Along with an abiding interest in Ruth the hero, Ruth the outsize man, I found in the people who knew him, most of whom are elderly now, a warm affection. You would ask about Ruth, and the first thing they would do, remembering, looking off into the past, would be to smile. I have a good friend named Jim Russell who is a lifelong baseball fan; one day after I had begun to write this book I had lunch with him. We got to talking about Ruth and about the various things I had learned. Finally he asked, "Have you found out what he was like? I mean, what kind of guy was he really?" It took me a moment to realize what he was getting at. I said, "Do you mean, underneath it all, was he a shit?" He said, "Yes. Was he?"

I told him about Ernie Shore and Bob Shawkey, neither of whom had any reason to be particularly fond of Ruth. Shore pitched in the minor leagues with him at Baltimore and was a better pitcher then than the Babe; yet Ruth was adulated far more than Shore. When the two of them were sold together to the Boston Red Sox, newspaper comment of the day said that the transaction could not help but be a good one for the Red Sox because of Ruth. But with Boston it was Shore who moved right in as a starting pitcher, while Ruth faltered and was sent back to the minor leagues again for a time. A year later, after the Red Sox had won the pennant, Shore pitched the opening game of the World Series against Grover Cleveland Alexander and started and won a second game; Ruth did not play at all, except to pinch-hit once. In 1917 Shore pitched a perfect game, one of the rarest feats in baseball. The Babe started that game and was thrown out of it by the plate umpire before getting anyone out. Shore, sent hurriedly to the mound in Ruth's place, did not allow anyone to reach first base in the nine full innings that followed and was credited with a perfect game. Baseball fans are more aware of that game because of Ruth than because of Shore. Even then, on his biggest day in baseball, Shore's solid accomplishment was overshadowed by the Babe's personality. Shore was a college man who later became a sheriff in his native North Carolina; Ruth was a reform school product. They roomed together in Boston, and the story is told that the Babe used Shore's toothbrush to brush his own teeth, and that Shore went to the manager of the ball club and insisted on being given a new roommate. Shore went into the armed forces in 1918 during World War 1, but Ruth, who was married by then, did not; Shore was not the same pitcher after the war, and by 1921 his big league career was all over, just as Ruth was moving into the big, big money.

If ever a man had reason to be disenchanted by the Hero Ruth, it would appear to be Ernie Shore. Yet he too chuckled when he was asked about the Babe. He said the unhappy roommate story was not true. It Wasn't a toothbrush at all, it was a shaving brush. The Babe didn't wash it out after he had used it, that was all. "Hell, I roomed with him in 1920 when we were both with the Yankees," Shore said. "I was the only one he would listen to." Asked what Ruth was like in those early days in Baltimore and Boston and New York, Shore replied with fervor, if not originality, "He was the best-hearted fellow who ever lived. He'd give you the shirt off his back."

Bob Shawkey was an outstanding pitcher in the American League for the first dozen years of Ruth's career. He had pitched against him in the beginning and later was his teammate on the superlative Yankee teams of the 1920s. In 1930 he was named manager of the Yankees and thus became Ruth's boss (for one season; he was deposed in favor of Joe McCarthy in 1930. Ruth had a burning ambition to be made the Yankee manager, and there were reports that he resented Shawkey getting the job. Shawkey told me some lively stories about Ruth, about fights he had had on the bench and in the clubhouse with teammates, about the time Miller Huggins, then the Yankee manager, fined Ruth $5000 for general misconduct, about an uproarious pennant celebration on a train coming back from Boston when Ruth and Bob Meusel, another Yankee outfielder, banged on the door of Huggins' compartment and said they were going to throw him off the train. Shawkey impressed me as a gentle, decent man, sure of himself without making a big fuss over it, the kind of man who as a ballplayer might have resented a show boat and troublemaker and flamboyant type like Ruth. Again I felt that I might have come across a vein of anti-Ruth feeling, and I asked, "Why did some people dislike the Babe?" Shawkey looked surprised and said, "People sometimes got mad at him, but I never heard of anybody who didn't like Babe Ruth."

I told this to Jim Russell at lunch and said that I had found the same sense of affection in all the oldtimers I talked to. Many of them had been specific -- sometimes startlingly specific -- in discussing the details of the things Ruth had done: the fights, the drinking, the eating, the girl chasing, the arrogance, his "indigestion" in 1925, his hypochondria late in his career, his bitterness and almost maudlin self-pity when he could not get the jobs he wanted in baseball after he was through as a player, the disastrous mistakes he made; but through it all there was a flow, a warmth, a delight as they talked about Ruth. He had been fun to be around. They liked him. Russell said he was glad to hear that. I was too.

» NEXT