Lou Gehrig
Based on Wikipedia: Lou Gehrig
On July 4th, 1939, a man who could barely walk shuffled to a microphone at Yankee Stadium. Sixty-two thousand people had come to say goodbye. Lou Gehrig, the most durable player in baseball history, was dying at thirty-six years old. What he said next became one of the most famous speeches in American sports: "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
He wasn't being ironic. He meant it.
To understand why requires understanding who Lou Gehrig was—and what he accomplished before a mysterious illness stripped everything away.
The Iron Horse
Baseball players get injured constantly. They pull muscles, break fingers, twist ankles. The game involves sprinting, diving, swinging heavy wooden bats, and occasionally getting hit by balls traveling ninety miles per hour. Missing games is normal. It's expected.
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive games over fourteen years. That's not a typo. From June 1925 to April 1939, he never missed a single game.
Think about what that means. Every day game. Every doubleheader. Every summer afternoon in sweltering heat and every September evening as autumn crept in. If the Yankees played, Gehrig was in the lineup. Sportswriters called him "the Iron Horse," the nickname usually reserved for locomotives that ran without stopping.
The streak survived everything. Once, a pitch hit him in the head and nearly knocked him unconscious—he stayed in the game. During an exhibition game, another pitch struck him above the eye and knocked him out cold for five minutes. This was decades before batting helmets became standard. He was in the lineup the next day. When he suffered a back injury so severe he couldn't walk off the field without help, the team listed him as shortstop the following game. He came to bat once, singled, and was immediately replaced by a pinch runner so he could rest. Technically, he'd played. The streak continued.
X-rays taken late in his life revealed he'd played through multiple fractures that were never diagnosed at the time. He simply never mentioned them.
This record stood for fifty-six years. Baseball historians considered it unbreakable—an artifact from a different era that modern athletes could never match. Then Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles passed it in 1995, eventually reaching 2,632 consecutive games. But for more than half a century, Gehrig's number seemed like it would last forever.
Growing Up German in New York
Henry Louis Gehrig was born in 1903 in East Harlem, weighing almost fourteen pounds at birth—an enormous baby. His parents were German immigrants. His father Heinrich was a sheet-metal worker who struggled with alcoholism and epilepsy, frequently unable to hold a job. His mother Christina worked as a maid and ran the household with an iron will.
Lou didn't learn English until he was five years old. German was the language of his home, spoken by parents who had arrived in America just a few years before his birth. His father came from Baden, in what is now southwestern Germany. His mother came from Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border. They were Lutherans who married in 1900.
Gehrig was the only one of four children to survive childhood. His two sisters died young from whooping cough and measles. A brother died in infancy. In an era before antibiotics and modern vaccines, childhood death was common but no less devastating. Lou grew up as an only child, helping his mother fold laundry and pick up supplies from local stores.
The family moved around Manhattan—Washington Heights, then 8th Avenue. They weren't wealthy. Christina Gehrig worked hard to provide, and she dominated her son's life well into his adulthood. He lived with his parents until he was thirty years old. His mother sabotaged his romantic relationships, disapproving of every woman he brought home.
This changed when he met Eleanor Twitchell in 1932. She was the daughter of the Chicago Parks Commissioner, and she had no intention of letting Lou's mother control their relationship. They married in 1933, and Eleanor helped Lou finally establish his independence. She also introduced him to Christy Walsh, who happened to be Babe Ruth's sports agent. Walsh made Gehrig the first athlete ever featured on Wheaties boxes—a marketing milestone that seems quaint now but was revolutionary then.
The Accidental Start
Lou Gehrig attended Columbia University on a football scholarship. He was recruited as a fullback, though he also pitched for the baseball team. Finding the engineering coursework difficult, he eventually left to pursue professional baseball.
But before he even started his freshman year, the manager of the New York Giants gave him advice that nearly derailed his career. John McGraw suggested Gehrig play summer professional baseball under a fake name—Henry Lewis—to earn some money. This was against the rules for college athletes. When Gehrig was discovered after playing twelve games for a minor league team in Hartford, he was banned from college sports for his entire freshman year.
The ban expired, and Gehrig returned to Columbia for the 1923 baseball season. On April 18th of that year—the same day the original Yankee Stadium opened for the first time, the same day Babe Ruth christened the new ballpark with a home run—Lou Gehrig stood on Columbia's South Field and struck out seventeen batters in a game against Williams College. Columbia lost, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that a Yankees scout named Paul Krichell was watching.
Krichell wasn't impressed by the pitching. He was mesmerized by Gehrig's hitting. The young man was left-handed and hit the ball with extraordinary power. Krichell had been trailing Gehrig for weeks, watching him crush home runs on various college campuses. He'd seen one land 450 feet away, at the intersection of 116th Street and Broadway. The scouts all said the same thing: this kid was "the next Babe Ruth."
Gehrig signed with the Yankees on April 30th, 1923. Except for a stint with their minor league team in Hartford, he would play his entire professional career within New York City—the same city where he'd played sandlot ball as a kid, the same city where he'd gone to high school, the same city where his immigrant parents had built their life.
In Ruth's Shadow
Here is baseball's cruelest irony about Lou Gehrig: he was one of the greatest players who ever lived, and for most of his career, he wasn't even the best player on his own team.
Babe Ruth was a supernova. He transformed baseball from a low-scoring strategic game into a power-hitting spectacle. He was larger than life—literally enormous, charismatic, excessive in every way. When Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927, it was the story of the season, the story of the decade, maybe the story of baseball history up to that point.
That same year, Lou Gehrig batted .373 with 47 home runs and 175 runs batted in. His 117 extra-base hits were second only to Ruth's all-time record. His 447 total bases ranked third in history. He was named the American League's Most Valuable Player.
And he was a footnote.
The 1927 Yankees are still considered by many to be the greatest team in baseball history. Their lineup was nicknamed "Murderers' Row" for its relentless offensive power. Ruth batted third. Gehrig batted fourth, right behind him. When the Yankees started putting numbers on their uniforms in 1929, Ruth wore number 3 and Gehrig wore number 4—their spots in the batting order, permanently stitched onto their backs.
This positioning was appropriate in more ways than one. Ruth got the attention. Gehrig followed behind, doing the work.
Consider June 3rd, 1932. Gehrig became the first player in the twentieth century to hit four home runs in a single game. He nearly hit a fifth—the center fielder made a leaping catch at the fence to rob him. After the game, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy told him, "Well, Lou, nobody can take today away from you."
McCarthy was wrong. That same day, John McGraw—the legendary Giants manager who had once given Gehrig that bad advice about playing under a fake name—announced his retirement after thirty years. The next morning, McGraw's retirement dominated the sports pages. Gehrig's four-homer game was secondary news.
This happened repeatedly throughout his career. In 1934, Gehrig won the Triple Crown, leading the American League in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average simultaneously. This is one of the rarest achievements in baseball. In modern times, it happens perhaps once a decade. And yet the Triple Crown didn't make Gehrig the biggest story. Ruth always was.
The Numbers
Statistics in baseball can be numbing. Here are Lou Gehrig's, stripped to their essentials: a .340 career batting average, 493 home runs, 1,995 runs batted in, a .632 slugging percentage. Seven consecutive All-Star selections. Two MVP awards. Six World Series championships.
But certain numbers tell stories. Gehrig held the record for career grand slams—home runs hit with the bases loaded, the most dramatic single swing possible in baseball—for decades. He hit twenty-three of them. Alex Rodriguez eventually broke that record, but Rodriguez played in an era of enhanced offense and took far more at-bats to do it.
In 1927, Gehrig drove in 175 runs. To put this in perspective: driving in 100 runs in a season is considered excellent. Driving in 150 is extraordinary. Gehrig drove in 175, breaking a record that Babe Ruth had set six years earlier. This record stood for decades.
On August 17th, 1933, Gehrig played his 1,308th consecutive game, passing the previous record holder, Everett Scott. Scott came to the ballpark as a guest to watch it happen. The streak was barely getting started. It would more than double before it ended.
The Body Begins to Fail
Something was wrong during the 1938 season. Gehrig could feel it. "I was tired mid-season," he said later. "I don't know why, but I just couldn't get going again."
His statistics that year were still respectable by normal standards: a .295 batting average, 114 runs batted in, 29 home runs. Most players would be proud of those numbers. But they were dramatically below Gehrig's own standards. The previous year, he'd batted .351 with a .643 slugging percentage. Now he was struggling, and he didn't understand why.
During the World Series that October, all four of his hits were singles. No extra-base power. No driving the ball. Just weak contact.
When spring training began in 1939, teammates and coaches noticed immediately. Something was deeply wrong. Gehrig's coordination was deteriorating. He couldn't field routine ground balls. He stumbled running the bases. The strength that had earned him the nickname Iron Horse was vanishing.
On May 2nd, 1939, Lou Gehrig walked into manager Joe McCarthy's office before a game in Detroit and voluntarily removed himself from the lineup. He was benching himself. The consecutive games streak—2,130 games over fourteen years—ended that day because Gehrig recognized he was hurting the team by playing.
"For the good of the team, I'm taking myself out," he told McCarthy.
Players and fans were stunned. Gehrig never missed games. That was the whole point of being the Iron Horse. But he wasn't the Iron Horse anymore. He was a thirty-five-year-old man whose body was betraying him in ways no one could explain.
The Diagnosis
In June 1939, Gehrig went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a thorough medical evaluation. The doctors examined him for days. They ran every test available at the time. On June 19th—his thirty-sixth birthday—they gave him the diagnosis.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS.
This is a disease that destroys motor neurons, the nerve cells that control voluntary muscle movement. As the neurons die, the muscles they control weaken and atrophy. First you lose fine motor control. Then gross motor function. Eventually, you cannot walk, cannot eat, cannot breathe. The mind typically remains sharp as the body fails completely.
In 1939, the disease had no treatment and no cure. It still doesn't. The life expectancy after diagnosis is typically two to five years. Gehrig's doctors gave him perhaps two years.
The disease is now often called "Lou Gehrig's disease" in the United States, though the term isn't used internationally. This is the kind of immortality no one wants.
The Luckiest Man
Two weeks after the diagnosis, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at Yankee Stadium. July 4th, 1939. The stadium was packed with over sixty thousand people. Babe Ruth was there—he and Gehrig had grown distant over the years, but Ruth came to say goodbye. Gehrig's teammates from both the current team and the legendary 1927 squad surrounded him on the field.
Gehrig was too emotional to speak at first. He stood at the microphone, tears streaming down his face, while the crowd waited. Finally, he began:
"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
He continued, thanking his teammates, his managers, his family. He spoke about the kindness he'd received from opposing players and fans throughout his career. He mentioned specific people by name—the groundskeepers, the trainers, the people who worked behind the scenes.
He never mentioned his illness by name. He never complained. He never asked for pity. A dying man stood before tens of thousands of people and counted his blessings.
"So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
The speech lasted barely two minutes. It has echoed for nearly a century.
The End
Lou Gehrig never played baseball again after benching himself on May 2nd, 1939. He officially retired later that season. The Yankees retired his number 4—the first time any team had retired a uniform number for any player in major league history. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in December 1939 through a special election, bypassing the normal waiting period.
He tried to stay active. For a while, he worked for the New York City Parole Commission, helping young people in trouble with the law. Eleanor stayed by his side as his condition worsened.
Lou Gehrig died on June 2nd, 1941, seventeen days before what would have been his thirty-eighth birthday. He had lived almost exactly two years from his diagnosis, precisely what the Mayo Clinic doctors had predicted.
The Yankees immediately dedicated a monument to him, one that now sits in Monument Park at the current Yankee Stadium. In 1969, the Baseball Writers' Association of America voted him the greatest first baseman of all time. In 1999, fans voted him onto the MLB All-Century Team—he received more votes than any other player on the ballot.
There is now a Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, given annually to the major league player who best exemplifies his integrity and character. The award isn't for hitting or fielding or durability. It's for being the kind of person Lou Gehrig was.
What Remains
Lou Gehrig's career statistics are remarkable. His consecutive games streak was once considered unbreakable. His seven straight All-Star appearances and six World Series championships put him among the elite of any era.
But that's not why people remember him.
They remember a man who played through pain because his team needed him. A man who benched himself when he couldn't help anymore. A man who, facing death at thirty-six, stood before a stadium full of people and called himself lucky.
The Iron Horse nickname suggested indestructibility. But Gehrig wasn't indestructible. He was human—completely, painfully human. He got tired. He got sick. He died young. What made him extraordinary wasn't that he never broke down. It's how he carried himself when he did.
In his farewell speech, Gehrig listed the people and experiences he was grateful for. He didn't rage against the unfairness of his diagnosis. He didn't lament the career cut short. He chose to focus on what he had, not what he was losing.
That choice—to find gratitude in the midst of tragedy—is why his speech still resonates. It's not about baseball. It's about how to face the worst moments of life with grace.
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive games because he refused to quit. And when his body forced him to quit, he thanked everyone for the privilege of playing at all.
That's the legacy. Not the numbers. The man.