Lawrence Peter Berra, "Yogi" to most of us and "Lawdie" (a corruption of Lawrence) to the few, like Joe Garagiola, still around to remember his childhood, left this earth this week.
Yogi Berra was undoubtedly one of the luckiest individuals on the earth the past 90 years, as if God ran out of good looks when He made Yogi, and so gave him luck to make up for it. He certainly was not a baseball player, or a Hall of Fame-level one at that, because of luck. Far from it; God also gave him the diligence to pursue that career and the talent to make it.
Yogi was lucky in life, the "other" game that we can certainly say he won at. He had a wife, Carmen, devoted to him through their 65 years together until her passing last year, and him to her. Everything he touched in business turned into money, most noteworthily his investment in the old chocolate drink Yoo-Hoo, from which he did very well indeed, as they say.
He was given an extraordinary talent for saying things that were a little off, that no one else would say, but which would have a kernel of truth deep inside -- sometimes very deep, but there. That was the talent -- the luck was that a few of those clever lines later, people began to ascribe equally clever, odd lines to him that he never actually said himself.
In perhaps the greatest piece of luck, he grew up in the Hill section of St. Louis, colloquially "Dago Hill" for reasons you can readily guess, literally across the street from another young Italian-American who would grow up to be a major-league catcher, the aforementioned Joe Garagiola.
Why was that lucky? Because Garagiola's gift was as a storyteller more than a catcher (though he won a World Series ring in 1946, before any of Yogi's ten). And Yogi was such a fascinating character, that he essentially made Garagiola's post-baseball career for him by giving him unending grist for his storytelling mill. If Yogi didn't say half of the things he was credited for having said, you may credit -- not blame, but credit -- his good fortune in childhood neighbors.
Even his teammates knew what a lucky soul Yogi was. There's a recollection in Jim Bouton's great 1970 book "Ball Four", of Yankee teammates in a moment of boredom, pondering the headlines if the team plane were to have crashed. "Mantle, others lost in airplane crash", they figured it would say. The sub-heading? "Berra OK; took later flight."
I was lucky enough to have seen Yogi play live, in 1959 (he went 0 for 2, but I had to look it up -- my memory is not that good, and I was certainly never a Yankee fan) in a game that Ted Williams also played in. That, however, is not the most striking memory I have of him in uniform. That, friends, would be on TV, watching the 1956 World Series and seeing him leap into Don Larsen's grasp after the last out of his perfect game against Brooklyn. I have a picture of that moment, autographed by both of them. Still can't figure out how Larsen didn't end up with a double hernia from that.
Yogi went on to become a manager in the majors, and even that was a stroke of luck. Ralph Houk was not going to manage the Yankees after the 1963 season and the loss to the Dodgers in the World Series. A few reporters were idly discussing how fast they could drop a rumor in a bar and have it get back to them. They thought "What is the most ridiculous rumor we could start?" and came up with "Yogi Berra will manage the Yankees in 1964." Trust me, that was not a logical thought in 1963.
Sure enough, not only did the rumor get back to them in record time, it also hit the papers and made him a logical candidate. Sure enough, Yogi was now an "official contender" for the position, got the job and took the Yankees to the seventh game of the Series, whereupon he was fired for losing it. Luck doesn't go that far, although Yogi did plenty of managing in later years.
My son Jay, a guest columnist a few weeks back, was born in 1981 and never saw Yogi play, of course. But even he had to eulogize him, and I asked permission to copy his Facebook post here to show how another generation saw him. He wrote this:
"The recently passed and sorely missed Yogi Berra had a way with words.
Granted that's like saying "Kobe Bryant had a way with women" or "Michael Vick
had a way with dogs", but the man could certainly make a phrase stick.
"One of Berra's favorite victims was percentages. Whether he was
saying that 90% of the game was half mental, or calling on his
teammates to give 100% in the first half of the game and then give the rest if
that doesn't work, Berra could never seem to get the numbers right. Over the last two weeks, I feel like I've been dragged through Hell.
I've given 100%, had another 100% bled out of me, and been told I still need to
give another 1000%. I've been really sick, and so 90% of my time was spent feeling like death, 40% of it
wishing for death, and 85% of it wishing for death on others. About 70% of my
brain is only effective 20% of the time, and the rest just doesn't work.
Jay's grandfather, my father-in-law, was a big Yankee fan (which didn't help our relationship), who died shortly after 9-11. Accordingly, the end of the piece invoked him: "*Sigh* Maybe Pop and Yogi are having a beer right now. And Yogi's
looking down and shouting, "Don't worry, kid! It gets better, unless
it doesn't."
There won't be a "fork in the road to take", to remember one of his great Yogiisms, on Lawdie Berra's journey to Heaven, just a straight shot.
A straight shot. Think I could use one of those. Jay, want to join me?
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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