One Summer: America, 1927

with baseball, from Hardware Age to Popular Science . The Literary Digest ran an admiring profile, as did the New Yorker soon after it began publication. No ballplayer had ever attracted this kind of attention in the wider world before.
    He came to be regarded as a kind of god. In 1921, a team of professors at Columbia University hooked him up to wires and something called a Hipp chronoscope, subjected him to a battery of physical and mental tests, and pronounced him ‘one man in a million’ for his reflexes, eyesight, hearing and ‘nervous stability’. He even scored 10 per cent above normal for intelligence – a fact that he boasted of with particular pride to anyone who would listen.
    People loved him – that’s genuinely not too strong a word – and not without reason. He was kind and generous, especially to children, and endearingly unpretentious. Introduced to President Coolidge on a sweltering day at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Ruth wiped his face with a handkerchief and said, ‘Hot as hell, ain’t it, Prez?’ At a party he referred to the holders as ‘the hostess and hoster’. But at the same time, he commanded a certain wit. Once when a traffic cop shouted at him, ‘Hey, this is a one-way street,’ Ruth yelled back, ‘I’m only driving one way!’ The sportswriter Red Smith became convinced that Ruth possessed a first-rate brain – one that combined shrewdness with simplicity, and innocence with penetrating perception. ‘It was, in its special way, a great mind,’ he insisted.
    Those who knew him well weren’t so sure, for Ruth’s brain had wondrous gaps. He could never remember names, for instance. When Waite Hoyt, his closest friend, left the team for the Detroit Tigers after eleven years as Ruth’s teammate, Ruth’s parting words to him were: ‘Take care of yourself, Walter.’ He was equallyhopeless at learning lines. Once for a national radio broadcast he was coached again and again to say: ‘As the Duke of Wellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.’ When it came time to recite the line, Ruth proudly blurted: ‘As Duke Ellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.’
    His extravagance was legendary. On one road trip, he wore twenty-two silk shirts in three days, then gave them all to the chambermaid upon departing. In Cuba, he lost $26,000 on a single horse race, and $65,000 in a few days. ‘It has been necessary for his employers to have him followed by detectives to protect him from himself as well as from confidence men, blackmailers, racetrack touts and bookmakers, gamblers and scheming young ladies,’ noted the New Yorker in 1926. Despite his wealth, often he didn’t have the cash to pay his income tax bills, including in 1927 when Ruppert made him the highest paid baseball player in history. Over the course of his career, by his own estimation, he lost or wasted well over a quarter of a million dollars.
    His teammates did what they could to help him, taking it in turns to go through his mail to alert him to anything important. ‘Ruth had 24 secretaries,’ Hoyt once observed. Doc Woods, the team trainer, once found $6,000 worth of cheques in mail that Ruth had discarded. Woods also commonly faked Ruth’s signature on baseballs and photographs, and reportedly forged some 10,000 signatures in one year.
    His appetites for sex and food, both seemingly boundless, were a source of perennial wonder. Marshall Hunt, sports editor of the New York Daily News , told how on road trips they would drive out into the country looking for restaurants that did chicken dinners. ‘What Babe really wanted,’ Hunt said, ‘was a good chicken-dinner-and-daughter combination, and it worked out that way more often than you would think’.
    His indiscretions often led to complications. Fred Lieb (the New York Evening Telegram sportswriter who first called YankeeStadium the House that Ruth Built) once watched as Ruth was chased through a train in Shreveport, Louisiana, by a woman (reputedly the wife of a state legislator) armed with a knife. Ruth escaped only by jumping off the train and then back on again just as it was departing. On another occasion he was chased ‘near naked’ out of a hotel by an aggrieved husband with a gun. When someone asked his Yankee teammate Ping Bodie what it was like to room with Ruth, Bodie replied, ‘I don’t know. I room with his suitcase.’
    As the 1920s progressed,