By Dave Kindred
The Sporting News

The death of the Yankee Clipper is a jolt to a nation that reveled in his talent, his grace and his majestic presence

To say aloud the man's name ... Joe DiMaggio ... is to see the world as it was, to see it in black and white, to see a strong man hidden in an old baseball uniform, so much flannel there it's flapping, NEW YORK across the grays, the entwined NY on the pinstriped whites.

Say the name aloud ... Joe DiMaggio ... and you hear in its gliding rhythms the music of a time when baseball mattered the most and when the player who mattered the most was the graceful, stylish, silent son of an Italian immigrant fisherman named Giuseppe DiMaggio.

Say the god's name aloud and you know, if you know anything, the truth of what the rapscallion/second baseman Billy Martin said of DiMaggio: "When he walked into the clubhouse, it was like some senator or president walking in there." Only, in DiMaggio's case, presidents invited him to dinner. Time magazine put him on the cover. He married Marilyn Monroe. Willie Mays said he wanted to grow up to be DiMaggio. Ask Pete Rose his age, he says, "Born the year of DiMaggio's streak."

Everywhere DiMaggio went in his final years, they introduced him last as "the greatest living ballplayer," usually because it was the right thing to do and always because he insisted on it. The man knew who he was.

"He was one of a new breed of heroes," historian Robert Smith wrote of DiMaggio, "who found his soulmates not among the 'dirty-faced little boys' or the raucous stay-out-all-nights, but in the upper reaches of the entertainment world, the high-stake gamblers, the 'smooth' lot who frequented the dollar-a-drink saloons, and the higher-rated hero-worshipers in radio, on the newspapers, and even among the club owners."

Asked not long ago how much money he'd make today as a player -- his top salary in those "dollar-a-drink" days was a phenomenal $100,000 -- DiMaggio allowed himself a tight smile. "I'd probably be part owner," he said.

The Yankee Clipper ... Joe D ... Joltin' Joe. "He was part of the culture, a Sinatra who couldn't sing," sportswriter Tom Callahan says. Or, to turn the phrase, Sinatra was a DiMaggio who couldn't hit.

Songwriter Paul Simon told author David Halberstam how in a terrible time for this nation he came to write the lyric, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you." Simon said Mickey Mantle asked why he'd used DiMaggio and not him. Rather than explain a complex idea, Simon said, "It was syllables, Mickey. The syllables were all wrong."

Truth was, for Simon's plaintive call for an unquestioned hero from an innocent time, only DiMaggio worked. In his book, "Summer of '49," Halberstam called DiMaggio "the perfect Hemingway hero, for Hemingway in his novels romanticized the man who exhibited grace under pressure, who withheld any emotion lest it soil the purer statement of his deeds."

From his rookie season of 1936 to a painful denouement in 1951, Joseph Paul DiMaggio built a Hall of Fame career. Most any reasonable measure of great players has DiMaggio in the top two dozen, his 56-game hitting streak in 1941 still standing as one of baseball's Everests. Along the way, and more important, really, in fixing him in memory, he stood elegantly and quietly at the center of a Yankees triumvirate that began with the rambunctious Babe Ruth and ended with the sybaritic Mickey Mantle.

In his 13 seasons -- three out for World War II, during which he played and coached baseball in Hawaii -- he hit .325 with 361 home runs. His Yankees won 10 American League pennants and nine World Series championships. Straddled wide in the righthanded hitter's box, his thin-handled bat held high, DiMaggio was so quick with his hands as to seem to pluck the ball from the catcher's hands. He hit as high as .381, had as many as 46 home runs in a season (with 167 RBIs) and played the large pasture of Yankee Stadium's center field as if each blade of grass belonged to him. (He once dropped an expletive on rookie left fielder Hank Bauer, who'd made the beginner's mistake of pursuing a fly ball into territory long since staked out by the great DiMaggio.)

Say it aloud ... the great DiMaggio ... and turn to Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea," where the old man, with a big fish lashed to his boat, thinks, "Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? ... I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. Also his father was a fisherman." And Santiago tells Manolin not to worry about the Indians of Cleveland. "Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."

Think of DiMaggio and think of his times. A Ted Williams biographer, Ed Linn, saw DiMaggio as everything Williams wasn't. "Joe's appeal went far beyond the drumbeating of the New York press," Linn wrote. "This silent athlete was an integral part of the folklore. Silence was synonymous with modesty and decency. ... Joe knew exactly who he was and what he represented. His uniform always had a tailored look. His cap was set on his head just so, his hair was neatly cut and slicked down, his jacket carefully buttoned. He never stuffed his glove in his back pocket. He never chewed tobacco. He had a way of putting on his glove and pounding it, as he was running out to center field, that amounted to a kind of public announcement that he knew how good he was."

The great DiMaggio may have come to the Yankees as a shy young man. He'd grown up in a home where English was the second language and he often felt insecure because of his early difficulties academically. But he well understood, as Linn suggests, that he came to the game with uncommon skill.

He was 17 when he first played professional baseball, brought to the San Francisco Seals by his older brother, Vince, already an outfielder there. There were nine DiMaggio siblings at 2047 Taylor Street, near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Three would play in the big leagues: Vince, Dom and Joe, who learned the game on a nearby "horse lot," an open space where milk drivers parked their horses and wagons.

"We used rocks for bases," DiMaggio told a biographer, "and it was quite a scramble among about 20 of us kids to scrape up a nickel to buy a roll of bicycle tape to patch up the ball each day."

He certainly preferred baseball to fishing. His father rose early every morning to operate a small boat bringing in herring, smelt, salmon and crabs. To fishermen whose livelihoods depended on the catch, the smell was tolerable. To little Joe, the smell forever reminded him of work he despised. Instead, he sold newspapers and played ball, first suiting up for a team sponsored by an olive-oil distributor named Rossi.

For the Rossis, DiMaggio won a championship with two home runs in a game. His reward: two baseballs and $16 worth of merchandise orders. Soon after, late in the 1932 season, his brother Vince asked Seals manager Jimmy Caveney to give Joe a chance. Caveney's answer: "OK, bring your kid brother around."

And on October 1, 1932, eight weeks before his 18th birthday, Joe DiMaggio played shortstop for San Francisco, batted second and tripled in a 4-3 victory. He was on his way. The next season, in fact, eerily foreshadowed the future. As a rookie minor leaguer with the Seals, DiMaggio hit safely in 61 consecutive games.

Two more years in the minors preceded his widely anticipated arrival at the Yankees' 1936 spring training camp in Florida. "DiMaggio certainly created a furor in his first two games against the Cardinals," Dan Daniel wrote in The Sporting News after DiMaggio's six hits with a triple in each game. "Sam Breadon (owner of the Cardinals) and Frankie Frisch (the manager) went into ecstasies over Giuseppe."

So did most everyone else for a very long time. DiMaggio would win three Most Valuable Player awards. If not the game's greatest hitter, if not the greatest outfielder, if not the fastest or the strongest, it mattered little to those who saw him play every day. The best sportswriter ever, Red Smith, wrote 10 years into DiMaggio's career: "You don't rate a great ballplayer according to his separate, special talents. You must rank him off the sum total of his component parts, and on this basis there has not been, during Joe's big-league existence, a rival close to him." So much for Ted Williams.

A majority opinion, that. And joined in by DiMaggio himself, though he never put it quite so baldly. Instead, he allowed a New York newspaperman named Tom Meany, his frequent ghostwriter/business partner, to quote him on several subjects dear to him, such as: His outstanding achievement? Not the 10 pennants and nine World Series championships, not the .325 lifetime average, not a wonder in the field but, curiously, a base hit in the 40th game of the 56-game streak. Because pitcher John Babich of the A's seemed intent on walking him, DiMaggio swung at a 3-0 pitch by his chin. "I belted it through his legs and made second base on it," DiMaggio said.

His missed opportunity? In 1937, he hit 46 home runs. He told Meany he would have broken Babe Ruth's record of 60 had he played in a ballpark other than Yankee Stadium, built to Ruth's specifications. "I could have hit 70 in a field which favored righthanded hitters," DiMaggio said. "I hit 15 triples that could have been homers. It seemed that every long ball I got hold of that season was a 400-footer, even the outs."

And he could run! "In 1935, my last year with the San Francisco Seals, I stole 24 bases in 25 attempts. But when I came to the Yankees, I found (manager) Joe McCarthy didn't want me to run."

By 1950, a series of injuries, the most critical a recurring bone spur in his right heel, left DiMaggio less than he'd been, still extraordinary but not capable of reaching his high standards. He also saw that the Yankees were preparing Mantle to take over in center field. When DiMaggio retired after the '51 season, his brother Tom explained the decision: "He quit because he couldn't be Joe DiMaggio anymore."

Sportswriters so admired DiMaggio, and he was so important to their work, that they largely ignored such evidence that the great man might not be all that humble. To go with the graceful athlete, they wanted a graceful person. Discouraging words seldom made it into print.

Yet it's undeniable that a certain darkness existed in DiMaggio.

Repeatedly, he argued money with the Yankees' parsimonious front office, holding out early in the '38 season. Told that he was asking for more money than even Lou Gehrig was paid, DiMaggio said, "Then Mr. Gehrig is seriously underpaid." In 1949, DiMaggio became baseball's first $100,000 player.

He could chill a rookie, even one as harmless as the Oklahoma country hick Mickey Mantle. "DiMaggio was utterly imperious," said a San Francisco newspaperman of the local hero. A loner, vain, surrounded by sycophants who served at his severe whim, DiMaggio could be tyrannical, as in a scene reported by Gay Talese: "They may wait for hours sometimes, waiting and knowing he may wish to be alone; but it does not seem to matter, they are endlessly awed by him, moved by the mystique, he is a kind of male Garbo. They know he can be warm and loyal if they are sensitive to his wishes, but they must never be late for an appointment to meet him. One man, unable to find a parking space, arrived a half hour late once and DiMaggio didn't talk to him again for three months."

Trifles, nothing more. Trifles against the power of a fame so mighty it inspired song and literature, a fame so mighty someone saw Hemingway with DiMaggio once and asked, "Hey, you're somebody, too, aren't you?" And Hemingway said, "Yeah, I'm his doctor."

In his last years, DiMaggio being DiMaggio, he worked memorabilia shows at which his autograph on a bat made the stick of wood worth maybe $500. The restaurateur Toots Shor once predicted that DiMaggio's funeral, at St. Patrick's in New York, would draw tens of thousands of worshipers, each passing the coffin to say, "You look good, Joe."

"Someday," Red Smith wrote in the last line of his last column, "there would be another Joe DiMaggio." But Red didn't really believe that. He couldn't have believed that anyone ever again would live a life that made it possible to say to Marilyn Monroe what the great DiMaggio said on their honeymoon in 1954.

Poor Marilyn, who never understood fame or baseball, had returned to her husband from a day's appearance before American troops in Korea. She told him, "Joe, you've never heard such cheering."

And he said softly, "Yes, I have."

Dave Kindred is a contributing writer for The Sporting News.