The King and the Sultan

August 16, 1948: George Herman "Babe" Ruth dies of throat cancer in New York. He was 53 years old.

August 16, 1977: Elvis Presley dies of a drug-aided heart attack in Memphis. He was 42.

Recently, on Facebook, I saw somebody compare Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, the greatest of all popular singers; to the Babe, the Sultan of Swat, the greatest of all baseball players.

Actually, the Babe and Elvis are very comparable:

* Both were born very poor, yet got very rich.

* Both totally changed their respective professions, and both did so for the better.

* Both were ridiculed by their predecessors as the best in the business; but, in each case, those predecessors swallowed their pride, acknowledged the men's greatness, and became friends with them: Ty Cobb with the Babe, and Frank Sinatra with Elvis.

* Both had royalty-themed nicknames. The Babe had several.

* Both became better known for their workplaces than for their hometowns: Babe, Baltimore to New York; Elvis, Memphis to Las Vegas.

* The Babe played some preseason and postseason "barnstorming" games in Elvis' hometown of Memphis, albeit before Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935. The Presley family didn't even move to Memphis, the closest large city, until 1948, when he was 13, the year Ruth died.

* Both made some bad movies. Both were better off playing, essentially, themselves: Ruth in the Harold Lloyd silent comedy Safety Last! and the Lou Gehrig movie The Pride of the Yankees; Elvis as singers Deke Rivers, Vince Everett and Danny Fisher in, repsectively, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole.

* Both were renowned for their comebacks: The Babe in 1923, 1926 and 1932; Elvis in 1960 and 1968.

This photo, taken at a war bond drive game

at Yankee Stadium in 1942, is colorized, but otherwise real.

Ruth's last year with the Yankees was 1934,

and the interlocking NY logo was adopted in 1936.

* Babe had 2 daughters, Elvis 1. Neither had any sons -- which may have been for the best: Being Babe Ruth Jr. or Elvis Presley Jr. might have been too much pressure. After all, Mickey Mantle Jr. never got out of the low minors, and he and Joe DiMaggio Jr. both became alcoholics.

* Both struggled with their weight, gaining it, losing it, and regaining it.

* Both died too young, due to substance abuse, and on an August 16: Babe from nicotine at 53 in 1948, Elvis from abuse of diet pills at 42 in 1977.

* Both were essentially "managed" by their wives after their deaths, making more money than they did while they were alive: Babe by Claire, Elvis by Priscilla.

* And Babe's birthplace, a rowhouse in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, and Elvis' home, the Graceland mansion south of Memphis (actually closer to the Mississippi State Line than to downtown), have been museums and major tourist attractions.

There were, of course, some significant differences. Perhaps the biggest is that the Babe is seen as a figure of his time, the Roaring Twenties, 100 or so years ago, an era whose films are in black & white, and silent; while Elvis is a product of post-World War II America, whose career was based in sound, and lived as part of the transition of popular culture from black & white to color.

When genuine color photographs of Ruth, or film with the sound of him speaking or playing ball, is found, it's a big deal. But for those of us who grew up while Elvis was still alive, Ruth was somebody our grandparents rooted for. For those who've come after us, he seems even more mythical than he did in the days before we had the Internet and other means of proving the myths false -- or, in some cases, true.

But we've seen Elvis on clear color videotape, in his 1968 NBC "Comeback Special," and in his 1973 Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite concert. Even though it's been almost half a century since his death, he seems like a recent figure. For those of us who still love his music, he feels like a current friend.

From the "Comeback Special," 1968

And yet, kids today know who Babe Ruth is, just as they know who Elvis Presley is. "Is," not "was." As Thomas Boswell, the great baseball columnist for The Washington Post, put it, adding the name of a contemporary of Ruth's, who pitched in his newspaper's city, We live in a disposable society. But we don't dispose of Babe Ruth. We don't dispose of Walter Johnson. We view these men as living, and contemporaries though they are dead."

Though Elvis Presley is long dead, and Babe Ruth even longer so, they still live within us. Because they are, still, the best there's ever been at what they did.

To both of them, I give Elvis' words: "Thank you very much."