Babe Ruth

Announcer: The following is a special presentation

of the HBO Sports documentary series...

Donald Honig: If Babe Ruth had not existed,

it would've been impossible to invent him.

He was the 4th of July, a brass band,

and New Year's Eve all rolled into one.

Studs Terkel: He was bigger in his dissipations,

bigger in his volatility,

bigger in his unpredictability.

He was eccentricity and total excellence

wrapped up in one person.

Robert Creamer: He made the world more fun to be in,

and everybody who was in his orbit felt more alive because of Ruth.

Julia Ruth Stevens: He's my father. He was the only father I ever knew.

He was such a lot of fun.

I enjoyed every minute of it.

Terkel: He was celebrated for being the mythical figure he was,

who, at the same time, was flesh and blood.

And because he was flesh and blood,

he gave us that feeling

of something larger than life

of which we are a part.

Jean Shepherd: He would get up to the plate,

he would kick the dirt a little bit,

take his stance...

and then smile down at the pitcher.

He'd take the bat, and he'd point it out like that.

Ben Bentley: And you saw people standing up, just applauding.

He hasn't done anything yet, but there he is. They're applauding.

Creamer: He swung and missed once,

you know, that tremendous swing,

he swung around, he's looking up into the stands,

and he was looking right at me, as far as I was concerned.

"Just look, there's Babe Ruth looking at me. Wow."

Bill Mazer: And what are you waiting to see?

"Hit a home run, Babe."

Waiting for the pitch, there was a sense

of a great coiled spring,

and when he swung...

-Bam! -Boom!

-Boom! -Bam! There it went.

It was so frightening. They all ducked.

All of a sudden, you see that ball go.

Up, up, up, up, up.

150 feet high as it passed first base.

and it just floated, floated, floated and went forever.

Like a homing pigeon, it would choose direction and leave town.

That ball had to travel at least 600 feet on the fly.

Over the fence, the parking lot, the restaurant next door,

and four blocks down the street.

And then, very suddenly,

from this moment of immense power and the ball flying out...

Terkel: He ran with little mincing steps--

thin legs, these delicate ankles--

and he minced his way, as though he were a dancer.

Gleason: Doffing his cap left and right,

bowing and waving to everybody.

And disappeared into the dugout.

Liev Schreiber narrating: At Babe Ruth's massive funeral in 1948,

a puzzled drama critic asked a sports writer

"What did this man Ruth do,

"what did he have to merit this?"

History tells us that Babe Ruth was the greatest player

in an era when baseball stood alone as a national pastime.

His talents were beyond unique,

first, as a brilliant pitcher with the Boston Red Sox,

then a thunderous slugger with the New York Yankees.

But was it just Ruth's astounding ability

that allowed him to sit among the gods?

How did the Babe's life pass from that of an ordinary human being...

to star, to legend,

and finally into myth?

Ruth was far from perfect.

He could be loud, and abrasive, and impossibly immature.

He was a perfect fit for the times.

A man of mighty appetites and unrestrained desires,

the Babe was a metaphor for the big, broadening shoulders of America.

Schreiber: Ruth himself once said,

"I like to live as big as I can."

In an era when our country was burgeoning with power,

no one hit the ball farther and louder

than Babe Ruth.

Honig: No novelist or Hollywood screenwriter,

at the furthest extremes of their imagination

would have dared invent somebody like this.

This was science fiction.

It's another dimension. Exponential is the word.

The leap is wild and crazy,

something Einsteinian.

Wagenheim: You had scientists

coming and examining Ruth,

and all kinds of strange, bizarre articles

in the press about Ruth having superhuman vision

or superhuman coordination.

It was as though someone had come from another planet.

Schreiber: The Babe's mammoth swing

transformed baseball. He practically invented the home run.

In 1920, he hit 54.

a total no other team in the league could match.

And he did it with an exhilarating presence and unmatched muscle

that had never been seen before.

John Kennelly: John McGraw may have been

the best inside baseball manager

that ever came over the Pike.

This guy was the Baltimore chop,

the bunt, move the runner along,

work for one run at a time.

Ruth came along and started breaking up ball games with one swing.

Game announcer: There it goes!

McGraw hated him!

Here he'd been, 30 years, managing and working for one run.

This guy wrecked the whole afternoon with one swipe.

Shepherd: Pitchers were afraid of him.

They'd lie at night,

knowing that the next day they're facing Ruth,

and they would toss in their sleep.

Bill Werber: I was on first base, and Ruth hit a home run.

I ran around second, hitting a pretty good clip,

Art Fletcher was at third base, saying, "Whoa! Whoa!"

'Cause the ball was way up in the right-field stands.

I kept on going, you know, and I came and sat down.

And when he came into the dugout,

he reached over, patted me on top of the head and said,

"You don't need to run like that, son,

when the Babe hits one."

Honig: He was doing it with such joy and simplicity,

almost as if he didn't know what he was doing.

He just went up and did it.

Creamer: His hitting was just unprecedented.

No one had ever done that before,

and that thrilled people. It excited people.

It gave you a vicarious sense of accomplishment

to see Ruth hit home runs.

It became an exciting thing.

Schreiber: For baseball, the timing of Ruth's accomplishments

was perfect.

At the beginning of the decade, a dark cloud of deceit

had threatened the game.

Accused of throwing the 1919 World Series,

several Chicago White Sox players were tossed out of baseball.

Disenchanted fans stayed away,

until they were lured back

by the game's two new powers.

Newsreel announcer: In move to clean up game,

team owners in 1920 made Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis

high commissioner of national pastime,

and he brought baseball back.

But Babe Ruth, too, was a big help

to the commissioner with his spindle legs,

beaming face, and booming bat.

Even when the Bambino hit a single,

thousands cheered, and thousands more fought to see him play the game.

Honig: The home team is in seventh place, going nowhere.

On a weekday afternoon, we'd draw maybe 2,000 or 3,000 people.

The Yankees came into town.

The crowds suddenly were getting larger.

Honig: Every seat was full on a hot Wednesday afternoon,

and there was only one reason for that.

Bentley: "Hey, the Babe is playing.

"Hey, this is somebody big, somebody we can root for."

Honig: Their beloved game was embodied in this man,

and they would sell out the house.

People wanted to see this guy.

Schreiber: In 1923, the Yankees took advantage of Ruth's popularity

by building a brand-new $2.5 million stadium.

It held 65,000 fans,

and because so many of them were there to see the Babe,

it was quickly christened the House that Ruth built.

Hayward Hale Broun: His existence enlarges us

just by looking at him, thinking about him.

It was because you saw perfection,

and it's so glorious that it's almost painful.

And when you were at the ballpark

and Babe took that big swing,

and the ball didn't fall down at the end--

it whacked against a seat in the bleachers--

you thought, "I saw this. I was here.

"I was in the presence of greatness."

And to be in the presence of greatness means

that some tiny fleck of it

is attached to you.

Honig: The most exciting thing in baseball

was watching Babe Ruth hit a home run.

And the second most exciting thing

was watching Babe Ruth strike out.

One of the few quotable lines from Lou Gehrig--

he said, "I batted after him, and it never mattered what I did,

"'cause they were always talking about what he had just done,"

even if he had done nothing.

Schreiber: More than any other athlete during sports' golden age,

Babe Ruth's appeal ranged far beyond

the man-made limits of the great ballparks he played in.

By the mid-'20s,

Ruth was everywhere.

Pushed along by the explosion of tabloid journalism,

he would eventually become an inescapable part

of popular American culture.

In the eyes of the press, the Babe was a dream subject.

He was made for them--

just as Al Capone was made for them