Standing at the top of the stairs at his home, Jim Hunter lost his balance. And although I wasn’t there, in my mind I can see the scene unfold with terrible clarity. He invited the world in, to raise public awareness, and maybe research money, for this disease. "I’d be a groundskeeper and not let anybody know me," the Hall of Fame pitcher said.Īnd yet in the months after his diagnosis he made his private agony very public. He was an intensely private man, a country boy who wanted nothing more out of retirement than living in obscurity in the last days he told one writer that he would have traded all his fame and money for health enough to watch his grandchildren grow up. Hunter was publicly upbeat, and remarkably brave. Then, the diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Hunter watched, in horror, as one arm and then the other began to weaken and hang flaccid at his side. But why did it have to start with Hunter’s marvelous right arm? The disease that took him at age 53 creeps from one part of your body to another, nibbling your nerves, paralyzing as it travels, until it hits your chest and chokes you to death. There is a sour irony to it that boggles the mind. But I cannot for the life of me understand why Jim "Catfish" Hunter had to go the way he did. ![]() When someone dies young, people grope for meaning and sometimes find it. Read a profile of Hunter from the National Baseball Hall of Fame's site. ![]() Jim "Catfish" Hunter died Thursday of Lou Gehrig's disease. : Hall-of-Famer 'Catfish' Hunter Dies at 53
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