A final home run

WASHINGTON

The 18-year-old U.S. Navy enlistee, thinking it sounded less boring than the dull training he was doing in 1944, volunteered for service on what he thought an officer had called “rocket ships.” Actually, they were small, slow, vulnerable boats used as launching pads for rockets to give close-in support for troops assaulting beaches.

The service on those boats certainly was not boring. At dawn on June 6, 1944, that sailor was a few hundred yards off Omaha Beach. Lawrence Peter Berra, who died last Tuesday at 90, had a knack for being where the action was.

Because he stood 5 feet 7 inches tall, he confirmed the axiom that the beauty of baseball is that a player does not need to be 7 feet tall or 7 feet wide. The shortstop during Yogi’s first Yankee years was an even smaller Italian-American, 150-pound Phil Rizzuto, listed at a generous 5 feet 6.

Yogi had, sportswriter Allen Barra says (in “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee”), “the winningest career in the history of American sports.” He played on Yankee teams that went to the World Series 14 times in 17 years. He won 10 World Series rings; no other player has more than nine. He won three MVP awards; only Barry Bonds has more, with seven, but four of them probably tainted by performance-enhancing drugs. In seven consecutive seasons (1950-56) Yogi finished in the top four in MVP voting. Only Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics (11 NBA championships, five MVP awards) and Henri Richard (11 NHL championships) have records of winning that exceed Yogi’s.

NO OFFENSE TAKEN

He grew up in what he and others called the Dago Hill section of St. Louis, when the Italian-Americans who lived there did not take offense at the name. They had bigger problems. Allen Barra notes that an 1895 advertisement seeking labor to build a New York reservoir said whites would be paid $1.30 to $1.50 a day, “colored” workers $1.25 to $1.40, and Italians $1.15 to $1.25. The term “wop” may have begun as an acronym for “without papers,” as many Italians were when they arrived at Ellis Island.

American sports and ethnicity have been interesting- ly entangled. The nickname “Fighting Irish” was originally a disparagement by opponents of Notre Dame, which for many years had problems filling its football schedule because of anti-Catholic bigotry. But sports also have been solvents of a sense of apartness felt by ethnic groups.

In 1923, the Sporting News, which for many decades was described as “the Bible of baseball,” called the national pastime the essence of the nation: “In a democratic, catholic, real American game like baseball, there has been no distinction raised except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible. ... The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon – his ‘nationality’ is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, hit or field.”

Yogi’s great contemporary, Dodgers’ catcher Roy Campanella, was the son of an African-American mother and Italian-American father. Today, with two Italian-Americans on the Supreme Court, it is difficult to imagine how delighted Italian-Americans were with their first national celebrity – the elegant center fielder on baseball’s most glamorous team, Joe DiMaggio, the son of a San Francisco fisherman.

DiMaggio was “Big Dago” to his teammates. Yogi was “Little Dago” and became the nation’s most beloved sports figure. As Yogi said when Catholic Dublin elected a Jewish mayor, “Only in America.”

Washington Post Writers Group