Leigh Montville - The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

Contents

This book is dedicated to
Jackson Nathaniel Moleux
Born: August 7, 2005

INTRODUCTION

T HE GRAND YEAR for researching Babe Ruth biographies was 1973. Five writers traveled around the country, stopping at retirement homes and suburban neighborhoods to talk to the last old men who remembered their time as teammates or friends of the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Reminiscences of long-ago hijinks and debaucheries were jotted into notebooks, impressions captured on tape recorders before the stories and the storytellers left the flat face of the earth.

The timing was important. Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves was on schedule to break the Babes biggest record of all, 714 career home runs, in the first months of the 1974 season. The excitement of that moment would also turn the focus to the past, making not only the followers of baseball but the general public remember the outrageous character who had set the record in the first place. Each of the five writers figured he had found an untapped and marketable story.

The Babe had been dead for 25 years, hadnt swung a bat in almost 40. The previous biographies, including two ghostwritten autobiographies, had woven fable and half-truths around the no-nonsense statistics of the box scores and record books. The feeling was that the real story finally should be told. Get it right. Get it out. Each of the five writers had decided independently on the same course.

It was a shock when each learned he was not alone.

I was having a very nice lunch with Jumpin Joe Dugan, Kal Wagenheim, the author of Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend, says. Joe was a teammate and a friend of the Babe. I remember him sayingafter he had told some wonderful storiesThe Babe suddenly seems very popular. I asked what he meant. He said, Youre the third guy whos interviewed me, writing a book about the Babe.

Almost the same thing happened to me, Ken Sobol, author of Babe Ruth and the American Dream, says. I think it happened to all of us.

In another version of the deflating moment, New York sportswriter Harold Rosenthal, a friend of Bob Creamers, author of Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, sent a message to Creamer that someone named Kal Wagenheim was writing a Babe Ruth book. Rosenthal didnt know Wagenheim and wrote, I know what a Kal is, but whats a Wagenheim?

Everyone was stepping on everyone elses toes. Everyone kept typing.

The strongest figure in the field, beginning to end, was Creamer. He had started first, seven or eight years before everyone else, and carried the most clout. He was a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, a tall and erudite man in his early fifties who already had written as-told-to books on New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle, broadcaster Red Barber, and umpire Jocko Conlon. The Ruth book was a personal challenge to see if he could write a biography on his own without the tape-recorded aid of the subject. His pace had been relaxed, the project added to his weekly chores at SI.

The approach of Aaron toward the record and the rumors of other Ruth books brought a call from the publisher. The relaxed pace was finished.

My editor, Peter Schwed, asked me how I was doing, and I told him I already had 70,000 words written, long enough to be a book, Creamer says. I also told him that at the end of the 70,000 words, the Babe was 19 years old and just starting to play for the Red Sox. Peter told me to get moving. I promised I would be finished by the fall, the date of the autumnal equinox.

None of the other writers was a sportswriter. Wagenheim had been a 37-year-old stringer for the New York Times, writing out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, when the plane carrying Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente and relief supplies for earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed while leaving the San Juan airport on New Years Eve in 1972. He covered the immediate story of Clementes death for the Times and in the aftermath was contacted to write a book. His hurried effort, Clemente!, was a best-seller. His publisher, pleased with the success, asked him to try another baseball biography. Wagenheim picked the Babe as his subject.

Ken Sobol was a writer for the Village Voice. His agent called him, suggesting a Ruth book. Robert Smith, 69, was a novelist, but also gravitated toward baseball nonfiction. Reviewers had called his 1948 book Baseball the first true history of the game.

The fifth writer, Marshall Smelser, was an academic. He was a historian, a member of the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book was The Winning of Independence, the tale of the American Revolution. Following baseball was one of his many hobbiesa large picture of the Babe had graced his office door for years. He decided to merge vocation and avocation to write not a book for baseball people, but a baseball book for people. The title was The Life That Ruth Built.

The five contenders followed separate but often overlapping tracks. Smith did little face-to-face interviewing, writing a book with a larger scopea history of the period with the Babes life serving mostly as touchstone and timeline. The other writers contacted teammates, family, friends of the Babe. Smelser sent a mimeographed set of questions to the former Yankees teammates of Ruth who were still alive. Sobol, looking for some negative voices, found them in the wives of former teammates. Creamer, after a lot of work, finally convinced former pitcher Waite Hoyt, Ruths teammate on both the Yankees and Red Sox, to talk for three days in Florida about the Babe. Wagenheim found great help from former sportswriters who had covered the Yankees. Everyone rolled through miles of microfilm in his local library.

Four of the books appeared in the immediate glow of Aarons achievement on April 8, 1974, his 715th career home run, off Al Downing at Atlantas Fulton County Coliseum. Creamers 443-page effort was the acknowledged winner. Its publication was preceded by a three-part series of excerpts in SI, and the magazines reviewer called it the best biography ever written about an American sports figure.

The books by Wagenheim, Sobol, and Smith, each of them solid and taking a different tack on the Babes life, were mostly lost or disregarded in the backwash of the praise for Creamers biography. In a few cases, one or two of the other works were compared to Creamers effort, sometimes favorably, often not, but mostly the books werent reviewed at all.

Smelsers biography did not appear until 1975. It was, as promised, a fat and scholarly book, 592 pages filled with footnotes. It was mostly well reviewed, but the marketplace moment had passed. Oddly, the book became a favorite of baseball people, but not people. Too many writers had tackled the same subject at the same time.

It was all an education about the publishing industry, Wagenheim, who never has written another sports book, says. In the middle of everything, you had Watergate and all the books that came out of that. I remember calling my publishers after I learned that other books were being written about the Babe. I was thinking they would arrange some big public relations campaign. What they didimmediatelywas cut back the press run.