The Reactionary Utopian
                      June 27, 2006


THE BEHEMOTH OF BUST
by Joe Sobran

     American sportswriting has changed a lot since the 
1920s. It's less lyrical, hyperbolical, and moralistic 
than in the days when Grantland Rice and others set its 
lessons in rhyming verse. Schoolchildren used to memorize 
"Casey at the Bat" -- the tragic story of Mudville's 
great slugger striking out in the clutch. But American 
optimism demanded a happy sequel, so other poems quickly 
appeared in which Casey got another chance and won the 
game with a home run in the bottom of the ninth.

     I'm not complaining. In our day the story would 
probably be told in free verse, with Casey winning the 
game but flunking a steroids test and turning out to have 
bet heavily on his own team.

     That was the golden age of nicknames for sports 
heroes. Every great star was given his own honorific 
title, usually alliterative. Jack Dempsey was the 
Mannasas Mauler; Luis Firpo of Argentina was the Wild 
Bull of the Pampas; Joe Louis was the Brown Bomber. Red 
Grange was the Galloping Ghost. Christy Matthewson was 
the Big Six; Walter Johnson was the Big Train; Lou Gehrig 
was the Iron Horse; Ted Williams was the Splendid 
Splinter; Joe DiMaggio was Joltin' Joe; Bob Feller was 
Rapid Robert.

     Then there was the one and only George Herman Ruth. 
The Babe, the Big Bambino, the Sultan of Swat. Kal 
Wagenheim's hilarious and moving 1974 biography lists 
some of his other appellations: the Mauling Mastodon, the 
Behemoth of Bust, the Mammoth of Maul, the Colossus of 
Clout, the Prince of Pounders, the Mauling Monarch, the 
Bulby Bambino, the Mauling Menace, the Rajah of Rap, the 
Wazir of Wham ...

     There were others too, but I've probably satisfied 
your curiosity by now. Suffice it that in this category, 
Ruth's record is probably safe. He'd come a long way from 
the Catholic orphanage where the other boys had called 
him ruder names. It's often remarked that he owed none of 
his feats to performance-enhancing substances; on the 
contrary, Wagenheim gives the impression that whenever he 
showed up at the ballpark drunk and sleepless, he was apt 
to slam a couple of homers, whereas his attempts at clean 
living had the opposite effect. It was the sportswriters 
who sounded as if they were on stimulants.

     Ruth enjoyed many advantages. He had a worshipful 
press that largely protected him from scandal; he played 
against only white players (except in a few exhibition 
games); he never hit against the slider; he played before 
night baseball.

     For all that, he was a stupendous talent beyond 
comparison to anyone else, sometimes hitting more home 
runs than all the rest of the league's teams put 
together. Most of his records lasted a generation or 
more. And before he played daily, he set pitching records 
that lasted nearly as long.

     Today ordinary players make millions of dollars a 
year. When Ruth was emerging as the hottest player ever 
known, he had a contract dispute, which he eventually 
settled for $27,000 -- spread over three years. During 
the Depression, when reminded he was being paid better 
than President Hoover, he pointed out, in his 
good-natured way, "I had a better year than he did."

     By then he'd played a magical decade for the New 
York Yankees, who'd bought him cheap from the desperate 
Boston Red Sox in 1920. But his decline began almost 
precisely with the Depression. He yearned to manage the 
Yankees when he retired, but the team's owner reasoned, 
with iron plausibility, that the wild-living Ruth was not 
the man to impose discipline on younger players. Other 
owners felt likewise, and Ruth never got a chance to 
manage. He played a final dismal fraction of a season 
with the Boston Braves, smashing three colossal homers in 
his last game, and then the greatest career of all time 
was over.

     It was the greatest career less because of those 
astonishing records than because of the sheer joy Ruth 
brought to the game -- and gave to the fans, especially 
boys, always dear to this orphan's heart. That delight 
leaps off every page of Wagenheim's biography, until the 
last sad chapters, which recount Ruth's agonized struggle 
with throat cancer. Shortly after his farewell to his 
fans ay Yankee Stadium, he was dead at 53.

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