I read Richard Ben Cramer's biography of Joe DiMaggio in a day and a half. The Hero's Life was compelling and convincing. I couldn't put it down. Only now, I wish I had.

        Sometimes, we know too much. Some things, we'd rather not know.

        DiMaggio worked in a time when cynicism was a quirk, not another national pastime. Heroes were still possible. The writers who covered his Yankees had no agenda other than to make him king. That DiMaggio was not always the man they described didn't matter to them or anyone else. DiMaggio was who America wanted him to be.

        Fifty-nine years after Joltin' Joe hit in 56 straight games, my 68-year-old father keeps
faith with the myth. “DiMaggio had class,” my dad says. “He was a guy a kid could look up to.”

        This is what Cramer tells us about Joe DiMaggio:

        He hung out with mobsters. He beat Marilyn Monroe. He was a failed husband, a missing father and a suspicious friend. He was greedy. Heroism was a lonely duty he craved and loathed at the same time.

        All those World Series rings DiMaggio claimed were stolen from him? The rings the Yankees replaced with replicas in 1998? Cramer writes they weren't stolen at all; DiMaggio exchanged them for “services of every kind.”

        That's a horrible revelation. In this book, it's just the leadoff hitter.
       

Up close
               Observe athletes long enough at close range, the twinkle will leave your eye. You'll still be amazed at what they do. But you'll burn at who they are. A sports writer who's not a cynic is a sports writer who's not paying attention.

        Sports pages used to be the feel-good avenues of the daily paper. Take a drive down this column, they promised. You'll feel better. Now, they're as fun as the editorial page.

        What I liked about Cramer's book, beyond frequent revelations of DiMaggio's occasional shabbiness, was the portrait Cramer painted of a nation with a passion for baseball in general and DiMaggio in particular.

        He was a celebrity, but not in the flash-and-dash sense of today. (DiMaggio was the anti-Deion.) DiMaggio was held in awe. The year of the 56-game streak, attendance records were broken everywhere. People believed in the myth, because the myth was all they had.

        After DiMaggio's then-wife Marilyn Monroe filmed the famous movie scene atop the subway grate — wind whooshing, dress blown up in her face — DiMaggio was so furious, he beat her. She divorced him. For years after that, Cramer writes, DiMaggio arranged sexual liaisons with Marilyn look-alikes.
       

No thanks
               Sometimes, we know too much. Some things, we'd rather not know.

        My father says sports were better then. Watching them, investing emotions in them and, I'm guessing, writing about the people who played them. Cramer's book makes that obvious. A nation in love has no time for cynicism.

        These days, we have time for nothing else.

        In August 1947, DiMaggio played every day on aching legs, even as the Yankees dominated the league. The sportswriter Jimmy Cannon asked him why. “Someone (might) be in the stands who has never seen me play,” DiMaggio said.

        If a player said that now, we'd chuckle at his innocence. More's the pity.

        Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at (513) 768-8454.

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