Guam and put on a destroyer to broadcast to the Japanese people about the wisdom of surrender before the United States unleashed its nuclear bomb. Nothing ever came of it.
He took his final shots at getting back into baseball in 1946, after the war ended. He tried to land the Newark job, the same minor league post he had spurned long ago. Ruppert’s estate had sold the team to a new set of owners. The Babe called new Yankees boss Larry MacPhail, the owner who ran the club, and made his pitch, but was turned down. He then took a nice trip to Mexico with Claire and Julia and her husband to investigate the new, renegade Mexican League, expenses paid, but found millionaire owner Jorge Pasquel mostly just wanted him to ride the elephant. How could Babe Ruth live in Mexico anyway? He came back to New York and called MacPhail again, looking for any kind of job in the Yankees organization. He heard nothing, then received a letter on Yankees stationery in early October.
“Bad news,” he told Claire. “Good news, they call. Bad news, they send a letter.”
MacPhail had proposed that Ruth work with sandlot baseball in New York, with kids. Claire said Ruth cried. Kids? They wanted him to work with kids? The door was shut and now it was locked. He never would get back into baseball.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
T HE BAD TIMES began on November 26, 1946, two months after the letter from Larry MacPhail. The Babe checked into French Hospital on 29th Street for “observation.” He had been suffering from headaches and pains above his left eye for the past few months. His voice had become increasingly hoarse. The left side of his face now was swollen, and his left eye was closed. He couldn’t swallow.
Dorothy, his daughter, said the pain had become so bad that he had threatened to kill himself a few days earlier.
“About 11 o’clock in the evening I received a frantic phone call from a friend telling me to rush over to Babe and Claire’s apartment on Riverside Drive,” she wrote in her book.
When I arrived, his bedroom door was locked and I could hear my emotionally distraught father threatening to jump from the 15th floor window. I got on my knees and looked through the keyhole, only to discover Babe trying to break the window guard by jumping up and down on the chain. I felt completely helpless, trying to console him from out in the hallway; I just wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him how much he meant to me. I don’t know what I said, but thank God he finally came to his senses and opened the door.
He had cancer.
The optimistic approach in the first few days was that he was suffering from a sinus problem and maybe was troubled by three bad teeth. The diagnosis was soon changed. A tumor had developed in the nasopharynx, a part of the air passages behind the nose. It sat in a place near the undersurface of the skull that was inaccessible to surgeons. As the tumor had grown, it had pressed against nerves from the brain that supplied the motor function of the throat and larynx. This was what made him hoarse and made swallowing difficult.
He was doomed. That pretty much was the case. The tumor now had grown into his neck. He was off on that long forced march of the cancer patient through surgery and radiation and experimental drugs. He was a pathfinder, really, one of the first cancer patients to receive both radiation and drugs at the same time, his name and fame bringing him to the front of the list. He still was doomed.
For the last 21 months of his life, he never would feel well again. He would feel better on some days, would play golf a few times and travel, would work with American Legion baseball for the Ford Motor Company, a job that sent him around the country, but he never would feel well. Health, survival, became his primary consideration.
The “observation” stretched into 82 days in room 1114 at French Hospital. He first was treated with radiation, then had surgery on his neck that was characterized by his doctors as “serious” on January 6, 1947, an attempt to alleviate the pressure on the nerves to his vocal cords. He was still in the hospital on his birthday on February 7, 1947. He received over 30,000 pieces of mail, including a bottle of water from Lourdes. He rubbed the water on his body. He pinned a miraculous medal to his pajamas.
“How old are you?” his nurse asked, confused by the old birthday problem. “Are you 52 or 53?”
“What difference does it make if you feel good?” he said.
This was one of the better days.
He left the hospital nine days later. This was not one of the better days. He was helped from the hospital door to the car, unable to walk on his own. He looked terrible, a thousand years old, his weight down to 180 pounds on his 6-foot-2 frame. He cried as 100 bystanders wished him well. His daughter Julia read a statement that her father wanted to go home to Riverside Drive to “look at the river from my apartment window.” An unidentified nurse told the Times the Babe was “still a very sick man.”
The newspaper writers, all of them, did a nice thing: they never mentioned the word “cancer.” They described how he looked and quoted what the doctors said, but they never said the bad word. The doctors never said the bad word. No one said the bad word.
The idea was to keep the news from the Babe that he was doomed. Maybe this worked. Maybe it didn’t. There was no doubt, though, that he knew he was “a very sick man.”
A Babe Ruth Day was held two months later on April 27, 1947, not only at Yankee Stadium but everywhere in baseball by order of new commissioner Happy Chandler. The Babe was at the Stadium, bundled into his camel’s hair coat, wearing the cap. He frightened people. They hadn’t seen him since he became sick. Even with a good tan, the result of weeks of recuperation in Florida, where he had fished and even tried golf, he was a sadly shrunken version of the man who once walked from the same dugout and made pitchers nervous.
The similarities to the farewell to Gehrig, eight years earlier, were obvious. Ruth thought about them the entire day. The differences also were obvious. The robust figure that put his arm around the dying first baseman and made him laugh now looked far worse than the dying first baseman had.
Like Gehrig, Ruth had no prepared, written-out speech when he approached the microphone. The crowd of 58,339 cheered at his introduction by Yankees announcer Mel Allen, and he started to cry and then started coughing, and for a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t be able to speak. He composed himself.
“Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” he
said in a terrible rasp. “You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad….
“You know, this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you’ve been a boy and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime.
“The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball. As a rule, some people think if you give them a football or a baseball or something like that, naturally they’re athletes right away. But you can’t do that in baseball. You gotta start from way down at the bottom, when you’re six or seven years old. You can’t wait until you’re 15 or 16. You’ve gotta let it grow up with you. And if you’re successful and you try hard enough, you’re bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now.
“There’s been so many lovely things said about me, I’m glad I had the opportunity to thank everybody. Thank you.”
The words weren’t nearly as compelling as the “luckiest man” speech by Gehrig, but the words didn’t matter. The delivery, the sound, the gravel and pain in each syllable was sent across the country and broadcast through loudspeakers at every ballpark before every game of the day, providing a window to the famous man’s struggle. He went back to the dugout, where he had another prolonged fit of coughing.
He then watched the first eight innings of the Senators’ 1–0 win over the Yankees. He was back in the hospital two months later.
The radiation had worked, allowing him to speak and to swallow a bit, to go to Florida, appear in public, make assorted stops for Ford, but the effects had worn off. The same symptoms had returned. His jaw hurt if he even tried to eat eggs. He now tried the new science, chemotherapy.
The drug, called teropterin, was basically a stronger, synthetic version of folic acid. Tests had been run on mice with mixed results, some of them encouraging. The Babe was one of the first human subjects, maybe the first. In these early days of chemical testing, there were very few rules. He consented to take a drug he knew nothing about for a disease no one had told him he had. There were no forms to be filled out. He simply nodded his head.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 43
