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The Behemoth of Bust
 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.
![[Breaker quote for The Behemoth of Bust: a/k/a the Wazir of Wham]](2006breakers/060627.gif) 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.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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