Heroes Are Hard to Find.

We meet again

Thanks for being here. We hope you’ll stay.

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Willie Mays died this week at age 93 and — you know what? We’ve been doing this too much lately.

My archive has become a running series of obituaries. I would argue that if you’re going to love sports, you have to love them in context, but this is one of those contexts that just breaks your heart and then keeps on doing it.

Mays’ passing certainly did that. (Here is an amazing clip of Giants broadcaster Dave Flemming trying to choke out the words during the radio broadcast on Tuesday, after he received notice that Willie had died in San Francisco.) Mays was such a connection to baseball’s past, when it really was the dominant sport in the country, and his was a very American story, full of hardship and obstacle but also accomplishment and, ultimately, a glory that stayed with him for the rest of his days here.

Mays knew he was great, which meant he didn’t need you to tell him. I’m sure I never met a more serenely self-confident star, with the possible exception of Henry Aaron. And well into his 80s and 90s, Mays was most comfortable inside a baseball clubhouse — the Giants’ clubhouse, that is.

Spring trainings in Scottsdale were epic; Willie and his people would walk in, pull up a couple of folding chairs around some plastic table in the middle of the room, and just sit and talk or play cards while all these wide-eyed young guys put on their uniforms to go to work. It was like the players almost couldn’t believe what they were seeing, but then Willie Freaking Mays would call one of them out by name and tell him to come over. It was spit-take city for some of those kids.

He would call them by name. He knew their names. If he didn’t, Willie would call them Young Fella or simply say, “Who are you?” In the presence of a legend, that always seemed like a fair question.

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The past few weeks made the world worse. Bill Walton, Jerry West, now Mays — the place is a little dimmer today. I think sports fans take it hard because, if you grew up in a certain time, you were allowed to believe that your athletic heroes were actually heroes.

Until fairly recently, the media didn’t really have the time or bandwidth to yank all these sports stars back to the ground. It’s easier now that everyone is the media (if you’ve got a phone in your hand, you’re a reporter), but of course easier doesn’t mean better. People can get dumpstered faster, is all.

These guys who just passed, they were part of a more traditional time. That doesn’t mean altogether better, either. Mays, like Aaron and so many others, endured racist taunts and threats, sometimes couldn’t stay in the same hotel as his teammates, sometimes had food served to him only out back of the restaurant — all that crap. But in that time and the decades that followed, if you were a wonderful athlete, you would be celebrated for that and that alone. The rest of your life was basically whatever and however you lived it, and we never knew much about that part. Speaking generally, this was Mays’ experience.

Sports has always been one part myth-making. I wouldn’t place too large a bet on that continuing. The smart athletes have used social media to try to keep it going a little, to leverage their own images or simply connect directly with fans, but the media at large are currently quite happy to chip away at the facade. Anti-heroes attract attention, too.

I was okay with the old way, which I suspect means that I was comfortable in my ignorance. Not sure I would recommend that as a life plan. On the other hand, I had heroes.