The details are obscure and cannot be completely exhumed. The Babe himself understandably prefers not to discuss them. But the legend is that back yonder in Baltimore, when he was a boy, the family owned a saloon and that one day, therein, there occurred a tribal brawl and a shooting.
The saloon was near a lumber yard, in a squalid precinct of the town. There, in the murkiness and shadows of great piles of lumber, the rough-grained youngsters of the neighborhood devised increasingly outlandish deviltries; and so, in time, the growing Babe’s incorrigible path led to a Catholic Protectory where, in the hands of good priests of the faith, he underwent sundry repairs.
Such, in part, is the background of that Gargantuan and singularly colorful fellow who has since risen to the golden eminence of baseball’s Home Run King.
It may explain a number of things to psychologists and biologists and other scientific folk who believe that, to a considerable degree, we are tugged this way and that by forces over which we have little control. It may also partly account for the fact that George Herman Ruth is the most picturesque, fascinating, and variable study in Behaviorism in the public eye—for many of the things which he does and has done, judged by the standards applied to common clay, would otherwise be beyond all auditing.
But the reeducation of Babe Ruth was not complete when, passing seventeen, he left St. Mary’s in Baltimore, and went forth into the wide-open spaces of the baseball world. Sophomorically, it had just begun. And now, after a hectic whirl on the treadmill of experience, he is at the high point of his spectacular and scandal-spangled career, and thirty-two years old.
I know this utterly unprecedented fellow intimately. In those dear, distant days of my past, before I degenerated into an editorial writer, I wrote sports and traveled hither and thither about the land with the Babe, helping him with his syndicated newspaper articles and, upon occasion, with more personal matters, generally of a most embarrassing nature. And so far as I am concerned his thousand and one failings are more than offset by his sheer likableness.
One thing and one thing alone Ruth does well, and this he does with supreme distinction. He can hit a baseball harder and farther and higher than any hitherto recorded and observed addict of the horsehide. For this he receives the largest salary ever paid an artisan of the ball fields—$52,000 per annum for an annum which comprises only the fair days of the fair seasons. In addition to this he derives income from other sources, having made close to a million dollars, all told, on baseball, syndicated newspaper articles, the movies, vaudeville, exhibition games after the regular season has ended, and by indorsing ice cream, baseballs, shoes, caps, suspenders, and countless other commodities. But to ladies concerned with bazaars for worthy purposes, to churches campaigning for building funds, to various charities, to sick and crippled children, to the Knights of Columbus (of which he is a member), and other organizations of the kind he lends his name and presence endlessly and gratuitously.
He is strictly a One Idea Man and in all the arts of human relationship has been woefully inept and naïve, for in him the physical dominates. In proof of this, aside from the evidence of known biographical and biological data, phrenophysicians point to the protuberant development of the lower third of his forehead.
There is as much literature in him as there is in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. In this connection it may be appropriate to recall an occurrence in Boston when, as a member of the Red Sox, he was beginning to set himself up in the home-run business and was exciting nation-wide interest in his giant bat.
“Bullet Joe” Bush, then also a member of the Red Sox and a boon companion of the Babe, was something of a clown and practical joker, as well as a pitcher of parts.
“Tarzan,” he said to the Babe while the boys whooped ‘er up under the showers following a game in which the Babe had hit one of his greatest home runs, “Tarzan, you sure did kiss that ol’ apple today—Tarzan.”
The Babe grunted his appreciation from under the shower spray. But Tarzan—what did that mean? Probably the name of some colossal figure in history. Surely Joe intended it for a compliment. The Babe’s suspicion, however, was aroused by Bush’s prankish antics. He investigated, learned that Tarzan had as much hair on his chest as even he, climbed trees, was half man and half ape, and the next day, on arriving at the clubrooms, he chased Bush all over the park with a bat!
Ruth is a bit of a hypochondriac. He complains of minor troubles, such as a bad stomach, eats huge quantities of bicarbonate of soda, and then devours unheard-of quantities of murderous food at astonishingly frequent intervals. By way of dessert he chews tobacco, as almost all ball players do, and then, as a cordial, takes a pinch of snuff.
Music he likes. He has a bearish basso voice and has outdone Ring Lardner in some Pullman riots of close harmony. But he is not quite as reliable as Lardner, for the Babe just naturally will hit some sour notes. Musically, he was born under the sign of a canoe, a moonlit night and a ukulele. He thrives on tear-jerkers and jazz, and often carries a portable victrola with him on the road, giving concerts in baggage rooms of railroad stations while waiting for the Yankee Special to be made up.
He hunts frogs at night with a light attached to the front sight of his rifle and this is his favorite vice; he could easily become the world’s greatest frog hunter if he put his mind to it.
He plays all variations of poker and pinochle, but prefers bridge. And this he plays as he hits a baseball. On the diamond he aims to dynamite the bailout of the lot and so strikes out more often than anybody else. But so compelling is his presence at the bat, so picturesque and showy and deliciously melodramatic his every move and appearance that he is, from the point of the onlooker, a success even when he is a failure. It would appear, then, that he should often get set in bridge. He does.
He is a double-jointed paradox of a fellow and must be viewed as such if one is to understand him. He is good or he is bad. It has been necessary for his employers to have him followed by detectives to protect him from himself as well as from confidence men, blackmailers, racetrack touts and bookmakers, gamblers and scheming young ladies. Seemingly, he was born to broil on the griddle of experience and learn in the fat-pan of adversity. Indeed, until the current baseball season began there was little convincing evidence that he had definitely retained any of his learning.
“I’ve been a babe—and a boob,” he told me some months ago, “and I’m through.” Apparently he is. Last winter he went to his farm at Sudbury, came back to New York to condition himself in a gymnasium, and then, in better physical shape than he had ever known, went South in advance of his teammates to prepare for the season ahead. And until he developed water on the knee recently he was well ahead of the record for home runs he set in 1921, when he drove out fifty-nine of them. Special rules are made for him by the manager of his team because he is a special kind of human being. He is restless and cannot sit around a hotel lobby with his teammates while on the road. If he were required to do this his playing would be affected. This has been proved, for a few years ago, at the direction of his manager, he went to bed early and rose early, and forswore his social, liquid, and epicurean excesses. He subscribed to this program of virtue for exactly three days—during which he failed to make a single hit, to say nothing of a home run.
Virtue of this kind was too much for him. He exploded and went off on an uproar, stayed out all night, went to the ball park with only an hour’s sleep—and then in one game hit two of the longest home runs he had ever achieved. This, perhaps, throws more light on the nature of the man than anything else. He is simply a freak, and a curiously likable one when caught in repose. But until this year he has never been able to free himself entirely from his biological background or his baseball environment and its peculiar and devastating benefits. Aside from predetermined influences he has been the victim of having to be King on and off the field of play. However, he no longer sits on a hot stove like the Christian Scientist in Al J olson’s story and asks, “What’s burning?” The Babe now knows. He, no longer, has a genius for getting into trouble, and, repentant and determined, he is currently smacking that ol’ apple, or onion, or baseball, as well as he did in ’21, his greatest year.
At that time he could not stand prosperity or resist his background or predetermined influences. He spent money as fast as he made it and intermittently found himself immersed in scandal and on the first pages of the newspapers. He lived high, wide, and handsome—and then came the collapse.
He bet as much as $26,000 on a single horse race and, of course, lost. In Cuba he was forced to cancel his passage home because of a matter of $65,000 which he owed bookmakers. He who had made almost a quarter of a million dollars in the preceding nine months was—broke!
But out of the orgy of spending and earning, his wife, unknown to him, had, pin-money fashion, swept up the dust of a greater sum of money than he had ever known before; and without a word she sat down, wrote a check for $65,000, resisting even tears.
Not many women have suffered more for their erring husbands than Helen Ruth has for hers. Her “Hon,” as she calls him, has been a very bad boy. But by the sheer force of her loyalty and courage she is finally on the threshold of a consoling and compensating triumph.
Two years ago, with Christy Walsh, who syndicates the Babe’s newspaper articles, she arranged for a $100,000 paid-up insurance policy which will provide adequately for them and their five-year-old daughter when his big bat is stilled forever. On her own, unknown even to the Babe, out of the wreckage of his earnings, she saved enough to buy a few apartment houses in Boston. The Babe did not know this until recently.
There is no intention here to dress him in the lace of a sentimentalist. The fact simply is that he is a boy, alternately bad and good—and will, I dare say, never grow up altogether. Could anyone but a boy, riding a runaway impulse, do what he did that time, when, weary of a big $10,000 car he had had built to order, he went in to look at another, almost equally expensive, but readymade? A priest who had been specially kind to him in his days at the Catholic Protectory in Baltimore had come to town and was with him. The Babe, in all innocence, asked the priest what he thought of the car which they had been inspecting. The priest approved enthusiastically and the Babe wrote out a check. Then, stirred by the priest’s enthusiasm, his impulsive mechanism sparked. He took the salesman aside and directed that the car be delivered not to him but to the priest!
Ruth is also something of a stoic. I have seen him in all kinds of difficulty and he has remained unperturbed. A few years ago it was his wont to scramble up into the stands to annihilate any fan who tormented him for striking out. Umpires were not safe from his wrath. The strain of being always expected to hit home runs was too much. The same burden is still on his broad back and great shoulders, but baseball’s bad boy is now a good boy and next year, as a reward for his reform and fine work this year, he will receive a salary of $75,000—an increase of $23,000 over his present annual stipend. ♦
