Bernie Williams knows that many people recognize him for using stripes, hitting from both sides of the dish and winning titles of the World Series with the New York Yankees. It is where its main legacy is found in the baseball game.
However, over the years, Manning Centerfield for the Yankees, Williams’s love for music, specifically the guitar, was always prevalent.
He remembered Pak Gazette Digital how, one day at the Yankees Club House, Rock Legend Bruce Springsteen was walking knowing the players. In general, the Yankees are the ones asked for an autograph, but this time, Springsteen was the main attraction while heading through the Club House.
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The former Yankee Bernie Williams touches the national anthem on the guitar during the induction ceremony of the National Baseball Hall 2021 on Wednesday, September 8 in Cooperstown, New York. The ceremony honored the members of the 2020 class: Derek Jeter, Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons and Larry Walker. (IMAGN)
However, Williams did not want an autograph in a bat or baseball. That was too simple.
“So, I have this fender telecaster in my locker and said: ‘Hey, could you sign this? I’m not going to make you sign a ball or bat. I think this would be really great,” said Williams. “Then, signed the guitar saying: ‘A Bernie, if you ever get tired of baseball …'”
Springsteen, a magician on stage, may have planned the sweets that Williams enter music in the future. It is his musical career, after baseball, which is being used to honor the legacy of his late father, while helping others along the way.
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This Friday marks the day of rare disease, and Williams spoke with Pak Gazette Digital about his work with Tune in Lung Health, a program created to support patients who deal with interstitial pulmonary disease (ILD), as well as their loved ones.
ILD causes irreversible scars of lungs that can hinder breathing, so difficult that many patients need to transport oxygen tanks. The disease affects approximately 50,000 Americans every year, and has no cure.
Bernabé Williams Figueroa Mr. died in 2001 due to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a type of IDL.
Bernabé Williams Figueroa Mr. died in 2001 when his son, Bernie Williams, played for the New York Yankees. (Tune in lung health)
“He was the one who taught me to play baseball,” Williams recalled about his father. “He was the one who taught me to play music with my guitar and all that. All these things join the full circle with this initiative, where I can really give back the community, remember their legacy and do great things in my mind too, to be able to feel rewarded while I help other people to navigate these really challenging times.”
This program explores how music and breathing can help people face the physical and mental aspects of the disease, and has allowed Williams to connect with patients and caregivers through their music.
“Music has always been a really important part of my life, and I have grown up, I can see how powerful music is in all aspects of life,” he said. “You can use it for healing. If you are emotional, you can go through difficult times. You can use it to exercise. The power of music is so vast, and for me, it seems that an obvious is obvious to present it and try to make this campaign part, which uses the power of music to deal with many of these things you have to treat when you are going through these disorders, like my father, when I have seen.
Through the initiative website, Williams, which has a Latin Grammy nominee under its musical career belt, loves the different ways in which patients and caregivers can use music and breathing exercises to improve their daily lives.
“Breathing is a large part of [singing]using your voice as an instrument, “he explained.” The application for people who really value each breathing they take and everything that happens in their life is also really important. So, having that information at hand, you can have these exercises to really improve the quality of your life. “
The former New York Yankees gardener Bernie Williams, at Yankee Stadium. (Wendell Cruz-USA Today Sports)
Williams said that this initiative is “very therapeutic” for him because it allows him to remember those great moments with his father through his other passion in life out of baseball.
In fact, Williams will be in the iconic stone pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with his band on March 27 – MLB Opening Day – to play some songs and have a conversation by the fire with fans, which will include this initiative.
The place of Signature Jersey Shore is the one that Springsteen began. It was the beginning of a path to rock greatness, and finally, a hungry professional baseball player to share his own music with the world.
They would connect again that path.
“20 years later, I am playing on stage with him for one of those dinners of the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation. [Springsteen] He was a guest interpreter, and brought me to the stage, and we had this great acoustic version of ‘Glory Days’ that we played together, he and his wife. That was a great moment in my young musical career. It is one of the things I remember and I will never forget, “Williams said.
Bernie Williams’ love for music has been intertwined in his initiative with the tuning with pulmonary health, which honors his late father. (Tune in lung health)
Williams will not forget the man who taught him how to scratch that guitar.
“While breathing, I will try to give people information and try to educate people about what I went through and what my father happened,” Williams said.
