MLB

Joe DiMaggio’s Penis Back In The Spotlight

As the story goes, Pete Rose was called by the state department in 1967 regarding a trip to Vietnam for some sort of morale-boosting tour. After first refusing to go, he changed his mind upon hearing that Yankee great and American icon Joe DiMaggio would be there as well. And it was on this trip where he “saw everything that Marilyn Monroe saw.”

The following is transcribed from Mike Missanelli’s radio show on 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia, courtesy of Sports Radio Interviews.

So five of us went over to Vietnam and we went to Saigon and met up on the Intrepid in Tonkin Bay. And we were there for 23 days. Now we’re down in the middle of the jungle, it’s hot, it’s so hot you can’t sleep, there’s a war going on, you can see the helicopter and every fourth bullet is a tracer. We’re up on a hill and there’s a valley and the other hill is where the war’s going on. And Joe says, ‘Man, I’ve gotta take a shower.’ I said, ‘Joe, we’re out in the middle of the jungle, what do you mean you’ve got to take a shower?’ He said, ‘I don’t give a damn, I’m Joe D and I’ve gotta take a shower.’ And the only way you can take a shower, Mike, is they have these big bamboo bags, like, and somebody’s got to get on a chair and pour the water and pull a rawhide thing and the water comes through and the guy takes a shower. So I saw everything that Marilyn Monroe saw. Now, when I tell people the best way to describe Joe DiMaggio, he was a penis with a man hanging from it. … Does that give you a better perspective?”

This isn’t the first time that Rose has spoken, at length (hiyo!), about Joe D’s manhood. He recounted the same story on the Howard Stern show back in March.

It’s also not the first time said manhood has garnered media attention. A photograph of a fully nude DiMaggio (link NSFW) went on display at an exhibition in San Francisco in 2009.

What’s almost sad about all of this is that DiMaggio was famously private, and this kind of attention (Pete Rose regaling a radio audience with tales of his penis, an art exhibition that featured him nude) would have horrified him.

[Deadspin]