Let’s start out by looking at a speech that nearly everyone has read or heard: the speech that baseball player Lou Gehrig gave at an appreciation day held in his honor on July 4, 1939. Gehrig had recently learned that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurological disorder that has no cure (today it is known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Although Gehrig was a reluctant speaker, the fans’ chant of “We want Lou!” brought him to the podium to deliver one of the most powerful and heartfelt speeches of all time.
Farewell Speech
Lou Gehrig
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?
Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert; also the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow; to have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins; then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology—the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Who wouldn’t feel honored to have roomed with such a grand guy as Bill Dickey?
Sure, I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift—that’s something! When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something!
When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles against her own daughter—that’s something! When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body—it’s a blessing! When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed—that’s the finest I know!
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So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for! Thank you.
(1939)
While in our time the word rhetoric may suggest deception, this speech reminds us that rhetoric can serve sincerity as well. No wonder one commentator wrote, “Lou Gehrig’s speech almost rocked Yankee Stadium off its feet.”