He earned fans' love in the end

Lou GEHRIG is one of those rare heroes every American has heard of and scarcely anyone knows much of anything about -- at least apart from the 1942 movie "The Pride of the Yankees," in which Gary Cooper recites the most famous farewell speech in American sports. Though Gehrig died 64 years ago, Ray Robinson's "Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time," published in 1990, has been the only serious biography until now. Jonathan Eig's "Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig" is comprehensively researched and richly detailed. It justifies its length by presenting a wealth of new information on Gehrig's life and times, retrieving the real Gehrig from the mists of legend while showing us why legend claimed him in the first place.

The reason that more hasn't been written about Gehrig is obvious: To most baseball fans, he is still an appendage of Babe Ruth. "For all his accomplishments, his movie-star looks, and his gentlemanly manner, fans, somehow, had never shown overwhelming enthusiasm for him," writes Eig. "Sportswriters said he lacked color. He was no Babe Ruth, they complained." Except, that is, on the field, where he was virtually Ruth's equal, on Yankee teams that were so dominant that journalists around the country were crying, "Break up the Yankees!" with a fervency that makes similar complaints about today's Yankees seem tame. But even on the field, Gehrig was always the costar; Ruth's "numbers" -- his 60 home runs in a season and his career 714 -- excited fans, while Gehrig's most famous statistic, 2,130 consecutive games played, was "the dullest record in the book." Apparently not everyone considered it particularly noteworthy: One columnist suggested that Yankee manager Joe McCarthy yank Gehrig from the lineup before the streak "becomes a worry to Lou."

Gehrig was probably the most respected player in the game, but that didn't translate into popularity: "He made little effort to get to know his teammates or the reporters who covered the team," Eig writes. "When members of the Yankees teased him, he shrank. When ... the media lobbed questions, he froze." He had "no gift for dissembling, which might help explain why the local newspapermen felt they could live without him in the first place. Gehrig took things seriously -- too seriously, sometimes."