Even worse is the myth that surrounds the tale - that Pipp, the "man in the shadow," as the Times once called him, didn't play that day because he had a headache, a story that appeared 14 years after the actual incident. Today, he's remembered as a trivia question: the guy replaced in 1925 by Lou Gehrig, who then went on to play a remarkable 2,130 games in a row. If only Pipp had been made of that sterner stuff, who knows what might have happened? Maybe he would have kept his job, Gehrig would have quit or been traded, and the name Wally Pipp might now be remembered as something more than the answer to a trivia question.Īs I've long been an avid fan of baseball history, my interest in the Gehrig legend was piqued when I read a then-new book about Babe Ruth and came across a passage that suggested the accepted Pipp-Gehrig tale was all wrong: ![]() But, legend has it, Wally Pipp allowed a minor ailment like a headache to keep him out of a game, and as a result he lost his starting job to a rookie, never got it back, and was traded away at the end of the season. The Pipp-Gehrig legend is a cautionary tale for the ages: In those days baseball players were supposedly made of sterner stuff and played through injuries and pain a veteran wouldn't dare to beg his manager for a day off unless he had a bone poking through his skin. (Technically Gehrig's streak began a day earlier when he entered a game as a pinch-hitter, but 2 June 1925 marked the beginning of his tenure as the Yankees' first baseman.) Not until May 2, 1939, was the name of Lou Gehrig ever out of a Yankee line-up. "I'll let that kid Gehrig fill in for you while you rest." ![]() "I can't play today, Hug," the big first baseman told Miller Huggins, the mite manager. His head was buzzing when he reported to the Yankee Stadium on June 2, 1925. Once that date came to be recognized as something significant, it also became the centerpiece of a baseball legend - Gehrig got his big break only because Wally Pipp, the Yankees' regular first baseman since 1915, sat out a game with a headache: ![]() (Gehrig died two years later, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is now commonly known as "Lou Gehrig's disease.") That was the day on which a youngster out of Columbia University, Lou Gehrig, took over first base duties for the New York Yankees, holding the position for the next fourteen years and embarking on a Hall of Fame career that saw him play in an astounding 2,130 consecutive games - a streak that ended only when a fatal disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) so eroded Gehrig's physical skills that he could no longer perform on the field. Likewise, in the world of sports, 2 June 1925 was not recognized as a significant date until many years later. Nor did anyone realize that when an 18-year-old boy recently returned from a stint driving Red Cross ambulances in post-war France made his way to Kansas City in 1919 and took a $50/month job drawing farm equipment ads for the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, Walt Disney had taken his first step towards founding a multi-million dollar entertainment empire. No one anticipated, for example, that when an 18-year-old machine shop worker clutching a battered guitar walked into the office of the Memphis Recording Service during the summer of 1953 and paid to record himself performing a couple of songs (ostensibly as a gift for his mother), Elvis Presley was on his way to becoming a towering figure in American popular music and a national icon. ![]() Not all events are recognizable as momentous at the moment they occur, however sometimes their historical significance is only evident in retrospect, after the passage of many years. Few people who lived through events such as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 or the terrorist attacks against America on 11 September 2001 would deny that they immediately recognized those events to be momentous ones - points at which history took a sudden left turn and unexpectedly headed off down a different path.
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