On D-Day, 19-year-old Yogi Berra and five Navy mates parked the USS Bayfield two long home runs from Omaha Beach and launched rockets and fired machine guns at the Germans—trying to smooth the way for the Allied invasion.
They stayed there 12 more days with orders to shoot down enemy aircraft.
Ted Williams, whose Boston Red Sox battled Berra’s New York Yankees hundreds of times during the 1940s and 1950s, served as a naval aviator for three years in World War II and gave 15 more months as a fighter pilot—occasionally serving as John Glenn’s wingman—in the Korean War.
Before Williams left for his Korean War assignment, he had dinner with legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. According to the superb book “The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams” by Adam Lazarus, Williams understood the stakes.
“Then he said—and this is what I can’t get out of my mind,” Rice told fellow New York sportswriter Frank Graham, “(he said) ‘I expect to be killed, of course.’”
Berra and Williams are two of the many examples of remarkable athletes who didn’t limit their greatness to the playing field—and risked their lives to do it. Veterans Day represents a wonderful opportunity to relive their sacrifices for the United States of America.
Ty Cobb, Warren Spahn, Bobby Jones, David Robinson, Hank Greenberg, Chuck Bednarik and Hoyt Wilhelm are among other athletes who saw active duty or worked as intelligence officers.
Bob Feller, who was perhaps the greatest pitcher of his day, enlisted in the Naval Reserve two days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Serving as a gun captain on the USS Alabama, Feller earned eight battle stars and six campaign ribbons in North Atlantic and Pacific theaters. After missing nearly four full seasons of his prime, Feller was discharged on Aug. 22, 1945, and earned a complete-game win over the World Series-bound Detroit Tigers two days later.
By no means are former Major League Baseball legends the only ones to come to their country’s aid.
After four years as a safety for the Arizona Cardinals, Pat Tillman and his brother, Kevin (an Anaheim Angels pitcher), enlisted in the Army in May 2002 as their response to 9/11. They trained to join the Army Rangers, and their regiment was deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Tillman was killed April 22, 2004, in Afghanistan by friendly fire during a firefight.
Forty years before, Roger Staubach enjoyed a wondrous athletic career at Navy. In addition to earning the 1963 Heisman Trophy and being featured on the cover of Time magazine (he was pushed off the cover of Life due to John F. Kennedy’s assassination), Staubach excelled for three years on the baseball team (batting .420 as a sophomore) and received two letters on the basketball team.
Upon graduation in 1965, Staubach immediately began to serve his five-year commitment to the Navy, which included one year in Vietnam. He entered the NFL in 1969 as a 27-year-old rookie with the Dallas Cowboys, who had the foresight to spend their 10th-round pick in the 1964 NFL Draft on Staubach. Within three years, Staubach led the Cowboys to the Super Bowl championship. He was awarded the Super Bowl MVP award, which came with a Dodge Charger. Staubach traded it in for a station wagon—the better to transport his three young kids.
Staubach’s Cowboys and Rocky Bleier’s Pittsburgh Steelers met more than once in the Super Bowl—and Bleier’s military journey was more harrowing than Staubach’s. After playing his rookie year in Pittsburgh, Bleier was drafted into the Army. He went to Vietnam and suffered multiple injuries in August 1969. He was shot in the thigh during an ambush. Not long after during that firefight, he saw a grenade bounce off his commanding officer’s back.
“It rolls toward me and I wasn’t but three feet from him as I was sitting there,” Bleier told the American Veterans Center. “I got up to jump and it blew up and I was standing on top of it… I had nerve damage coming up out of my (right) foot, broken bones under my foot. Fortunately I didn’t lose any part of my foot.”
During his lengthy recovery that included several surgeries, Bleier was told he would not play football again. Instead, he played 10 more seasons with the Steelers and won four Super Bowls to go with his Purple Heart and Silver Star.
“Because I became a story and because we were successful, it put Vietnam on the top of the list,” Bleier said. “So all those Vietnam veterans out there who were repressed, who didn’t get the credit or the pat on the back, all of a sudden, here was one of ours that made it. And got through and got recognition for his service, which the rest of us can ride on his coattails or whatever it might be. But it was well-deserved (recognition) that we all should have gotten at that time.”
