opinion

Montini: A tough day for Yogi Berra's best friend

The best human being I know lost his best friend Tuesday and so on Wednesday morning I called him.

Then again, everybody was calling Joe Garagiola Sr. on Wednesday morning, the day after Yankee great Yogi Berra died at 90.

“Today is a rough day for me,” Garagiola said. “I’ve lost another one. Yogi was the best. He was a blessing. There was only one Yogi and all he ever wanted to do was to make you happy. It’s a tough day.”

The two of them grew up together in the same St. Louis neighborhood. Each was a good athlete, each with dreams of playing major league baseball.

“Yogi was the best player, better than anybody in the town,” Garagiola said. “If you’re choosing up sides he was the first one, every time.”

They both made it to the big leagues, eventually. Each a catcher.

Garagiola played for St. Louis and other teams. Berra was a Yankee, winning more World Series rings than anyone and making it into the Hall of Fame.

Garagiola would go into broadcasting after baseball, and get into the Hall of Fame that way.

Through it all, over all the decades, they remained best friends.

And the best people you’d ever meet.

Last year the Arizona Diamondbacks honored Garagiola for having received the 2014 Buck O'Neill Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The award is presented for "extraordinary efforts to enhance baseball's positive impact on society."

Garagiola's impact on society goes way beyond baseball.

He tirelessly worked to refurbish the St. Peter Indian Mission School on the Gila River Reservation.

Before ballplayers made the kind of money that could last a lifetime Garagiola founded the Baseball Assistance Team (B.A.T.), which has awarded almost $30 million in grants to over 3,000 needy individuals.

It goes on and on.

For fun, he spent roughly 15 years of his “retirement” working as a part-time broadcaster with the Diamondbacks.

He and Yogi and the generation they were born into are from a time and place and from families that taught them never to take things for granted and always, always, to share.

“Yogi and me and the people in our old neighborhood we had nothing, you know?” Garagiola told me. “But we had each other, and that was everything.”

And for nearly a century they have shared it with us.

Last year, Garagiola told me, "Muhammad Ali had a line. I live by it. It should be in the catechism books: 'The service we give to others is the rent we pay for the life we have here on earth.'"