Source: nytimes.com
Author: George Vescey

Joe Garagiola has been to too many funerals. Some of them were for friends who chewed tobacco, the way Garagiola used to do.

Now Garagiola has been given the gift of time. He intends to use it to speak out against the habit of chewing tobacco.

“I tell these guys, ‘You may not like what I say, but with lung cancer you die of lung cancer,’ ” Garagiola said the other day, with the zeal of a convert. “With oral cancer, you die one piece at a time. They operate on your neck, they operate on your jaw, they operate on your throat.”

Garagiola is one of America’s gifted talkers — starting in bullpens and dugouts, moving on to broadcasting games, then doing game shows, the “Today” show.

He is still talking. Last month he traveled to a Congressional hearing to speak against smokeless tobacco. The trip itself was a gesture of courage, because he was recovering from brain surgery for what he calls a nonmalignant ailment, which he said was not linked to the tobacco habit he beat 50 years ago.

Last Friday, Garagiola received great news. After a CAT scan six months after surgery, doctors told him he was clear. He took a deep breath and celebrated by doing what he does best.

Speaking about the lobbyists for new smokeless products, he said: “They tell you it’s a safe alternative, but my answer is, Hey, don’t jump out the 50th floor, jump out the 25th floor. You got 25 floors on your side. The results are going to be the same.”

At 84, he still sounds like the exuberant kid catcher who batted .316 in the 1946 World Series. He doesn’t like to admit he could play — it’s bad for his bench-warmer image.

While Garagiola was with the Cardinals in the late ’40s, he picked up the habit of chewing from teammates, many of them rural and Southern. (Young white males are the highest users today — 15 percent.)

Garagiola remembers the day he stopped chewing, in the late ’50s, after his baseball career ended. His youngest child, Gina, came home from grade school and asked if he was going to die from cancer because of tobacco.

“I said, ‘That’s it,’ and I put it aside,” he said. “It was difficult, but I quit.”

He became an activist, going around to training camps with Bill Tuttle, a former outfielder whose jaw was being chipped away by operations for cancer. Tuttle, who had learned to chew from older players, died in 1998 at age 69.

There were successes. When Curt Schilling was with the Phillies, Garagiola walked him to the free clubhouse exam by telling endless Yogi Berra stories. Garagiola describes the stricken look on Schilling, who soon had a precancerous lesion removed and has given credit to Garagiola for helping to save his life.

In mid-April, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing, led by its chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.

Terry Pechacek of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said smokeless tobacco could cause oral cancer and pancreatic cancer and had been linked to fatal heart attacks. He also said the product was highly addictive.

Baseball officials agree that smokeless tobacco is dangerous, but they cannot address the issue until collective bargaining for the next contract, after the 2011 season. Some players assert they have the right to chew.

“We’d like to discourage players from using smokeless tobacco,” Michael Weiner, the new head of the union, said in a recent interview, adding he had “no doubt of the effects to habitual users.”

Rob Manfred, an executive vice president of Major League Baseball, noted that baseball provides oral exams and literature about the danger of smokeless tobacco.

Baseball does not permit smokeless tobacco in the minor leagues, but Garagiola, who has been around clubhouses since he was 15, knows all the tricks.

“Kids, they’re smart, they put sunflower seeds in front, dip in the back or whatever, and they’ll spit so the tobacco cop doesn’t get you,” he said. “And when they come to the big leagues, the first thing they do is put a dip in their mouth.”

Garagiola talked about a star pitcher he saw on television recently, coming out of a game: “They’re praising him for being a gamer and he sits on the bench and what’s the first thing he does? He takes out some tobacco.”

At least baseball could stop players from sticking that familiar circular tin in their hip pocket, Garagiola said. He said he told a baseball official: “Arnold Palmer always walked on the green and flipped a cigarette. Why wouldn’t you let a guy walk up to home plate and flip a cigarette when he got to the batter’s box? You don’t allow that.”

Garagiola told about the funeral in 1998 for a high school coach, Bob Leslie, who died of oral cancer at 31. As he delivered the eulogy, Garagiola noticed his friend’s widow “holding this baby and I’m thinking, He’s not going to see her go to school, he’s not going to see her get married.”

His voice quavered, momentarily. Then he resumed. Joe Garagiola still has something to say.