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Foreword

by Jonathan Eig

I once tried to imagine what Lou Gehrig would have said if he had been healthy enough in 1939 to travel to Cooperstown, New York, for his induction in baseball’s Hall of Fame. I visualized him saying these words that I wrote:

It is a wonderful honor to gain induction today to the Baseball Hall of Fame and to join the pantheon of great athletes and great men who have come before me. This game of baseball has meant everything to me, as it has so many boys. It took me and my family out of poverty. It taught me to be a man. I’m proud that I played hard and that the Yankees won a lot of ballgames and our share of World Series with me at the first sack. I’m proud I hit the ball square and sometimes far. I’m proud that I played fair. I’m proud that I showed my opponents the same respect I showed my own teammates. I’m proud I gave it my all every time I grabbed a bat or slipped on a glove.

But I guess if there’s one thing above all else that I’m proud of, one thing that made me who I am today and got me to the Hall of Fame, it would be this: strength.

Yes, strength. You see, I was a poor kid, a little on the pudgy side. I didn’t have much confidence in myself. My mother loved me so much she didn’t want to ever let me leave the house. I had three siblings who died, and I was her last hope. So I grew up shy and nervous. I never thought I would amount to much. But my father, he taught me the value of exercise, and soon I started packing on muscle. I was the biggest and strongest kid on the block, and then I was the biggest and strongest kid in high school, and after that in college. And I began to believe in myself. To walk into a clubhouse and see Babe Ruth and Bob Meusel and Waite Hoyt wearing Yankee uniforms and welcoming you to the club, boy, you’d better believe in yourself. That’s the first thing I tell kids today when they ask me how to be a ballplayer. I tell them it’s not about how you swing the bat or grip the ball. First thing you have to do is believe. Second thing you have to do is work hard. If you do those things, even if you don’t amount to much of a ballplayer, you’re going to be OK.

Me, I turned out to be a pretty fair ballplayer. I have a lot of people to thank for that, including my parents, my beautiful wife, my coaches, my teammates, the owners of the Yankees, and, of course, the fans. You probably heard that I gave a speech at Yankee Stadium when I found out I was sick…that I was…dying…I said I considered myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Well, I wasn’t saying I was lucky to get this disease, this amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Nobody’s lucky to get sick. I was saying I was lucky to have had a good life, lucky to have parents and a wife who love me, lucky to have played baseball. Mostly, I guess I was lucky to be strong. But here’s what I’ve learned, now that this disease has got me behind in the count no balls and two strikes: I learned that it’s not really muscles that make you strong. I learned that it’s how you face a challenge—like how my parents faced the challenge of losing three kids, or how my wife is facing the challenge of losing me…

I hit some balls pretty hard in my day, and I suppose that did take a kind of strength. But hitting a baseball doesn’t make a man a hero. There are a whole lot of people out there as sick as I am, people with ALS and all kinds of other diseases. They’re not giving up. They’re meeting every day head on, still swinging for the fences with everything they’ve got.

To fight on through disaster, to dedicate your final days to the loved ones you will soon leave behind, and to believe in yourself when you have nothing left but that will to believe…that is the greatest strength I know.

Thank you.

As Lou Gehrig’s biographer, I feel a responsibility to speak up for Lou and to share his story, and even to put words in his mouth from time to time. But the beautiful irony is that I really don’t have to because Chris Pendergast has carried on Gehrig’s legacy so bravely and so well.

Chris and I met in 2006 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I had been invited to address scientists working on a cure for ALS. I said that day that I believed ALS would be cured in my lifetime. I still believe that. But I also pointed out, sadly, that Lou Gehrig had believed it, too, when he was diagnosed in 1939.

Gehrig’s story is the stuff of tragedy—baseball’s strongest man inflicted with a fatal disease that wore his muscles away. But there’s beauty in it, too, because the disease is forever linked to a man whose courage and optimism grew as his physical strength faded. Gehrig chose not to hide his illness from the public. He chose not to seek pity. He called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” and meant it. And his courage proved contagious. He has inspired millions of people facing hardship to hold their heads high and to concentrate on what life has given them rather than what might be taken away.

In Blink Spoken Here: Tales from a Journey to Within, Chris shows he is a worthy heir to the Gehrig line. He may have Lou Gehrig’s disease, but he also has Lou Gehrig’s strength, Lou Gehrig’s love, and Lou Gehrig’s hope. To read his story is to share that strength, that love and that hope.

Jonathan Eig is the author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig.