RIP Lawrence Peter Berra, the sports legend named for a deacon saint

Last updated on: September 23, 2015 at 9:33 am by Deacon Greg Kandra

RIP Lawrence Peter Berra, the sports legend named for a deacon saint 2015-09-23T09:33:07-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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The Yankees legend, and lifelong Catholic, died yesterday at the age of 90:

Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who may be more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.

…Lawrence Peter Berra was born on May 12, 1925, in the Italian enclave of St. Louis known as the Hill, which also fostered the baseball career of his boyhood friend Joe Garagiola. Berra was the fourth of five children. His father, Pietro, a construction worker and a bricklayer, and his mother, Paulina, were immigrants from Malvaglio, a northern Italian village near Milan. (As an adult, on a visit to his ancestral home, Berra took in a performance of “Tosca” at La Scala. “It was pretty good,” he said. “Even the music was nice.”)

As a boy, Berra was known as Larry, or Lawdie, as his mother pronounced it. As recounted in “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee,” a 2009 biography by Allen Barra, one day in his early teens, young Larry and some friends had gone to the movies and were watching a travelogue about India when a Hindu yogi appeared on the screen sitting cross-legged. His posture struck one of the friends as precisely the way Berra sat on the ground as he waited his turn at bat. From that day on, he was Yogi Berra.

Stump Merrill, who coached for Berra in the ’80s, remembered:

Every Sunday, he made me go to Mass with him. I remember telling him: “I’m not a Catholic, what do I do here?” He said: “Don’t worry. Just do what I do.” It was easy because he couldn’t kneel either because his knees were as bad as mine!

God bless you, Lawrence.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him…

Photo: Wikipedia

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