It goes on and on. Philippe Halsman photographed his hundredth cover for Life and declared, "This is the high point of my career. It has taken me 27 years to achieve this record and I like to think of it as the equal of, maybe the superior of, Babe Ruth's." The New York Mets brought up a promising young slugger named Mike Jorgensen, who said, with a cheerful nod toward the concept of transmigration of souls, that he couldn't miss as a major leaguer because he was born August 16, 1948, the day Babe Ruth died.

Thus, Ruth lives, all around us, which is a matter of satisfaction to some, irritation to others, disinterest to a few. When Marianne Moore, the baseball fan, was asked about Ruth she said, "I never particularly liked him. He was tough." Roger Maris, when in 1961 he pursued and broke Ruth's sacrosanct record of 60 home runs in one season, was subjected to a continuing stream of abuse from spectators, sportswriters, letter writers, people in the street, people who for some reason deeply resented what Maris was doing and who felt impelled to act as surrogates for Ruth in trying to defend his record. Maris broke it anyhow, with a laudable display of sustained skill and athletic courage, yet a decade later only a handful of people knew where Roger was or what he was doing, while tenors and bank robbers and photographers and God knows who all else were still being measured against an indefinable standard of superiority called Babe Ruth. What will you bet that people, and not just those who attacked Maris, will write in after reading this and point out with some acerbity that Maris did not break Ruth's record, that Ruth hit his 60 in the old 154-game season and that Roger had only 59 after 154 games and needed the extra times at bat of the expanded 162-game season to get to 60, let alone 61? The phrase "with an asterisk," meaning a qualified success, came into common American usage after that 1961 season because of diehard insistence that Maris did not really break the Babe's record.

Maris himself never said a word against Ruth, so far as I know, but, Lord, he must have tired of hearing Babe Ruth's name. So have others. Or, at any rate, they have tired of hearing of Ruth as hero. Leonard Shecter, in his book The Jocks, a somewhat sophomoric attempt to tell the ungilded truth about sport, tried to undo the popular image of Ruth as a jolly, lovable, funmaking giant. Shecter wrote, "In fact, he was a gross man of gargantuan, undisciplined appetities for food, whiskey and women....Ruth was never the playful, outgoing man he was supposed to be....It does not take much research to find out what the Babe was really like. It doesn't matter. The fake Babe Ruth is more palatable than the real one." And I hurry to blunt Shecter's comments because Ruth is alive for me too, and I know he is more complex than that, and I want my idea of the total truth about him to be known.

How many people dead a quarter of a century can arouse so much continuing interest, so much passion? Granted, we make special folk heroes of those highly proficient in sport. But very few people care, one way or the other, that Ty Cobb was a psychotic or that Honus Wagner as an old man coaching with Pittsburgh used to swipe baseballs and trade them for beers. Yet many insist that Cobb was a better ballplayer than Ruth, and Wagner may have been better than both of them. Does it matter about Cobb or Wagner? No. Yet Ruth matters. At seventy, Waite Hoyt, a member of baseball's Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, an urbane, intelligent, caustic, unsentimental veteran of a notably unserene life, talked of Ruth with intensity and fire. "I am almost convinced," Hoyt wrote to me, "that you will never learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Joe Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe's. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan's own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth's crudities, and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief, an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given his home-run power -- and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn't and couldn't take time to understand."

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