Give thanks for Joe DiMaggio
Posted: Thursday November 26, 1998 08:23 AM
In a perfect, sensible world, we would bow to give our thanks for a
multitude of blessings and include Joe DiMaggio, somewhere midway. How
appropriate that his birthday falls just hours before Thanksgiving, for it
offers a collaboration of emotions so important to our perspective.
Arnold Palmer would've been 12 when the Great Yankee Clipper hit in 56
straight games. How appropriate, indeed, that this hero, before Snead and
Hogan and the men of his sport, was a man who combined consistency
with grace and power. Joseph Paul DiMaggio remains, a half century
later, a hero of the largest sort, far transcending baseball. He's a symbol
of class and magnificence, the last of his kind. A graceful dinosaur with a
difference. Joe D seems immortal. In the turbulent '60s, when Paul
Simon scribbled down his famous line -- "Where have you gone, Joe
DiMaggio?, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you," -- he was expressing a
nation's yearning for a less complicated time; he was looking for a hero,
someone in whom to believe. Santiago, on the waters of the Caribbean,
mused in "The Old Man and the Sea:" "I would like to take the great
DiMaggio fishing . . . they say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as
poor as we are and would understand."
DiMaggio, who has been hospitalized for more than a month, has lung cancer AP | |
It seemed so fitting that
Hemingway, this giant of literature, would pause in his narrative to honor
DiMaggio. There is a Nanci Griffith song called Marilyn Monroe: "The
sun will stop Shinin' . . . hearts will stop poundin' . . . the screen is
so lonely tonight . . . then men are out prayin' . . . the women are sayin'
. . . she died for the loss of her prime, and lived on DiMaggio time."
We all have, from the moment he quietly stepped forward in woolen
pinstripes and captured our souls. He was all things to all people at a
time when all needed something, during an era when our world was
collapsing, hearing the distant drumbeats of war, desperate for a moment of
cheer. Decades later, after the war and Mantle and Marilyn and Mr.
Coffee, after a thousand ceremonial first-balls and an occasional
old-timer's game, there was DiMaggio in line, the only guest specifically
requested by the Emperor of Japan at a state dinner. Decades later, the
only athlete invited when President Reagan hosted Gorbachev. Decades
later, still the man.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? In reality,
nowhere. He remains as much with us today as he did a half century ago.
Then, we followed long-distance, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines
and news reels. Today, he is much closer, deep within.
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