The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  His was another success story of the twenties. He now wrote articles for national publications. He was as famous as some of his clients. He had taken their Wall Street advice, investing well in the stock market and expanding still more, and he now owned a second home in the country. The rich people loved him. He not only had programs for them to follow, he had the charm and imagination to make the programs work.

  “The strangest morning assignment I ever had was with Helen Clay Frick in 1919,” Artie reported. “She was supposed to be the richest bachelor girl in the world. Her doctor had a theory that she should be made to do what she liked least. That was boxing; so I was sent up to the famous Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue to box with her. She put on gloves, but she had no interest in it. It was silly foolishness, she said.”

  The second morning, Artie appeared again with gloves. Again, there was no interest. Artie had a badly chapped lip, though, and in the sparring Miss Frick gave him a “little tap” and the lip began to bleed. Miss Frick was startled.

  “What did that?” she asked.

  “You did it,” Artie said. “That was a terrible sock you gave me. Go easy.”

  A good wink was the only punctuation mark Artie needed for the story. Ms. Frick became a boxing fan and put on seven needed pounds. Artie moved along to the next hard case.

  The Babe had found the right man.

  “About the middle of December, 1925, Babe Ruth came into my gymnasium in New York City a physical wreck,” Artie McGovern reported in Collier’s magazine. “He weighed 254 pounds. His blood pressure was low and his pulse was high. He was as near to being a total loss as any patient I have ever had under my care. He had lived a life of excesses and was suffering the inevitable consequences. His stomach had gone back on him completely. His eyes had been affected. The slightest exertion left him short of breath. His muscles were soft and flabby.”

  The description might have been a bit overdramatic—a gruesome “before” to set against a wondrous “after” for potential customers—but there obviously was work to be done. Artie preached self-denial, a concept that obviously was new to the adult Babe. The adult Babe listened.

  His new days began early with the Artie McGovern wake-up service. A set of exercises was done right in the bed, leg lifts and crunches and movements as simple as holding each end of the pillow and extending the arms out and bringing them back again and again. The exercises were followed by a brisk walk, which was followed by a massage, shower, and bath. All of this before breakfast.

  Diet was important. Artie cut out red meat and sweets. No medicines were allowed because he wanted the Babe’s body to do its own work. No snack foods. Breakfast featured poached eggs and one slice of toast. Lunch was a salad. The dinner entrée was lamb or chicken, served with two vegetables and another salad. No liquid was served with any meal because Artie wanted the Babe to chew his food regularly, not wash it down. Cold water was taken out of the diet because Artie felt it disturbed the stomach. Hot water, however, was served throughout the day—two glasses after most exercises and most meals—because Artie thought hot water cleansed the body. Constipation was another of Artie’s great worries. The Babe was soon awash in hot water.

  The exercises at the gym varied. Artie concentrated on muscles that weren’t used for baseball. The baseball muscles were fine, being used regularly. Artie worked on strengthening the abdominal and hip muscles, feeling they weren’t strong enough to support the weight that the Babe somehow could add simply by walking past a table of food. Artie wanted a better posture, a better silhouette. The other concentration was the legs. Artie wanted the Babe’s thin legs also to help carry around that bulky torso.

  In publicity pictures, the famous client was shown riding the stationary bike, rowing on the rowing machine, sitting in a sweatbox with a pained expression, sparring with Artie, both of them wearing huge boxing gloves. In the background, small weights and Indian clubs were hung on the gymnasium wall. A medicine ball was on the floor. The Babe presumably used all of the apparatus.

  McGovern was surprised at how determined, how competitive Ruth soon became. Every day seemed to bring changes. The man who was introduced to handball and bushed after just one game now was playing five and six games in a row and asking for more. Artie would have to tell him to take a break.

  “At the beginning the Babe was quite sluggish and went to his work in a dull way,” Artie said. “Now he is more alert and keen—has more snap and pep; he kids and jokes with the boys, where as previously he had very little to say.”

  The Babe publicly laid out his goals for the 1926 season in the New York Graphic on January 2. They were listed as his New Year’s resolutions:

  To beat his world’s record of 59 home runs made in 1921. To observe strictly the training rules laid down by the Yankees. To hold his temper. To be obedient. To be thrifty—no more extravagance. To take part in every one of the 154 games on the schedule. To watch his diet carefully. To conserve his health. To do his share in bringing another pennant to New York.

  The newspapers were filled with questions about the great rehabilitation work that was taking place at McGovern’s gym. Was this a publicity push for the Babe? Was this just another halfhearted, half-baked attempt to keep everyone quiet? Paul Gallico appeared at the gym to check on Ruth’s conditioning. He also was surprised. He played handball with the Babe.

  “Ruth plays a handball the way he does a fly ball against a concrete wall,” Gallico wrote.

  Get the ball first and worry about the wall afterward. He is amazingly fast on his feet. Baseball fans realize that for a big man he is speedy, but not until you get him inside a small enclosed court do you realize how he carries those 220 pounds about. He gets his hands on shots he had no business making. I slammed one ball past him when he was at mid-court and he chased the thing back and by the time he got to the rear wall he was right with it. True, he slammed head first into the wall so that the building shook, but what of it? He made the shot. And that seems to be all that counts when the Babe is playing.

  A gag picture from the gym showed the famous client tooting on the saxophone. Paul Whiteman, a heavy man known as “the King of Jazz,” was on one side, sticking his fingers in his ears and making a face. John Philip Sousa, in shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, looking as if he had been rousted out of bed in a daze by a house fire, was on the other side. There is no record of the conversation, but Artie McGovern did have stories about all three men.

  “Paul Whiteman was a surprise,” McGovern said. “Most people think he’s just a fat man. They don’t know he used to be an intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champ. Fast as lightning on his feet. He can beat Babe Ruth at handball.

  “John Philip Sousa is a grand old man. In fine shape. When he came to me a couple of years ago, he couldn’t lift his left hand to his head. He had conducted his band with his right hand, holding the left across his chest, for so many years the muscles of the left side lost their function. He had to take a slow, painful, patient set of exercises, but he went through with it.”

  The Babe was the story of the day. He wasn’t with the program long at the gym—six weeks total—but the slide was stopped. He lost 44 pounds. His waistline was reduced by eight and three-quarters inches. (He now had a 40-inch waist.) His blood pressure went up from 107 to 128. His pulse rate went down from 92 to 78. In the six weeks, he stopped his body’s sad decline and not only brought it back to what it once was but made it better. He was now the mature athlete hitting his prime.

  The slide was done. Wait and see. He would spend time with Artie McGovern every winter for the rest of his playing career. He had discovered—or perhaps had been pushed by Ed Barrow or Christy Walsh or even Claire Hodgson to discover—a new approach to baseball training. To use a term that would not arrive until years later, he had a personal trainer.

  Ballplayers of this time didn’t go to gyms and work out under the direction of fitness specialists. They didn’t work on specific muscle groups that might be a concern. Ballplaye
rs mostly went home to their farms and planted their crops or raised their cattle. Ballplayers found off-season jobs. They needed the money. They needed the start toward second careers after their baseball lives were done. Ruth, because of his situation, because of the money he made, was one of the few ballplayers who could devote this extra time to preparing to play the game. It was the same situation the wealthy boxing champion traditionally enjoyed compared to the struggling challengers he would face. He was the full-time athlete, while the competition had to work a second job to survive. The champion had the advantage.

  The caricature of the overweight fat man would remain, especially as Ruth grew older with an older man’s body, the weight harder to lose with each succeeding year, but the truth was that he had rediscovered the athlete at his core, the secret of his performance. His appearances always deceived. He was a big man with an oddly shaped body, naturally thick in the middle, but with slender legs and small ankles and wrists that gave him so much whip, torque, when he swung a bat. He had the body of a Thoroughbred racehorse.

  He would not exactly become a leader of temperance and fitness movements, but he also would never squander his abilities the way he had during the 1925 season. He would listen. In his own way, he would listen. He was not a fat pig.

  “Babe Ruth has to be kidded into everything,” Artie McGovern would say in later years. “If you suggest a thing, he’s against it. If I told him to lay off sweets and pastry, he’d go out and eat a half-dozen pies à la mode. So I don’t say anything. I look sad.

  “‘What’s the trouble Artie?’ says the Babe.

  “‘A good friend of mine died last night, Babe. Bill Brown. Diabetes.’

  “‘What’s diabetes?’ says the Babe.

  “‘Well, Bill Brown was a great big fellow. Always ate a lot of sweets and pastries. Gave him diabetes.’

  “The Babe doesn’t say anything, but he begins to go light on the pie à la mode.”

  Before he left for spring training, the new and improved Bambino showed up at the Yankees’ office at 42nd Street for a day and asked assorted staffers to punch him in the stomach. He also appeared at the third annual New York baseball writers’ dinner at the Hotel Commodore, an evening of sketches and laughs. He and Artie contributed to the fun when they became involved in a loud, comic argument about whether or not the Babe should have dessert and wound up sparring. One of the sketches also was devoted to the Babe. The title was “If the Babe Was the Manager.” He was portrayed making out the lineup card in the hotel lobby at three in the morning after returning from a night on the town. After much debate about the perfect nine to face the Cleveland Indians, he was told that the opponent was the St. Louis Browns. It was funny stuff.

  He arrived in St. Petersburg on the morning of February 5, wearing a now-unneeded camel’s hair overcoat and muffler, Marshall Hunt in tow. A writer remarked that he looked very good and maybe had found the nearby Fountain of Youth.

  “No,” the Babe replied, “I found Art McGovern’s gym.”

  “I used to eat ten meals a day,” he added. “Every time I saw a frankfurter stand or a soda shop I had to stop. The trouble was I knew nothing about how to eat. A few months in the hospital and a few more in the gymnasium have taught me something.”

  His workout plan now was to play 36 holes of golf per day. He and Hunt went straight from the train to the Jungle Club to take care of the first 18 holes on the schedule. Hunt reported that the Babe’s golf game needed some work. The big man—well, the not-as-big-as-he-was-before big man—shot an even 100.

  “The orthodox construction of the modern golf course was a disastrous handicap to the Babe’s style of play today,” Hunt wrote. “Had the rough been directly in front of the tees and the fairway on both sides of the rough, Mr. Ruth assuredly would have had a much more satisfactory score. Yet, under a ripe Florida sun Ruth enjoyed a good workout, contracted a handsome case of sunburn and announced that his gross leakage through the hide was entirely gratifying.”

  For the next two weeks, golfing partners were amazed most at what Ruth had—or didn’t have—for lunch between rounds. He would order a dish of ice cream. Or he would order tea and toast. End of order. This was the Babe? Where were the fat steaks and the Appalachian mounds of potatoes? He went deep-sea fishing on some days, once with a cigar-smoking Congregational minister. A minister? He returned for more golf.

  When official workouts for the 1926 season began, he was tanned and healthy. He affected a new look with a rubber shirt that made him sweat more and a white eyeshade that soon had him compared to tennis player Helen Wills. He was more than friendly with Miller Huggins and filled with optimism. Everybody noticed the change that had arrived. The Babe was a professional athlete again—or perhaps for the first time—and ready for work.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  H ELP HAD ARRIVED without much notice during the 1925 season. Who sees a pinch hitter in the eighth inning of a 5–3 loss to the Washington Senators on June 1 when the King of Swat has returned from his sickbed? As every eye watched and each pencil recorded the slightest furrow in the brow of the wobbly Bambino, the fluctuations of labored breath after labored breath, a 21-year-old rookie went to the plate and hit for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger. He flied gently to left, and truth be told, even the Bam himself, pulled from the game in the sixth, back in the clubhouse, missed the first of 2,130 games Ludwig Heinrich Gehrig would play in succession for the New York Yankees.

  Who knew?

  He was a big kid, this Lou Gehrig, raw in the field, shy in personality. He had been around the scene for a little bit, a local phenomenon signed off the campus of Columbia University. He was young enough to have developed his approach to hitting in the glow of the Babe’s heroics, one of the first of a first generation of free-swinging imitators, kids who wanted to hit the ball far as much as they wanted to hit it often.

  In June 1923, shortly after scout Paul Krichell convinced him with a $1,500 bonus to quit college, he went to the newly opened Yankee Stadium for a first workout. The story—maybe true, maybe not—was that he was told to grab a bat and the one he grabbed belonged to G. H. Ruth, which of course worked just fine. He spent that season and the next in Hartford, busting fences, loved by the local population, and was called up to the big club at the end of both years.

  In the spring of ’25, he had made the team, then mostly sat on the bench until Huggins decided to shuffle some cards in a losing hand. The day after Ruth returned and Gehrig pinch-hit, the little manager inserted Gehrig at first in favor of Wally Pipp, put Howard Shanks at second in favor of Aaron Ward, and Benny Bengough behind the plate instead of Wally Schang.

  The first baseman was the one who stuck for the next 15 seasons.

  Krichell had called Ed Barrow after seeing Gehrig for the first time—a game at Rutgers in New Brunswick where he hit two homers—and said he had found “the next Babe Ruth,” but “next Babe Ruths” were being discovered everywhere. There seemed to be a “next Babe Ruth” in every town in America. There were young Babe Ruths, old Babe Ruths, female Babe Ruths, even animal Babe Ruths, dogs and cats and chickens that performed some feat of strength. John McGraw had tried out a guy from Texas named Moses Solomon, “the Jewish Babe Ruth,” “the Rabbi of Swat,” who lasted for only eight at-bats in 1923. The real Babe Ruth had been confronted with Cristobal Torriente during his misadventures in Havana. Torriente was known as “the Cuban Babe Ruth.”

  “What’d you think?” sportswriters asked the real Ruth.

  “Them greasers are punk ballplayers,” he replied. “Only a few of them are any good. The guy they calls after me because he made a few homers is as black as a ton and a half of coal in a dark cellar.”

  Gehrig was the closest thing that would come along. His swing was different from the Ruth swing, tighter, more compact, but he held the bat down at the bottom, next to the knob, and swung hard. His home runs went on a different course, straight and direct as opposed to Ruth’s happy parabolas, but they landed in the same place.
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  Time would come when the two men would be compared in a thousand different areas, from the way they dressed to the way they spoke to the way they ate, drank, and made what each thought was merry, but that was the future. The new kid, the big kid, was good but not spectacular in his debut in 1925, with 20 homers and a .295 average, more than enough to keep his job. The legend would grow that Pipp had begged out with a headache, never to return, but this was not true. What did happen was that Pipp was beaned in batting practice a month later, suffered a fractured skull, played little the rest of the season, and was sold to the Cincinnati Reds in February for $7,500. Gehrig owned the job outright when he went to training camp in 1926.

  “Lou Gehrig was sort of a model American young man,” Waite Hoyt said. “He was sort of a Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy…. He was not very popular at first with the Yankees because, with his teammates, he was one of two or three guys who just lived in a world of their own. He was not a carouser or a nightclub guy or a fellow who sought out entertainment. He was shy, a family guy, in a sense, with his mother.”

  A look into the Yankee future had come toward the end of the 1925 season, lost this time in the attention paid to Ruth’s recent return from tabloid exile and the inattention paid to a seventh-place ball club. On September 10, in the fourth inning at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, A’s pitcher Dolly Gray surrendered a leadoff home run to Bob Meusel, a line shot to the center-field bleachers. Ruth, the next batter, pounded the ball over the right-field fence. Gray took hold of his third new baseball of the inning, delivered it to Gehrig, and watched it go over the right-field fence, farther and deeper than the first two shots. This was the first time since 1902 that three major league batters in a row had hit home runs.