This Weekend Baseball Honors Lou Gehrig to Raise Awareness for ALS
July 3, 2009 · Josh McCain · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
This weekend Major League Baseball teams across the country will be taking time out to honor Lou Gehrig by having a guest read his famous “I am the luckiest man alive” speech, as well as every team will be wearing 4ALS patches.
For those of you who don’t know about ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a deadly disease that kills the victim’s nerve system that controls muscles and leads to paralysis of voluntary muscles including those that control breathing. Those who contract this disease usually die within five years.
So this weekend when you’re watching baseball, and lighting off fireworks take sometime out and check out www.als-mda.org.
“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 17 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 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 the next nine 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!
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.
So I close in saying that I might have had a tough break—but I have an awful lot to live for!”
Lou Gerhig July 4, 1939.
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