Pride of the Yankees

On last Friday night two forces collided. Deborah’s love for anything black and white on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) and my sports. Deborah would like to go asleep to TCM while I would be happy to go asleep to ESPN.

So on Friday night one of the greatest movies of all time came on – “Pride of the Yankees” - its black and white –its TCM and it sports. The greatest sports story of all time. No kidding.

If you don’t know – its about Lou Gehrig – the Iron Man – he got recruited right out of Columbia to play for the Yanks (in order to pay for his mother’s surgery). He replaced Wally Pipp at frist base (one of the all time trivia quesitons) and played a successive 2,130 games that was not surpassed on until Baltimore’s Cal Ripken surpassed it in adjulent applause in 1980 or something,

The movie is something else – what a great cut of the day this provides us. European
immigrants providing their son everything and wanting their son to be above all things – an engineer. Ohh god. Kiss of death – that engineering thing.

And because Lou’s Mom gets sick he decides to sign with the Yankees to pay her hospital bills. And the rest is history.

Lou Gehrig became one of the most prolific sluggers of all time – and teamed with Babe Ruth they formed the most formable batting duo known to man and the baseball world. And they kept the newspaper press world happy all of the time.

And one of the greatest thing of this movie is the REAL Babe Ruth was in it. You could see the greatest sluuger of all time in real life.

Hey Deborah – the Babe is in this movie.

Oh yeah – who plays him ?

No the Babe is in this movie.

Yeah but who plays him?

No it’s the fucking Babe and he’s right here. Gary Cooper is eating his hat right there. (Gary Cooper – what a great real life American).

Then he got sick.

And he gave the speech known around the world.

While knowing he was dying within months he told the Yankee stadium throng gathered that day that he was the “luckiest man” who ever lived. In probably the most televised and repeated speech of all time.

Never braver words have ever been told,