Holiday Road: Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum

By Paul M. Banks

How does one define the term “Ruthian?” As a home run that travels 450-475 feet or more? At the George Herman “Babe” birthplace and museum, a wall articulates what it means to be Ruthian…Here’s my interpretation: “to swing big, to live life doing everything with great excess. To hit more home runs than anybody and to hit those homers longer than anyone else can hit one, to have as much sex as possible with as many women as possible, to engage in gluttony of food, and overindulge in alcohol. To be insatiable and satisfy those who share that insatiability.” The charming little boyhood home of “The Babe” can be found within the picturesque cobblestone streets in the old part of town. Baltimore is an old city dating back to the postcolonial era; and here -just a few blocks away from Oriole Park at Camden Yards and an adjacent small strip of bars buzzing with orange and black on game day- is where it is most alluring to tourists. The house boasts a few jerseys, balls, bats, and artifacts of the Catholic school orphan who rose to become the savior of baseball in the first part of the century. One of the more interesting exhibits highlights the task of playing the Babe on the silver screen. However, the collection of Ruth memorabilia is almost equally impressive at the institution’s sister museum, the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards (the next location that I’ll feature). If you do both museums at the same time, there’s a discount. And both stay open later than usual on days when the Orioles are in town. 

Heroic Tales
 
I’ve always been fascinated with the how and why regarding hero worship in our society. Early in my childhood, I realized that athletes reside at the top of our cultural pantheon (although certainly not in those words), and I think that fact has a lot to do with why I’ve been obsessed with sports since I was a kid. In the Babe Ruth gift shop, a small book, more like a pamphlet, is for sale. Looking at the title and skimming it, I see it tells the whole story of who “The Sultan of Swat” really was, even the dark side. I don’t think it sells many copies though because its exterior looks quite low budget when compared to the other literature for sale. And these books pretty much deify Ruth. The gift shop also sells hats of three teams: Orioles, but mostly Yankees and Red Sox. Anything that unifies the Yanks and BoSox is truly heroic.

Human beings are not now and never were just good or evil, moral or immoral. You can be neither “with us or with the terrorists.” When visiting the shrine of a legendary historical figure, I’m always intrigued by the picture they paint of him or her. At the Frank Lloyd Wright museum in Oak Park, IL, the tour guide described the most famous of architects as a complete fucking asshole. Excuse my language, but the anecdotes related by the tour guide described the man as an utter prick to his family and his workers. I found this extremely interesting because if there was one place where Wright’s character and legacy would be sugarcoated, it would be there. At the two Ruth museums in Baltimore, his personality is VERY sugarcoated, much as it was by the press in his lifetime. A couple days before visiting “B-More,” I was at the Newseum in Washington D.C. There is a short film there about the sports media, and it features an interesting Ruth anecdote. Sports writers pass along a story handed down from a previous generation. The Babe once came running naked through a train car. Chasing after him was a crazed naked woman brandishing a knife. One sportswriter turned to the other and said, “Well, there’s one more Babe Ruth story we won’t be writing.”

I understand completely. I recently attended a ballgame with a girl who all but revealed herself to be the mistress of one of Chicago’s star players, a young woman who claims to be “just friends” but given the behavior she described (and some behaviors I even observed) in all likelihood is a “kept woman” of a very known, very rich and very married ballplayer here in town. I even have a fanfoto.com picture of myself with her from the ballgame we went to, but that doesn’t matter, neither does her relationship with that All-Star ballplayer for that matter, because it’s all one big story that will never get written.  And the stories that don’t get written and published are sometimes just as important as the stories that actually do circulate!

So what about the Michael Jordan Museum?

Every time I pass by the Michael Jordan statue at the United Center, I see numerous tourists snapping photos of the man who is to the NBA what Babe Ruth was to the Major Leagues. Someday Jordan will pass away and some time after that, there will be a museum devoted to him and his life. So how will he be portrayed? Just as Nike, McDonald’s and Gatorade want him to be presented? Or will future generations that never got to see him live get the whole story? I can accept this future museum depicting the fact that M Jeff took time off to play minor league baseball during the prime earning years of his basketball career. I mostly accept this because I completely buy into the conspiracy theories about how he was being suspended from the NBA for his destructive off-the-court behavior: some theories say it was his gambling, others say it was his adulterous philandering they wanted to punish for fear of it ruining his image and the reputation of the league. I just don’t accept the idea that the ultimate corporate marketing department disguised as a human being and absolute king of personal competitiveness would just leave the game that made him an emperor during his peak to pursue a silly and quixotic baseball dream. Jordan doesn’t make decisions that don’t make business sense. And this maneuver made his financial bottom line look a lot worse for a couple years. Like the whole military-industrial complex, not just one lunatic killing JFK theory, it just makes too much sense that David Stern and company would use this baseball thing as an excuse to keep devastatingly bad PR from being released about Jordan, the man who has done more than ANY individual to raise the profile of ANY professional sports league. Of course, the NBA is going to protect the man who was the global face of the league for the entire 1990s.

Jordan was an amazing athlete, possibly without parallel. He was so intensely competitive that he would stop practice if they weren’t scoring correctly and he un-retired twice.  Like Frank Lloyd Wright or General George S. Patton (I guess Babe Ruth too), sometimes you have to be a completely egomaniacal asshole in order to get results accomplished. I accept that. If it means punching teammates who screw up in practice drills or throwing chairs at incompetent teammates at halftime during games, so be it. I accept all these inconvenient truths about the greatest player in basketball history and the best athlete in Chicago sports history. I hope that the curators of the Jordan museum will as well. And that they will present that story, the whole story for museum visitors. It won’t be a very hard job for them to do a more balanced and accurate depiction than the Babe Ruth museums did!

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