You were the greatest.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
13 Comments
13 Comments
In his prime he would get base runners home, simple as that. ” The game is 90% mental, the rest is in your head.” RIP Yogi.
My dad likes to tell the story of when he was in New York on business back in the 50’s. He decided late one evening to pop into this little hole-in-the-wall bar near his hotel to have a couple of beers. There were only a few people in the bar so he spent about an hour or so bullshitting with the bartender. It got to be about 11:00 and most everyone had left, when the door opened and in walks Yogi with Whitey Lockman, who at that time was pitching for the New York Giants. They both sat at the end of the bar. My dad waited as long as he could, allowing them to finish a couple beers, and finally went down and introduced himself and asked if they minded giving an autograph. They both signed the back of his business card and invited him to sit with them, as they pretty much had the bar to themselves. They stayed for a couple more hours while my dad just soaked up the fact that he was having beers with Yogi Berra. They finally got up to leave, shook my dad’s hand, and told him they were pleased to have met him.
I still have those autographs in my office at home. My dad still talks about this amazing chance encounter and how down to earth both Yogi and Whitey were. Every time he tells the story he sounds like the same excited 22 year old kid he was when it happened.
That’s a great story, and it’s one that doesn’t surprise me in the least. There will be a million of them, because Yogi was a very, very special irreplaceable human being.
That is a great story. With what other sports personality could that happen today? I have no suggestions. It’s a vanished era.
RIP Yogi.
I think he took the right fork.
More than his ten rings his greatest feat may have been snubbing for 14 years and helping to humble Steinbrenner which allowed real baseball people to return the Yanks to greatness.
And it took another great, Jeter, to help convince Yogi that he had won and could/should return to the stadium.
He may have seemed to some as a bit of a goof ball but he was a fantastic competitor and a man of conviction.
There are just no words to even begin to explain what Yogi means to me.
I can’t even try.
I was hoping you’d be able to articulate something. He was, after all, closer to your generation than mine.
Sadly, I never got to see him play since he was before my time. I’m of the generation that was traumatized when Thurman Munson died in his jet plane. My dad was a Dodger’s fan and yet he only had good things to say about Yogi.
I lived a blessed life as a child. I lost a grandmother when I was five, but I hadn’t seen her recently because she lived in Michigan and so I was sad but not traumatized. Other than that, I didn’t suffer losses in my early life.
The single worst thing that happened to me in my childhood was the loss of Thurman Munson. It still reverberates to this day. It was complete and utter despair and desolation, a total reckoning with senselessness and the chaos of the moral universe. I did not recover, and neither did the organization.
It totally reorganized my thinking about the world, and permanently.
It must sound crazy to a non-sports fan, but you had to be a boy of that age and living around New York, and you had to understand Munson.
Today, I’m better prepared for the loss of Yogi, particularly at a ripe old age. But Yogi meant almost as much to me. There was no way that the things people said about the Yankees could be true when we had Berra and Rizzuto in our corner. We knew we were the good guys.
How could we not be?
I’m right there with you. Was blessed to have had my grandmother until I was 28 and to have been very close with her. In fact, she was the most special person in my life. I can’t imagine who I would have been but for her because my parents, though they meant well, were insane. Had she not been there, I would have been a wreck (or maybe dead).
But the Yankees meant so much to me. When I was maybe 10, I wrote a long letter to Chris Chamblis and he had his bat boy, Joe DeAmbesio I believe, write back to me. At the time I was disappointed because I didn’t get what a big deal it was for a player to make any effort to reach back out to a fan.
When Thurman died, I was beside myself with grief. Truly grieving. Went on and on about it until this guy who was a friend of my parents’ good friends with whom I was staying for a few weeks (in upstate New York — we were from Long Island) went off on me, telling me to shut the fuck up, stop whining, etc.
My childhood was probably not as gentle as yours. It was a lower class existence with all that entails. But you and I shared a deep love for a team and its heroes.
I’m a California guy who hated the Yankees and started falling hard for the Red Sox during the ’75 World Series. I remained strongly with the BoSox for decades afterward. A portion of my personality is sympathetic to tragedy and the underdog; I also loved Dewey and Boggsy and others. It was hard to be surrounded by smug A’s fans during the years some very good Boston squads were getting ritualistically slaughtered by the great Oakland teams of the late ’80’s.
This begins to explain why I lacked major sympathy for the Yankees and their fans when Munson died so shockingly. I feel a bit bad about it in retrospect. Looking back, I can’t come up with a circumstance in American sports that meets that level of sudden tragedy, for a player and his family or the team he played for. Invaluable and irreplaceable on the field and in the clubhouse, I understand Thurman’s value much more now. While I could never truly know your childhood experience, thanks for helping me understand you better.
Regarding Yogi, it’s good to read stories that show a man who was as great as he was a player, a very considerable statement. My favorite Yogi story is the one Bouton shared in Ball Four, from the 1964 pennant chase:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonica_Incident
Yogi had just retired as a player in ’63, and was immediately installed as manager of the great Yankee dynasty. He took them to the Series where they lost in seven games…and Yogi was fired immediately afterward and replaced by the manager of the Cardinals team that won that Series. Shit, no wonder Yogi was bitter- that’s pretty screwed up. And we see where that managerial change got the Yankees- immediate drop to the second division for a decade. Yogi must have gained justification for his resentment of the Yankees from that result.
Yogi was such a versatile player. He’s known as a catcher, but he played plenty as an infielder and outfielder and set all sorts of records as a pinch hitter.
What a ball player!