Everything
about him was big. His whole life was big, and in September 1946 the pain in
his head was big. The agony behind his left eye wouldn't go away. The whole
left side of his face was swollen. His left eye had clamped shut. His whole
head ached, and he was hoarse and couldn't swallow.
At first,
the doctors thought it was merely a sinus infection. Then they guessed some of
his teeth had gone bad, so they pulled three. Then came the diagnosis—a rare
cancer in the back of his nose and throat—nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Only about
1,000 Americans are diagnosed with it every year.
Babe Ruth
would be dead 21 months later.
He fought
hard, just the way he'd battled to win all through his life. He was one of the
first patients in the world to receive experimental chemotherapy. Some
researchers think he was the first patient with his type of cancer to be given
both chemotherapy and radiation.
A Tough Old Ox
Maybe he
was in the right place at the right time. Maybe the doctors thought he was such
a tough old ox that he would thrive in the face of unknown treatments.
He asked no
questions about what his doctors were doing. He knew that the daily injections
of teroptin might help him or that they might make his condition much worse. He
had been told the drug had rarely been given to humans before. (It is related
to methotrexate which today is used to treat cancer.)
''I realized that if anything
was learned about that type of treatment, whether good or bad, it would be of
use in the future to the medical profession and maybe to a lot of people with
my same trouble,'' Ruth wrote in his autobiography.
To say that Ruth was tough would be
the understatement to end all understatements. Casual baseball fans and experts
agree he was the best who's ever played the game, and you don't win that sort
of universal acclaim unless your hard-won achievements prove it ten times over.
An
Olympian Record
When he started in the major leagues
in 1914, the home run record was 27. He hit 27 in 1919. The next year he
slammed an amazing 54. His all-time high of 60 came in 1927, and he closed his
career with 714 dingers, an olympian record that stood for 47 years.
Want more? He led the league in
homers 12 times. He played on seven world championship teams.
What's more, before he was the king
of sluggers, he was one of the best pitchers ever. He is lifetime ERA (Earned
Run Average) of 2.28 over 1,221 innings ranks him as the third best pitcher
ever in major league baseball.
He loved everything about life from
hot dogs and women to fast cars and fancy clothes. Most of all, he loved kids.
In the 1926 World Series, he even performed something close to a miracle for a
seriously ill boy named Johnny Sylvester. On his death bed (or what the press
said were his final house), Johnny asked his father if he could have a ball
autographed by Babe Ruth. The press got the story, and the Babe said he could
do better than that—he would hit a home run for Johnny. And Babe Ruth being
Babe Ruth, he hit three home runs in that game. Johnny Sylvester lived until
1990.
“A
Rotten Start”
What explains the Babe's affection
for children? When he was seven, his father took him by the hand to St. Mary's
Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore. It was an orphanage. Ruth would spend
the next 12 years there. He was on its books as "incorrigible." He didn't have an easy time of it, at least at first—the other children taunted him, calling him "nigger lips" because of his dark complexion.
No one knows why he was sent there.
His father was a saloon keeper. Maybe the police told his father his joint was
just too rough to have a child around. On the other hand, Ruth told reporters
no one could make him go to school and that he had learned how to hold a beer
mug before most kids could hold pencils.
"I hardly knew my
parents," he wrote in his autobiography. "I had a rotten start, and
it took me a long time to get my bearings." Rarely did his parents visit
him. "I guess I am too big and ugly for anyone to come to see me. Maybe
next time," one of the other boys remembered him saying.
Ruth may
have started out rotten, but he ripened into one of the world's greatest
athletes and most beloved celebrities. His appetite for life was insatiable.
"I swing big with everything I've got," he said. "I hit big, or
I miss big. I like to live as big as I can."
MORAL: If you play for one run, that's all you get.
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