Word: dimaggio
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...question to ponder over the post-World Series winter: How was it that Joe DiMaggio--a high school dropout whose favorite reading material was Superman comics, a man who was a lousy father, an unfaithful husband and a wife beater, a guy who was reluctant to enlist in World War II, someone who never did a meaningful day's work in the last 47 years of his life, who was monumentally vain and cheap and mistrustful--became a national hero...
Simple. He could hit and throw and run with a gliding grace, and when he could no longer do those things he...well, he looked great in a suit. But as Richard Ben Cramer establishes in his absolutely persuasive DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Simon & Schuster; 546 pages; $28), Joe D. had a secret. He knew the power of silence. The less he gave, standing remote and noble and regally aloof, the more the world took it as evidence of dignity...
Normally, you might worry about a writer's ability to draw meaningful biographical blood from the soundless stone that was Joe DiMaggio. It doesn't help that the existing historical record is a fabulous piece of packaging, abetted by three generations of sports writers who knew that "the Daig"--short, one is sorry to say, for "Dago"--was their meal ticket. But Cramer is an all-star reporter, and if his fertile prose at times sprouts too many colloquial tendrils and exclamatory blossoms, it soon gives way to the sheer muscle of his facts. Oddly, the book's weakest part...
...rest of DiMaggio is rendered so vividly you almost want to look away. During his nonpareil career, DiMaggio learned to squeeze every drop of privilege out of his fame. Every nightclub operator in New York City understood that if DiMaggio came into his joint, it was good for business--which was why no one minded depositing the required couple of hundred into DiMaggio's account at the Bowery Savings Bank in exchange for the visit...
...illiterati). "Back then a Subway Series was of a piece--there were 13 of them in New York between 1921 and '56. The Yankees were playing the Giants, or then later they were playing the Dodgers. It was a rivalry renewed, and players developed histories within the Subway Series. DiMaggio played in six of them. Ruth, Mantle, Whitey Ford, Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers, Jackie Robinson." The Subway Series even has a patron saint. Stengel was on the Giants' roster in the very first New York-New York Series, when both the Yanks and Giants played in the Polo...