‘I CONSIDER MYSELF THE LUCKIEST MAN ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET EARTH.’

On July 4, 1939, baseball great Lou Gehrig delivered what continues to be called ‘baseball’s Gettysburg Address’ at Yankee Stadium and gave a speech that included the term that could become legendary. He died two years later and his fiery widow, Eleanor, wished nothing more than to maintain his storage alive. With her forceful will, she and the irascible maker Samuel Goldwyn quickly agreed to make a film based on Gehrig’s existence, The Satisfaction about The Pride from the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic from the Yankees. Goldwyn didn’t understand–or treatment about–baseball. For him this film was the psychological story of the calm, modest hero who married a spirited girl who was the like of his lifestyle, and, after a storied profession, gave a brief speech that changed his legacy. Using the globe at war and soldiers dying on foreign soil, it was the kind of movie America needed.

Using first scrips, letters, memos, and various other rare paperwork, Richard Sandomir tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a classic was born. There was the so-called Scarlett O’Hara-like search to find the actor to play Gehrig; the beautiful revelations Elanor designed to the scriptwriter Paul Gallico about her life with Lou; the interval training Cooper underwent to learn how to catch, throw, and strike a baseball for the very first time; and the tale of two now-legendary Hollywood stars in Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright whose nuanced shows endowed the Gehrigs with upstanding dignity and cemented the baseball icon’s legend.

Sandomir writes with great insight and aplomb, painting a remarkable portrait of the bygone Hollywood era, a mourning widow using a dream, as well as the shadow a legend cast on one of the best sports films ever.