Lou Gehrig’s Disease: A Correction
On July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig delivered the Gettysburg Address of baseball. ‘Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth’ he intoned into the gulf of Yankee Stadium. Outdoors, in the microphone, and on the radio his pauses for breath explode softly, stitched in echo (‘today-today’, ‘myself-myself’, ‘the luckiest man-iest man’, ‘on the face of the earth-of the earth’).
Gehrig wasn’t Lefty Gomez but he didn’t talk about being good; he talked about being lucky. The New York Baseball Giants sent him a gift; he knew Joe McCarthy, non-anachronistically; his mother-in-law was nice to him and so on. Funny and compact, it’s a potent speech. It’s also delusional. Lou Gehrig was dying and he knew it and there he was, talking about luck.
61,808 were actually there and way more than that claimed attendance. Everyone else knew Gehrig after Gary Cooper got his strong silence on in The Pride Of The Yankees. When the kabuki of American masculinity plays you posthumously, it almost doesn’t matter that he runs the bases backward.
Gehrig’s big records have been contemporarily broken by Derek Jeter and Albert Pujols. Baseball is not superstitious but it’s a little stitious: players hop over lines, shun pitchers throwing no-hitters, swear off sex for the entirety of a winning streak. Okay maybe that last one was only because Tim Robbins is insane.
Gehrig died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,—or as putzes like Christopher Moltisanti love to point out, Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease which is totally ironic. A dark malady may be the general gestalt of Gehrig’s legacy. But it’s not so much ALS; Lou Gehrig’s disease is believing you’re lucky when you’re not.
Signs, signifiers, games of chance, goldrushes, manna from heaven, guns and religion. Americans ad-libbing through executive decisions, popping gin-laced bubblegum, flipping coins to determine who lives or dies. Catastrophic self-doubt is the etiology of Lou Gehrig’s disease. How do you think the term “get lucky” got started? Some moron got a girl he didn’t think he deserved.
Gehrig, in proclaiming himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, overlooked the part where he got sick in the prime time of his life. Ending his remarks he mentioned the “bad break” he’d been given as though it didn’t compromise everthing he just said.
By a curious calculus Gehrig decided he was lucky because he’d got to do a few nice things, not unlucky because he wouldn’t get to do a few more.
In 2002 Jack Whittaker, West Virginian, won the juiciest Powerball pot ever disbursed: 314 million. In 2005 his jelly-bellied deterioration through descending tiers of mishap was preserved by a surreal, singsong piece in Washington Post Magazine: it includes a mountaineer joke about a man who died smiling. Cause of death: lightning strike. Reason for smile: he thought he was being photographed. Whittaker embodied that way too literally. He blew through 45 million dollars the first year, roughed up strip joints, drove his wife away, and buried his granddaughter who overdosed, a casualty of privilege.
Whittaker’s not the only one. Lottery winners who self-destruct are a pop-culture talking point, but nobody talks about them having Lou Gehrig’s disease.
