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Gehrig provides lesson in courage

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By MARTIN FENNELLY | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 3, 2009

He thought he was lucky.

Seventy years ago Saturday, on a Fourth of July at Yankee Stadium, a quiet Yankees first baseman named Lou Gehrig, an Iron Horse facing a death sentence, stood before microphones and spoke simple words.

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

It remains sports' Gettysburg Address.

At all major-league ballgames Saturday, players, coaches and umpires will wear patches honoring Gehrig and there will be on-field ceremonies to help raise awareness and funds to battle amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - Lou Gehrig's Disease. There is still no cure.

"I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans."

He's just newsreel to most of us, or Gary Cooper in "Pride of the Yankees." But Lou Gehrig and his words echo even today. They speak to what we long for in sports and beyond - dignity, honesty, integrity, humility and grace.

I'm thinking of lying steroids users, those hopeless cheats. I'm thinking of the T.O.s who shout it out ... look at me, look at me. I'm thinking of our obsession with a pop icon and whack job who lived on the edge of reason and sometimes the law.

Then I think of Lou Gehrig.

"When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something."

It's amazing that a career .340 hitter who averaged an impossible 147 RBIs a season is more remembered for simply going to work every day, but that was Lou Gehrig.

He played with a broken thumb, a broken toe, a bad back. When doctors X-rayed him late in his career, they found 17 different fractures that must have healed while he was playing - 2,130 consecutive games, a mark that stood like Gibraltar until Cal Ripken Jr. came along.

Gehrig did what he did in the shadow of the men who batted in front of him on great Yankees lineups - Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio.

But the words echo. A few months after he had to retire, his body being slowly strangled by ALS, there was Lou Gehrig on the Fourth of July 1939, on "Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day," stepping to those microphones. There were few dry eyes at Yankee Stadium, and Gehrig's weren't among them. At first he could not speak. And then he did.

"When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been your tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know."

Gehrig died two years later, on June 2, 1941. He was only 37.

He wasn't the last of his kind. I'm thinking of the quiet courage of a Heisman winner named Ernie Davis as he battled leukemia. I'm thinking of Arthur Ashe's days of grace.

I'm thinking about ALS patients everywhere. It's nearly the Fourth of July. I'm thinking about soldiers who've fallen. I'm thinking of men and women back from the war, trying to walk on new legs, never complaining, with their families behind them.

I'm thinking of small boys and girls with terrible illnesses, fighting fights they cannot win, and still those smiles on their faces, a light that could show us the way if we stopped to watch.

I'm thinking of courage and human dignity.

It's hard to put it into words.

A guy named Gehrig did it 70 years ago.

"So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you."

Happy Fourth, Iron Horse.

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