The Pride of the Yankees and the Birth of the Sports Biopic

On June 2, 1941, Lou Gehrig died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of 37. Six weeks later, producer Samuel Goldwyn secured the film rights to his life story. Goldwyn was not a baseball fan. He had no particular interest in the sport. But he had seen the newsreel footage of Gehrig's farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, and he understood what he was looking at. He was looking at the most moving scene in the history of American sports, and he was going to put it on screen.

The Pride of the Yankees was released on July 14, 1942, barely a year after Gehrig's death. It starred Gary Cooper as Gehrig and Teresa Wright as his wife, Eleanor. Babe Ruth played himself. Walter Brennan played a fictionalized sportswriter based on Fred Lieb, a close friend of the Gehrigs. The film was directed by Sam Wood, written by Herman Mankiewicz and Jo Swerling from a story by Paul Gallico, and produced with Eleanor Gehrig's involvement as a paid consultant. Cooper was her first choice for the role.

The problem was that Cooper knew nothing about baseball. He had never played the game, never watched a game in person, and was, by every account, a terrible athlete. "He threw the ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit," said Lefty O'Doul, the former major leaguer hired to coach him. Cooper was also right-handed, and Gehrig threw and batted left-handed.

The solution has become one of the most repeated stories in film history, though recent research has complicated the legend. The traditional account, which Cooper himself told in a 1956 Saturday Evening Post article, is that the production gave him a jersey with the lettering printed backwards, had him bat right-handed and run to third base, and then flipped the film so that everything appeared left-handed. Research by historian Tom Shieber, published in 2013, found that the footage was actually reversed only once, during a brief sequence depicting Gehrig's minor league days. For throwing scenes, a left-handed double named Babe Herman, a former major leaguer then playing for the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League, stood in for Cooper in wide shots. In close-ups, Cooper did his best to bat left-handed, with mixed results.

None of it mattered. The film was not really about baseball. It was about a man, his marriage, his parents, and his death. The baseball sequences are montages and shorthand. The emotional core is the relationship between Cooper and Wright, which deepens as Gehrig's body begins to fail, and the speech at the end that everyone knew was coming.

The film condensed and reorganized Gehrig's actual farewell remarks, moving the "luckiest man" line from the beginning to the end for dramatic effect. No intact footage of Gehrig's full speech survives. A small fragment of newsreel is all that exists. The movie's version became the version most Americans know.

The Pride of the Yankees received 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Cooper, and Best Actress for Wright. It won one, for film editing. It was among the top ten box office films of 1942. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 94% approval rating.

It established the template for every sports biopic that followed. The humble origins. The rise to greatness. The supportive spouse. The physical decline. The farewell. Every baseball movie from Bang the Drum Slowly to 42 to The Natural owes something to The Pride of the Yankees, and Gehrig's speech, the real one and the movie one, remains the standard against which every sports farewell is measured.