Yogi Berra was about five foot seven. He might have weighed 190 pounds in his catcher's gear. He was a man of ordinary proportions. We might assume his heart was no larger than average, though it certainly must have been an especially effective muscle.
When Berra died last week, I was sad in the way we sometimes are when people we only know about die. I am just old enough to remember Berra as a baseball player; he was one of the ones I read about, whose statistics I memorized. When the TV talking heads went on about what a lovable character he was, when they started running down all the malapropisms he allegedly uttered--a lot of which actually make sense if you think about them--I wanted to interrupt them, to point out that he was probably one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He was certainly the best at his position, which is probably the hardest to play and arguably has as much to do with a baseball team's chance of success as a football team's quarterback. If we measured the greatness of baseball players by the same standard we apply to football players--if we judged them less by the numbers they compile than by the important games they won or lost--there would be no question about Berra's greatness.
But even if you go strictly by the numbers, you might decide he was the best catcher ever. Better than Johnny Bench, better than Bill Dickey. And even if you won't concede that, you must concede that he was far more than comic relief, Mickey Mantle's goomba sidekick from the Hill, St. Louis' Italian immigrant neighborhood. Berra grew up across the street from Joe Garagiola, who was considered the better major league prospect. I know because Garagiola, who eventually made more of a mark as a broadcaster than as a player, told us that incessantly in the anecdotes he shared on NBC's Game of the Week and later on the Today Show. That's how the image of Berra as koan-dropping holy fool, a sort of Forrest Gump or Ringo Starr figure, was installed in the American consciousness.
Writer Allen Barra, in his 2009 book Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, wrote that Garagiola "undermined the perception of Berra as a great player and competitor and replaced it with the image of an amiable clown who was lucky enough to have been around when the Almighty handed out roster spots on winning teams. I don't mean to imply that was Joe's intention, but the stories, repeated endlessly on television and paraphrased in newspapers and magazines and then in subways, in offices, and in bars, created a pseudo-Yogi that took on a life of its own, a caricature of a real man."
And at first, especially during his playing days, Berra resented the focus on his "personality"--he even tried to sue Hanna-Barbera Productions, Yogi Bear's creators, for defamation of character. (And this was a couple of years before Garagiola joined NBC.) But being an intelligent and opportunistic businessman, Berra gradually came to terms with the persona, exploiting it in commercials for beer and insurance. And though he never said many of the things he is alleged to have said, he apparently could turn a phrase.
I don't suppose this column has much chance to correct any misperceptions of Yogi Berra, and I even wonder if we ought to try to set the record straight. Everyone is full of contradictions; most of us are capable of both selfishness and altruism. We get the sort of folklore that we need, we print the legend and celebrate the myth. No one wants to hear how John Wayne was only human, or that Thoreau made his mother do his laundry. Even immortality is transient; 100 years from now baseball might be irrelevant.
And what seems most important to me about Berra is how well he did his job, and how humbly he did his duty. He was at D-Day, an 18-year-old Navy gunner mate on a rocket boat off the coast of Normandy who took fire and pulled drowning men out of the ocean. He wasn't exceptional; a lot of people did things like that. But a lot of us can't quite imagine doing those things, and can only be grateful we have not been tested.
Berra passed other tests as well; he was one of those who welcomed Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, to the show. A couple of years ago Berra's museum in Montclair, N.J., partnered with Athlete Ally, an organization that promotes the inclusion of LGBT athletes in sports.
Despite the story first reported by Roy Blount Jr. in 1984, and likely propagated by Berra himself, there's scant evidence to suggest Berra met with Pope John XXIII in 1959 and greeted the pontiff with a simple, "Hello, Pope." But it's a useful myth, suggesting as it does that all of us are really just ordinary folks beneath the airs and honors we affect.
It was a coincidence Berra died on the day another pope, a humble one of simple tastes, arrived in this country. An ordinary-seeming man who, like Yogi Berra, seems to have an exceptional heart.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/29/2015