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Richard Sandomir dives deep into Lou Gehrig's speech as its 75th anniversary approaches.
The speech has been dubbed, with some hyperbole, "baseball's Gettysburg address." The connection to Lincoln is strained, perhaps, but the speech is still so good and so concise that it suggests a ghostwriter, perhaps a pal like Fred Lieb of the Sporting News. There are many nice touches, and there is nothing hackneyed. Gehrig spoke of "grand men," "that wonderful fellow" and "that smart student of psychology." Three sentences begin with "When you have," emphasizing his message through parallel structure. Notice the short phrases that followed the dash in five sentences: "that's something," "it's a blessing" and "that's the finest I know." By breaking up each thought, he let his thankfulness linger, as if he were punctuating those thoughts with a "Wow!" In the last sentence, he returned to his misfortune, elevating his disease to a "tough break" yet still minimizing its severity.
"The speech resonates, because it speaks to everyone who has suffered illness or lost a loved one," said Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, a 2005 biography. "Gehrig says we shouldn't think about ourselves and whatever troubles we might have. Instead, we should think about all the good fortunes we've had in life. To die is to lose everything, everyone we've loved, but he looks at it from another angle and says death helps him see all he has been blessed with -- his family, his friends, his teammates, his career. He chooses life. He chooses optimism."
Newspapers did not provide transcripts of the speech. Gehrig was beloved, but no newspaper would have sent a stenographer in anticipation of a memorable speech. Eig's book includes a different version, patched together from newspaper accounts and newsreels, but the differences are not major, and Gehrig may have deviated from the text he'd prepared. In The New York Times, for example, John Drebinger seems to have mashed up the opening and closing of the speech, making the most memorable line less potent in the process: "You've been reading about my bad break for weeks now. But today I think I'm the luckiest man alive. I now feel more than ever that I have much to live for." |
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