Crash ruined Campy’s body but not spirit

The baseball star was traveling from his liquor store in Harlem to his home on Long Island when the rental car skidded on an icy patch, rammed a telephone pole head-on and flipped. Nobody wore seat belts then. The driver’s body slammed the steering wheel. His head whipped forward, then back.

The first policeman to reach the scene had no trouble recognizing the man inside. “Why it’s Campy,” he said.

“Yes, it’s me,” Roy Campanella said with a groan. “Would you please turn off the engine. I don’t want to burn to death.”

The date was Jan.28, 1958, and one of the best catchers in baseball history had just become paralyzed for life. An ambulance rushed him to Glen Cove Community Hospital, where he underwent 4 hours of surgery. But there was little the doctors could do.

Afterward Dr. Robert Sengstaken, the neurosurgeon who headed a seven-person medical team working on Campanella, said he “would not rule out” the possibility of his playing baseball again. That was balderdash. The accident had broken his neck, injured his spine and left him a quadriplegic.

For the next 35 years until his death from a heart attack in 1993 at age 71, Campanella could not use his arms, hands or legs. His wife, Ruthe, left him a short time after the accident, but he was fortunate enough to marry a former nurse, Roxie, who gladly shared his burdens.

Those burdens were heavier than most of us could ever know, yet Roy Campanella accepted his fate with equanimity and remained a beloved ambassador for the game he loved. The title of his autobiography, and a subsequent TV movie starring Paul Winfield, said it all: “It’s Good to Be Alive.”

So did Campy’s most famous quote: “You have to be a man to play baseball for a living, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too.”

Some found it fitting that Campanella’s career ended before the transplanted Dodgers played their first game in Los Angeles — as if the Good Lord wanted Campy to remain a Brooklyn Dodger for life. But why would the Good Lord have wanted a good man to spend the rest of that life in a wheelchair?

In the spring of 1983, Campanella was being wheeled about the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., by Tommy Davis, a two-time National League batting champion who considered this an honor. After Davis was called away momentarily, Campy turned to a nearby sportswriter and said softly, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m awfully hungry, and there’s an apple in my jacket. Could you get it for me?”

I did, and I considered it an honor.

Given the distance of half a century — and the exploits of more recent superstar catchers like Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, Thurman Munson and Gary Carter — younger fans today might find it difficult to appreciate how great Campanella was. In the 1950s, though, arguments raged nonstop through New York City and the nation over whether Campy or the Yankees’ Yogi Berra was better.

Playing in tiny Ebbets Field, Campanella won three National League MVP Awards (1951, 1953, 1955), batted as high as .325, hit as many as 41 homers and had as many as 142 RBI in an era when nobody had heard of steroids. And, oh yes, the Dodgers won five pennants in his 10 seasons and missed two others on the final day.

Defensively, he was a squat (5-foot-8, 200-pound) fortress who cajoled and cussed a string of mostly ordinary Dodgers pitchers into doing their darndest. If Campy hadn’t missed the last two games of the 1951 National League pennant playoff with a pulled thigh muscle, chances are nobody would remember Bobby Thomson today.

How good was he at handling pitchers? The late Rex Barney, a control-challenged Dodgers hurler in the late 1940s and a cherished P.A. announcer for the Baltimore Orioles decades later, once recalled how he lost a no-hitter after shaking off a sign from Campanella.

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