The Old Ball Game (28 page)

A huge snowstorm fell over New York so that the streets were hardly cleared for the funeral at St. Patrick's three days later. McGraw rested in a plain casket, holding a crucifix. The cathedral was packed, and despite the freezing cold, the crowd spilled over in large numbers outside. It was reminiscent of the old days at the Polo Grounds, when the overflow stood in the outfield.

Mathewson was never right again after he was gassed. Shortly after he returned from France, he began catching colds, one after another. They settled into a cough that lingered. “In the summer of 1919 he developed a strange lassitude,” Jane said. Maybe that is why he managed to endure Hal Chase as well as he did.

McGraw was one person who, right away, feared the worst. Blanche would hear him get up in the middle of the night, shuffling around, even talking to himself about Matty's cough.

Before the 1920 season began, it was obvious to McGraw that Mathewson was too weakened to be with the team. Big Six appeared to shrink. He coughed more and more and lost his appetite. His weight whittled away to 150. Finally came the truth: he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

The year before, a hundred thousand Americans had died of it. Before that, the disease had struck a disproportionate number of soldiers on both sides of no-man's-land. The infection is spread either from drinking infected milk or from another
person who already has TB. Obviously, Matty had taken it on in France. However, tuberculosis was not necessarily fatal. Branch Rickey, for example, had recovered from it years before. That gave Matty hope, even though it had been only three years since his brother had died from the disease. Practically, though, his system was so weakened by the poison gas he had ingested that he never had a chance to fight the tuberculosis. One way or another, the Great War killed him. He did get ninety-five dollars a month disability while he lived.

The sanitarium at Saranac Lake, near Lake Placid in far upstate New York, was believed to be the most salubrious place for TB treatment. It had brisk, extremely dry air and some of the finest specialists. The Mathewsons went there with hope, but quickly learned that both of Matty's lungs were infected. Essentially, that began the toll of the bells. The doctors collapsed his lung; that brought great pain but no progress. “When a fellow can't read or write or talk and barely move,” Ty Cobb said, “it takes a little doing to keep his mind off his troubles.”

But, in fact, Matty persevered. “A fellow begins to feel that life is worth fighting for and to realize something of what it means to lose it,” he said. “Oddly, a fellow thinks less and less of himself and more and more of others. He has less dread of death. He sees that life is good and that death isn't bad at all— if one is ready for it.”

Apparently, the fellow accommodated himself well to that possibility.

McGraw would place long-distance calls regularly, from home and on the road, bringing Matty reports of the team's progress. It was cheering that the '21 team regained the pennant. At the end of the season, on September 30, the Giants held a benefit for Matty, bringing back many of his old teammates to play the current Giants in a fun game before the regularly scheduled match against the Braves. It rained, but fifty-four thousand
dollars was raised. The mail was already pouring in to Saranac Lake from all over the United States, often addressed only to “Matty” or “Big Six.”

The
Times
was moved to write: “Matty . . . still is the undaunted soul in the life battle he is fighting against the white plague.” Big Six had always been portrayed as something of a saint; now began the process of raising the saint to martyrdom.

His condition did improve, too. He played some checkers and began to take a special interest in the physical life of the Adirondacks outside his window. “It is a good old world,” he told Jane. He traveled south to New York to launch Christmas Seals and was cheered as the “Saranac miracle.”

By 1922 he really was a bit better, and although he remained weak, he began to wander about the area surrounding Saranac Lake. He concentrated on studying flowers, counted sixty-one different varieties, searching especially for his favorite wild-flower, the blue gentian. “When I see the gleam of petals in the grass,” he rhapsodized, “I bend down eagerly to look and see if this is an old friend.” With Jane driving him, he took up quail hunting. He also worked on a board game called Big Six. On one trip to the Polo Grounds, when the crowd spotted him, the fans lost all interest in the great war hero General Pershing, who was there with the baseball commssioner, Judge Landis, and flocked in Matty's direction.

Mathewson was so encouraged that he thought he might be able to return as a coach for Muggsy. McGraw, though, had another scheme. The woebegone Boston Braves were being sold to a friend of McGraw's, and he arranged for Mathewson to become the president. Jane was opposed to the idea, but Matty went along with McGraw. The Giants were the '23 Opening Day opposition for the Braves, and Manager McGraw and President Mathewson embraced before the game. Jane had a right to be concerned. Matty was really only a figurehead, but he wasn't up to even that minimal task. His condition began to worsen again. Now whenever
people would see him, they were shocked by his appearance, gaunt and pale, sure enough another of the white plague's victims.

Christy, Blanche McGraw, John McGraw, and Jane Mathewson, at the McGraws' home in Pelham, New York, 1923.

The Mathewsons moved into an even larger house in Saranac in 1924. It was obviously home for the duration; Christy Jr. graduated from high school there, then went off to Bucknell, to his father's alma mater, class of '27.

Over his doctor's objections, Matty went to the 1924 World Series, as a reporter. It would be, of course, McGraw's last, nineteen
years after their first, together. The Giants lost the deciding game to Washington, when Walter Johnson, the Big Train, the man who had replaced Mathewson as the premier pitcher in the majors, came on in relief and shut down the Giants. That was the last game Matty saw, hunched over in the press box, wearing glasses now, a body shriveled, lost under sere and sagging skin.

Still, the next February, Mathewson made it to St. Petersburg to watch the Giants train in the warm sun. Unfortunately, even in Florida he caught cold and returned to Saranac, sicker than ever. Rumors of his death came often now; they were, in truth, only a little early. Matty replied, though: “Just say for me that I'll fan death again. He can't touch me, I'm sure of that.”

But as the baseball summer wore on, as he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday, the end drew inexorably closer. Matty dutifully kept a record of his temperature. As late as September 29 it was normal, but then it went back up again. The World Series began on October 7. For the first time in five years, the Giants weren't in it. It was Pittsburgh, at home at Forbes Field, against Washington, Walter Johnson pitching for the Senators. In the fifth inning, word reached the press box that Big Six wouldn't last much longer.

On his deathbed, Matty told Jane: “It's nearly over. I know it, and we must face it. Go out and have a good cry. Don't make it a long one. This is something we can't help.”

The fellow, who was ready for death, found it at eleven o'clock that night.

The next afternoon, at the second game of the Series, McGraw sat in a field box with Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. After all these years of hating one another, Muggsy and the Georgia Peach put their antipathy behind themselves for Matty. McGraw said: “I do not expect to see the likes of Matty again, but I do know that the example he set and the imprint he left on the sport that he
loved and honored will remain long after I am gone. Matty was my close friend. His passing is one of the great sorrows of my life. God rest his soul.”

Both teams wore black armbands and, before the game, they marched slowly out to stand under the American flag, which was lowered to half-staff. Many in the crowd began to spontaneously sing “Nearer My God to Thee”:

E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me;
Still all my song would be,
Nearer my God to thee,
Nearer my God to thee.
Nearer to thee.

Then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, but muffled.

Right after the game, McGraw left for New York, where he met up with Blanche. Together they went to Saranac, and then, with Jane, they brought Matty's body back to Lewisburg, the little college town where Matty had gone to Bucknell, where his son was now. Christopher Jr. watched with Muggsy, who was one of the pallbearers, as they lowered his body into the ground.

The simple stone raised there read:

CHRISTOPHER MATHEWSON
1880–1925
CAPT
128
PENN
DIV

Nine years later, after McGraw's funeral service at St. Patrick's, his coffin was put on a train to Baltimore, where he would be buried. As Muggsy had for Matty, Christopher Mathewson Jr. accompanied McGraw to his final resting place.

The tributes that poured in for Mathewson after his death mostly referred to his character. A classic example was what W. O. McGeehan wrote in his column in the
Tribune
: “Matty was the best loved and most popular of all American athletes. . . . If baseball will hold to the ideals of this gentleman, sportsman and soldier, our national game will keep the younger generation clean and courageous, and the future of the nation secure.”

Upon McGraw's death, it would be different. The encomiums then were mostly of a professional nature, rather very much the same as those that had come when he retired two years earlier. “The man whose name is synonymous with games everywhere, even in Japan,” the
Times
had said then. Now, at his death, it was Judge Landis commending him for embodying “the virile competitive spirit of baseball.” Ty Cobb noted that “he put everything he had into baseball,” adding, “the game needs more like him.” America needed Matty; baseball needed Muggsy.

It is interesting that when, in 1956, baseball instituted an annual award for pitchers, it was named for Cy Young. Granted,
Young won far more games than any other pitcher, 511, but most of those came in the nineteenth century, and he had never been nearly the presence that Mathewson was. Then, Mathewson had been voted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, Young in the second election. But by 1956, Mathewson had been dead more than three decades, and the role that Matty had originated and played so well—the all-American hero—had been submerged by sheer numbers. There had been another world war, and even tuberculosis was not nearly the threat it had been. Everything about him seemed so passé. Even the New York Giants were on their last legs; they would disappear from existence in 1957. If only Big Six had possessed the foresight to tell McGraw, when he was dying, to sometime win one for Matty.

McGraw has probably fared better over time. His name is still sometimes invoked as the prototypical tough-guy coach, whatever the sport. Then, too, there have surely been more—and more distinct—McGravian copies around than modern Mathew-sons. Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, Red Auerbach, Bear Bryant, Woody Hayes, Bobby Knight, Scotty Bowman, Vince Lombardi, and Bill Parcells are all McGraw's spiritual heirs. Matty, though, was more a creature of his time, a collegian when so few Americans were; a sportsman when that mattered; a muscular Christian rather than a born-again. Of recent vintage, David Robinson, the basketball star who graduated from the Naval Academy, is probably the closest example, but he is a minority, an African-American, who played, even for television, in the obscurity of San Antonio. Then too, maybe the reason Mathewson is so relatively little remembered is that he was one of a kind, for all time, necessarily left back in his time. He was a personal paragon, the absolute best at what was then the nation's indisputably premier sport, playing for the most important team in the biggest city—and not, just incidentally, playing for the manager who was the most controversial sports character in all the land. For all Mathewson was, he was more
because of Muggsy. Anyway, never again are those planets going to align themselves.

McGraw is the more difficult to piece together. He possessed so many contradictory elements. As competitive as he was, he must have surely been fighting himself more than anyone else. Muggsy was a self-taught first-generation dropout; a self-made little guy; cocky and mean, but sentimental and generous. Most successful coaches today weren't very good players; McGraw was one of the very best of his time. On top of everything else, when he was young and striving, he had to overcome the most terrible tragedies—just as Mathewson saw a picture-perfect early life shatter into shards as he grew older.

Finally, for all that the two men accomplished together, the harsh truth is that, in the crux, the Little Napoleon and Big Six suffered defeat and anguish more than they enjoyed triumph and joy. Mathewson particularly proves how truly powerless any one great player is in a team sport. We so much expect the great star to carry his team to victory, even though time and again it doesn't work out that way.