Mets Card of the Week: 1973 Yogi Berra

1973 DAILY NEWS YOGI BERRA

I am late to the wake.

The pundits and pontificators have all had their summary say about the man’s life. The many rings and awards, the eponymous -isms, the service to his country…

And now the only one left to speak is the 8-year-old boy with a dog-eared stack of baseball cards.

It is 1973, and so many of the seams in the boy’s life are tearing. His father is being squeezed out of what was once the family business, and answering the pain with the alcohol that would take his liver and his life four years later. His mother is on her third or fourth nervous breakdown, the most-recent of which he got to witness up close. His 15-year-old sister left the house one year prior, to escape from this turmoil into the last unfriendly dregs of the hippie dream.

It should come as no surprise that the boy spent a lot of time with his grandparents that year. These were his father’s parents, who had raised his dad in Brooklyn, moved to Garden City when their Artie left for college in Maine, and were now spending their final decade in the first floor of a rented house in Queens.

The boy thought that his trips from the center of Long Island to Queens were strange and magical sojourns. That mystic point on the LIE where the old Eldorado crossed over into New York City felt like bursting through a wall of water into another world– suddenly the pavement was pocked and rough and alive, and the buildings crept ever closer to the roadway in a crude, emphatic embrace.

The boy loved to read in those days, and he treasured newspapers for their seemingly infinite variety of subject matter. But only Newsday, the Long Island Press, and the Sunday New York Times made it to the edge of his driveway; the Daily News was a city paper, too blunt and uncouth for the placid suburbs. But his grandparents subscribed…

That summer in Queens over regular weekend breakfasts of Entenmann’s crumb cake and single-serving boxes of Post cereals, his grandparents would present the boy with the latest Bruce Stark Mets caricatures from the Daily News comics section, including this peninsula-chinned portrait of Manager Yogi Berra.

The Mets were foundering in mediocrity that season, but somehow the gospel of “Ya Gotta Believe” helped push them right to the precipice of a World Series victory. And the boy learned something about the power of persistence and simple belief along the way. He learned also that you do not always need to be great to achieve great things…

The boy thanks you for your part in these lessons, Yogi. May you rest in peace.