 Mike HlasHi, I'm Gazette/TheGazette.com sports columnist Mike Hlas. This is the Hlog. We will meet here, discuss things, and then go [...] |
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Less hero-worship might be a more-heroic approach
Sports deities don't create themselves
It would be fun to hop atop a high horse and laugh at everyone else for putting faith in false sports idols.
But I’ve bought into my share of illusions over the years. In 1998 I wrote about how great the home run battle between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa was. And it was great, if you like your baseball to come from a pill bottle or needle.
When Lance Armstrong came to Cedar Rapids in 2007 (for a great cause, to inspire and empower people who have cancer), I wrote about his “willpower.”
When they were kings (AP photo)
“Maybe it takes someone who bicycled up the French Alps faster than anyone else and has never slowed down, an unstoppable hope machine,” I wrote. That prose was just a little overheated, oui?
But the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is investigating the seven-time Tour de France champion. That doesn’t mean Armstrong was guilty of juicing during those Tour triumphs. But you and I sure don’t know if he was or wasn’t.
And I don’t need to dig very far into Gazette archives to find things I wrote about Joe Paterno that followed the party line of calling him a guiding light in American sport.
But, as I should have told myself at least as often as I’ve told others who are quick to canonize coaches or athletes, we seldom really know these people. Few are as noble as they are portrayed. Or as rotten, for that matter.
In my line of work, it’s a lot simpler to promote the heartwarming. It’s very easy to assist in the mythmaking.
That’s because a lot of people like to have their positive feelings of people fortified. I know I do. I sure want to believe those I enjoy and admire are full of integrity. But the only ones I’m very confident about are those I have gotten to know and observe closely.
When you write such things about someone, the responses to the stories obviously are favorable. There is no backlash, no anger, no worries. It feels good to get positive feedback from the public. Real good.
Plus, how dreary would this existence be if we didn’t focus enough on the best in people?
Often, by the way, such portrayals are on the money. Thankfully, many public figures really are chock full o’ integrity and decency. The world has no shortage of people, famous and otherwise, who would hold up magnificently under scrutiny.
Penn State, last Oct. 8 (Mike Hlas photo)
But there also is a lot of carefully constructed image-making, by the subjects themselves and those who report it. Image isn’t everything.
Maybe we should remind each other to not turn fellow human beings into deities, to dial down hero-worship of anyone. Someone who really is a good egg probably doesn’t crave the ego-massage, anyhow.
There have to be some people who look back and wonder why they ever vigorously pursued an autograph of a Tiger Woods or Jim Tressel or Pete Rose or Michael Vick. At the time, they surely thought those were heroes without deep flaws. Had anyone suggested otherwise, they might have been branded liars and fools.
A rational person would look at why high-ranking Penn State people were part of a cover-up for a child-rapist and ask why “protecting” a football program could have possibly been that critical to them.
A college football program. A multimillion-dollar institution centered around games played with an oddly shaped ball that can take funny bounces. Guarded by men of great accomplishment, but men who helped keep horrific crimes in the darkness.
It’s incredible, isn’t it? Maybe if we all tweaked the culture just a teeny bit and tried to make these games just a tiny bit less important … hey, it’s fun to pretend.
A guy at Penn State last Oct. 8 (Mike Hlas photo)
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I used to have two t-shirts. One read “Football is Life” and had a tigerhawk logo. The other read “Iowa is Football: There is Nothing Else.” Well, no it isn’t and yes, there is. Iowa is James van Allen and Al Jarreau and Kurt Vonnegut and Tennessee Williams. It is Janet Guthrie and Simon Estes and actor John Anderson and many others.
Life is… well, I doubt you know what it really is until you pace outside of an emergency room treatment cubicle while the staff evaluates your screaming, frightened two-year-old granddaughter for a possible fractured skull after she wriggled around and flipped out of your arms at home. She survived and my hair got a little grayer. Today, she is a healthy ten year old and those two tee-shirts went the way of the dust-rag years ago. That was life. That IS life.
A lot of things constitute life, but the least of them is how well one group of young men do against another when they dress up in funny suits and play with a ball. It does not come close to being a top priority. Not even a little bit.
Perspective must be maintained. Getting carried away with ANYTHING–religion, politics, grammar, literature, opera, ballet, money, status, fashion–you name it–and there is a problem. We have to keep a wide focus in order to see the big picture and, thereby, keep things in perspective.
There’s nothing wrong, and much good, in following opera or college football. We all need diversions, and if you have perspective, you know college football is no more a menace to society today than it ever was. Teddy Roosevelt was going to ban it for being too violent more than a century ago. Back in the 1930′s, Grantland Rice and others bemoaned in national sports magazines how money would soon ruin college football.
We move from crisis to crisis, and life goes on. It will go on more happily not by closing down diversions like college football or opera, but by simply keeping them all in perspective. After all, there is also the T-shirt that says, “Life is hard. Then you die.” Why not enjoy some diversion in between?
Perhaps the most influential writer on this subject I have encountered over the past 10 years is the Presbyterian evangelical Tim Keller. I quote below from a sermon “Talking about Idolatry in a Postmodern Age”. One need not be a Christian to be challenged by Keller’s reasoning in this area. He outlines a secular understanding for the dangers of idolatry, once they are properly framed. I think anyone can reflect on the implications of this:
“Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry. …I have found that when you describe their lives in terms of idolatry, postmodern people do not offer much resistance. They doubt there is any real alternative, but they admit sheepishly that this is what they are doing.”
“Making good things into ultimate things”, ignoring the hollowness of worshipping ‘good’ totems from the everyday: this is how our entertaining obsession with a sports culture (a “good thing”, I suppose) may land that same culture in the ditch. This time it is a very, very deep trench. I see more of myself in this act of “making good things into ultimate things”, in a variety of contexts, than I would prefer. Perhaps others do too. All of this is neatly summed up by the hysterical reaction by some of the PSU fanbase, and panicked confusion, at the PSU BoT level, to the idea that perhaps an idolatrous statue of Paterno be removed from campus. Here the statue is not just a metaphor for Keller’s sin of idolatry, it is the idolatry itself.
** http://www.monergism.com/postmodernidols.html
** Keller’s book _Counterfeit Gods_ is a favorite of mine.
Those are three different and well-stated posts from Paul, Sanji, and Sue-Don.
I think the thing that has given me a shred of perspective is being so close to big-time sports for three decades.
The people that have the most respect for a team’s opponents are the team itself. You seldom hear a high-level athlete or team hurling insults about the other side. And you seldom fail to see mutual respect shown on the field or court after a game.
The people who seem to best understand they aren’t part of a noble calling, but are simply athletes/entertainers, are the athletes themselves. That’s not to say they can’t be noble (in many cases, they are), but that comes from how they conduct themselves and live their lives.
I think of college football as being most important to the players. Some do think of working toward a job in the NFL and that’s OK, but most see it as a way to get a colege education. I experienced a full ride at Iowa towards an engineering degree in the late 50′s and then found a great job at Collins. I think football does a great job of teaching team skills that are so basically important in successfully performing our later life long job functions.