CHAPTER 10

Last of the Ninth

DAD’S GRANDCHILDREN WERE obviously taken with the love and affection all around him on Yogi Berra Day. Larry’s daughter, Lindsay, who had just graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications, earned a job with the Yes Network, the pioneering cable operation the Yankees owned that broadcast all their games, deriving another huge revenue stream for George Steinbrenner. All the kids were talented and athletic, smart and ambitious. Which was why it hurt me that my beautiful daughter Whitney stalled along her own path, having developed a drug problem herself, like me, sliding into the clutches of alcohol and drugs.

I never asked how or why. Because I’d been there, done that, and knew that even the best people succumb to easy gratification. It’s funny—and sad—how life repeats when we get older. Because I found myself in the same exact position I had put Dad in, and now I had to be the one to worry myself sick about my own child, support her, and also give some tough love at times. But I needed some assurance myself, that, like my use, hers had nothing to do with any resentment or anger about her family, whether she blamed me for the divorce, whether my habits had anything to do with hers, whether it could have even been genetic.

WHITNEY: I never believed that. I don’t think Dad realized how much I learned from him and my grandfather. They were very similar in a lot of ways. Neither of them were smothering. They didn’t say much. When I got a little older, every time Dad came by he’d ask coyly who am I dating, what are these guys like? You know, fishing for information because he wanted to protect me. That was funny to me, but I loved him. And Grammy and Grandpa took an interest because they’d had three boys, but most of the grandchildren were girls—seven of the eleven.

But every child has a point where they break free, do things for their own reasons. That’s what happened with me when I started using cocaine. Trust me, you don’t want to know the details, and that’s not what’s important. But I started pretty young. I did well in school, played sports, was popular and all that stuff, but I was pretty rebellious and just partied a lot. Cocaine and alcohol were part of it. And it worked for a while, and then it didn’t, and it all came to a head around the time when I first went away to college.

You could draw a parallel with Dad. I didn’t know the whole story, but from what he’s told me, it happened the same way for him, only with him it went on much longer. And I think the reason it didn’t for me was that he was a huge piece of my life through all of this, and he’d been through the same thing. I had him for support. He could tell what I was doing. No one knows a coke user like someone who is or was a coke user. In fact, he started to have conversations with me long before I thought that there was any issue. In high school he would start to have conversations, sit me down and talk about things, and I just didn’t see it as a problem yet.

My dad and I both have addictive personalities. But I also think that our experiences were different. He was able to manage his life to an extent, and that wasn’t my experience. I couldn’t pull off “normal.” I had that allergy, that gene, where if I put a substance in my body I react differently, and I can’t handle it, really. So he knew I was in trouble. He didn’t get mad. He was understanding. And from his own experience, he was someone who I trusted and could relate to, listen to. He took me to my first AA meeting when I was like nineteen. But he put it to me the same way his family did to him. It was like, “You’re either going to do the right thing and get things together, or we’re not in your life and you’re on your own.” It wasn’t like I could go on with what I was doing and be accepted as a Berra.

Like him, that was what I needed to hear. So I did rehab. I went to live in a halfway house in Florida, got a degree in social work from Florida Atlantic University. I worked in substance abuse for a time and found my path in life, to connect with and help other people that are struggling in any way. I work in alternative health and healing. I’m a yoga teacher. I work with reiki, which is an energy exchange healing method. I’m currently in Chinese medicine school, studying healing methods like acupuncture. Thankfully, my problem was over a short period of time, and I have Dad to thank for that. If he ever worried that what I did was somehow his fault, I can say flat out it wasn’t. Sometimes it isn’t that complicated. You can love someone and still hurt them. But if they love you, the hurt is a way of leading you back to them.

Whitney shaped my life, too. I knew I had to be clean and sober in her eyes. I knew exactly what she was going through and could help her. Naturally, it was difficult at times. I knew all about denial, self-delusion, resistance to good advice, being selfish. But you never falter, never give up. Dad never gave up on me. Your words get through, then get through some more. And, today, at thirty, her life now is all about yoga, healing, and spirituality. We give to each other, the way a father-child relationship should work.

The relationship has made me a better person. I never intended to be an example to others, but as time went on, I was something like a role model. I’d be playing a round at Montclair Golf Club and, knowing who I was and my checkered history, a guy would come up to me and tell me his son came home from college and was addicted to some drug or another. He’d ask me for advice because he couldn’t get through to the kid and it was killing him. I’d try to make him see that his son wasn’t shaming him—he didn’t want to be on drugs—and tell him to hang in there with him, be tough but understanding; tell him the things in the world he needs to care about are things he already has, his family, his life. Tell him he has to make a choice.

There’s no foolproof way to take someone off drugs. Sometimes you’ll fail; sometimes it will go tragically bad. But like Whitney says, pain can lead to relief and happiness. You don’t make yourself the victim of a loved one’s problem. It’s about something much bigger than that. Dad never once played the victim. In the end, he didn’t care about me shaming his name, but the terrifying possibility of losing his son, and me losing my family. When he had to get tough with me, he put it in my hands, and I put it in Whitney’s—it’s time to choose one of two roads, and you have one last chance to choose the right one. We both chose right. Because we had help from people we loved.

Yogi Berra entered the new millennium as a legitimate elder statesman, a man of great pride, who took his legacy seriously and wouldn’t allow anyone to mess with it. In 2003, a one-man play, Nobody Don’t Like Yogi, came to Broadway with Ben Gazzara playing Dad looking back on his life. Ben had met with Dad at the museum, because Dad loved great actors. However, he never gave his authorization for the project, and after it opened, friends of his who saw it said it had taken liberties with the truth in its portrayal of him, and Mom and Dad refused to see it and lend any credence to a lie.

The real problem with preserving the legacy of Yogi Berra, however, was that Dad himself was too trusting with people who told him how much his name, his brand, was worth. Dad didn’t know that he was worth the same as Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial. A guy would come over to the house and say, “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you sign a couple hundred balls.” He’d say, “Okay.” He didn’t think about what he was getting per baseball. If guys were charging $100 for a signature, they’d get $20,000, double what they gave him. He wasn’t getting his market value, and he didn’t know any better. He had no clue that his autograph on a baseball brought in a top price.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have good business judgment. As I say, he never really made a bad investment, never had to worry about money. When my brothers and I had all moved out of the house, and he didn’t need all that room anymore, he sold it for a handsome profit, and he and Mom bought a smaller one, a sort of love nest for them in their old age. So he had a golden touch. It was that none of the guys he played with had a head for standing up for themselves when it came to self-worth. They came from a whole different time; jocks then weren’t supposed to have any say about what they were worth. They were conditioned that way. And with Dad, he just didn’t want to believe anyone was taking advantage of them. He loved the Yankees’ owners, loved the GMs. He had trusted Ralph Houk and George Steinbrenner, both of whom stabbed him in the back. Because his philosophy was, anybody that’s trying to help you, be nice to them.

His perspective was that of a poor kid from the Hill, who worked his way up and had a beautiful wife and loving kids who grew up in a beautiful home. He had everything he needed, money in the bank, and it was the result of hard work and good values. But that didn’t mean we were going to let people rip off his name. After all, his name always meant money for someone, judging by all the commercials he did long after his playing days. All anyone had to do was see his mug on TV and smile, and they’d remember the product. And sponsors were paying all kinds of money to get him in a studio for a few hours. Back in the ’50s, a guy from an ad agency would come in the clubhouse and hand him a hundred bucks to do a Marlboro commercial. Now, just one signature on a baseball from his playing days could bring in many times that.

So Timmy and I said, hey let’s take this over, because Dad’s been getting cheated for so many years. We shut off anyone else claiming to represent him. With Larry, we formed a company in 1994 called LTD, our first initials. Timmy is an expert in the memorabilia field and collection industry and I had the ability to communicate with people. We began to handle all of his licensing. Over the last twenty-five years, anyone wanting to make a deal for signed memorabilia has had to go through LTD. Everything like that is consolidated within the family business, which is the way it should be. I remember when they used to sing “We Are Family” in Pittsburgh. Well, that family lasted one year. We’ll be a family forever.

Dad was happy about it. That was how he was introduced to the business of being Yogi late in life, when the stars of the past were suddenly getting big money for card shows and appearances. It wasn’t enough for a lot of them. I thought it was demeaning to Mickey and Willie Mays to be paid for greeting people who came into casinos, because they needed money. They weren’t being celebrated; they were used as props. Dad would have rather slept on a park bench than do that, and they would get in trouble with baseball for having an association with gambling and had to quit doing it. It was an insult to their greatness and dignity. And that was never going to happen to Yogi Berra.

We saved him a fortune, which was the least I could do to honor the man who gave me so much. With everything controlled to make sure he was rewarded properly, I’m proud to say that only Yogi Berra, among all of the stars of his era, really achieved earning his market value in his lifetime. In fact, he might have had the highest market value of any ballplayer who ever lived. And he deserved every penny. He did so many commercials where he didn’t even know what the product was or the name of the company. After he filmed one for Aflac insurance—you might remember him in it, sitting in a barber shop, dispensing Yogi-isms to the befuddled barber and the Aflac duck—someone asked him who it was for. “Amtrak,” he said. Same old Yogi. Another, for Visa, co-starred his physical opposite, Yao Ming, the seven-foot-six center for the Houston Rockets at the time. The spot, a classic, had them each responding to a store clerk who keeps saying “Yo!” Ming repeating “Yao!” Dad’s line was “gi… Yo-giii.” It’s only funny if you see and hear it, how he looked into the camera as he patiently repeated, “Yo-giii.”

He also had numerous requests to be a keynote speaker or to appear at a banquet. For some, like the Italian American Club, he’d do it for nothing. He received a doctorate of letters from Washington University in St. Louis and was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame with the actor Jack Nicholson. He gave commencement speeches, many of which were written for him by Mom or Dave Kaplan. It almost seemed as if Dad was in the prime of his life. You couldn’t keep up with him. But then, that was an old story.

At the same time that I was putting a lot of work into maintaining his legend and market value, I was putting a lot of work into my own value—to myself. Doing that out of the glare of the public spotlight made life more real, more meaningful than the constant intrusions when you’re a pro athlete. I lived quietly, humbly. And I found the woman I’d been waiting for all my life. Her name is Jane Woodruff, a Montclair girl, thirteen years younger than me—imagine that. I’d been divorced fifteen years, living clean, preparing for the next journey. I was ready for love and marriage again, and Jane was sent from heaven.

Jane is a lot more sophisticated than me, that’s for sure. She was born and raised in Montclair. However, Jane’s mother is from Switzerland. Having a European background, Jane has taught me a lot about how to carry and present myself, which I definitely needed. I’d spent literally half my life in locker rooms, screaming, bumping into people, walking around in my underwear. I’d be in a restaurant, see someone I knew, and yell across the room, completely oblivious to disturbing anyone else. She made me more aware of my personal space and taught me to be cognizant of my surroundings. It was like taking a course from Miss Manners.

Mom and Dad loved Jane, because they knew she was good for me. She is smart, athletic, family-oriented, and extremely cultured. Dad loved that she is also humble. He would always get that look in his eye when he was around people who boasted and talked too much, and she didn’t. I definitely married up, which of course is what Dad always said about himself. I knew what he meant. We got married in her Protestant church on May 1, 2004, because I was sort of a lapsed Catholic, and I deferred to Jane, who has strong religious beliefs. Mom and Dad’s gift to us was a trip to Rome and Ireland. No, I didn’t make it to the Vatican to say, “Hello, Pope.” We went on our own up the Amalfi Coast on the Salerno Gulf and stayed on the Isle of Capri off the Sorrentine Peninsula. That was also walking in Dad’s footsteps, repeating his journey to the Old Country after D-Day. He knew how beautiful and inspiring it was, and that I would benefit from that experience. He was right. It was two weeks in paradise. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Dad, meanwhile, was becoming an icon to another generation. He was in constant demand as baseball’s prime elder statesman. It didn’t matter whether you loved or hated the Yankees. You loved Yogi. In 1999, baseball honored its All-Century Team at Fenway Park in Boston. Dad and Johnny Bench were the catchers. And after the ceremonies, when he was cheered, he walked from the field entrance through the crowd and up into the press box. As he walked up the steps through the stands, every row got up one after the other and stood up for him and clapped for him. That said it all. No old team rivalry could ever eclipse how all baseball fans felt about him.

That of course was a common scene at his “home” park. Dad enjoyed going to Yankee Stadium just to meet with the players and the manager, for the camaraderie. That was in his blood, as it is with all of us who played. He made a ritual of going each spring to Tampa, George’s hometown, where the Yankees moved their spring training base in 1995. There, he could don the pinstripes and help the Yankee catchers get their game down. Yet he had no interest in watching games. He’d go to the stadium at three in the afternoon and be home by five. He was nearing his nineties, but with his spry little baby steps and grace, it seemed he would live forever. I believe he wanted to do just that.

He found himself outliving nearly all of his contemporaries and best friends. John McMullen died in 2005; Phil Rizzuto in 2007. Dad had watched Scooter suffer with cancer of the esophagus. After Phil needed an operation that removed half of his stomach, he was put in a nursing home in West Orange, New Jersey, and Dad visited him often, coming away shaken as Phil wasted away. The deaths of John and Scooter hit him hard; sitting in the church for their funerals, then watching them be buried, he had to confront his own mortality, but he never lost that sense of vitality, his love for life. He wanted to enjoy every minute of it.

There would be more losses. George Steinbrenner died in 2010, which saddened him, as he’d established a pretty good relationship with George. And Larry Doby left us in 2003, two years after his beloved wife, Helyn, had died, both of cancer. As he had with John and Phil, Dad had visited both of them during their painful last months, and he was in the congregation for both of their funerals. Knowing the end was near for his friend, he established the Larry Doby Wing at the museum, honoring not only Larry but all the great Negro League players. He wanted Larry to know he would be remembered.

The museum became a wonderfully successful attraction; chartered buses would roll up all the time with either school field trips or seniors who had grown old with him but never forgotten their memories of youth rooting for him. But no good deed goes unpunished, I guess. In 2014, some guys broke into the museum and stole dad’s World Series rings, fourteen in all, ten championships and four consolations. It was like a Mission: Impossible episode. They actually lowered themselves down from the ceiling on ropes with a lever system and had special jacks. They used glass cutters that opened up the cases like a hot knife through butter. They avoided the laser security sensors, took the rings, and left.

LARRY: They planned it down to the second. It’s a five-minute response time for the police to get to the building once the alarms go off. They were in the building for four minutes. They only took Dad’s stuff. In the case right next to the rings was Don Larsen’s perfect game uniform worth a million dollars, but they didn’t take it. There was a Lou Gehrig ball; they didn’t take it. They just took Dad’s rings and two Hall of Fame plaques. That was it, nothing else.

When we found out, Timmy, Larry, and I talked to him about the theft. He said, “I’m more upset for you guys. I lived it. It’s all up here,” pointing to his head. “I don’t need those rings for the memories. They were for you guys.”

Imagine being that unselfish. Sure, he had so many rings that they all seemed to fudge together. But, back then, the ring was a good part of their income. Hank Bauer used to say, “Don’t fuck with my ring,” another way of saying, “Don’t mess with my money.” I was more like Dad. My one ring, for the Pirates’ ’79 championship, was also stolen, years before that. How’s that for a terrible coincidence? I had a facsimile ring made for me, because having earned a ring was important to me.

Even so, I was far more concerned with Dad’s rings and getting them back. The FBI got involved, but they came up empty. We paid investigators, and we figure the rings are in Russia somewhere, in somebody’s safe. You can’t really fence them, because no one would want to be known having them. You can’t take the chance of someone saying, “Hey, I just saw Yogi Berra’s rings.” You can’t sell them and can’t show them to anybody, so why even take them? The FBI says they’ll probably turn up because there will be a one-time fence, some secret exchange. They’ll try to do it anonymously, and the guy who stole them will get away with it, but at least we’ll get the rings back. We’re hoping. But I’ll tell the robbers a little secret. Some of the rings were replicas, not originals. So when you try to sell them, guys, be prepared for a shock. You won’t get what you think.

In his last decade, it seemed Dad was drinking in high honors all the time, some owed him for too long. One of the proudest days of all came in 2009 when the US Navy Memorial honored him with the Lone Sailor Award, which is given each year to a navy veteran who achieved lofty status by applying the touchstones of his service: honor, courage, and commitment. The award was sometimes given to an athlete, such as Stan Musial in 2007 and Arnold Palmer in 2008. It’s presented in Washington, DC, and Dad was no stranger there. He had met every president from Truman to Obama and been invited to the White House ten times for state dinners and various functions. He and Mom were greeted warmly by the Obamas that day. Mom said Michelle Obama was stunning. Democrat or Republican, Mom knew what class was. And she still wore her own class and sophistication extraordinarily well.

The only thing that makes me sad about it was that he didn’t get his Medal of Freedom, the highest honor an American can receive, while he was still living. They had ninety years to do that. I suppose they thought he’d live forever. It sure looked like he would. Right up until the last few years, he never seemed to age much. His only concession to Father Time were the glasses he’d worn since the ’70s. He walked the same, with those graceful little steps, and played golf almost every day in good weather until his knee began to bother him. He and Mom were greeters at the Bob Hope Classic and other big tournaments. He hosted his own tournament, the Yogi Berra Classic in Montclair. The celebrities still loved to be around him. And he loved being anywhere.

When he went to Yankee Stadium for opening day in 2003, he was sitting with Whitey when on the scoreboard were listed the names of Yankees who had died during the off-season. “Boy,” he told Whitey, “I hope I never see my name up there.”

But age was finally starting to catch up to his body. He would deal with his knee pain by having cortisone shots and getting the knee joint drained. However, in 2000, unable to walk the golf course properly, he decided to undergo a knee replacement. That surgery is a common procedure for seniors. But as a result, Dad lost his gait. He began to lose muscle definition in his lower body, and his ankles became bloated. Dad had the legs of a football player; his massive thighs were like tree stumps and his calves like big melons. All that muscle tapered to skinny ankles, like a racehorse. But all the swelling made him look different, even though he attacked his rehab and worked out every day. He had made it a ritual every morning to work out with John McMullen at the New Jersey Devils’ training facility up until John got sick. But his muscle tone atrophied.

Physically, it wasn’t the same Yogi. But he had that old spunk. He wouldn’t let pain or weakness stop him from living his life as he wanted. He still got on the plane and went to Tampa for spring training with the Yankees. He and Mom went out for dinner, to the museum, to the golf club. He still played gin with his friends. He was still Yogi, just slower. But the telltale signs of his frustration became more frequent. He couldn’t swing a golf club as hard, because, like swinging a baseball bat, the legs generate the power. He’d take a short swing, get the ball halfway down the fairway probably a hundred yards fewer than he used to. Then he would sit in the cart, wincing in pain. He would never complain or make excuses. “I’m getting older. I could hit a baseball farther than I can a golf ball” was his explanation for a lesser quality of life, saying it with a shrug and a little sardonic grin. Not that it sucked getting older, just that he was getting older. But he saw the positives. “Hey, I can get out there and take a swing. I don’t care how far it goes,” he would say, I imagine that was something like what he must have told Casey Stengel more than a few times, except that when he swung at a ball in his prime, it went out like a missile.

I didn’t feel too bad for him—he still beat the pants off me and my brothers when we played cards or Monopoly with him. He still could have sunk more hoops on the driveway sitting on a chair than we could have on two good legs. But when I did see him in obvious discomfort, I wished that he’d never had the knee replacement. He would have been better off living with the pain by continuing the shots and draining his knee. Because with all the bloating in his legs, he lost more mobility and then could barely walk at all at times; when he tried, he would sometimes fall down.

That was shocking to us. This was Yogi Berra. A man as graceful as any man could be, yet a man we now had to worry might fall and break a hip or an ankle. One time, he went out to get a haircut, and while walking out of the house he fell down the stairs outside. He was okay but had nasty cuts on his forehead, nose, and arms. As proud as he was, he waved off any help. He didn’t go in the house and clean himself off. He struggled to his feet, slid into the driver’s seat of his car, and drove to the barbershop. He walked in there a bloody mess. But he got his haircut. He always finished what he started.

A couple of times when he fell, we had to bring him to the hospital because we didn’t know if he had a concussion. And he hated hospitals. Hated ’em. But he would be spending some time there. After a while, he developed an irregular heartbeat and went in for tests. The doctors once tried to shock his heart back to its regular pace, but it didn’t work, so he started taking Coumadin to prevent a stroke or heart attack. And being on this kind of regimen had an effect on his personality. He became withdrawn and a little closed off. Taking the pills made him feel cold, so he bundled up inside the house and stopped wanting to go out and do the things he loved doing.

Mentally, he was still sharp as a tack. On good days, he was spry and in a good mood, telling his jokes. He was also more immersed in protecting his legacy than he had been before. In 2014, for example, he and Mom gave their blessing to another play that focused on their life together, Bronx Bombers. It was produced by the same people who had staged Lombardi and Magic/Bird, and they made sure to obtain the approval of baseball, the Yankees, and Mom and Dad, who revealed a lot about themselves, before putting it on Broadway. In the show, Yogi dreams about interacting with Yankee stars past and present, and his relationship with Mom is, accurately, the center of his life. The lead roles were played by Peter Scolari and his wife, Tracy Shayne, who didn’t need to act to show love and affection for each other. I enjoyed it, but it’s just so hard for an actor to nail what Dad was really like; many have tried, such as Paul Borghese in Billy Crystal’s 2001 HBO movie 61*, but none have gotten it right.

With Yogi Berra, you had to be there. You had to experience the quirks to know that whatever he said, he never wanted to hurt anyone. You had to hear him when he ran into an old acquaintance and growled, “Hey, what the hell are you doin’ here?” to know that while he sounded gruff and grumbly, it was just his way of joshing you, putting you at ease. He wasn’t dour or distant; he was just Yogi being Yogi. Lord knows, he did that with us all the time, and we loved it when he did. Because that was the essence of the man I grew up with, and I gave thanks to God for keeping him around as long as he did.

The same could be said for my mom. In 2010, Carmen Short Berra was eighty-five years old and seemed ageless. She was in good health and as beautiful and regal as a queen. She and Dad celebrated their sixty-fifth anniversary on January 26 at the museum, where they loved to spend time saying hello to the tourists who came through. Mom had dealt with small things that cropped up with regard to her health, but she was notorious for ignoring anything wrong with her. She didn’t want anybody to know if there was something going on. She had her own doctor, kept to herself. I had no idea that she also had an irregular heartbeat and was on Coumadin; she never told us. One day, on her way back to her car from a coffee shop, she heard what sounded like a click inside her head, and then everything was spinning, and she was seeing things upside down.

She sat down on the curb, managed to get out her cell phone, and felt the buttons to call 911. An ambulance came, picked her up from the curb, and took her to the hospital. The doctors said she’d had a sudden aneurysm, a small amount of bleeding in her brain, and that it caused a small stroke. When they called my brothers and me, we went and picked up Dad and raced to the hospital. When we got there, she was in a room and complained of a headache along with a very weird feeling of being separated from her body and everyone sounding like they were speaking to her from an echo chamber. Leave it to her, after a week in the hospital, where we all stayed with her ’round the clock, she made enough of a recovery to go home. Larry, who had recently gotten divorced, moved in with them and could help both Mom and Dad move around.

They were still together and happy about that. However, that interim didn’t last long. Mom and Dad were functional but needed a lot of help because neither one could go up the stairs unassisted. We hired care workers to take care of our parents, who needed to be monitored around the clock. Dad was still falling down, and we lived in fear that he’d fall down the stairs and have a catastrophic accident. For his own safety, we convinced him to move into the best assisted living place we could find, Crane’s Mill, in West Caldwell, around twenty minutes from the house. It was a huge decision for him to be taken from his house, his castle. But he didn’t fight it. The day he left, we all cried, but Dad was, well, Yogi.

“I’ll be back,” he said, a vow we knew he would not be able to keep.

Mom stayed a little longer at home, with a full-time caretaker. She was taken for visits to Dad, but she was deteriorating as well and couldn’t bear being separated from the man she loved. She missed him so much that she said she wanted to be with him. So we moved her to Crane’s Mill, too, into a room right next to his. We put a doorway in and made their rooms adjoining. Neither one of them liked it there. They both wanted to be home, but they made the best of it.

Then Mom had another stroke and things went bad fast. She lost her ability to swallow. She could only swallow if they made her food and water into a gel so she could get it down her throat with a straw. Her quality of life was reduced to the point where she didn’t want to go on.

It got so hard for her that she couldn’t take it anymore. She told the doctors and attendants that she wanted to stop all that and let her life end. When we were visiting her one day, she said, “I’m going to refuse medication, and I’m not going to eat. I’m not going to live like this.” We tried to convince her otherwise, though there was nothing anyone could do to make her life better. It’s beyond heartbreaking when you know your parent is in pain, but the trade-off for ending the pain was to end her life. The moral and ethical issues involved in that kind of a decision pale before the simple, gut-wrenching reality that this is your mother, the person who brought you into the world, and that when she goes, much of your own life will go with her. So we tried to keep her alive.

“Mom, you can get better,” we’d say. But she’d say, “No, this is what I want to do.” Which was to die with the same dignity with which she lived.

Dad couldn’t do anything for her; he was declining fast, too, his organs failing. He had congestive heart failure, water was filling his lungs and joints, his heart was not working hard enough to drain the fluid. He couldn’t walk, and he could barely shake your hand because he was weak and his fingers were blown up like little balloons. He had no interest in watching TV anymore; he just sat kind of slumped over, staring. It was all I could do to keep from crying, which I knew he wouldn’t want to see. I kept it upbeat, but I was dying inside, too.

We hired additional hospice workers to help Mom, and they got her to eat a little. But in the early spring, the time of year that used to be so exciting to both of them and to each of us, all she could really do was read. She constantly read books, basically waiting to die. The people at the facility and the hospice people said, “If that’s what she wants, there’s nothing we can do.”

On March 5, 2015, I got a call that I better get there quickly. The whole family gathered around her. She was weak and couldn’t get out of bed. We all knew this might be her last day. Larry, Timmy, and I went and got Dad from physical therapy. We brought him to Mom’s bedside. And then, in a sight I will never forget, out of nowhere, Yogi Berra became young again, if just for a minute. Drawing up all his inner strength, he suddenly stood up out of his wheelchair, with vigor, unaided, as if some hidden force was pulling him up. His voice, which had gotten so weak and faint, was strong again, as it was over sixty-five years ago when he asked her out on their first date. Looking straight at Mom, in perfect Yogi Berra pitch, he made his last wish.

“Come on, Carm,” he told her. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go back home. You’re all right. We’ll have a drink together. C’mon, Larry, Timmy, and Dale are here. Let’s all go home.” Mom managed to put on a little smile, almost a smirk, as if it came from her past, too. “Sure, Yogi,” she said.

It was all she needed to say. Because at that moment, both of them were transported back in time, to when they were lovesick kids on the Hill. Some might say it was a miracle. I say it was their love that broke through the reality of sickness and pain, giving them one last minute to share before death would they part.

We were all there until late at night before going home. Mom’s good friend Joni Bronander stayed with her along with Larry’s daughter Maria. As they were sitting at her bedside, they saw Mom’s head rise from the bed and her arms reached for the sky, as if she saw a light or something. She gently lowered herself back into the bed and passed.

She was still beautiful, still regal. Lying on her white bed sheets, she seemed gossamerlike, forever the queen. When the producers of Bronx Bombers were casting the show, they specified that the character of Carmen Berra had to be “the epitome of all that a Yankee wife should be. She exudes confidence without ever seeming pompous, and exemplifies the good citizen without ever appearing plain. She is dynamic, energetic, embodies sex appeal; men are attracted to her and women are drawn to her. A fashion maven, she has an instinct for saying, doing, and wearing the right things at all the right times. All respect and admire her.” Dad said all that and more, in his eyes, whenever he looked at her.

We held her funeral at Immaculate Conception Church in Montclair, where we had worshiped for fifty years, and laid her to rest in Gates of Heaven cemetery. Dad was there, and we made sure to spend the rest of the day with him at Crane’s Mill. But it was an unspoken thought for many of us that we would be retracing these same steps soon for Dad.

We always knew he wouldn’t live long if Mom went first. They were a big part of each other, ’til death did they part. Dad didn’t speak much about her, but she was on his mind. He was still capable of having a very brief conversation and of being the same old lovably cantankerous Yogi, especially when I tried to ease his mind about coming to the end.

“Dad,” I told him, “you’re going to go soon, and you’re going to go to heaven, and you’re going to go join Mom up there.”

He glared at me. “What do you mean me—why don’t you go join Mom?” he rasped. “I don’t want to go yet.”

Because he loved life and lived every minute of it to the fullest. He never, even while in Crane’s, liked to admit he was terminally sick. But he knew he had to face it. A few days before he died, I asked him how he was feeling.

“Something ain’t right,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell I’m at. This ain’t good.”

He made it through almost seven very sad months after Mom died. On September 22—sixty-nine years to the day from his first game as a Yankee—he was doing badly, and the first one the hospital called was Larry.

LARRY: I got the call to come right over, time was running out, and I made it and I was hugging him, saying Mom’s coming for you. And Tim also made it to the home just before he passed away. It was amazing how he held on the whole time. The day he died, as weak as he was, he weighed the same as in his playing days, 190 pounds. He didn’t lose any weight like most people do when they get older. People used to come in, or the nurses used to come in and help him and everything, and they’d go, Jesus criminy, what the hell is this guy doing, he’s like a rock. It wasn’t like he was wasting away.

It was like he was hanging on, waiting for the right moment to let go. And the nurse said later that when she heard I’d gotten there, she hugged and told him, “Larry’s here, Yogi. You can leave now.” And that’s when finally, he let go and stopped breathing. I’d watched both my mother and father die. It’s not something you ever would have thought you’d see when you were young and they were young. But not even Yogi Berra could live forever.

TIM: I was at Mom and Dad’s house when Larry called. I got there just in time. I tried to prepare myself for months, get it in my mind that my father was dying, but he was that kind of a man who always beat the odds. He fooled everyone who counted him out. It was like he had a line to God. But, you know, he had seen enough. With Mom gone, he didn’t have that great anchor, his life partner. He was ready to go. And we’d prepared ourselves for that. But you never really can. It still hurts.

I was running up the steps from the parking lot when he died. My brothers were there, each holding one of his hands. I bent over and kissed him on his forehead when I got to him. We prayed over him, and as I did I realized he was as much a friend to me as a father, just as he was to people who never knew him. I was incredibly sad that our family and the world had lost a true original, and I cried having lost our parents—as had Dad—so close together in time. But I wasn’t consumed by sadness and grief. Because that was the way Dad had taught me, that life was meant to be enjoyed, that a good life was something to celebrate, not mourn, when it was over. And I just knew he was back with my mom and playing baseball again with his old teammates. He was young again and out of pain. I was, and am, convinced of that.

LARRY: My hero died in front of my eyes. But we had sixty-six years together, and you have a lot of memories of a man who lives that long and that well. He never cheated himself, his family, or his fans, not for a minute. He showed what life is supposed to be like, how it’s supposed to be lived. And so I feel like Dale. I remember him for all the good memories. I try to laugh, not cry.

TIM: Your first thought is, my dad won’t be there anymore; there’s a big hole now in my life. But there are a million things that came to mind about him. That’s his legacy more than anything he did on a baseball field. He packed a lot of living into ninety years. No one ever lived a fuller, better life than my dad.

He had given ninety glorious years to baseball and humanity. He had absolutely no complaints. He’d lived his dream, married his queen, raised a family he loved. For us, he was all any child could ever ask for in a father, and that’s something you carry with you always, until you die. Even if you didn’t know him, you thought you did. You don’t have to idealize a man like Yogi Berra; he was perfect just how he was. For me, I had to live with the guilt of causing him pain, but also the satisfaction that he knew I had learned what he had tried to drum into me at a young age. It took too long, but as he said of those long shadows that used to engulf Yankee Stadium on those magical fall afternoons, it gets late early. I guess that’s another way of saying better late than never. Dad always said he wouldn’t change a thing in his life. He knew he didn’t ever have to.

LARRY: We wanted Dale to do the eulogy. He’d had to find out what Dad meant to him the hard way. He’s caused Dad the most worry and we knew he wanted to say thank you in public, for the world to hear.

When he died, the New York Times headline was: YOGI BERRA, YANKEE WHO BUILT HIS STARDOM 90 PERCENT ON SKILL AND HALF ON WIT, DIES AT 90. The article called him “one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters.” That was the tone of his funeral, which was fit for a president or king. The service was carried live on local TV from the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It was standing room only, all four hundred seats taken, the building roped off so that his fans could stand outside and listen to the service on a public address system. I gave the eulogy for the family, setting the tone by telling a joke he would have loved: that when he came to the pearly gates of heaven, St. Peter wasn’t there yet; when he showed up, Dad greeted him with “You’re late.” But, in reality, it was perfect timing.

Standing a few feet from the table on which Dad’s urn sat next to a miniature bronze catcher’s mitt, I spoke about what he’d meant to me, to us, to baseball, to America, without ever trying to be anything but who he was, the redoubtable Mr. Berra. I was so proud, too, when Whitney rose to lead the congregation in reading from the Bible. She broke down briefly, and said, “Sorry,” though not a soul blamed her. I think it was at that moment that she knew how special it was to be a branch of Yogi Berra’s family tree.

Joe Torre then delivered a eulogy for the baseball community, saying Dad “personified the American dream.” And Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York gave another eulogy, equating Dad with another famous son of Italian immigrants, Pope Francis. Both men, he said with a grin, even had similarly oversized ears. Yankees past and present were there, led by Derek Jeter, who told a few amusing anecdotes. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was there. Jackie Robinson’s beautiful widow, Rachel, was there. Numerous political leaders were there. Hundreds of navy sailors, honoring Dad’s service during World War II, ringed the church, as they would if a president had died. A navy trumpeter played “Taps.”

My brothers and I walked down the aisle out of the church, a weeping Timmy holding the urn that held our father’s ashes. We then formed a long procession to the Gates of Heaven cemetery, led by the longest police motorcycle brigade I’ve ever seen. Then we buried him next to Mom, together in eternity. We also arranged for a public memorial at the museum the following Sunday. No one had any doubt that Yogi Berra had passed right through those pearly gates on his way to heaven, right on time. On that day, not only New York mourned and paid tribute to him, as well as laughed out loud as people recalled his famous “Yogi-isms,” one of which I thought about with a smile: “You should always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

All of America, all the world, paused for a moment that day to remember what Dad meant to them. They had memories of him that will never fade, and personal feelings about him even if they had never met him. One of the many newspaper reporters who were at the funeral, the New York Times’ Harvey Araton, who had written a touching book called Driving Mr. Yogi about how Ron Guidry used to drive Dad around Tampa during spring training in his later years, told of an elderly woman who had waited outside the chapel for hours. She had never met my father but drove hundreds of miles to be at his funeral. She and dozens of others cried as the service was carried on loudspeakers. When the mourners began to come outside, the woman begged people if she could have one of their programs. When someone gave his to her, she again wept.

“Standing out here,” she said, “I felt as if I could see through the bricks, as if I was inside. I’ve been a Yankees fan since I grew up, but I always believed that Yogi Berra was much more than a ballplayer.”

To that, I can only say one thing. Amen.

His popularity never seems to fade. On November 24, 2015, only two months after he left us, Dad was awarded the highest honor a citizen can receive, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in a ceremony at the White House. Larry accepted it for him, President Obama draping the medal around his neck. The president gave a touching speech, calling him “an American treasure” and relating some of the famous Yogi-isms. There were a lot of laughs, and a lot of tears, on that day.

Meanwhile, way further down on the radar, I reached my sixties, healthy and happy. My family grew. Jane gave birth to two daughters, Alexandra and Kay, making me the proud father of three girls, who all have the Yogi genes. Alexandra is a pretty good little softball player, and Kay a wonderful gymnast. To be able to resume being a husband and father again in my sixties is a gift, as far as I’m concerned.

Larry lived in our parents’ house for a while, but we reluctantly sold it. Still, every time we pass it, and especially when we pass the magnificent house we grew up in, we’re transported back in time. And we smile. Never have Larry, Tim, or I ever considered for a minute moving out of the Montclair area. We have continued to live right down the street from each other. If you never understood why Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen’s song “My Hometown” touches the soul so deeply, you’ve never lived in a town like Montclair your whole life.

As I write this, Dad’s been gone three years, yet I feel as close to him as I ever did. It’s common wisdom that you don’t know what you had until it’s gone. It’s still hard to believe he’s not around, that I can’t call him for advice when I’m feeling low or share when I feel good. My brothers and I talk about him all the time. What he would have said. How he communicated. His funny ways. How he would never embarrass anybody. How he was the most unique man in the world. How completely confident and incredibly secure he was with himself. More than anyone I know, he was unaffected. Completely unaffected. His relationship with the guy who owns the corner store was as important to him as his relationship with a corporate CEO.

He had less of an ego than anyone I’ve ever known. Near the end, I would sit with him and talk about the old days. I’d ask, “Dad, what was it like in ’73 with the Mets? What was it like with those guys?” He’d say, “Good.”

“Well, you know,” I went on, trying to get a reaction, “Seaver sometimes overlooks you. He talks about Hodges all the time and doesn’t even mention you.”

“He pitched good for me.”

“What was it like when you managed the Yankees?”

“That was good, too.”

“What about Mickey and Whitey?”

“They played good for me. And Pepitone. I made him play first base every day and he had a hell of a year.”

You just couldn’t get a negative word out of him. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I never met a player, or anyone else, who didn’t love him. And I know why. He loved them, too. If you ever met him, you felt an immediate calm. It was the same thing Jack Maguire—or Bobby Hoffman—felt so long ago when one of them looked at him and saw Buddha. For me, that calm was more effective than a swift kick in the ass, which I really deserved. I still feel his calm thinking of him.

That had a lot to do with me becoming comfortable enough with my past to relive it in these pages. It was definitely painful, but what resonated the most of everything he ever told me was that you don’t learn from your hits; you learn from your errors. I am the proof of that. What did I learn? That when you come to a fork in the road, you take it. I took it.

I’m still on that road, still following the Yogi rules. I’m punctual. I’m appropriate. I try to do the right thing all the time. And I know how to play the game of life. If I get stopped by a cop because I was messing with my GPS and switched lanes by accident, he could give me a hard time. But I’ll be very respectful, and he’ll say, “Ah, go ahead, you’re all right.” He doesn’t ask to see my license, doesn’t know my name. Just by my voice inflection, the way I look at him, he knows I’m okay. He knows I’m sober. He knows I’m clean. There’s nothing in my voice that sounds like I’m concerned about being stopped. I have that whole thing down pat. Thanks, Dad.

If there’s one thing I learned writing this book, it’s something he taught us all with one of those Yogi-isms: if the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be. Back when youth was being wasted on me as a young man, I wouldn’t have had a clue what that meant. Today, I do. Life is not about being perfect; it’s about living with not being perfect. I’m still obsessive, still have an addictive personality. But it’s all channeled into something positive, although I’m just a bit too addicted to golf. I have a five or six handicap, and I’m out there all the time. And I’m obsessed with it to the point where it affects my marriage and my family. My kids will say, “Dad, watch a movie with me,” and I have to beg off, because of golf. I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m a better father the second time around, but not good enough, not yet.

Then, too, just like Dad, I have to learn how to understand the kids of a new generation. I try. But just try explaining to them what rock-and-roll is, who Eric Clapton is, who Ritchie Blackmore is, who Ginger Baker is, get them to listen to a guitar riff, a drum solo. I had to learn why Dad liked the Mills Brothers and Gene Krupa, so they can appreciate rock, too, but few of them do. However, the culture that birthed both Yogi Berra and rock-and-roll, as the old song goes, “is here to stay, it will never die.”

I also obsess over elevating New Jersey. Rutgers joined the Big 10 a few years ago and they are terrible in sports. The problem is that New Jersey high school sports are really good, and if we just kept our kids home, Rutgers could compete nationally, on the same level as Tennessee, Alabama, USC, and Penn State. But the Jersey kids don’t stay home; they go everywhere else and become All-Americans. Or they go to the shore and do tacky reality shows. Well, one day we will rise.

As for baseball, I have good memories of it—and a regret. The regret is not knowing how good I could have been. I may be overstating it, or I may have too high an opinion of my abilities, but I think I could have made a few All-Star teams if not for a few of my poor choices. I don’t watch ballgames on TV much, and I never go to the ballpark. I’m not a Mets fan anymore. I put all that out of my mind and my soul. I loved coaching Whitney’s softball teams, and I currently help coach Alexandra’s softball team. If I had sons, I might be more involved and keep up with big-league opportunities for them, because if I did have boys, they’d probably have the same genes Dad handed down to his boys. As it is, my daughters are talented athletes. Even Jane is a tremendous athlete; she can play any sport, kills at tennis and paddle tennis. Sports are a large part of the Berra family. That’s undeniable. It will always be that way. But when I retired, I never wanted to pick up a bat or ball again, or care about the big leagues. That’s my past, and it will stay there.

LARRY: Dale’s sixty-one now and looks thirty-five. He’s amazing. He’s still hyper as hell. He’s a health freak now. He goes, “What are you eating that for? You’re not supposed to eat that. Eat this instead. What are you drinking?” He’ll really come after you. I’ll go, “Will you be quiet?” But I know he’s right.

He means what he says about baseball. We had played together in the early 2000s in a softball league. We played in local tournaments in Jersey. And Dad got a kick out of watching us. He’d rag us, you know: “Ya gotta bend over for a grounder,” but he was proud of us getting out there and competing. This is how competitive Dale was; he said, “I’m going to play with you until we win the state tournament.” So he played, we won it, and he threw his glove into the trunk of his car and said, “That’s it for me.” He was like Dad, who never played softball or in Old-Timers’ games. He didn’t want to be the old Yogi, only the prime Yogi. And he would only do it if he won.

[Dale] didn’t take that glove out of the trunk for sixteen years. Then, I convinced him to play again, and he did. It’s two guys over sixty playing on a team, laughing, happy to be active. It’s great having him back, enjoying his life so much. We don’t care about who wins. I can’t run because of my knee, but they made that rule to help me out. We just do what we can. We both have had our ups and downs, but one thing we always had in common was that we were Yogi Berra’s sons. That was our saving grace.

One of the last things Dad said to me wasn’t a Yogi-ism. He said that people who turn their life around get a lot of respect. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been sober for the last twenty-seven years, and there’s nothing that will prevent me from remaining that way. For him. And for me.

If he were here, he would be asking what he always did whenever he saw me—“You all right, kid?” And that sly smile would creep across his face when I would tell him, “Yeah, Dad, I’m all right.” Well, somewhere up where he is, sipping a vodka with Mom and telling old stories with Mickey, he knows that. And between sips, I can almost hear him saying what he always did.

“Kid, that’s all I wanna hear.”

That will get me through another day.