When Joe DiMaggio died, a 57-year old man with a gray pony-tail was one of the select few allowed to attend the family funeral. He was a casket-bearer that day, his face anonymous to the national ...

From "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" Editor's note: ESPN.com is running excerpts from Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life recently published by Simon & Schuster. This is the third ...

By the time the lights went on again, DiMaggio had vanished. Perhaps the best insight into why DiMaggio quit came from brother Tom: "He quit because he wasn’t Joe DiMaggio any more." ...

"All this dignity that he carried himself with was really about his own worship and adoration for what Joe DiMaggio meant to other people," says New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte on ESPN ...