Although he always insisted on being introduced as the “greatest living baseball player,” it could never be true as long as Willie Mays was alive at the same time as Joe DiMaggio. And Ted Williams, DiMaggio’s great contemporary and rival, could dispute the title if it really mattered.
Still, a man has his pride, and no one had more than DiMaggio. Certainly DiMaggio is the last great sports figure in the age of innocence, ours, not necessarily his.
Red Smith, the sportswriter, was once asked why he kept writing about games when he was in his 70s.
More Top Picks Best Flexible Seating For Special Education Classrooms
“On the chance,” Smith said, “I might meet another Joe DiMaggio.”
DiMaggio remained mostly myth, something not allowed in these days of cable nibs and smart-aleck columnists and sound bites and Jerks of the Day. If Albert Belle had played when DiMaggio did, maybe he would be the ideal. Probably not.
We no longer carelessly assign all the noble virtues to athletic heroes, and maybe they no longer deserve them. Maybe they never did. But I think it is the world that has changed, not the essential and accidental genetics that create such specialness.
Michael Jordan, the nearest thing to DiMaggio in our age, has not been without examination, the kind that reveals inevitable flaws and human pettiness. Still, nothing Jordan has ever done has been unforgivable, even to the extent that our fingers remain crossed that he will never prove to be less than deserving of our appreciation. Jordan remained a great athlete who is also as decent and worthy a human being as our age will allow.
If there is an arc between DiMaggio and Jordan, it is full of footbridges.
Oh, how we lathered over Mark McGwire last summer, given half a chance, which is all he deserved. He may be a very nice person and splendid friend and neighbor, but we know his muscles belong to science as well as to the St. Louis Cardinals.
We want to believe the best of Sammy Sosa, and we do. But before Sosa was bashing home runs 20 a month and winking at us behind press podiums, what we thought of him was that he was overpaid and selfish and prone to miss the cutoff man.
Possibly no one at any time ever had a bad thought about Joe DiMaggio. When his first wife sued for more child support, the judge turned her down and ruled that she should never have divorced someone who was a great sportsman, an exemplary father and an outstanding citizen.
There it is in a legal document, everything we wish our sports heroes to be. George Steinbrenner wanted DiMaggio to throw out the first ball at last year’s World Series, a duty that fell to Sosa not just because DiMaggio had been hospitalized with what seemed an inconsequential illness.
TV and Major League Baseball preferred Sosa, the current feel-good ballplayer, over the man against whom such things should be measured. A Yankees old-timer told me that DiMaggio really just wanted to avoid the fuss, a natural assumption that refused to concede that the great DiMaggio was irretrievably ill.
DiMaggio managed to conduct his own long and national wake, surviving with familiar dignity several reports of his passing. This one seems, alas, to be true, but I will wait until DiMaggio confirms it himself.
Though he played in New York, DiMaggio was all of America’s icon, playing the only game that mattered at the time, performing at a level of excellence above nearly all others, save Williams and maybe Stan Musial.
But songwriter Paul Simon did not wonder where Stan and Ted had gone at a time when the nation needed heroes. It would be a better story if that is all there was to it, but Simon has said he just liked the meter better with the name Joe DiMaggio than his own personal Yankee hero, Mickey Mantle. It may not have been what Simon wanted, but still he got it right.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Such a simple and complicated question. He is where he always will be, in center field at Yankee Stadium. It was the rest of us who have moved to meaner and more cynical places.
I talked to DiMaggio only once, sometime in the ’70s, at an autograph-signing show, and I found him to be no better nor worse than any modern ballplayer. He was impatient and barely civil, my conclusion being that it was not to his advantage to humor me.
My problem, not his, was I expected more. I never wrote the piece I had planned, not because DiMaggio would have come off as another surly ex-jock making a buck from his fame, but because I thought he was boring. Again, my problem, not his.
I do remember using one response from him when I asked him what he would say to George Steinbrenner if he were negotiating his salary in today’s market.
“Hello, partner,” DiMaggio said, not smiling.
But I still smile when I remember it.