Yogi
A Life Behind the Mask
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4.5 • 64 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Discover the definitive biography of Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees icon, winner of 10 World Series championships, and the most-quoted player in baseball history.
Lawrence "Yogi" Berra was never supposed to become a major league ballplayer.
That's what his immigrant father told him. That's what Branch Rickey told him, too—right to Berra's face, in fact. Even the lowly St. Louis Browns of his youth said he'd never make it in the big leagues.
Yet baseball was his lifeblood. It was the only thing he ever cared about. Heck, it was the only thing he ever thought about. Berra couldn't allow a constant stream of ridicule about his appearance, taunts about his speech, and scorn about his perceived lack of intelligence to keep him from becoming one of the best to ever play the game—at a position requiring the very skills he was told he did not have.
Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and four years of reporting, Jon Pessah delivers a transformational portrait of how Berra handled his hard-earned success—on and off the playing field—as well as his failures; how the man who insisted "I really didn't say everything I said!" nonetheless shaped decades of America's culture; and how Berra's humility and grace redefined what it truly means to be a star.
Overshadowed on the field by Joe DiMaggio early in his career and later by a youthful Mickey Mantle, Berra emerges as not only the best loved Yankee but one of the most appealingly simple, innately complex, and universally admired men in all of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Legendary Hall-of-Famer and folk sage Yogi Berra is baseball's humble yet profound everyman in this warmhearted biography. Pessah (The Game), founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, recounts Berra's ascent from a childhood in a working-class Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis to his career as the catcher of the storied Yankees of the 1940s and '50s, when he won five consecutive World Series rings. Pessah styles Berra as beloved but insufficiently respected: he suffered secret pain from jibes at his intelligence and looks his long arms and fire-hydrant silhouette got him dubbed "the Ape" and his kindness earned him a reputation as a weak, ineffectual manager even though he won two pennants in six seasons. He's a down-to-earth and well-behaved but recessive figure in much of the book, a stolid foil for the antics of more dramatic Yankees like the tragic aristocrat Joe DiMaggio, the rebel boozehound Mickey Mantle, and the soap opera trio of George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and Reggie Jackson. Throughout, Pessah celebrates Berra's cultural afterlife as a font of artless aphorisms in which wisdom rises from the ruins of logic ("You should always go to other people's funerals. Otherwise, they won't come to yours"). The funny anecdotes and exciting play-by-play from baseball's golden age will keep Berra's legions of fans happy.
