Business…check this here lil ditty on Barry Bonds, steroids, and segregation. Yeah, they’re connected.
Anyway, Big Rell raises an interesting question on his always interesting blog (Blogroll)–how should we view our heroes after they’re gone.
This is a salient question now that Kirby Puckett has passed away. Puckett was a helluva baseball player, apparently the most pleasant man on Earth, and also accused of doing some really dastardly things including sexual assault and actually dreading some of the charity work that bolstered his image.
(Most of that dastardly information came from a piece in SI by Frank DeFord years ago. That piece is questioned by some, but DeFord might be the best in this business. Tough call all around. RW raised a different question at the time–should that piece have been run while Puckett was on trial? The answer–no.)
And to this question, my answer is pretty direct–we need to evaluate the totality of the person being considered. But if the issue raised doesn’t have much to do with why we love that person, then we need to think more deeply.
Puckett’s demons are interesting because they all seemed to surface after he retired, after baseball was taken from me. Those demons then serve as an interesting illustration of who he was and just how much baseball meant to him (not to mention what it must be like to go blind as a relatively young man). Without baseball, he seemed to have trouble telling up from down in the world. DeFord said that without baseball, Puckett went back to being fat Kirby and it ate him alive.
There’s something seriously illustrative to be taken from that. Kirby was a kid from the south side of Chicago. Baseball, from what I read, was what got him out of the ‘hood. And then to have all of that just vanish from thin air? Wow, man.
Long of the short–if you’re going to do pieces about how much Kirby loved baseball, you need to see what happened to him without it. Without doing so, any retrospective on his life is incomplete. In fact, doing so without talking about the bad stuff minimizes the effect of saying just how important and wonderful baseball was to him.
The goal in this job is to write the best piece you can, as far as I can tell. When i hit the keyboard, I want to offer a unique perspective and the highest level of quality I can. If adding that stuff about Puckett would have made my piece better or provided interesting insight, I would have.
I am not here to please my readers. I’m here to inform them, make them think and, if possible after accomplish those first two, entertain. The entertaining part is very important, but not until those other two things are taken care of.
But there are some grey areas. What do you do with something shocking that really doesn’t matter that much? Chances are you let those things go.
But consider this–we’re going to lose Muhammad Ali before too long (I don’t know anything, but he’s 60 years old). Over time, Ali has been changed in the eyes of many from being a demon to a plaster saint. Of course, neither is true. In fact, him being a plaster saint might be worse because that doesn’t encourage people to reconsider things and learn for themselves.
But Ali had big problems, most notably rampant adultery and his tendency to attack someone’s dignity in the name of promoting a fight. Should we ignore that he met Veronica Porsche (sp?) in Zaire while he was still married? Not sure.
But for a man that used religion and morality as a basis of his opposition to the war, it might be necessary to consider that to get a full portrait of who he was and to allow us to consider just how important his faith really was in his opposition to that war.
So adding such a detail isn’t quite necessary. But it does illustrate more about the man than we’d get just sayin, “man, he said he aint’ got no beef with Ho Chi Minh!”
But that’s my two pennies. Comment as you please.
6 thoughts on “Bonds and Puckett”
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First things first: That piece on Bonds, Babe, segregation and steroids is arguably one of the best pieces of your writing I’ve ever read. Seriously. Blew me away, which is hard to do. Great stuff, man.
As for what to do with our heroes after they die, I’m torn. I’ll admit that part of me cringed when I got to Spelman and learned that the upright and moral Martin Luther King I learned about in elementary school was the same Martin the Morehouse Man who whored around on Coretta all over Atlanta.
But then I decided that we should love our heroes not for their divinity, but for their humanity. That MLK had human weaknesses like the rest of us only makes his strengths more admirable. It also makes him more relatable, I think…if he can make mistakes and still make a difference, then why can’t we?
I found it ridiculous that they edited out Cedric’s “Martin Lutha the King was a HO!” comment from Barbershop after the first screening because of negative feedback. Hell with that. He was. That doesn’t magically negate the Civil Rights Act.
Even after death, our heroes can’t be heroes unless they’re human first.
I agree with Alia, your piece on Bonds, roids, ruth and segregation was absolutely genius writing and an angle I never considered. I’ll love to see the e-mail on this though, you’re gonna get called a race-baiter etc etc, despite the fact that people probably just read the first paragraph of the article and nothing else.
Secondly, the thing with Puckett — I knew him and he was cool but he wasn’t one of my favorites. I think that affects how i look at him.
When Jordan or Griffey, Jr. or Emmit passes (if I’m not gone first) it’ll be hard for me to listen to people talk about their life outside of sports and some of things they did wrong.
Admiration is a strange thing…
I agree with Alia, your piece on Bonds, roids, ruth and segregation was absolutely genius writing and an angle I never considered. I’ll love to see the e-mail on this though, you’re gonna get called a race-baiter etc etc, despite the fact that people probably just read the first paragraph of the article and nothing else.
Secondly, the thing with Puckett — I knew him and he was cool but he wasn’t one of my favorites. I think that affects how i look at him.
When Jordan or Griffey, Jr. or Emmit passes (if I’m not gone first) it’ll be hard for me to listen to people talk about their life outside of sports and some of things they did wrong.
Admiration is a strange thing…
I think there is something that needs to be noted vis avis how we remember heroes (I think “our” is a loaded modifier in this case – my heroes may not be yours, nor do I think in a pluralistic society they should be): What sort of human transgressions are besmirching their heroic track records? This is one instance where I think moral relativism works perfectly.
MLK being a philanderer rightfully should have a greater impact on his legacy than Ali being one should have on his. MLK’s position as a moral authority required that he was both held to higher account and had to transgress a public and presumably deeply held personal code in order to cheat. Ali was bound by no such code or position. Ali was merely a womanizer; whereas MLK was a hypocrite, and worse, an apostate by proxy through his actions. As influential and revered a figure as Ali became, he never took an oath, recieved any formal training or ever requested to be anything other than a boxer.
This is easily continued – OJ killed two people, whereas Jim Brown beat up his wife, ergo we should think better of JB. Clinton lied about getting some brain, Bush lied about having one etc…
How we remember our heroes has to do with how they presented themselves and what they did on balance. Unfortunately, most jocks did very little to leave the world a better place than they found it – Ali is the exception. Remember Kirblett on the field, but don’t forget what he did off it.
Sorry, have to add something – on balance, MLK of course did more for the world than Ali. It is just that his moral transgressions seem greater given his position. Not sure Kirby Puckett or even Ali can be put in the same stratosphere.
Check his blog. Good stuff.
Great piece on Bonds/segregation, but yeah, prepare for loads of hate mail. Let me give you a taste of what you’re in for:
“Your obviously a moran! Why do you people always have to play the race card! Babe Ruth wasn’t a cheater. He had no control over whether the league was segregated.”
Anyway,
I have always hated the deification of “heroes.” I have never understand why adults would buy into the simplistic notion that important political/social/artistic figures are saintly, and that to highlight the personal indiscretions of these figures amounts to slighting their contributions.
With sports, it’s even more absurd, primarily because, as you point out in the article, people attach (an almost moral) significance to sports and athletes that they don’t deserve. It’s quite evident in the (often racialized) nostalgiic discourse about the imagined “good ol’ days of sport,” in which heroes cared about the fans and played for the love of the game.