On the Fourth of July, 1939, a dying Lou Gehrig bid farewell to the Yankee Stadium crowd with the impossibly graceful declaration that he considered himself to be the “luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
In a way devoid of all irony and tragedy, I’ve always thought that phrase was a fitting description of another legendary Yankee of a later generation.
Once upon a time, and perhaps still, Derek Jeter knew it himself.
“I don’t think there’s a person in the world that has been more spoiled than I’ve been,’’ he said at the parade after the 1998 Yankees juggernaut won the World Series, their second in his three full seasons to that point.