BIG BAM, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　He was the Sultan of Swat. The Caliph of Clout. The Wizard of
Whack. The Bambino. And simply, to his teammates, the Big Bam. From
the award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Ted
Williams comes the thoroughly original, definitively ambitious, and
exhilaratingly colorful biography of the largest legend ever to
loom in baseball—and in the history of organized sports.
　　“[Montville is] one of America’s best sportswriters.” —Chicago
Tribune
　　Babe Ruth was more than baseball’s original superstar. For
eighty-five years, he has remained the sport’s reigning titan. He
has been named Athlete of the Century . . . more than once. But who
was this large, loud, enigmatic man? Why is so little known about
his childhood, his private life, and his inner thoughts? In The Big
Bam, Leigh Montville, whose recent New York Times bestselling
biography of Ted Williams garnered glowing reviews and offered an
exceptionally intimate look at Williams’s life, brings his
trademark touch to this groundbreaking, revelatory portrait of the
Babe.
　　Based on newly discovered documents and interviews—including
pages from Ruth’s personal scrapbooks —The Big Bam traces Ruth’s
life from his bleak childhood in Baltimore to his brash entrance
into professional baseball, from Boston to New York and into the
record books as the world’s most explosive slugger and cultural
luminary. Montville explores every aspect of the man, paying
particular attention to the myths that have always surrounded him.
Did he really hit the “called shot” homer in the 1932 World Series?
Were his home runs really “the farthest balls ever hit” in
countless ballparks around the country? Was he really part
black—making him the first African American professional baseball
superstar? And was Ruth the high-octane, womanizing, heavy-drinking
“fatso” of legend . . . or just a boyish, rudderless quasi-orphan
who did, in fact, take his training and personal conditioning quite
seriously?
　　At a time when modern baseball is grappling with hyper-inflated
salaries, free agency, and assorted controversies, The Big Bam
brings back the pure glory days of the game. Leigh Montville
operates at the peak of his abilities, exploring Babe Ruth in a way
that intimately, and poignantly, illuminates a most remarkable
figure.

　　LEIGH MONTVILLE, a former columnist at the Boston Globe
and former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, is the
author of the bestselling Ted Williams, At the Altar of
Speed, Manute,and Why Not Us? He lives in
Boston.

　　“A comprehensive look at a gargantuan life.” —People
　　“Montville is refreshingly nonjudgmental about his superstar
subject.  First-rate biography.” —Los Angeles Times Book
Review
　　“Crisp analogies and astute observations, combined with a fluid
writing style, are Leigh Montville’s strengths in this definitive
biography of the Splendid Splinter.  Montville’s writing is
rich and full, like a Ted Williams swing.  He connects
solidly. A raw, no-holds-barred view of [Williams’s] life.” —Tampa
Tribune
　　“An engaging, fascinating read.” —San Diego Tribune
　　“Ted Williams is not only a first-rate sports biography, but also
a first-rate biography, period.” —Baltimore Sun

　　Chapter One
　　The little boy and the man get on the Wilkens Avenue trolley on
the morning of June 13, 1902. It is a Friday. They are off on a
trip of great dimensions. Details are important but do not seem to
be available. There is so much we want to know. There is so much we
never will.
　　Is it really morning?
　　Or maybe early afternoon?
　　Probably not night.
　　The man and the boy take seats in the second row. Or maybe they
are all the way in the back. The boy is on the outside so he can
see the streets of Baltimore pass. Or maybe he is on the inside.
Maybe he is looking at his shoes.
　　The jangle of nickels and pennies rolling through the conductor’s
coin box is background noise. Wasn’t the coin box always background
noise on a trolley? The ding-ding of the bell is heard when the
trolley makes a stop. What is the weather? The Baltimore Sun
predicted showers and cooler. Is it raining right now? Cool enough
for a jacket? Don’t know. Can’t be sure.
　　The man is sad or resolute or perhaps secretly happy. The boy is
. . . does he even know where he is going? Is the packed little
suitcase on the seat next to him a clue? Or is there no suitcase?
He is dressed in the best clothes that he owns. Or are there no
best clothes? The conversation is quiet, short sentences, the man’s
mind lost somewhere in the business of the moment. Or perhaps there
is no conversation, not a word. Or perhaps there are laughs, the
man talking and talking, joking, to take the edge away.
　　What?
　　Imagination tries to build atop slim facts. The man is 31 years
old. That is birth certi?cate truth. His wife is 28 years old. That
is another birth certi?cate truth. Their ?rst son, the boy, as
recorded in the Of?ce of the Registrar of Vital Statistics,
Baltimore City, by midwife Minnie Graf, is seven years, three
months, seven days old, except . . . except he will believe for
most of his years that his birthday is one year and one day
earlier.
　　Why is that?
　　The urge is to sketch in the rest of the picture, make judgments,
add colors and emotions and maybe a passing billboard or two. Can
it be resisted? The mother has kissed the boy good-bye at the front
door of 426 West Camden Street, a tear rolling down her cheek. Or
she has said nothing. Or she was relieved. Or maybe she wasn’t even
there. The boy is sad, crying. Or he is mute, de?ant. Or he is
clueless and con?dent, always con?dent.
　　
　　The biggest mysteries in the life of George Herman Ruth–and some
researchers say Herman is his true middle name, handed down from
his father, and some say it is his con?rmation name–are
front-loaded and frustrating. The topographic representations of
most famous lives feature well-de?ned peaks of public achievement,
brightly lit and easily seen, but a fog often settles over the
personal life below. The fog here covers everything.
　　Babe?
　　Babe Ruth?
　　Behind that moon face with those small eyes, that ?at nose, those
big lips that will be captured in any instantly recognizable
portrait in a blue New York Yankees cap, the boy will forever hide.
He is only a shape, glimpsed here, glimpsed there, lost again. No
one has found that boy at the beginning of it all, touched him,
gotten to know him. No one ever will. If the right questions ever
were asked, the answers never were given. Time has ?nished the job.
There is no one to talk to now. No one is around.
　　He will become the Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, the Big Bam,
baseball royalty, the greatest home run hitter of his time or any
time, a character as interesting as Einstein or Edison or Elvis or
any other twentieth-century innovator or inventor, but he will
never ?ll in the early blanks. Want to grow up to be Babe Ruth? He
will never explain how to start.
　　The trolley ride with his father on that June day of 1902 will
always be a bewilderment. The boy will say as a man only that he
was “a bad kid.” Not much more than that. He was seven years old.
He was an only son. He was taken to that trolley because he was a
seven-year-old bad kid? How bad could he have been? “Incorrigible”
was a word that was used.
　　There are no stories of a mother, none–good or bad or madhouse
crazy. There is one picture of her, a grainy shot, pulled from a
group photo of a family reunion, her famous child in her lap. Her
hair is up. Her high collar is buttoned. She is not
smiling. 
　　There are few stories of a father. He was a lightning-rod
salesman and then the owner of a succession of taverns. He had an
anger that coursed through him. Or so it seemed. The one famous
picture of father and son, later in life, shows a beefy man,
striped shirt, necktie, vest of a waiter. He has a cigar in his
left hand, stands behind his bar. Christmas decorations hang from
the ceiling. He would like to pour you a beer.
　　The environment can be stitched together from history books and
memoirs of local writers, but it is a broad picture of
turn-of-the-century Baltimore and a bad neighborhood and
working-class woes. Stevedores, sailors, wagons, horses, the
many-layered bustle of business–these are the backdrop in an area
of alleys and cramped brick houses near the docks on the wrong side
of Pratt Street, the downtown dividing line for class and
economics.
　　The general neighborhood, which included the house of George
Herman’s maternal grandmother at 216 Emory Street, where he was
born, was called Pigtown. He is a boy from Pigtown. The name comes
from the great herds of pigs, hundreds of pigs, that are run
through the streets on a regular basis from the nearby stockyard to
the nearby slaughterhouse. Residents, it is said, would open their
basement windows and reach out and try to grab a passing, squealing
potential Sunday dinner.
　　The speci?cs of family life are elusive. The father ran assorted
taverns in the area, nine in one count, one after another, so the
family moved often. The mother was pregnant much of the time, had
eight children, including two sets of twins. Six of the children
died early. She herself was dead of “exhaustion,” the word on her
death certi?cate, at age 39. The certi?cate also said she was a
widow.
　　A widow?
　　That’s wrong.
　　Isn’t it?
　　The meager bits of information scrawled on forms and in ledgers
by bored civil servants are pen-and-ink riddles as much as facts.
The father was supposed to be Lutheran, the mother Catholic. They
were married in a Baptist church. The boy supposedly was baptized
Catholic, but 11 years later was baptized Catholic again. The word
“convert” was written on the side of the of?cial certi?cate. Why
was that? Any mistakes made then are codi?ed now, preserved as
Paleolithic truth when found by armchair archaeologists.
　　The most spare anecdotes or one-liners are repeated with each
succeeding retelling of the larger tale, gathering weight each
time. They are repeated here. The grown-up boy supposedly told
Chicago Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers of
Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame that his father took him to the
basement and beat him with a horsewhip. Another story mentioned a
billiard cue. Another said his mother beat on him in
frustration.
　　The image that clicks into place is an embattled household on the
perforated edge of poverty. Alcohol fuels discord and noise.
Volatility is the one constant of every day, the smallest
situations ticking, ready to explode. Love and quiet are luxuries
that can’t be afforded. Bills are always due. Frustrations sit in a
pile that never will get smaller, life turned into existence. An
unpleasant existence at that. The birth date for little George–if
it is right–indicates that he was born seven months after his
mother and father were married. What about that fact? Did his
parents know? Was that why they were married in the ?rst
place?
　　Is any of this right?
　　A sister survived. Mary, called Mamie, was ?ve years younger than
little George. Or maybe six. She would live to be 91 years old,
dying in 1992, but was of little help. She developed a mostly
romanticized version of childhood, as many people do. Her parents
were “in the restaurant business.” Her brother was “a very big boy
for his age, very good-hearted to everyone he met. He would get
very angry at times, but it was soon forgotten.”
　　She did say, “Mother was not a very well person.” She didn’t
elaborate on what sense of “well” she meant. Physical or mental? Or
both? Didn’t say. At times she was at variance with things her
brother said. He said he had an older brother, John, who died in a
street ?ght. She said there was no older brother; George was the
oldest. He also said their mother was a mix of Irish and English.
Mamie said this was nonsense; their mother was German.
　　Research seems to back Mamie’s side. The mother, maiden name
Katie Schaumberger, was the daughter of Pius and Anna Schaumberger.
They both were born in Germany; then Katie was born in Maryland.
The other side of the family also goes back eventually to Germany.
George Ruth Sr.’s parents both were born in Maryland. There is
dispute about where his grandparents were born, either in Germany
or Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Dutch country. Pick
one. If Bucks County is the choice, the great-great-grandparents
were from Germany.
　　Added to the confusion are a couple of other names, “Erhardt” and
“Gerhardt.” These were names mentioned mostly by the boy, the son,
in later years. He tried to explain, more than once, that Ruth was
his real name, not Erhardt or Gerhardt. Who exactly thought his
real name was Erhardt or Gerhardt was never explained.
Someone–perhaps a bunch of someones–must have thought so. Why else
would he explain?
　　In his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, ghostwr…