FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio, whose classic swing and classy persona made him one of the most revered sports figures of the 20th century, died early yesterday after a five-month battle with lung cancer. He was 84.
Mr. DiMaggio passed away at his Hollywood, Fla., home from complications after the removal of a cancerous tumor from his lung last October. His funeral will be Thursday in Northern California, with burial in the San Francisco area, where he grew up and began his professional baseball career.
"DiMaggio, the consummate gentleman on and off the field, fought his illness as hard as he played the game of baseball, and with the same dignity, style and grace with which he lived his life," said Morris Engelberg, his close friend and longtime spokesman.
While best remembered for the record 56-game hitting streak that enraptured a nation during the final summer before the United States entered World War II, Joe DiMaggio was one of the pillars of a long-running Yankees dynasty that began with the arrival of Babe Ruth in 1920 and lasted until the waning years of the Mickey Mantle era.
Babe Ruth. Lou Gehrig. Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle.
They are the four horsemen of Yankees legend. Babe Ruth was the charismatic, hard-living superstar of the Roaring '20s. Lou Gehrig was the tragic, inspirational figure of the '30s. Mickey Man tle would eventually replace Joe DiMaggio in the Yankees outfield in the early '50s, but not before Joltin' Joe -- the Yankee Clipper -- had become a sports hero of near-mythical proportion.
Of song and story
So great that Ernest Hemingway referred to him as "the great DiMaggio" in his classic novel, "The Old Man and the Sea."
"I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the ancient Cuban fisherman says in one of Mr. Hemingway's best-known works. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand."
So great that he was voted baseball's greatest living player in a poll conducted during the celebration of professional baseball's centennial season in 1969.
So great that nearly two decades after he played his last game, his name evoked nostalgic ruminations even among the self-absorbed purveyors of pop culture in the late 1960s.
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1968. "A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."
`A private person'
