Comeback

Joe DiMaggio's friends were worried about him. For days in a row, he shut himself up in his midtown Manhattan hotel and brooded. He watched ballgames by television; the semimonthly installments on his $90,000-a-year salary seemed to increase his gloom. Waiting for his sore heel to heal had made easygoing, hard-playing Joe DiMaggio a different man.

Last week, to the delight of Joe DiMaggio and of U.S. baseball in general, the doctors gave him the green light; Joe was ready to take his turn at bat again. Outfielder DiMaggio, down to a lithe, trim 195, put on his uniform and went to the bench with the team. Exuberantly, he wrestled with Teammate Charlie Keller, clowned with Phil Rizzuto, scuffled with other teammates. Nobody had ever seen reserved, 34-year-old Joe act so coltish.

As he trotted onto the field at Boston's Fenway Park for the first of a three-game series with the Red Sox, DiMaggio was far from mid-season physical condition, but a load had been taken off his mind and he seemed to feel nine feet tall. In his first time at bat, he lashed out a sharp single. The next time, he slammed a home run, drove in the runs that won the game. Red Sox fans came to their feet and gave him one of the loudest and longest ovations ever heard in Fenway Park. Joe was back all right--and he wasn't through proving it.

Next day, with the Yanks trailing 7-1, he hit another homer with two men on, to put his team back in the game. Three innings later he homered again, to win it. After the game, Joe Dugan, an old Yankee third baseman who used to play with Ruth and Gehrig, rushed into the pandemonium in the Yankee dressing room and planted a kiss on DiMaggio's forehead. "Just had to do it," Dugan explained, "I've never seen anybody who could surpass this guy." On the third day, Joe whomped homer No. 4 to confound the Red Sox and sweep the series. After the sportwriters ran out of superlatives, all the great DiMaggio could do was grin.

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