WHAT I SHARED WITH MY DAUGHTER ABOUT PHIL RIZZUTO

 "God bless this wonderful game they call baseball." 

-- Phil Rizzuto

Earlier last week I sat down with my six year old daughter to watch a Yankeeography on YES.  The episode we watched? A tribute to Phil Rizzuto.  At first, she wasn't that into it, it wasn't a cartoon and a lot of it was in black and white.  And then I mentioned that Phil Rizzuto was her great great uncle.  "See that man," I said, "that's grandpa's uncle.  Doesn't grandpa look a lot like him?"  From there, she was hooked.

Growing up, people always asked me what it was like to have an uncle in the family who played for the New York Yankees.  No doubt it was cool.  I got to hear stories, sometimes first hand, about the days of the October Twelve. My daughter, like me, loves stories.  She loves to listen to them and she loves to tell them.  And so, while many of the stories she was hearing during this episode were hard for her to understand, she asked me to tell her my favorite story about her great great uncle.

I smiled and said, the thing I remember most about Uncle Phil is that he never seemed like a celebrity.  He was a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle and a friend.  He just so happened to also be an excellent ball player, and he loved the game.  I remember driving in the car with him and my Aunt Cora.  My grandmother, Uncle Phil's sister, had just passed away and we were on the way back to a family house in Queens, to welcome family and friends after the service.  Despite growing up in the area and having visited the house on numerous occasions, Uncle Phil still tended to get lost.  And, despite my living in New Jersey, I somehow knew the way and so I sat in the backseat acting as co-pilot.  We were close to the house when Uncle Phil drove down a neighborhood street and saw kids playing stick ball.  Even in 1994 kids were still playing stick ball in Queens.  My Uncle, without hesitating, stopped the car, got out, and started playing stick ball with those kids.   Here are these kids, on a random Tuesday afternoon, playing stick ball on a Queens street when a car stops and Phil Rizzuto gets out to play with them for five minutes.  Those kids are probably still telling the same story to their friends and family today.

But I suppose that's the kind of man he was. He loved the game and he loved life. It seems that everyone he touched has a personal connection or story to tell. When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he organized a bus to take his family and close friends up to Cooperstown.  On the way up, I remember asking a man sitting across from me on the bus how he knew Phil Rizzuto.  He replied, "I've been Phil's mailman for 15 years."  Yep, that about sums it up.


-- Donna McSorley / @donnamcsorley


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