The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth by Leigh Montville Page A

released from prison.
    The stories about women were constant. He told them. Everybody told them. Not exactly shy about his sexuality, he brought professional women back to his room on the road, coupling while his poor roommate tried to sleep. (In a story told in many variations, the names and places changing with each retelling, Ruth is in the bedroom of a suite with a professional, or maybe an amateur, while the roommate tries to sleep in the living room. Ruth, after each adventure, comes into the living room to smoke a cigar. The roommate the next morning counts the cigar butts in the ashtray. The number is…it varies. Seven seems popular.)
    Third baseman Larry Gardner talked about walking into a room and finding Ruth with yet another prostitute.
    “The guy was lying on the floor being screwed by a prostitute,” Gardner said. “He was smoking a cigar and eating peanuts and this woman was working on him.”
    All women were potential partners. He let that be known, through word, leer, and innuendo. Not all women were charmed.
    “He was a mess,” Larry Gardner’s wife, Margaret, remembered in Ken Sobol’s
Babe Ruth and the American Dream.
“He was foul-mouthed, a show-off, very distasteful to have around. The kind of person you would never dream of having over for dinner. I suppose he was likable enough in his way, but you could never prove it by me.
    “Once, on a train, he came up to me and started talking in that loud voice of his about how I had gotten him in trouble. I asked why and he said earlier on the trip he had seen a woman he thought was me and he had come up behind her and whopped her on the head, but it turned out to be somebody he didn’t know. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.”
    He was a practical joker in the clubhouse, physical stuff out of second grade—like nailing someone’s new shoes to the floor, slipping a piece of cardboard into the middle of someone’s sandwich, using fire in creative ways. The bulk of his teammates accepted him in the way they would accept a mischievous, immature little brother. Some couldn’t stand him. The team was split pretty much into two different cliques along religious lines, the Protestants and the Catholics. Ruth was with the Catholics. Veterans Tris Speaker and Smokey Joe Wood, best friends and leaders of the Protestants, couldn’t stand him. Forty years later Wood would do a taped interview with Lawrence Ritter and talk about life with “the Big Baboon.” Thinking about what he said, pretty much unkind, he would call Ritter back a few days later to redo the interview in a nicer fashion.
    The “Baboon” nickname was in effect. “Tarzan, King of the Apes” was another. A late entry was “Two Head,” a tribute to the literal size of his head (large) and the figurative size (growing larger by the day.) That was a favorite of Dapper Dan Howley, a former Phillies catcher from nearby Weymouth, who worked out with the team.
    Howley spotted Ruth driving one day on Washington Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in Boston. Howley started shouting, “Two Head, Two Head.” Ruth spotted him, stopped his car, and started chasing him. Traffic backed up immediately. Howley hid. Automobile management was and always would be a problem. Ruth drove fast and without worry. He parked anywhere. He hit things, including pedestrians, was caught for speeding, had at least one auto incident in each calendar year. He hit a hay wagon in 1915.
    Every day was a 24-hour flurry of activity. He dressed in a cacophony of plaids and colors, had a pair of yellow shoes. He was known in the sporting houses off the Fenway. He was increasingly known in the sporting houses across the American League. He hunted, fished, brought words to exclusive golf courses that simply weren’t allowed. He had another sandwich, thank you very much. He developed a taste for beer.
    Carrigan, who first fined him back in training camp, eventually came up with a plan to corral