“Of all the great and glamorous athletes, the gigantic and sometimes screwy sports figures of the Dizzy Decade who clattered across the sports stage with fuss and fume and fury, and the thunder and lightning of their compelling personalities, Lou Gehrig, the ball player, was probably the simplest, the most retiring, the most sensitive and honest.”
—Paul Gallico, sports columnist and first screenwriter of The Pride of the Yankees
The Pride of the Yankees—the story of a simple, sensitive, brilliant, and honest athlete—was the first great sports film. A big-budget movie in 1942, the first full year of America’s involvement in World War II, it brought us Gary Cooper as Gehrig: a near-perfect marriage of a modest, heroic subject and an actor who specialized in modest, heroic characters. Pride helped define Cooper’s career, but more crucially, his performance is critical to defining Gehrig’s legacy as a man of integrity who somehow tells a stadium full of fans that he is “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” despite having a disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that had just ended his career and would end his life two years later.
Seventy-five years have not diminished Pride’s powerful evocation of a man struck down in his midthirties, who was loved deeply by an intimidating immigrant mother; his adoring wife, Eleanor; his teammate Bill Dickey; and his manager, Joe McCarthy. He was an ordinary man who did extraordinary things in ballparks until ALS stopped him.
Pride would only hint at the seriousness of the disease, but its telling intimations of his mortality (a sudden stabbing pain in his shoulder; the loss of dexterity that rendered him unable to tie his bow tie) suggest the terrible reality.
As his life ebbed, Lou Gehrig needed friends to distract him, to cheer him up, to let him talk about anything but amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. One of the regulars was John Kieran, a friend and sports columnist for the New York Times. Kieran maintained a positive tone during visits to Lou at his house in Riverdale, in the Bronx, in mid-March 1939, ignoring the clear signs of Lou’s decline—his weight loss, his faltering voice, his inability to move from his chair on his own—in his columns.
So Kieran relied on what Lou wanted to discuss. Baseball, football, and swimming. Facing Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1928 World Series. The Yankees’ plan to move second baseman Joe Gordon to first base.
“He can’t miss!” Gehrig said. “Just give him a little time to practice and he’ll be a whiz at first base. Maybe he’ll make the Yankees forget Lou Gehrig.”
Hardly. No one has forgotten him in the seventy-six years since his death.
He batted .340 over 17 seasons, with 493 home runs.
He drove in more than 170 runs three times, including 185 in 1931.
He averaged 40 doubles and 12 triples a season.
No one was calculating OPS in his day, but his career on-base and slugging percentage of 1.080 ranks third in history, behind Babe Ruth and Ted Williams.
And, despite myriad broken bones and maladies, he played in 2,130 consecutive games—from the first in 1925 to his last in 1939.
He was an exemplary player, second to Ruth.
And an exemplary man, far better than Ruth.
His humanity emanates in so much that was written and said about him as he radiated joy—and somehow gratitude—while ALS was killing him.
In one of his columns, Kieran described a visit by Gehrig’s doctor, Caldwell B. Esselstyn (whose son developed a heart-healthy vegan diet that President Bill Clinton followed to great success). The doctor had been a guard on the Yale football team twenty years earlier. If patient and doctor discussed anything medical, Kieran did not record it. But that is no surprise. There was no effective treatment for ALS, then or now. Lou’s medical team was probably telling his wife, Eleanor, just to keep Lou comfortable. And this visit was evidence of that: The friendly family doctor, a big man who loved sports almost as much as Gehrig, was there to keep up Lou’s spirits.
One of the subjects that day was swimming.
“I was telling Lou about the new breast stroke—sure, it’s the ‘butterfly stroke’—because it was all new to me,” Esselstyn said.
Lou wanted to learn more about it from Yale swim coach Bob Kiphuth.
“Doc has told me all about him,” Lou said, sounding enthused. “His teams won more than a hundred and fifty straight meets and his swimmers set hundreds of records.”
Four days later, Kieran arrived again at 5204 Delafield Avenue while Lou was listening to a spring training game. Kieran spotted a first baseman’s glove on a shelf—which let Lou spin a story and allude to his diminished health.
“It’s the last glove I used,” Gehrig said as Kieran examined it. “Jimmie Foxx gave it to me. For years I used the smallest glove of any first baseman I know. But toward the last, when I couldn’t bend over so well, I was having trouble getting in the low throws and short hops. Jimmie suggested that I try a bigger glove. He gave me one. That’s it.” The conversation turned to a picture of Lou rounding third base in the 1928 World Series. Lou laughed, but Kieran did not understand. Nothing appeared to be funny in the shot. So Lou explained.
The picture showed him getting revenge against Cardinals right-hander Grover Cleveland Alexander, who had beaten the Yankees twice in the World Series, and saved a third game two years earlier. With Ruth and Cedric Durst on base in the first inning of Game 2 of the 1928 Fall Classic, Gehrig whacked a three-run homer.
“There was Alex, thinking he’d have us feeding out of his hand, as usual,” Gehrig said. “Well, with two on in the very first inning he threw me one—the first ball—right where I liked it and I smacked it away up in the right-field bleachers. Man, oh, man! You should have heard what he called me as I ran around the bases. That’s why he’s looking at me in the picture. He’s pouring it on—and I’m laughing. In fact, I’m still laughing.”
This was Gehrig distilled to his essence—a man talking animatedly but unable to do much more than toss nuts through the window of his house at his favorite pheasant. By now, he probably knew he was dying, or that the disease was not slowing its course. But if Kieran’s accounts of Lou’s strong spirits were true, then some combination of faith and optimism, friendship and Eleanor’s care had to be preventing him from despair. The public could not see him this way. Fans knew he was a decent man and understood that he was sick, but few could possibly know that ALS was a death sentence and that Lou would be gone very soon.
They witnessed, heard, or read about his humble farewell speech on July 4, 1939, between games of a doubleheader. It was his baseball funeral, a gathering unlike any in baseball history, with teammates, past and present, surrounding him on the infield at Yankee Stadium and 62,000 nearly filling the Coliseum-like arena unsure what to make of this suddenly thinner, weaker Iron Horse before them.
He shook and wobbled. Some wondered if he would fall in the heat.
But when he spoke, he declared he was the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” because of the blessings of his teammates, his managers, his wife, his parents, his mother-in-law, team president Edward G. Barrow, and even the New York Giants. His disease? A “bad break.”
He concluded that he had “an awful lot to live for.”
But not for long.
His life pivoted at this point. No longer a ballplayer, he was a victim, soon to be baseball’s version of a martyr. And if he wasn’t thankful for the dubious gift of an awful disease, he was grateful for what he had left.
Tragedy had made Lou Gehrig film-worthy.
And The Pride of the Yankees was born.
The movie became essential to Gehrig’s afterlife.
It pushed Ruth—the megastar—to the role of a supporting player.
It starred Cooper, who specialized in playing men of quiet dignity.
And it gave perpetual life to Gehrig’s “luckiest man” speech, the most important ever delivered by an athlete and one of the most memorable by an American in any profession. It deified Gehrig, not just on that hot summer’s day, but for what has passed for all time. Cooper not only re-created the speech but recast it in the image of all the characters of quiet dignity that had built his reputation.
All these decades later, Cooper has been the dying Gehrig, standing in baggy, billowing pinstripes, speaking into a bank of microphones and declaring that he was not just a lucky man but “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
For the past seventy-five years, Gehrig’s legacy became inseparable from The Pride of the Yankees, which was not a baseball film but a Gary Cooper movie, much as Sergeant York, High Noon, and Meet John Doe were.
Gehrig’s speech is more familiar to fans through Pride than through the few bits of surviving newsreel. His life, however fictionalized to suit the conventions of a Hollywood romance, is better known through Pride, as is his marriage to Eleanor, filtered through Cooper’s and Teresa Wright’s portrayals of well-matched sweethearts.
Cooper became Gehrig. Gehrig slipped into Cooper’s lanky body. He animated the static, limited archive of Gehrig imagery that showed him healthy—slashing a double, flashing his dimples with that warm smile, embracing a cloche-wearing Eleanor.
Cooper disappeared into Gehrig’s character as he did Sergeant Alvin C. York, Marshal Will Kane, and Long John Willoughby. But Cooper approached the Gehrig role with some trepidation. He did not know how to play baseball, his lithe build was very different from Lou’s thickly muscled physique, and portraying someone so real to so many people presented a steep challenge. He met it, of course, and became Gehrig’s cinematic, pinstriped doppelgänger. No actor has ever embodied a real-life athlete as Cooper did with Gehrig.
Pride’s depiction of Gehrig has reinforced his place in the Yankee pantheon. Dying so young prevented him from attending events after his retirement, as nearly every great Yankee did, at Old-Timers’ Days, and celebrations in their honor, since World War II. Before dying in 1948, Ruth made two storied performances at Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built, one of them while croaking out a message in a voice struggling to be heard against advancing cancer, and the second, in pinstripes, his body more clearly ravaged, famously leaning on a bat.
Other Yankee stars endured as icons for decades after their playing days ended, bringing a Field of Dreams–like atmosphere at the stadium. With repeated appearances into the 1990s, some in uniform, many more in a sober business suit, Joe DiMaggio nurtured his title (announced at his insistence) as the “greatest living ballplayer.” Yogi Berra became a cuddly catcher-philosopher before our eyes with each trot onto the field, building his immense late-in-life popularity by facing down owner George Steinbrenner for being cruelly fired as manager sixteen games into the 1985 season. A more recent crop of retirees like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera receive the adulation and riches that modern free agency and a powerful media confer and have decades of worship ahead with each return to the stadium.
Gehrig’s death deprived fans of seeing him age into an old-timer, watching him unveil his centerfield monument or becoming an elder riding a golf cart to join other old-timers along the first base line.
But Pride perpetuates Gehrig’s image as a reserved, selfless son, husband, and teammate; he is preserved in cinematic amber, demonstrating his integrity again and again. Cooper could not make us remember Gehrig’s particular muscularity, but he still reminds us of his character’s humility. No film has influenced an athlete’s image more than Pride.
Pride also set the bar for portrayals of inspirational athletes by Hollywood studios. Characters played by Sylvester Stallone (Rocky), Robert Redford (Roy Hobbs in The Natural), Hilary Swank (Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby), and Kevin Costner (Crash Davis in Bull Durham) advanced Cooper’s model for integrity, all in different ways, much as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is the template for high-minded, courageous morality in law.
Pride’s long tail of influence led to other unintended achievements: It gave early recognition to ALS, a devastating, incurable disease that was mysterious until it came for Gehrig, and became known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease” by 1940.
And Cooper’s delivery of the “luckiest man” speech became the measuring stick that all retiring athletes are judged by.
None have equaled him.
Its greatest achievement was to establish a formidable, continuing physical legacy for Gehrig, almost like an annuity that renews itself with each showing. The actual speech is an elusive document. Only bits of newsreel from it exist. It was not transcribed as a presidential address would be. No copies of what he read aloud appear to exist—if they ever did. But the speech exists in Pride, shorter than and different from the original, but re-created so well that it has become the de facto version. And the life of Lou and Eleanor, as depicted in Pride, is how we continue to view a couple who had only six years together before ALS came for him.
“To this day,” said Yankees historian Marty Appel, “we see Pride of the Yankees as an accurate portrayal of Lou Gehrig.”