Yankees legend Lou Gehrig is known for his stellar career with the Bronx Bombers, including being an essential part of the storied 1927 team's "Murderers' Row" and his 56-year record for consecutive games played. His legacy also rests with his retirement speech—dubbed "baseball's Gettysburg Address"—which he gave on July 4, 1939. Gehrig died from ALS in 1941, and his life was further immortalized a year later by Gary Cooper in the Hollywood depiction of his life, The Pride of the Yankees.
However, it turns out that the road from the actual speech to the silver screen (now a pop culture touchstone as well) was not a direct one—especially since there was no known contemporaneous or a written transcription. New York Times writer Richard Sandomir reveals the surprising backstory in an excerpt from his book, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.
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Lou Gehrig could not have looked any lonelier.
It was July 4, 1939 — “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day.”
But it was Gehrig’s baseball funeral.
Nearly every image of Gehrig that day at Yankee Stadium conveyed his desolation. He was helped onto the field by team president Ed Barrow while a fretful Manager Joe McCarthy kept an eye on his weakened star. Lou stood alone except when he stepped forward to shake hands with well-wishers or briefly hold the gifts he set down on the infield. As he stood before nearly 62,000 fans, his once-mighty body was withering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative disease that would soon take his name.
The Iron Horse was dying.
On this hot and sunny Tuesday, Lou had already waited in the dugout during the Yankees’ loss to the Washington Senators in the first game of a doubleheader, then stood for the entire length of a ceremony he sought to avoid.
Lou’s baggy uniform was hanging on him as if it were a size too large for his once-muscular frame. He shuffled. He limped.
To McCarthy—who adored Lou—he looked wobbly
“If Lou starts to fall, catch him,” McCarthy told Babe Dahlgren, who had replaced Gehrig as the Yankees’ first baseman two months earlier.
Gehrig’s growing frailty contrasted with the physically hale men surrounding him on the infield: the current Yankees, the Senators. and a dozen teammates from the 1927 Murderers’ Row team, including Babe Ruth, Waite Hoyt, Bob Meusel and Wally Pipp, whom Gehrig replaced at first base in 1925 and remained in the lineup until he had played in 2,130 consecutive games.
The older Yankees were dressed in somber clothes appropriate for the doleful occasion, save for the Babe, who sported a white suit and open-collared shirt as if he were headed to a polo match in the Hamptons.
Each of the retirees would outlive Lou.
There was no plan for Lou to speak. The ceremony would have ended with gift-giving and speechifying by luminaries like New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Postmaster General James Farley if he had not given his speech.
But Lou had at least prepared to speak. He had arrived that afternoon with something to say — if not the absolute will to say it. The dynamics of his marriage to the former Eleanor Twitchell — who had already become his legacy keeper — suggests that a speech was her idea. She knew that he had played in the shadow of Ruth and would not have wanted him to leave his stage without saying something.
When the ceremony neared its end, Lou waved off the emcee Sid Mercer’s request to speak. The tributes had overwhelmed him. “He gulped and fought to keep back the tears as he kept his eyes fastened to the ground,” The New York Times wrote. Added the New York Post: “He was close to breaking down.”
Mercer told the crowd: “He is too moved to speak.”
But the crowd chanted—they wanted Lou to say something.
“We want Lou!” they shouted. “We want Lou!”
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, standing at right of the microphones, paid tribute to Lou Gehrig, left, on July 4, 1939. The Yankees and the Washington Senators are in the infield, with the famous 1927 Yankees team in the foreground, in a row at right. (AP/REX/Shutterstock)
McCarthy whispered enouragement to him and Lou hobbled to the bank of microphones. Gehrig did not have a written speech to deliver — and no actual copy of it appears to exist. Had he forgotten it in his locker? Had he, after working on it the day before with Eleanor (as she has said), discarded any drafts and decided to deliver it extemporaneously? That would have been a bold and risky decision given Lou’s shyness and lack of experience at giving speeches.
Whatever his preparation, Gehrig delivered a magnificent speech — short, memorable and filled with gratitude despite the diagnosis of ALS that had forced him to retire and endure the growing indignities of a body that was betraying him.
When Lou spoke, he leaned into the microphones. Hands planted on his hips, he started: “For the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break” — as if the disease that had ended his ballplaying career could be fit easily into the category of a “bad break.” Then, he looked down and paused for three seconds, as if trying to recall a sentence he might have bounced off Eleanor or to ad-lib what became the speech’s most famous line:
“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
His voice — the sound of a New Yorker who had been raised in Manhattan by German immigrant parents — reverberated around the stadium. His gratitude poured out: to his teammates; his mother, father, mother-in-law; McCarthy and his predecessor, Miller Huggins; his roommate Bill Dickey; the New York Giants, who played across the Harlem River in the Polo Grounds; sportswriters and groundskeepers and concessionaires, and, of course, Eleanor (“a tower of strength” who had “shown more courage than you have dreamed existed”).
And, in his final sentence, he returned to his opening, saying:
“So, I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”
Eleanor watched the ceremony from a box seat behind the dugout with her brother, Frank, and Lou’s parents. Accompanying them was Rosaleen Doherty, a reporter for the Daily News who wrote that Eleanor did not cry as Lou spoke “although all around us, women and quite a few men, were openly sobbing.”
Eleanor told her: “I’m glad Lou was able to walk out there and make his little talk over the microphone. I knew he wouldn’t let the fans down.”
Silenced by Gehrig’s words, the crowd erupted in cheers when the speech ended. It was at this point that Ruth moved toward Lou, embraced him and said something that brought a smile to Lou’s face, leading sportswriter Jack Miley to wrote that Ruth “clasped baseball’s most famous invalid in a bear hug and Lou’s ceremony was a success. A great fellow that Ruth and always the life of the party!”
Newsreels recorded Gehrig’s words that day but did not preserve them for eternity. Only four lines from the speech have survived — and no official written version exists. No newspaper transcribed it.
The official version that has been quoted in the decades since is almost certainly the one Eleanor sent to Samuel Goldwyn, who produced The Pride of the Yankees, the 1942 biopic about Lou, with instructions that Gary Cooper deliver it in the film as Gehrig did on the field.
“You can count on the wording being perfect,” she wrote to Goldwyn on April 16, 1942, when the shooting of Pride was nearly over, “because Lou and I worked on it the night before it was delivered, and naturally my memory could not fail me in this instance.”
Conceding that she had set the speech down from memory suggests that if there was an actual written speech, it had been lost. And her version was imperfect — it omitted some lines and differs in respects from the way that some reporters rendered it in their newspapers' accounts of the speech; in one instance, United Press wrote that Gehrig had inelegantly said: “I am a fellow who got a tough break. I don’t believe it. I have been a lucky guy.”
For all of Eleanor’s hope that the screenwriters would film the speech as she remembered it, they had other ideas.
They gave it a rewrite (rendering it less literary than the original) that reduced Gehrig’s litany of thanks and moving the “luckiest man” line to the end where it had a greater dramatic wallop that it did in the original.
“People say that I’ve had a bad break today,” Cooper says, as Gehrig. “But today... today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
The speech was filmed on Goldwyn’s studio lot — not at the other Wrigley Field, in Los Angeles, where most of the baseball action was shot. And Eleanor was there when Cooper re-created her husband’s indelible words. Eleanor took a seat on Stage 4, trying to be unobtrusive. All was dark, save for the spotlights that illuminated Cooper as he spoke.
“Quiet!” an assistant director shouted.
Cooper gave the speech with hesitations and moistened eyes, speaking of his good fortune in the face of tragedy. It was very familiar to Eleanor — and all too difficult to watch. Her sobbing interrupted a take. Cooper restarted but Eleanor rose to leave, a young widow in a black dress, unable to stay as she did when Lou delivered his speech. Now, she didn’t have to stay.
For the last 76 years, Cooper’s portrayal of Gehrig has helped perpetuate the Iron Horse’s memory. No, Cooper was not athletic enough to play as well as Gehrig did — Cooper had to learn baseball from scratch, which explains his mediocrity in the scenes where he was required to swing a bat or catch a ball— but that did not matter.
Cooper turned Gehrig into yet another one of his characters with quiet dignity: a decent man who loves his wife and faces death with grace.
And if not for Cooper’s rendition of the speech, its power might have faded long ago.
Richard Sandomir, the author of The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic, writes obituaries for The New York Times.
