Batting a thousand at being a man: Lou Gehrig always stepped up to the plate to meet whatever life pitched his way--even his own impending death--with the integrity, humility, and equanimity of a real man.

I would not have traded two minutes of the joy and the grief with that man for two decades of anything with another.

--Eleanor Gehrig

No man is a hero to his wife. The aphorism is rooted in the seventeenth-century proverb, "No man is a hero to his valet," from Mademoiselle A. M. Bigot de Cornuel, an observation that, on meeting our heroes, we find they have feet of clay. Like us, they put their pants on one leg at a time.

But maybe that wasn't the case with Lou Gehrig, the man they called "Gibraltar in Cleats," mythic giant of the New York Yankees in the era of Ruth and Pipp and McCarthy and Lazzeri. If any twentieth-century athlete qualifies as a man among men, it's Gehrig, the polar opposite of the modern athlete, represented in either the criminal, the crybaby, or the steroidally fortified multimillionaire. "He was beautiful," Eleanor Gehrig wrote. "Six feet tall, 205 pounds, sturdy as a rock and innocent as a waif."

The innocent waif was born June 19, 1903, Heinrich Ludwig Gehrig, into a rapidly changing world. Skyscrapers rose to the heavens in New York City. Henry Ford began the Ford Motor Company. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize. Edwin S. Porter produced The Great Train Robbery. Thomas Hunt Morgan discovered chromosomes on genes, and the Wright Brothers flew. Other famous Americans born that year? Clare Boothe Luce, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope. In England, George Orwell.

Gehrig's two sisters and a brother died before they reached the age of two. Lou's mother believed baseball was a "waste of time" that would "never get you anywhere," a "game for bummers." If you believe the film Pride of the Yankees, she wanted him to follow in the steps of his Uncle Otto, an engineer. Lou attended Columbia University on a football scholarship to study engineering, but he made his mark on the baseball diamond. It wasn't long before the Yankees came knocking, and in 1925, after a few years in the minors, Gehrig donned number 4. "Larrupin' Lou" batted fourth to Babe Ruth's third.

His statistics are legendary. He posted a lifetime .340 batting average and blasted 493 home runs. His batting average in the World Series was .361, with his best against Chicago in 1932, .529. Most impressive of all, he played 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood until Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles broke it on September 6, 1995. Gehrig played through broken fingers, sprained ankles, bruises, contusions, and just about every other imaginable ache and pain. X-rays showed seventeen broken or fractured bones in his hands, particularly the glove hand, many of which healed without the intervention of a doctor. He was one tough German.

All these facts about Gehrig add to his luster; they burnish his image as the kind of hero men can only dream of emulating. But it wasn't Gehrig's extraordinary athleticism that accounts for his inclusion here, nor is it why Gehrig is held in mythic regard. Rather, it was Gehrig's determined face while handling the adversity of a terminal disease.

Gehrig played ball for nearly fourteen years without a break, but in the season of 1938, his muscles began to fail. In Pride of the Yankees, it begins with a crick in his shoulder. Of course, he just shook it off. Just another day at the ballpark. But it was more than that.

The Iron Horse deteriorated rapidly. His teammates didn't know why, but they saw what was happening to this incredible specimen of manhood. His batting average plummeted 56 points to .295. A mystified Joe DiMaggio watched Gehrig miss nineteen straight cuts in batting practice. One afternoon he fell while trying to put on his pants in the clubhouse. Another time, he fell off a bench in the clubhouse when he got up to look out the window. Attending a pro-golf tournament in Florida, friends noticed he didn't wear cleats to walk in the grass as he usually would, but tennis shoes. He had good reason: he couldn't pick up his feet, which slowed his base running. Nor could he move his hands fast enough to catch balls fired across the diamond to him at first base. In the ultimate affront to a hitter of Gehrig's clout, a batter whose average hadn't dropped below .300 since 1925, Lefty Grove of the Boston Red Sox walked Joe DiMaggio so he could face the ailing first baseman. Gehrig was an easy out.

At home, Eleanor watched the decay, wondering what was happening to her Luke. Just a slump at the plate, they said. He just needs a little rest, everyone agreed. He dropped kitchen china inexplicably. He fell frequently when he and Eleanor went ice-skating, a favorite pastime. This, she asked herself, is a slump? Finally, on May 2, 1939, he took himself out of the lineup. A few weeks later, Eleanor scheduled an appointment at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Harold Habein knew what was wrong as soon as Gehrig inched into his office. "When [he] entered my office," the doctor said, "and I saw the shuffling gait, and his overall expression, then shook his hand, I knew." The Iron Man had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, after that, forever known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He was thirty-six.

The disease is a death sentence, although Lou didn't know right away. He died on June 2, 1941, sixteen years to the day he replaced Wally Pipp at first base.

A Modern Ballplayer

But before describing how Gehrig handled his tragic destiny, listen to another story about a modern ballplayer and how he handled what anyone would consider a disappointment, although certainly no colossal tragedy worthy of the rebarbative display to which the public was subjected.

The player's name is unimportant; it serves no purpose to ridicule the man. Let's just say he was, in his own mind, a player of Gehrig's caliber. He expected induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Such was his conceit that he invited reporters to his home the day he knew the telephone call would come. They gathered in his kitchen, expecting, as did he, word of his elevation to baseball's Valhalla. But the news from Cooperstown wasn't what he expected, and he was not among the chosen few. Understandably, he was disappointed, as any good ball player would be. But he wasn't just disappointed. He was angry, feeling unjustly deprived of something he so richly deserved. What followed was a display of puerile histrionics: a foot-stomping, childish tantrum.

The New York Times reported: "[He] described how his wife ... planned a surprise party for him and instead wept when they discovered he had not been elected. That caused [him] to cry, too. There were reporters [there] poised to witness a celebratory scene as he was finally honored as one of baseball's elite players. But it did not occur and tears flowed."

"He admitted to being devastated," the Times continued, "because he felt the expectation of being elected more than ever this year. He spoke about how it would torment him if his [aging father] did not live to see him enshrined." In complaining about the snub from baseball's pantheon of heroes, the player said, "I'd like to ask any of the sportswriters did any of them ever get behind the plate and catch for nine innings?"

Sitting behind a plate for nine innings? How about a death sentence before age forty? "Devastated?" You're "devastated" when your nine-year-old boy gets cancer. You're "devastated" when a drunk driver kills your daughter. But not when the Hall of Fame says it isn't your turn. What would Gehrig have said? Probably something like this: "Well, boys, you can't win 'em all. Let's toast the guys who made it. They were better men than me."

Since inducted at Cooperstown, the player is an example of modern American manhood, particularly the modern athlete, and we can thank the news media for depicting the specimen in all its glory. He is a perfect example of what we don't want our sons to be: conceited, arrogant, and spiteful, believing himself more deserving than someone else. Jesus Christ said the first will be last, and the last will be first. This fellow did not agree. One can only imagine how he would have handled the news Gehrig received in the flower of his manhood.

A Good Guy, a Great Man

Now, consider a few things about Gehrig, and you'll know he handled what most would say is a cosmic injustice and, in an unguarded moment, perhaps a divine injustice.

As with modern athletes, in the old days, an athlete's talents and popularity were measured in commercial endorsements. Lou endorsed a breakfast cereal called Huskies, and appearing on Robert Ripley's Believe or Not radio program, he was supposed to plug the product. "Well, Lou, what helps you hit all those home runs?" Ripley asked.

"A heaping bowlful of Wheaties?" Lou replied. Huh? Wheaties? Lou returned the thousand dollars he was paid to pitch Huskies, then he returned to the show and plugged the cereal correctly.

"Lou," biographer Richard Bak wrote, "believed in doing the right thing." He invested all of his life savings for his parents after he married Eleanor and handed them the deed to a new house and new car.

And we know he was tough. He played through those seventeen broken bones for more than a decade, including a thumb and toe, as well as back spasms, that would have dropped a less resilient man. He once played a game the day after a pitcher beaned him unconscious. Next day, he wore an oversized cap to accommodate the grapefruit on his noggin. He smashed three triples.

It wasn't easy for Gehrig to pull himself out of the lineup, but when he did, no one had to ask. He told manager Joe McCarthy: "For the good of the team, Joe. Nobody has to tell me how bad I've been and how much of a drawback I've been to the club.... [T]he time has come for me to quit." By all accounts, Gehrig was resolute and valiant. When his batting average dropped, he took a three-thousand-dollar pay cut without complaint. He simply worked all the harder to recover his prowess at the plate. He struggled mightily against the unknown. One account has Gehrig eating grass to conquer the creeping paralysis. Eleanor dutifully pulled it from the ground to make some sort of soup. He thought the vitamins would cure his disease. They didn't.

Gehrig Faces Death

On July 4, 1939, Gehrig delivered the most famous oration ever by an American athlete. Such was its emotive puissance it is known as baseball's Gettysburg Address. It was Lou Gehrig Day at Yankee Stadium, and all his teammates, current and former, were there to honor him. That included the Babe, with whom he hadn't spoken in years because Gehrig's mother (or wife, in some accounts) made an unflattering remark about the accouterments of Ruth's daughter. Sid Mercer, a veteran sportswriter who served as master of ceremonies, told the sixty thousand adoring fans that Gehrig was too moved to speak. The crowd wanted none of it. "We want Gehrig!" they roared. "We want Gehrig!" And Gehrig went to the microphone:

   Fans, for the past two weeks you
   have been reading about a bad break
   I got. Yet today, I consider myself the
   luckiest man on the face of the earth.
   I have been in ballparks for seventeen
   years and I have never received anything
   but kindness and encouragement
   from you fans.

Gehrig continued talking, but not about himself and his stellar career. Rather, he spoke about his teammates and pals and what they meant to him. And then he spoke about the men he played against, and how grateful he was that they sent him a gift. "That's something," he said. "Sure, I'm lucky."

That doesn't sound anything like the catcher who assembled sportswriters at his home to get the news about his induction into the Hall of Fame, but then hear ing the bad news that he wasn't ready for Cooperstown, threw a tearful tantrum.

Gehrig's humility is one of the hallmarks of genuine masculinity. Ever humble, even in his final appearance on the baseball diamond where he was a champion, he didn't speak of himself or his awful fate. Rather, he told the assembled throng that he was lucky, then expressed his admiration for others, diverting the spotlight to them. He praised his mom and dad. He praised his loving wife. He even praised his adoring fans. He spoke about everyone but himself, and when he did speak of himself, it was only in the context of others: how lucky he was to have known them and for them to love him. Was he afraid? Undoubtedly. Eddie Rickenbacker said that courage is conquering fear, not the absence of it. Gehrig picked up the hand he was dealt and played it like a man.

Aside from showing us how a real man faces death, Gehrig was no criminal, as are so many of today's athletes. He was never convicted of a crime, nor ever accused of one. He never spit on an umpire or throttled his coach. He was no multimillion-dollar crybaby. Today, such "men" seem to be the rule, not the exception. Gehrig, a sportswriter once wrote, was "unspoiled, without the remotest vestige of ego, vanity or conceit."

Likening him to the public image of the man who played him in Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper, another writer called him "a figure of unimpeachable integrity, massive and incorruptible, a hero. Today, both are seen as paradigms of manly virtue. Decent and God-fearing, yet strongly charismatic and powerful." The difference between the two, however, was that Gehrig genuinely embodied those traits.

Gehrig would be out of place in modern sports. It seems as if newspapers carry a daily report of millionaire athletes--particularly the rotten, criminal timber of the NBA and the NFL--landing in jail. Few if any modern athletes are "innocent" or "massive and incorruptible" or "unimpeachable" or "unspoiled, without the remotest vestige of ego, vanity or conceit." Gehrig was.

One of Gehrig's teammates, shortstop Sam Jones, paid the Iron Man the highest compliment any man could hope to receive: "Lou was the kind of boy that if you had a son, he's the kind of person you'd like your son to be."

Any son's father knows what kind of tribute that is, the kind of tribute few modern athletes deserve. It says, in so many words, there goes a real man.

RELATED ARTICLE: A farewell to his fans.

Following is the text of Lou Gehrig's July 4, 1939, farewell speech at Yankee Stadium.

Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career to associate with them for even one day?

Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert--also the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow--to have spent the next nine years with that wonderful little fellow Miller Huggins--then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology--the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy!

Sure, I'm lucky. 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.

When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles against her own daughter, that's something. When you have a father and 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 a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I might have had a tough break but I have an awful lot to live for?

R. Cart Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, to be published by Cumberland House an September 1. The text of this article, printed here with permission, is chapter six in the book.