Show caption Yogi Berra during a baseball game in his 1950s heyday. Photograph: Getty Images Notebook The blurred boundaries between Yogi Berra and Yogi Bear Tim Dowling The death of one of baseball’s greatest ever players inevitably made my thoughts turn to a cartoon bear @IAmTimDowling Wed 23 Sep 2015 12.55 EDT Share on Facebook

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News of the death of the baseball legend Yogi Berra came as a great shock to me, mostly because I had no idea he was still alive. I was too young to watch the great Yankees catcher play ball (he retired the year I was born) but I remember him as a manager, first for the Mets, then the Yankees - and his glowering presence in the dugout.

Berra is also remembered as the source of a body of oxymoronic – and occasionally just moronic – truisms: “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded.” “It ain’t over til it’s over” is easily the most enduring of his coinages, although that’s more of a tautology. But when I was a child I simply thought of him as forming one half of the universe’s oddest coincidence: how could there be a man called Yogi Berra, and a bear called Yogi Bear? I mean, what are the odds?

No one ever offered me an explanation. Perhaps I never asked. As I got older I came to assume that the catcher was simply named after the bear. Yogi wasn’t Berra’s real name, after all; he was christened Lawrence. But even that seemed weird: the baseball player wasn’t even a little bit reminiscent of the cartoon character. There must have been lots of other bears he was more like.

Only much later did it occur to me that the bear must have been named after the ballplayer, since the latter made his big league debut in 1946, and the former didn’t appear until 1958. Only now do I discover that Berra was reportedly unhappy about the homage, and even considered suing Yogi Bear’s creators, Hanna-Barbera. They in turn claimed the whole thing was a giant coincidence. So I was right all along.

Babe Ruth at the 25th anniversary of the opening of Yankee Stadium in New York in 1948. Photograph: Harry Harris/AP

Candy from a Babe



All this puts me in mind of what I considered to be the universe’s second oddest coincidence in those days: how could there be a baseball player called Babe Ruth, and also a candy bar called a Baby Ruth?

For a long time I just assumed that the sportsman was named after the confectionery. I’d read a children’s biography of Babe Ruth, so I knew his real name was George. I also knew the nickname Babe was given to him by minor league teammates because he was young, but I figured the serendipitous play on words was what had made it stick.

What I didn’t know was that the Baby Ruth candy bar wasn’t introduced until 1921, the year after Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in his first season with the Yankees. In a subsequent court case the manufacturers claimed the whole thing had been a coincidence, and that the confectionery had been named in honour of Ruth Cleveland, the daughter of the ex-President Grover Cleveland. The explanation was thought a bit odd at the time, since by 1921, Ruth had been dead for 17 years.

It’s the way he tells them



David Cameron’s barbed, if contrived response to the lurid revelations in Michael Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography could have done with a little editing, or at least rehearsal. On Monday the PM told 300 guests at a Tory fundraiser that he’d just been to hospital that day to receive treatment for a back problem. After being asked to lie on his front for an injection, he was told by the doctor, “This will just be a little prick, just a stab in the back,” which, Cameron said, “rather summed up my day”.

What the doctor should have said – or what Cameron should have said he’d said – was, “It’ll just be a little prick stabbing you in the back.” The punchline would have delivered itself. The delights of piggate notwithstanding, I hate to see someone mess up what could have been a pretty good joke.