Educational Wealth

Who are the Yankees, the great DiMaggio and the Indians of the Cleveland?

 

The Old man and the Sea

Ans:  Santiago often talked to Manolin and to himself (in his internal monologues) about his youthful baseball tournaments and about DiMaggio, the baseball champion. He also talked
about McGraw, the great baseball manager. Santiago is a man who honours men who work hard, have confidence in themselves and have integrity.
Santiago’s attitude toward Joe DiMaggio is one of the foundness and honour. He thinks Joe is great and has faith in the Yankees because they have,the "great" Joe DiMaggio. Hemingway also shows us Santiago’s respect for DiMaggio through Santiago’s remarks about Joe while he is fighting to catch the big marlin.
"The Yankees cannot lose,"
‘But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”
"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
Reading news about baseball matches was his hobby. While struggling with the marlin in his boat, he thought of the results of the matches. It brought to his mind great champions and drganizers of the game like DiMaggio and McGraw like whom he himself wanted to be. Now, he was to be a champion of fishing, no less an expert than DiMaggio. He was to show how much capable and successful he was in his own field.
Actually, baseball and DiMaggio became symbols of the energy that he had lost with time, and. he understood this. However, he wanted and tried to act “youthfully" to defeat the marlin and the forces of nature. 

This amounted to stretching himself too far, to exceeding his limits and to acting against the  realities of his situation, in a word, to overreaching himself. Santiago states that he wonders how DiMaggio would have liked how he hit the marlin “in the brain".