Back in the day when baseball was the all-consuming national sport, there came legends whose names still resonate.
Yogi Berra was one of those names, and he has passed away at age 90.
The 18-year-old U.S. Navy enlistee, thinking it sounded less boring than the dull training he was doing in 1944, volunteered for service on what he thought an officer had called “rocket ships.” Actually, they were small, slow, vulnerable boats used as launching pads for rockets to give close-in support for troops assaulting beaches.
The service on those boats certainly was not boring. At dawn on June 6, 1944, that sailor was a few hundred yards off Omaha Beach. Lawrence Peter Berra, who died Tuesday at 90, had a knack for being where the action was. […]
Yogi had, sportswriter Allen Barra says (in Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee), “the winningest career in the history of American sports.” He played on Yankee teams that went to the World Series 14 times in 17 years. He won ten World Series rings; no other player has more than nine. He won three MVP awards; only Barry Bonds has more, with seven, but four of them probably tainted by performance-enhancing drugs. In seven consecutive seasons (1950–56) Yogi finished in the top four in MVP voting. Only Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics (eleven NBA championships, five MVP awards) and Henri Richard (eleven NHL championships) have records of winning that exceed Yogi’s.
He grew up in what he and others called the Dago Hill section of St. Louis, when the Italian Americans who lived there did not take offense at the name. They had bigger problems. Allen Barra notes that an 1895 advertisement seeking labor to build a New York reservoir said whites would be paid $1.30 to $1.50 a day, “colored” workers $1.25 to $1.40, and Italians $1.15 to $1.25.
His “Yogi-isms” are as legendary as his baseball career:
1. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
2. “It’s deja vu all over again.”
3. “I usually take a two-hour nap from 1 to 4.”
4. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”
5. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”
6. “You can observe a lot by watching.”
7. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
8. “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
9. “It gets late early out here.”
10. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
11. “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”
Greetings:
I grew up in the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s, living about a mile due north of Yankee Stadium. Even though our family was a paternally-designated National League family, the fame and success of the Yankees was those years were tough to ignore. And, as baseball had not yet become anything so mercenary as it is today, there were some benefits other than geographical and affiliative that could be had. Specifically, during the school year, but not the summertime, we would shoot down to the Stadium after school and the ushers and ticket-takers would let us “sneak” in to watch the last couple of innings. So, not so much in the spring, but a lot in the fall, when the Yankees were almost always in the pennant race, and depending on which team was “in town”, we would abuse the privilege as much as we could get away with.
After the game was over, we would swing around to the players’ exit. It being the Bronx, home of the famous cheer, visiting teams had to endure the emotions of the locals, some good, some bad. (The Bronx, after all, was somewhat diversely multicultural even before those terms became weapons.) The Yankees, in their turn, pretty much had to suffer the slings and arrows of intemperate adulation. While there was occasionally some variation in receptivity based on the day’s performance, the players seemed much more mature than today’s in spite of their being bereft of today’s lawyers and accountants and PR shills. They were pretty much gentlemen, but Yogi was the gentleman-est of them all. Whoever raised him and however they did it, they certainly gave the world as gift.
A couple other bits of life well lived come to mind. I haven’t seen this mentioned elsewhere, but Yogi was involved with a company that made a local bottled soft drink called “Yoo-Hoo”. It was a kind of chocolatey non-carbonated concoction that could be passed off to a non-up-to-date parent as something like chocolate milk. To me, it was a bad egg-cream (hold the egg, hold the cream) in a bottle. Some locals thought Yogi owned the company but he certainly owned the company’s tag line which he would pronounce as “Mee Hee for Yoo-Hoo”. And no one ever thought poorly of him for that.
On a more personal note, back in the early ’70s, I had a long (for me) term sweetheart. One day while trying to execute what nowadaze is known as a “team-building” exercise, I explained that we were like the Yankees’ Whitey (Ford, pitcher) and Yogi”. Several interesting years later, I made the mistake of trying a rehash and what it provoked was, “When you first told me that I knew immediately that I was Yogi.”
And she was right and Yogi was the best.
Wow. He was still alive?
I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner; I merely assumed he was gone because most of his cohort from that generation is gone.
Huh.
Que descance en paz.
“conservativism
Baseballis 90 percent mental. The other half is physical ”the turtle and orangeman don’t do physical
the turtle and orangeman don’t do physical
There is scant evidence they do mental either.
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