A life touched by Lou Gehrig &#8212; and the disease named for him

Robert Tierney, whose wife died of ALS, once played catch with Lou Gehrig. (John Gastaldo / Union-Tribune)

“Four people, two birthdays,” he said. “Saved two cakes a year that way.”

Then one day she collapsed in her garden and couldn't get up. She waited three hours until a neighbor got home. Later, she hid a pair of pliers under the driver's seat of her car because she needed a better grip to turn the key.

She battled ALS for years until it killed her in 1999.

During that whole sad time, a teenage memory of a game of catch kept tumbling back.

“I always knew it was there. It was a memory,” Tierney said. “Then I started giving it some more adult thought, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of my life, really.”

Along with a memory, Gehrig gave Tierney some advice in 1939. He told him to become a pitcher, not a second baseman, because he wouldn't have to move around as much.

So it was that Tierney developed four pitches and went on to play in a very low-level minor league team in Louisiana.

“Baseball was rough in those days,” he said. “It was no place for sissies. You throw a guy close, and the guy on your team gets up the next inning, he better be ready to duck not once but two or three times. And if he ended up lying on the ground, the umpire would call him chicken.”

Tierney grew up on an Iowa farm, the sixth of 10 children, all of them born without a doctor in attendance. At 7, he lost his right thumb to a tractor. Not long after, a brother accidentally pierced his left knee with a pitchfork.

He never fully recovered from the injury, which left him laid up much of the time because of an infection. He began catching St. Louis Cardinals games on his family's battery-powered radio, and developed a lifelong passion.

“I laid there listening to that ballgame every afternoon,” he said. “I'll never forget it.”

His family's move to Minnesota in 1938 turned him into a Minnesota Twins fan. After a brother and a son persuaded him to move to Oceanside five or six years ago, he started watching the Padres. He still does every day.

He confesses it's tough to keep track of the score sometimes because he can't read the graphic in the upper corner of the screen. He jokes that if he lives for another 10 years, the Padres will become his adopted team.

Today, in the seventh inning at every ballpark, Gehrig's speech will ring out again for Tierney and others to hear. Once more, the Iron Horse will say, “I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for.”

Tierney expects to catch the game from a skybox, an invited guest of the Padres. He's not sure how much he'll see because he's blind in one eye, but the baseball fan believes he'll “get a feeling just from being in the park.”

It's a feeling he remembers sharing with Gehrig all those years ago.



