Download The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic AudioBook Free
On July 4, 1939, Gehrig supplied what has been called "baseball's Gettysburg Address" at Yankee Stadium. There may be, for now, no known intact film of Gehrig's speech, but instead just a swatch of the newsreel video footage has survived, making use of his starting and concluding remarks: "For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad chance I acquired. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the facial skin of this globe" - the previous series, of course, having become one of the most famous, invoked, and inspiring ever, anywhere. The New York Times account the next day called it "one of the most touching scenes ever before witnessed on a ball field", that made even hard-boiled reporters "swallow hard." The landscape and the storyplot may likely have been basically lost to background totally were it not for the film Pleasure of the Yankees, most widely known for Gary Cooper, as the dying Lou Gehrig, movingly describing himself as "the luckiest man on the facial skin of the planet earth", even while his body was being ravaged by the condition that was soon known as after him. Here, now, in The Pleasure of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of your Vintage, by Richard Sandomir, New York Times athletics columnist, is, for the very first time, the full report behind the pioneering, seminal movie. Filled with bigger than life individuals and unexpected facts, Sandomir's e book instructs us how Samuel Goldwyn acquired no desire to produce a baseball film, but he was persuaded to produce a quick deal with Lou's widow, Eleanor, shortly after Gehrig acquired passed. Nostalgic, breezy, and fun, The Pleasure of the Yankees catches a lost amount of time in film and athletics history.
