July 4th will mark the 70th anniversary of perhaps baseball’s most famous moment. (And maybe the most famous speech in sports history -- is “Win one for the Gipper” close?) Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” farewell to roughly 60,000 at Yankee Stadium took place on July 4, 1939. Can any athlete ever again be as beloved as The Iron Horse was during his 277-word farewell? Is it possible? If Gehrig had to deal with the 2009 world back in 1939, would he have been looked at the same way when he stepped up to the microphone at Yankee Stadium?

 

How could he? Can you imagine one of the three or four best hitters of all time going through what Gehrig went through, but having it happen today? It would be disgusting, 50 times worse than Jade Goody. You’d have TMZ parked in the Mayo Clinic. Some guy who was teammates for an hour and a half with Gehrig 15 years ago would come out with a scandal-filled book (yup, my money would be on Wally Pipp, too). And yes, you’d hear the whispers. “Well, his power numbers really spiked in 1927. How does someone go from 16 homers to 47?” It would never end. Probably some girl he dated as a freshman at Columbia would wind up as “The Bachelorette.” And all because a guy could hit a baseball.

 

(How great Gehrig was as a hitter? Well, there have been 46 150-RBI seasons in baseball history. Gehrig has seven of those, as well as three of the Top 6 all time totals. He’s third -- behind Ruth and Ted Williams -- in both career slugging and OPS. As an all-around hitter he may not have an equal. Eighteen players in history have five seasons with at least 200 hits. Those 18 guys have combined for seven 40-homer seasons. And five of those belong to Gehrig.)

 

You can argue that the media loves to build these guys up and then chop them down. I’ll buy that to a degree, I guess. Here’s a list of just some of the people that at one time or another were basically raised to “role model” status by the mainstream media:

 

Marion Jones

Dwight Gooden

Steve Garvey

Bruce Jenner (I’m not even sure he’s done anything wrong, but as of last Thursday night he is now the living male celebrity with the most bizarre physical transformation over the last 30 years.)

Dan Jansen

A-Rod

Sosa and McGwire

O.J.

Roger Clemens

Pete Rose

Kirby Puckett 

 

And it’s happening still. Michael Phelps has had a tough run since Beijing, right? Now, should he have been acting like he was doing research for a role in the 2010 remake of “Dazed and Confused”? Of course not. But why was it such a huge story? Because he won a million gold medals, or because he was the world’s biggest TV star for a couple of weeks last summer? 

 

I do wonder if the media, for all the heat they take about being cynical and bitter, down deep really want to believe. Was there somehow a comfort in thinking that Steve Garvey was more than just someone who could get a hit three times out of ten? I’m 34 years old and am fully aware that the ability to perform at the highest level in a sport has very little to do with a person’s character. I think most everyone feels that way today. But I'm not sure that was the case in Gehrig's time, or Mantle's or even with Yaz. So what happened?

 

In the last 40 years there have been four key factors that have led to the demystification of the American athlete. (Remember, until about 1965 or so the media protected the athlete’s private life.)

 

(1) Ball Four (Of course. Opened a lot of eyes. You mean Mickey Mantle drank? Roger Maris was surly and wouldn’t run out ground balls? Managers may not know everything? Greenies? Most of America dismissed the book as hippie crapola when it released in 1970 but it remains the best sports book ever written. What continues to amaze me is that there have been probably 10,000 athlete autobiographies written since and not one has approached the candor and intelligence of Bouton’s work. Most of today’s books might as well have been written pre-Ball Four. No guts at all. Very strange.) 

 

(2) Watergate (Reporters as stars. If a President can be brought down, maybe writing that Billy and Reggie won’t be recording a duet of “You Decorated My Life” anytime soon won’t mean the end of civilization.)

 

(3) The O.J. Trial (The lesson for the fans here was: We really don’t know anything about these people. Yeah, Detective Nordberg and the guy in the Hertz ad were not around in Brentwood on June 12, 1994, but it seems pretty likely that the man who beat Nicole Brown Simpson in 1989 was guilty of double murder -- only if you believe that pesky DNA, which puts the odds of anyone other than O.J. committing the crimes at around 170 million to 1. O.J.’s punishment for his 1989 guilty plea? 120 hours of community service. And he kept his job at NBC sports -- which would never happen today. Could this have less to do with Lou Gehrig, by the way?)

 

(4) The Internet (The final nail in the coffin. Don’t show up drunk at a bar. Don’t text. Do not, do not, do not suggest that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dying on the same day was worse than 9/11. The Internet: Where we finally learned that they are just like us.)

 

Gehrig played an integral role, in my opinion, in what was the last night of pure sports worship (and by “pure” I’m not implying that all the players in the game were clean, just that the fans and media both bought in 100 percent). Cal Ripken breaking the consecutive games streak was a celebration; really the final night of innocence before The Steroid Era invaded and the Internet was a part of our everyday life. To the public Ripken was a worthy successor to Gehrig -- stoic, workmanlike, humble, friendly to the fans, only played for one team in his career, a family man, all the good stuff that dads can tell their sons. Whether anyone believed all that to be true about Ripken was immaterial. They believed the idea of it was possible. 

 

And this somehow leads us back to Gehrig. In the 68 years since his death, we’ve learned a great deal about the players of his generation, as time away from the game allowed the players and media from that era to open up. We’ve learned that some players from that time were fall down drunks, cheaters, gamblers (the Black Sox were not alone), racists (KKK members) and that’s just from the non-Ty Cobb division. So what eye-opening revelations were made involving Gehrig?

 

Well, none, actually. I guess that’s not true, it seems that he may have been too close to his parents (the reason for the Ruth/Gehrig decade-long feud was that Lou took his mom’s side in an argument with Babe’s wife over how Claire Ruth dressed her daughter. I’m serious.) That’s it. Gehrig simply played the game every day as just about as well as it could be played. He loved his wife and his parents and seemed to treat all his teammates with respect, as an equal. And when a horrible (and still, at the time, virtually unknown) disease took away his body, he bravely fought it for as long as he could, giving a name and a face to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. 

 

I’m not sure even TMZ could find a way to bring that down.