Mighty mite was a winner and a saint
WE WILL remember him forever for telling us that it gets late early, although it ain’t over ’til it’s over. But there was so much more to Yogi — no last name needed — than all those Yogiisms that made him one of a kind, and one of our Last American Heroes.
He didn’t have Mickey Mantle’s muscles, or Joe DiMaggio’s amazing grace, or Derek Jeter’s looks or girlfriends. He didn’t have Reggie Jackson’s ego, or George Steinbrenner’s bluster. His 10 Yankee championship rings may have defined him as a baseball player, but absolutely not as a man.
His 65year love affair with his wife, Carmen, the icon’s icon, was storybook. A battery for the ages. A father and grandfather for the ages, too.
If there were any skeletons in Yogi’s closet, no one knew about them. Or can find them now.
In a selfabsorbed world, Yogi was more substance than style every step of the way. “He was so real,” Joe Torre said Tuesday at the funeral service at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Montclair, NJ.
He never stood on any pedestal. He never bigtimed anyone. He treated others the way he wanted to be treated.
A Purple Heart, and a giving heart. He was a walking, talking anachronism from a sweeter, more innocent time.
He was so human. When The Boss fired him prematurely, 16 games into the 1985 season, and dispatched an underling to relay the news, Yogi viewed it as a broken promise, and this prideful man refused to set foot inside Yankee Stadium for nearly 15 years, as much as it killed him, until a peace was brokered in 1999. He loved being a Yankee long after he hung up the Pinstripes, all the way to 90.
Yogi felt he and the Yankees were wronged when Jackie Robinson was ruled safe stealing home in the eighth inning of Game 1 of the 1955 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he stomped around in fury at the plate and took it to the grave with him.
He resembled Everyman in a baseball uniform, all 5foot7 of him, a squatty body with those big ears, swinging at anything close to the plate.
There was no pretense to Yogi. What you saw was what you got.
“When we travel on these trips [in spring training], especially the long trips, we’d be in uniform and we’d be [driving] . . . and he had to go to the bathroom,” Torre said in his eulogy. “So we had to find a place to stop. And you pull up, and Yogi gets out of the car. And you have to see this to appreciate it. Number 8 . . . walking into the 7Eleven to go to the bathroom.” Laughter now inside the Church of the Immaculate Conception. “And people saying . . . ‘No! No!’ ”
Timothy Cardinal Dolan extolled all of Yogi’s Hall of Fame virtues and compared him to Pope Francis: “Would you think about the two for a minute? — the smile, the open face, the innate courtesy . . . the awshucks attitude . . . the earthy grasp of heavenly and eternal values ... even the big ears, all right?” Laughter. “Are they not similar? Are they not similar?”
Saint Yogi. A treasure sent from heaven.
If anyone deserves to Rest In Peace, it’s Our Yogi.