Hard to Say Goodbye.
Tough year for fans of icons
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We spend more time looking over our shoulders than we maybe used to. It’s an occupational hazard of being a sports fan. If you love a game you follow it, and if you follow it you remember players and moments and numbers, but you never really delete anything from your mental files. You just keep adding, collecting.
These players have a terrible habit of turning out to be human. They get a little slower and have to retire from sport, and after they retire they get older, but we keep on remembering them as younger. Eventually they pass, because life, and we have to make another emotional adjustment, which feels completely unfair.
Willie Mays will always be about as old as he looks on that baseball card, but of course he was 93 in actual years when he died in June. Pete Rose, whose career and life were inescapable for any baseball fan of the past several decades, died in September at 83. Rickey Henderson was only 65 upon his death Dec. 20. Rickey would’ve turned 66 on Christmas Day.
Tough year for baseball fans. These guys were the lifeblood of so many sports conversations and so many memories. Rose was a walking controversy; you could just raise his name and almost immediately get into a sports fight with someone about the Hall of Fame, and the baseball industry’s habit of looking the other way on things until it has no choice but to react. (Then does so, badly.)
In the bigger picture, and it’s a selfish thing to say, we fans have a difficult time processing the loss. Some of these people, these athletes — they hang around for so long that we begin to imagine that we know them. We don’t, believe me, but we think we do. We’ve heard them talk a lot, that’s for sure, and we’ve seen what they did on the field, and it all forms the image of a person without actually being a person. It is a shadow, but a magnificent one.
They don’t seem like people, exactly; they’re more like what people would be if they were successful all the time.
That’s how it felt about Mays. Rickey Henderson, so far as I knew, had virtually no unsuccessful moments during his entire life. (We know this is a lie, but it’s a great lie, and so we carry on with it.) Pete Rose got banned from baseball, and yet it only seemed to grow his legend. Rose was infamous after he was famous, but it all adds up to the same thing. He’s still a guy sliding head-first into second, third, home.
Fernando Valenzuela passed away this year at age 64, and the longtime manager and baseball character Whitey Herzog moved on as well. Orlando Cepeda was 86 when he died in June, but we still called him the Baby Bull and always will. Luis Tiant passed in October; people called him El Tiante, and if you saw his pitching windup once, you never again had trouble remembering who he was.
It is just a lot of loss. And this is going to keep happening, I’m afraid, because we’ve watched baseball long enough and avidly enough that, although every such loss feels impossible, the people we’ll always think of as young are no longer so, and there are a lot of them, after all. It will hurt, and it will happen.
I mean, we’re fans. We are collectors and zealous holders of memories. But to do that, we also have to get our hearts broken. It’s certainly not fair, and nobody told me about this when I started collecting baseball cards as a kid. At the very least, they should’ve put the information in a manual. But now that I’ve been warned, I figure I’ll just go on collecting.
Well said, Mark. My baseball (and Tigers) love really flourished in 1985, so I knew Rickey first as a Yankee. I missed most of Rose (though I checked his hit total in the newspaper every day during that summer of ‘85) and all of Mays, Cepeda, and Tiant, but still felt like I knew them due to reading of their exploits in various baseball books (over and over again). I was rooting hard for Herzog’s ‘85 Cards (and especially Vince Coleman) only to see them go down in seven to the Royals. Still feels strange to be older now than all the players are (and were when I was a kid). Thanks for this perspective today. Looking forward to a new season and more memories in the making!
Very well said, Mark. You hit the nail on the head. I would add that those of us who are 60+ may have a slightly bigger burden since a higher percentage of players back in the day stayed with the same team their entire career, or at least very close to it. I think we tend to associate a player with a particular team more so than do fans today given player movement.