“Lou Gehrig”

“Lou Gehrig”

Lou Gehrig is one of the most iconic ballplayers to ever wear a uniform. His name sounds larger than life, just like most of those early Yankees heroes.

Babe Ruth. Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle. Lou Gehrig.

These aren’t people — they’re legends. And it feels almost like they were legends from birth, fundamentally different from regular people like us not just in their extraordinary abilities, but in their audacity to be so great.

Lou Gehrig took over for Wally Pipp at first base for the New York Yankees on June 2, 1925, and from then on, he played in every single game for the remaining 14 years of his career — 2,130 consecutive games — never taking a day off to rest, to heal, to give his mind a break, to show even a glimpse of weakness. Examinations late in his life showed that he had played through numerous untreated broken bones and countless concussions over the years.

Through it all, he was a hitter almost beyond compare. Gehrig’s was a career of relentless greatness.

Only a terminal diagnosis finally caused him to falter. Gehrig had a down year inn 1938 by his standards, though a great one by mortal measure.

“I was tired mid-season,” he said in the fall of ‘38. “I don't know why, but I just couldn't get going again.”

By the start of the 1939 season, Gehrig had completely and mysteriously lost his strength. He couldn’t hit. He could hardly run the bases and struggled to make routine plays in the field. It was as if overnight the most unbreakable player in the game had become a ghost.

Gehrig took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939, after a month of inexplicable futility, ending his streak of invincibility. He never played a big league game again.

On June 19 of that same year — his 36th birthday — Lou was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a fatal disease in which the body breaks down over a period of a couple short years.

Just a few short weeks after receiving his terminal diagnosis, Gehrig appeared at Yankee Stadium to be honored in a special ceremony between games of an Independence Day doubleheader. Reluctantly, nervously, nobly, he stood and gave a brief and unforgettable speech.

He must have been terrified. Wracked with physical and emotional anguish unlike I ever hope to know. But that suffering belonged to Lou Gehrig the man, and very few knew Lou Gehrig the man. The 60,000-plus in attendance each adored Lou Gehrig the Legend, and Lou played his part, reassuring the many that no weight was too great for the Iron Horse to bear. He saw his tragically truncated life as a bad break, he said, and considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. Then he bowed his head and fought back tears.

Perhaps he was telling the truth. I wonder if he’d have traded his 37 years as Lou Gehrig for a lifetime as anyone else.

He died on June 2, 1941 — 17 days before his 38th birthday, and 16 years to the day after he began his famous consecutive-games streak.

Can you imagine wrestling with such an unbearable diagnosis in such a public way? How did he maintain such a brave face while preparing to face the unknown at such a young age? Maybe Lou Gehrig the man and Lou Gehrig the Legend are really one and the same, but in his darkest nights, I bet he had some strange and vidid dreams. I bet he wrestled with a lot of unanswerable questions. That’s what this song is about.

“Lou Gehrig” features Kelly Erb on violin, and it was produced and recorded by Jeff Woollen at Raven Cries Recording Studio. The cover art is Gehrig’s passport photo, taken in 1931.