Lou Brissie, 1924–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

In June 1941, Lou Brissie seemed destined to become a baseball superstar. The lanky, teenage pitcher had just signed to the Philadelphia Athletics, with the team agreeing to pay his college tuition for three years. But all too soon, “World War II intervened,” said the Augusta, Ga., Chronicle. Brissie enlisted in the Army the following year and was slogging through northern Italy in 1944 when a German shell shattered the bones in his lower left leg into 30 pieces. Medics told him it would have to be amputated. “You can’t take my leg off,” Brissie protested. “I’m a ballplayer.” A doctor warned that he’d die without the operation. “Doc,” he replied, “I’ll take my chances.”

Brissie was taken to a military hospital in Naples for the first of 23 operations on his leg. He was walking within a year and by 1947 was strong enough to play for the Athletics’ minor-league team in Savannah. “Brissie wore a metal brace to protect his leg, but he was a sensation, winning 23 games and losing five,” said The New York Times. By season’s end, the left-hander was playing for the Athletics. At his peak in 1949, he achieved a 16–11 record and pitched three innings in the All-Star Game, said the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier. “I knew I was a symbol to many veterans trying to overcome problems,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let them down.”

Brissie retired from baseball in 1953, and in the years after often visited veterans’ hospitals to talk and give hope to American soldiers wounded in wars from Korea to Afghanistan. “People with disabilities have told me, ‘Because of you I decided to try,’” he said in 1985. “That changes you.”