FIFTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, BABE RUTH SILL CAPTIVATES AS MAN, MYTH, LEGEND

Whether you believe he actually pointed to center field and predicted the most fabled hit in baseball history, there is one shot Babe Ruth did call.

Sitting in her New Hampshire home today, an 81-year-old woman sighs.

“Daddy rarely read books or went to movies, he said it would hurt his eyes, he warned me about the same thing,” said Julia Ruth Stevens. “I ignored him. Now look at me.”

Today, on the 50th anniversary of George Herman Ruth’s death, with the country celebrating its first sports hero through print and television and ceremony, his lone surviving child can see little of it.

A degenerative eye disease has left her legally blind.

But she knows what we are just beginning to understand.

“What happened with Daddy, it was always something you could just feel,” she said. “It still is.”

Indeed, today we feel it, embrace it, the majesty and the mishaps, the talent and the turmoil, the legend and the big galoot of a right fielder who swallowed it whole.

Fifty years after his death, all of Babe Ruth’s important records have been broken, yet he is larger than ever, a symbol of mammoth strength and childlike frailty during a time when our heroes are no longer big enough to handle both.

With a face like a seat cushion, a body like a bonbon, legs like twigs, and the smile of a little boy, he ran pigeon-toed on to the landscape as our war-weary country was looking for a personality.

During 21 years of big swings, he defined it.

Babe Ruth made America believe that nothing succeeds like excess.

Today we love home runs. We love to eat until we fall away from the table, grunting. We buy expensive things, throw expensive parties. We aren’t afraid to laugh like a horse or cry like a baby. Sometimes our desires get us into trouble, but hey, kid, we mean well, we’ll try harder next time, OK?

Babe Ruth made America believe, going from the hopelessness of Baltimore streets to the glory of the world stage and nearly back again.

In his final years, he fell into despair when nobody would hire him as a manager. Owners chuckled that they didn’t think he could manage himself.

He died of throat cancer on Aug. 16, 1948, at 53, gray and thin and wondering how his wonderful life had so quickly disappeared.

“I’m so glad to see you,” he told his daughter shortly before his final breaths, as if he thought she had departed as well.

The thing is, our love for him didn’t disappear. We had just momentarily grown bored. Not anymore. Today he’s making a comeback as big as that final career home run he dramatically knocked out of Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field.

Babe Ruth’s image is on TV commercials, print ads, beer mugs, shirts, even a restaurant in London. And what must this street-educated man be thinking if he looks down and discovers that he has his own Web site.

The more we know about Babe Ruth, the more we want to know. Thus the theme of this 50th anniversary column:

Fifty things about Babe Ruth you may not know.

Things like, he referred to his daughter Julia as “Butch.”

Things like, as she was doing a recent telephone interview, she was sitting in her home next to a manicured field.

A field where, that night, a bunch of kids would be playing baseball.

In the local Babe Ruth League.

*

1. The “Baby Ruth” candy bar has nothing to do with Babe Ruth. The Curtiss Candy Co. named it after the late daughter of President Grover Cleveland. When Ruth tried to sell his own candy bar, the patent office rejected it.

2. For years, for unknown reasons, Ruth thought he was born on Feb. 7 instead of Feb. 6, which was on his birth certificate. When he realized his error, he shrugged, and continued to celebrate on Feb. 7.

3. He was not an orphan--his parents owned a bar, and he was placed in an orphanage/reform school because they couldn’t handle him. Yet he circulated the story throughout his life to inspire orphans.

4. The incident that many agree led to his banishment to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, in Baltimore, occurred when he stole a dollar from his parents’ bar and bought ice cream cones for all the children on his block.

5. In his final two years at St. Mary’s--with his mother dead of tuberculosis and his father busy in the bar--he had no visitors.

He said, “I am too big and ugly for anyone to come see me.”

6. He began his career at St. Mary’s as a left-handed catcher. He would put the right-handed mitt on his left hand, catch the ball, throw it in the air, drop the glove, catch the ball again with his bare left hand, and throw out runners attempting to steal.

Now you try it.

7. Until his death, Ruth maintained that his favorite memory was the time he informed the other boys at St. Mary’s he actually was going to be playing baseball for real money.

8. On Ruth’s first spring training in 1914 with the International League Baltimore Orioles, coach Sam Steinman warned other players not to mess with the big rookie because he was a favorite of owner Jack Dunn.

“He’s one of Jack Dunn’s babes,” Steinman said.

The name stuck.

9. Ruth’s first home run as a professional baseball player, occurring in that initial spring training, was the longest ball ever hit in Fayetteville, N.C.

It broke a record set by Jim Thorpe.

10. In that first year in professional baseball, he received one piece of fan mail . . . from Brother Gilbert of St. Mary’s.

11. Several years later, in an unexplained fit of rage, Ruth tore up 100 letters that had gathered in his Yankee locker. Upon piecing them back together, a trainer discovered $6,000 worth of endorsement checks.

12. In his first five weeks in the major leagues with the Boston Red Sox, Ruth bought a car, got a license, was in an accident, had his license suspended, met and proposed to his first wife.

13. In Ruth’s first World Series pitching appearance with the Red Sox, he pitched 13 consecutive scoreless innings. Yes, in one game.

14. Ruth moved from pitcher to the outfield in 1919 with the Red Sox after a man named George Halas flunked a tryout at that position.

15. The $125,000 paid to the Boston Red Sox for Ruth by Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert at the end of 1919 was more than Ruppert had spent to buy the entire Yankee franchise.

There were no players involved in the deal because all parties agreed no amount of players could equal Ruth.

16. Ruth learned about the sale while playing golf at Griffith Park. He had just finished an exhibition here with a group of pitchers against whom he hit 125 home runs in one hour.

17. In 1920, Ruth’s first year with the Yankees, workers at the Polo Grounds created vertical foul lines to help umpires judge Ruth’s mammoth blasts.

This led to the invention of the foul pole.

18. Ruth was so popular during that first year in New York, he had a pay phone installed next to his locker.

19. At home, Ruth changed his unlisted phone number so much he often forgot it.

20. In 1920, the first year Ruth’s home runs captivated the nation, he hit 54. Finishing second in the major leagues was St. Louis’ George Sisler with 19.

Ruth nearly doubled the major league record, and hit more than 14 of the other 15 major league teams.

21. Although reputed as a giant, Ruth stood only 6 feet 1 1/2, no taller than the Dodgers’ Todd Hollandsworth. He was considered big because, at the time, he was four inches taller than the average major leaguer. Put 250 pounds on that frame, and you have Cecil Fielder, only shorter.

22. In the spring of 1925, Ruth was so overweight and in poor health that when he missed a connection on a train ride to New York, the London Evening News reported he had died.

23. Babe Ruth was the first athlete to have a business manager, a young guy named Christy Walsh, who met him by posing as a bootlegger’s delivery boy.

24. Once Ruth showed up after the start of an 8 p.m. Yankee team dinner with no cap, torn shirt and uniform pants caked in mud.

After that day’s spring training game, he had lost track of time while playing with dozens of children in a sandlot down the street.

25. During another spring training game, reeling from a hangover, Ruth ran into a palm tree while chasing a fly ball and knocked himself unconscious.

*

“It’s amazing that so many people still love him, talk about him, write me letters about him,” Julia Ruth Stevens said of her father. “And none of them ever knew him.”

Oh, but we all knew him. Maybe not for what he did back then, but for how he affects us today.

Babe Ruth practically invented the autograph. Nobody in history had signed as many, or as often, always for kids who reminded him of himself. Collectors be warned: He signed so much, he taught Yankee trainer Doc Woods to sign for him.

Babe Ruth’s presence inspired phrases such as “Ruthian,” meaning huge, and “out in left field,” which referred to any kid dumb enough not to sit behind him in right.

Babe Ruth was one of the first stars to appear in ads in his underwear, squelching the long-held rumor he did not wear any.

There is one thing it appears Babe Ruth did not do.

Ruth did not call his home run against Chicago Cub pitcher Charlie Root in the third game of the 1932 World Series.

Research for this column, which involved several books, including “The Life That Ruth Built,” as well as ESPN and HBO documentaries, point to the same thing.

It seems Ruth was not pointing, but just angrily waving at the center field crowd after someone had tossed yet another lemon at his foot.

If he really did call the shot, why did none of the newspapers mention it the next day? Why didn’t even Ruth mention it until the myth had grown the next spring?

Another myth is that baseball’s greatest player was always embraced by the game he helped make famous.

When he retired during the 1935 season at 40, nobody would give him the one job he wanted, that of a manager.

“It was almost like baseball blacklisted my father,” said Stevens, who recently published a warm family photo collection. “All this talk about him not being able to manage himself, that was baloney. They were just mad at him for salaries as a player.”

Whatever the reason, many days in his early retirement were spent playing golf, then hustling home with the same question.

“He always asked Momma if there had been any calls for him,” Stevens recalled. “And she always said no.”

After losing out on one managerial opening, he returned home, put his head on the table, and wept.

The other legacy that Babe Ruth never produced was that of another Babe Ruth.

He had two adopted daughters, but no sons, fittingly confirming he would be the first, the last, the only.

*

26. Ruth once picked up Yankee Manager Miller Huggins--whom he despised and called “Little Boy”--and dangled him off a train.

27. During one day at Coney Island with Yankee teammates, Ruth ate four porterhouse steaks, eight hot dogs, and washed them down with eight sodas.

28. Ruth would end his all-night parties after Saturday Yankee games with a visit to dawn Mass, where he would throw $50 into the collection plate.

29. Ruth, whose boarding school was segregated, once called a team of Cubans “greasers,” and said one of their players was “as black as a ton and a half of coal in a dark cellar.”

30. At one time Ruth swung a bat that was nearly one pound heavier than Mark McGwire’s 33-ouncer.

31. In 1926, a year in which he had 47 home runs, Ruth also had 10 sacrifice bunts. McGwire has not had a sacrifice bunt in the last five years.

32. To end the 1926 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, in Game 7, with his team trailing by one run, running on his own, Ruth was thrown out trying to steal second base.

Today such a blunder might ruin a player’s career. But Ruth explained, to the satisfaction of everyone, “I wasn’t doing any . . . good on first base.”

33. Ruth once was arrested by an overzealous public official in San Diego for breaking child labor laws. His crime? He brought children from the audience on stage during his vaudeville act and gave them baseballs.

34. With the Yankees in 1927, Ruth made $70,000 . . . while Lou Gehrig made $8,000.

35. Because of petty disagreements involving their wives and Gehrig’s mother, Ruth did not speak to Gehrig for six years. The freeze lasted from 1933 until Ruth hugged him on Gehrig Appreciation Day in 1939.

Moments later, Gehrig announced he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

36. Once, while barnstorming in a prison, Ruth accused an inmate-umpire of being a robber, then pretended to call for the guards when one of the convicts stole second base.

37. In tradition with early German American laborers, Ruth used to wear cabbage leaves under his cap to keep him cool.

38. Ruth never remembered anyone’s name, even those of teammates who had been with the Yankees for several years. To save himself embarrassment, he called everyone “Kid.”

39. When meeting President Calvin Coolidge during the hot summer of 1924, Ruth also apparently forgot his name, and simply said, “Hot as hell, ain’t it, Prez?”

40. Johnny Sylvester, the little boy for whom Ruth reportedly promised a World Series homer, never even met Ruth until after that game in 1926.

He was a sick child to whom Ruth mailed two balls autographed by various members of the Yankees and Cardinals. The balls just happened to arrive before the fourth game, during which Ruth just happened to hit three home runs.

41. A year later, Ruth didn’t even recognize the name Johnny Sylvester.

42. Ruth was hired as a freelance writer for a popular syndicated news service during the 1934 World Series. Once there, he casually told writers from three other publications about his plans to retire, promptly scooping himself.

43. While struggling toward the end of his career, Ruth was booed in Yankee Stadium.

44. The final wire story of his final game, against Philadelphia on May 30, 1935, doesn’t even mention his name.

45. While living in retirement on the 15th floor of a New York City apartment building, Ruth would drop used flashbulbs onto cars and soap into fountains.

46. During World War II, in an effort to upset their American counterparts, Japanese soldiers would yell, “To hell with Babe Ruth.”

47. In the first Hall of Fame voting, 11 of 226 writers did not have Ruth on their ballots.

48. Ruth was never told he had throat cancer until, shortly before his death, he was transferred to a New York hospital with the word “cancer” on the sign out front.

“So that’s what I have,” he reportedly said when he saw it.

49. The heirs of Babe Ruth still earn as much as $1 million a year in royalties from his endorsements.

50. On the day he hit the final home run of his career in 1935, he hit three. When No. 714 left Forbes Field, Babe Ruth crossed home plate and ran into the opposing Pirate dugout.

“Boys,” he said, “that last one felt good.”