Yogi Berra – The
Yankee Exception
by Will Wright
, "I
never play a game without my man." Casey
Stengel
I'm a life-long Red
Sox fan. It's sacrilege for a Fenway acolyte to admit liking a
Yankee. But for the last fifty years (since his retirement,) there's
been one Yankee that Red Sox nation has been allowed to like - Yogi
Berra.
It wasn't just
admiration for the way he played the game, and some people forget
what a great player he was. It wasn't just because he was always
kind and approachable. There have been other Yankees with these
credentials that remain damned to lowest circles of the Red Sox fan
inferno.
What endeared Yogi
Berra to even those he beat on the diamond from the mid forties to
the early sixties, was that he was one of the funniest men alive
(until just recently, when the alive part stopped.)
The thing is, nobody
seems to know if his humor was on purpose, or just a series of
fortunate mistakes. A number of Yogi-isms are so popular that
they’ve become cliché’s
It ain't over til
it's over.
It's deja vu all
over again.
It gets late
early out here.
When you come to
the fork in the road, take it.
You can observe a
lot by watching.
Is it a great
accomplishment to create cliché’s? In Berra's case, I think it
was, because not only were his sayings funny, they forced us to look
at common words in a new way. There was wisdom in his humor.
Never answer an
anonymous letter.
The future ain't
what it used to be.
If you don't know
where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
Take it with a
grin of salt.
Baseball is 90%
mental. The other half is physical.
It ain't the
heat, it's the humility.
Berra affected the
culture by maintaining his naive, wise, humor all his life, never
taking a bow for lines other humorists would die for.
Why buy good
luggage, you only use it when you travel?
The towels were
so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.
I don't know
(what gender the streakers were.) They had bags over their heads.
He hits from both
sides of the plate. He's amphibious.
You better cut
the pie into four slices. I'm not hungry enough to eat six.
Even Napoleon had
his Watergate.
So here's to Yogi!
(Yogi-isms in bold) If
you can't imitate him, don't copy him.
Don't
ask me anything I don't know. I'm not going to answer.
Let's pair
up in threes,
and take
a two hour nap from 1 to 4.
Remember, we
have deep depth,
and you
wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you,
but we
were overwhelming underdogs.
Because in
theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in
practice there is.
If
people don't want to come to the ball park, nobody's going to stop
them
because
nobody
goes there anymore - it's too crowded.
Possibly because
it
was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too
much,
and half
the lies they tell about me aren't true.
Up
till now, it's
tough to make predictions, especially about the future,
because he
must have made that before he died.
I'm surprised Weird
Al, or some other genius hasn't made a song of them yet. But maybe
parody would be just gilding the lily.
I can imagine the
eulogy Yogi might make for himself. It might begin with, I
never said most of the things I said,
but I
want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.
Even those of us who
revere Yaz and can't say Bucky Dent without an obscene adjective
proceeding, will miss Yogi Berra!
His career highlights.
