Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee

Allen Barra. Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. 451 pp. Cloth, $27.95. As he states in the introduction to his biography of the iconic New York ballplayer, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, Allen Barra's goal is to separate the authentic Yogi from the mythic Yogi, the man from the media creation. Noting that Berra is painfully shy and reluctant to embrace the role of public figure, Barra writes, The real Yogi was no cliche, and he was nobody's invention but his own (xxxvi). Such is the basic contradiction of this breezily written book, more a tribute than a critical biography. Barra, a Wall Street Journal sports reporter who is not related to his subject, attempts, often successfully, to break through the Yogi-isms in order to present a portrait of exemplary athlete who is neither lacking in intelligence nor a clown. While much of the Yogi Berra narrative is already well known, it is a compelling story nonetheless. Born of Italian immigrants in St. Louis's Hill neighborhood, Berra played sandlot ball as well as soccer, bocce, street hockey, and something Berra identifies as bumby --a game roughly resembling Johnny on the Pony --together with a host of neighborhood boys, including fellow future major leaguer and mythifier Joe Garagiola. It was in St. Louis that Berra--called Lawdy by friends and family alike, in mocking tribute to his mother's heavy Italian accent--acquired the nick-name Yogi, reputedly because of his resemblance to Eastern mystic his friends saw in a short travelogue. Writing of Berra's St. Louis childhood, Barra notes that, though the future Yankee's family was far from affluent, his childhood experience was an idyllic existence for a boy, its pleasures untinged by the misery caused by the Depression in the outside world (n). Rather than simply explain how Berra's father, Pietro, and many other of the neighborhood's laborers managed to remain employed during the Depression, Barra tries his hand at scholarly research. He cites How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis's landmark study of New York's slums, published in 1890, in order to explain how the proud working-class residents of the Hill managed to stave off poverty. According to Riis's study, Barra notes, Italian Americans were the least likely among recent immigrant groups to become paupers. That Riis's subjects were slum dwellers in Manhattan's notorious Five Points in the late nineteenth century, not working-class residents of extremely stable ethnic neighborhood with little crime, seems to be unimportant. Indeed, no distinction is made between time periods, locations, or socioeconomics of the Italian American populations to which Barra refers. Herein lies a major problem with Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee. At the same time it is a readable popular biography of a well-known public figure, it wants to be a scholarly text, complete with numerous substantive foot-notes--like the one following the Riis reference, citing the rates of indigence among Irish and German immigrants in relation to those from Italy in the 188os. Not only does this attempt at scholarship, and others like it, fall flat, it takes away from what appears to be a well-researched, if neither critical nor objective profile of the player. Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee is most successful when it leaves scholarship behind and focuses on its subject's exploits on the field and his relationships around it. Particularly interesting, for example, is the author's description of Berra's development as a catcher under the tutelage of Bill Dickey--catcher being a position which Berra had to learn, having been signed for his offensive ability. …

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