It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

He didn't have a speech writer.

You could say that about Yogi Berra. In fact my wife did. (It also applies to Casey Stengel [and Samuel Goldwyn for that matter]. “You can look it up.”) And it's a good thing, too.

He's often viewed as a clown, but Yogi was one of the smartest men in the game. Those immersed in baseball will remember him as a Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, and later as a coach or manager, primarily for the New York Mets and the Yankees. He was very, very good at his craft, making the All-Star team fifteen years in a row, and being voted the award for Most Valuable Player three times.

But it was his malapropisms – his “Yogi-isms” – that made him a folk hero to most people, and some of the things he said will be remembered long after most of his athletic records are superseded. We'd all be the poorer if his comments had been filtered through the typewriter of a well-schooled author (many of those remarks were made before computers had been popularized, so columnists had to use typewriters) and offered as erudite aphorisms in sophisticated language. Erudite they were – and very insightful – but it was his often unintended turn of phrase that made them memorable.

He wasn't very articulate, having dropped out of school in the eighth grade. And his early life was spent in an Italian neighborhood in St. Louis. But he knew baseball – both the physical side of it and the mental. The words may have seemed befuddled, but the ideas behind them weren't. One of his most famous remarks, “It ain't over 'til it's over,” was made in 1973 (Dan Cook, a columnist for the San Antonio News-Express wrote “The opera ain't over till [sic] the fat lady sings,” but that wasn't until 1976) as he guided the Mets from last place in the Eastern Division to National League champions and to the World Series. He wasn't a quitter.

Among numerous other wise, if clumsily constructed statements, he is remembered for “It's déjà vu all over again,” “Ninety percent of this game is half mental,” “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” “You can observe a lot by watching,” and “Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours.” There are those who will maintain that they weren't all original, or that what is remembered is not accurate, but he was the first to admit that. Or, as he put it, “I really didn't say everything I said.”

He was a baseball player, philosopher, and educator and a lot more. He demanded the best of his players, and he got it.

And he also expected stellar performance from others – including members of his family. “I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”

Yogi Berra died last year. Today is his birthday.  He would have been 91.