Lou Gehrig stood at the microphone in the middle of Yankee Stadium, a broad-shouldered man in a uniform that had begun to belong more to memory than to flesh.

He was thirty-six years old. The game had been his daily bread. Now his hands were failing him. His body had become a house whose doors were slowly locking from the inside.

Sixty-one thousand people had come expecting sorrow.

They had come to see a man robbed. They were ready for bitterness, for the hard complaint of a good life cut short. They were ready to pity him, which is one of the smaller gifts human beings offer when they do not know what else to bring.