"I am happy, very happy, but I don't have to jump up and down."
This quote lodged itself in my brain at a young age. It juxtaposes strong emotion with slight admonishment, at least as I understood it. Yes, another person might leap out of their seat, but I am content. You don't know how I express myself.
Years later, I tried to find a source for the quote. I had remembered it as a baseball player, getting interviewed after some big win, hanging around in some local bar with his team, happy but not outwardly ecstatic.
It proved difficult to find. I started with simple Google searches for the quote, phrases within the quote, sometimes looking for baseball-related pages, sometimes not.
The first find was a quote from Kimi Raikkonen, a Finnish F1 driver, from 2012. Apparently known for being blunt, he was quoted after the win as saying "I'm happy but there's nothing to jump around about." This is essentially the same phrase, and is in the context of a competition, but 2012 is too late to be the quote I knew as a child.
The next lead was something that Google's AI summary coughed up, some vaguely similar quote attributed to Tommy Leach. Leach spent 12 years with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early 1900s, playing in three World Series, winning one. Supposedly the quote could be found in The Glory of Their Times, a book full of player interviews from the early days of baseball. I found the book at my local library and read every page related to Leach to no avail. It's possible he said something like it, but only the idiot AI ever said so specifically, and its purported source was wrong.
In an unrelated YouTube video some weeks later, I watched Rainbolt try to figure out the book someone was reading, based only on a blurry photograph of one page. Once he identified some of the strings of text, he plugged it into Google's Advanced Book Search, a tool that I did not know existed. Hm, maybe this is the secret, I thought: a way to search only the text of books, without the distraction of other sources, real or fake.
A few search attempts later, after several different phrasings, I had another lead. The quote seemed to be present in Clemente!, a book about Roberto Clemente, coincidentally also a longtime Pirate. While the book search was able to show the quote in the preview, I couldn't see the context of the full page, and my library didn't have the book. Still a little distrusting of the internet, I bought a secondhand copy of the book on eBay.
About a week later, I received and read Clemente! and found the precise quote, as presented above. It's October 6th, 1971. The Pirates have just defeated the Giants for the National League pennant and are about to go to the World Series. Clemente is not in a bar, he is on a training table in the clubhouse, but the basic situation matches my original recollection. Here's the excerpt:
Al Oliver slammed home a long homer to insure the victory. The Pirates were on their way to their first World Series since 1960.
They raised hell in the clubhouse, splashing each other with champagne, milk, beer, soda—but Roberto sat quietly upon a rubbing table in the trainer's room, his favorite spot. "I am happy, very happy, but I don't have to jump up and down. Some people think I am strange because I don't jump up and down." For similar reasons, he explained, people thought him sad because he was rarely seen smiling. "But I am happy inside. It's just how a person's face muscles are. Now you take Sangy [catcher Manny Sanguillén], the way the muscles in his face work, he looks like he's always smiling, even though he may feel sad."
Pirate owner John Galbreath wedged through the circle of reporters and shook Roberto's hand effusively. "You're everything we think you are. You never let us down. You come through every time—you're the greatest."
So where exactly did I hear this quote? It's tough to say. It's not the most memorable or distinct line. I don't recall ever reading a book about Roberto Clemente either. My best guess is that I read it in some sports-related book, possibly a book that Google's book search hasn't indexed, while away from home. I must have been very young and somehow stashed the line very deeply, without the surrounding context aside from the connection to baseball.
I read the entirety of Clemente! even after finding the quote and enjoyed it very much. Clemente was a strong personality and a fascinating character, full of interesting thoughts. When he was honored by the Pirates at Roberto Clemente Night in 1970, he said this: "In moments like these, you can see a lot of years in a few minutes."
He was 35 when he said that, just over two years before he died in an airplane crash. I started this microjourney wondering about the quote at the top of this page. Since reading Clemente!, I've been thinking a lot more about the quote at the bottom.