Word: dimaggio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surviving players Halberstam sought out, only Joe DiMaggio turned him down (not even mutual friend Edward Bennett Williams could twist his arm). Yet Halberstam's portrait of DiMaggio is the finest part of the book. The author has a tender, intuitive sympathy for the proud, remote athlete. DiMaggio does not need a writer to confirm his stature, but still he is lucky to have such a thoughtful, intelligent chronicler. Boston had its own superstar in Ted Williams, and that brings up the inevitable comparison between Halberstam's work and John Updike's classic account of Williams' last game, "Hub Fans...
Icons as regal as Ernie Banks ($12 an autograph), Willie Mays ($12) and Joe DiMaggio ($30) are involved. "It's the free-enterprise system," says ex- Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer, who is capable of modeling underpants on billboards without blushing and is available to sign anyone's shorts for $10. Mostly they sign bubble-gum cards and glossy pictures...
...that's where DiMaggio has gone. Joe looks as cool at 74 as he used to in center field. But the Yankee Clipper knows the value of celebrity and the attraction of having the proof in writing. In the greatest reversal since Serutan, DiMaggio brought a baseball to a White House dinner last year, when Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting President Reagan, and acquired their autographs for free. "Reagan's is very precise," says DiMaggio, who once had to fight a souvenir collector at his bank to retrieve a check made out by Joe and endorsed by his then wife Marilyn...
...Rose is hard, but imagining Rose without baseball is horrible. On plane rides home from the World Series, he used to calculate the number of days to spring training. He marks time by the inning, even in references to his birth in 1941, usually adding, "the year of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak." During Rose's own hitting streak in 1978 -- the National League standard of 44 -- he was caught in a paternity suit, and his marriage was dissolving. Only between the white lines of the field was he serene. Last week, before a mob of reporters...
...driving across Indiana in early May 1968, searching for Bobby Kennedy's whistle-stop campaign, one heard another chord as well -- Paul Simon's wistful note of mythic disconnection: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes...