One Summer: America, 1927

Ruth increasingly stayed at superior hotels to the rest of the team, at his own expense. There he would hold court to anyone who cared to drop by. Waite Hoyt once counted 250 visitors to his suite over the course of an evening. Ruth seldom knew who any of the visitors were. At a party in his rooms at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, Ruth famously stood on a chair and shouted, ‘Any woman who doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.’
    If sex was unavailable, he just ate. Marshall Hunt swore he once watched Ruth down eighteen hot dogs at a sitting. Several witnesses reported seeing him order a dinner that consisted of double helpings of everything – two porterhouse steaks, two mountains of fried potatoes, two salads, two slabs of apple pie with ice cream – then come back six hours later and consume the same meal again; in between he ate eight hot dogs and drank six bottles of pop. ‘Lord, he ate too much,’ Harry Hooper, a teammate, told Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times . Over the course of his career, it was calculated that Ruth had gained and lost two and a half tons.
    On the whole, he got away with his wayward lifestyle, but when he faltered, he faltered spectacularly. In 1922, he had a dreadful year. He was suspended on five separate occasions for various behavioural breaches and altogether missed about a third of the season. He squabbled endlessly with his manager, the long-suffering Miller Huggins. Once when Huggins criticized Ruth and his teammate Bob Meusel for their lack of discipline and output, Ruth carried the diminutive Huggins to the rear platform of theobservation car and dangled him upside down over the rails until he withdrew his complaint. After Huggins’s death, one of his sisters claimed that Ruth had taken five years off his life.
    In the winter of 1922, at what was supposed to be a testimonial dinner, Jimmy Walker, soon to be mayor of New York – and a man who knew a thing or two about high living – publicly castigated Ruth, calling him ‘a great athlete, but also a great fool’. Ruth, he said, had let everybody down by his loutish behaviour during the season. ‘Worst of all, worst of all,’ Walker went on:
     
you have let down the kids of America. Everywhere in America, on every vacant lot where kids play baseball, and in the hospitals too, where crippled children dream of movement forever denied their thin and warped little bodies, they think of you, their hero. They look up to you, worship you. And then what happens? You carouse and abuse your great body … The kids have seen their idol shattered and their dreams broken.
     
    Ruth by this point was sobbing piteously – but worse was still to come. As he left the dinner that evening he was served a summons on behalf of one Dolores Dixon of Brooklyn, charging him with being the father of her unborn child. Ruth was in the embarrassing position of not being able to recall whether he had slept with the woman or not. In the end, it appeared that he had not. ‘Dolores Dixon’ turned out to be a fictitious name and the woman in question was unable to supply dates or places that tallied with Ruth’s known movements. The suit was dropped, but not until Ruth had been made to look exceedingly foolish.
    In 1925 everything went wrong again. He arrived at spring training 40 pounds overweight, and struggled to regain his form. In early April, as the Yankees were playing a series of exhibition games on the way home from spring training, Ruth began to feel unwell. By the time the team reached Asheville, he was feverish and barely coherent. Once outside the train, he collapsed. As he was obviouslyin no state to play in an exhibition match, Miller Huggins, the manager, told him to continue on to New York. At Grand Central Station he collapsed again and went into convulsions. He was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital.
    Rumours circulated that Ruth had eaten too many hot dogs. The episode became known as ‘the bellyache heard round the world’. The hospital was curiously vague about Ruth’s condition and treatment, which led others to suppose that he was being treated for syphilis or some other venereal embarrassment. It now seems evident that whatever ailed Ruth, it was seriously acute and almost certainly gastric. Ruth was in bed for a month and weak enough to need a wheelchair for several days beyond that. Altogether he spent almost seven weeks in the hospital. When he did return to the Yankees, he was sporting a fresh