Yogi

Reporter: "What did he say?"

Yogi: "You know, he must read the papers a lot, because he said, 'Hello, Yogi.' "

Reporter: "And what did you say?"

Yogi: "I said, 'Hello, Pope.' "

Yoga is an Eastern study, and Berra is Midwestern Italian. Once, at a dinner held so Japanese journalists could get together with American baseball stars, a Tokyo newspaper editor was ceremoniously reeling off a list of Japanese delicacies that he was sure his American guests would enjoy. "Don't you have any bread?" Berra interrupted.

Berra's parents were born in Italy. (On his passport, Yogi is Lorenzo Pietro.) He was born in St. Louis, and his sayings are in the American grain. For instance, after visiting the Louvre and being asked whether he liked the paintings there, Berra said, "Yeah, if you like paintings." Another time, after attending a performance of Tosca in Milan, he said, "It was pretty good. Even the music was nice." These remarks are less in the tradition of the Bhagavad-Gita than in that of Mark Twain, who observed that the music of Richard Wagner was "better than it sounds." Berra is also supposed to have said, after someone mentioned that a Jewish lord mayor had been elected in Dublin, "Yeah. Only in America can a thing like this happen."

Berra hasn't followed the traditional regimen of a person who gives his life over to yoga. He has never attempted to assume the Lotus, the Plough, the Fish or the touching-the-top-of-your-head-with-the-soles-of-your-feet position. In his playing days, it's true, he so mastered the Bat Swing and the Crouch that he's now in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And this spring, in the Yankees' new flexibility program, he stretched, bent and folded himself pretty well for a man of 58. But when he's asked whether he knows the body toning postures of yoga, he says, "Nahhh. A couple of people wrote me, 'What exercises do you give?' thinking I was a, you know.... Ahhh, I don't do no exercises."

In traditional yoga, the practice of meditation is of central importance. But Berra says, "Guys talk about doing this meditating when they go up to the plate. If I'd done that I'd've been worse. I went up there thinking about something else."

And yet there's something inscrutable about a man who said, when he saw the late Steve McQueen in a movie on television, "He must have made that before he died." There's something mystic about a man who said, "You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." And there's something wise about a man who said, "Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting."

Although yoga is "a definite science," the Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda has written, "There are a number of great men, living today in American or European or other non-Hindu bodies, who, though they may never have heard the words yogi or swami, are yet true exemplars of those terms. Through their disinterested service to mankind, or through their mastery over passions and thoughts...or through their great powers of concentration, they are, in a sense, yogis; they have set themselves the goal of yoga—self-control."