If you want to attract more clients, you need to improve your impromptu speaking skills. Each year in July I reread my favorite off-the-cuff speech of all time. On July 4, 1939, a dying Lou Gehrig delivered what has been called "baseball's Gettysburg Address" at Yankee Stadium.
Study this version, from the Baseball Hall of Fame website, to understand the power of gratitude in the face of adversity.
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.
When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.
So, I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.
Who was Gehrig thinking about, himself or others?
Recently I found out the scene and the story would likely have been largely lost to history, altogether, were it not for the film, Pride of the Yankees, best known for Gary Cooper, as the doomed Gehrig, movingly describing himself as "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," even as his body was being ravaged by the disease that was soon named after him.
The new book, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic by New York Times sports columnist Richard Sandomir, reveals for the first time the full story behind the pioneering, seminal movie. Filled with larger than life characters and unexpected facts, the book shows us how Samuel Goldwyn had no desire to make a baseball film but he was persuaded to make a quick deal with Lou's widow, Eleanor, not long after Gehrig had passed. Furthermore, Hollywood icon Cooper had zero knowledge of baseball and had to be taught to play.
A great book if you want to know, in the immortal words of the late Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story.”
