Everything They Had by David Halberstam

DiMaggio and Johnny Unitas, each the son of immigrants. Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, descendants of slaves who would become special American icons. All of them were in different ways driven by the unique forces which created America—the combination of prejudice inflicted on those who had gone before them, and yet the belief that in the lives of their children things would get better. More, the world of sports offered the ideal arena for new Americans, or black Americans whose forebears had been suppressed by racism, to show their strengths and their talents. Only the U.S. military was in any way nearly as democratic a venue.
    America was, of course, almost without knowing it, a favored nation. The quality and energy and passion of its immigrant citizens and the part they were to play in the successes of the coming century were not to be underestimated: They were to become inventors, scientists, workers, farmers and exceptional citizens. “Give me your tired, and wretched and poor,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, ironically mocking the words taken from Emma Lazarus and engraved on the Statue of Liberty, then adding himself, “Some wretched, some poor.” What Moynihan meant, of course, was that America was getting the cream of the crop, though when they had first arrived they did not look like the cream of the crop—all they carried were their hopes and ambitions, and their desire to be not just Americans but good Americans.
    This explosion of affluence and power and confidence connected directly, it would turn out, to the world of sports; more, the world of sports would serve as an almost ideal window through which to watch the profound changes taking place elsewhere in the society. Was the country more confident, more affluent, and did its citizens have more leisure time? Then they would show it by becoming more addicted to their games.
    No one signified the coming of power quite like Babe Ruth. He changed the very nature of sports. He was five years old when the century began (or at least he so believed, since it was also possible that he was four years old). Because his deeds were so awesome, particularly when measured against the existing dimensions of what passed for power, his name was almost immediately turned into an adjective. Long drives, more than half a century after he played his last game, are said to be Ruthian. He was the perfect figure about whom to create a vast assortment of myths and legends, some of them true, some of them not, though it meant little if they were true or not, because the ones which had been made up seemed just as true as those which could more readily be documented.
    Ruth was big, joyous and seemingly carefree. Rules were made to be broken—he had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage not because his parents were dead but because they could not control him. That sense of him, as a kind of all-American Peck’s Bad Boy, seemed to endear him to many of his fellow citizens, more trapped by all kinds of rules in their lives than he was in his. If editorial writers on occasion thundered against his childlike and occasionally boorish behavior, the same antics seemed to charm millions of ordinary American sports fans.
    He brought drama to everything he did. He was not just a great athlete, he was a show, fun even when he struck out. He became a phenomenon. Ordinary people longed to read about him. The outrages he committed socially were the outrages of the common man, the ordinary American catapulted to an elite world by his athletic success, but unspoiled in his heart. After he had signed for $80,000, a salary greater than that of President Herbert Hoover, and a reporter questioned him about it, he had said, “Why not? I had a better year than he did.” When he met Marshal Foch, the commander of the French forces during World War I, he had said, “I suppose you were in the war.”
    If Ruth was the most egalitarian of sports