Yogi Berra found forks in the road and he took every one of them.

There’s a decent chance that more than a few people reading this have never heard of Yogi Berra and clicked on this article by mistake. If you’re Gen-X, like me, you more than likely remember Berra from his appearances in Miller Lite commercials. If you’re a baseball fan like me, you know he played for the New York Yankees and he managed/coached some teams after he retired. You might know that he was on a bunch of Yankees teams that won the World Series.

If you take the 99 minutes it takes to watch It Ain’t Over, the documentary of his life, well, you’ll realize you don’t know a heck of a lot of what you don’t know (a layman’s attempt to craft a Yogi-ism).

From his hardscrabble, working family upbringing in St. Louis to his military service: getting injured on D-Day and being awarded a Purple Heart; to his vital role in helping the Yankees win 10 World Series, Yogi Berra was a legend. His career was absolutely insane: he won 3 MVP awards, was selected to the All-Star team 18 times in 19 seasons, and was elected to the Hall of Fame. Yet, somehow, all of that was overshadowed by Berra’s charm, gregariousness, and an underappreciated ability to make a cogent point by couching it in seemingly inane aphorisms.

It’s a major award!!

That’s not saying this movie is a home run, but it is definitely a stand-up double (you had to know at least one of those was coming). It spends too much time reliving the “slight” from 2015 when Berra wasn’t named one of the four greatest living players. Yes, you could make a strong argument that he should’ve been included, but it’s hard to argue against the players that were chosen: Henry Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays. As an Orioles fan, I could just as easily argue that Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson also deserved the honor, but the players chosen were just as deserving. Overall, the film does a good job covering his life on the field and a decent job covering his life off the field, of which I would’ve liked to see a little more. His devotion to his wife and kids was made clear, in particular his love for his wife of 65 years, Carmen. Yet, of his 3 sons, we learn a lot more about his son Dale than his other two children, Larry and Tim. It’s understandable to a degree when you hear Dale’s story and how it intertwined with Yogi’s, but Tim and Larry get a bit of a raw deal by comparison.

Schwarzenegger not included

The best thing the filmmakers do is to start each segment with a famous quote by someone like William Shakespeare or Albert Einstein, then throughout the segment, we hear a Yogi-ism that you are shown is related to that famous quote, showing just how smart Yogi was by revealing the universal truths behind his colloquialisms.

Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?

Overall, this is a movie worth seeing even if you aren’t a baseball fan. Like Yogi said, “You can observe a lot by watching”. You can learn something, too.

4 forks in the road out of 5.

Screener courtesy of Allied Marketing and Sony Pictures Classics.
It Ain’t Over is playing exclusively in theatres.