Wednesday, June 02, 2010
My Hero
Ken Griffey Jr. retired today. My god, I idolized this guy when I was a kid. Now I'm thirty years old. How time passes.
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2 comments:
As a kid, I always thought idolization of baseball stars was strange. What, exactly, were people idolizing? What actions, what exploits, what last-second heroics? I mean, when there are football and basketball players around...?
This is not to say that playing baseball was no fun -- just that having baseball heroes seemed strange.
Z-wiz,
I've been thinking about this question, and I'm having a hard time with it. I think, though, that it has something to do with how much more than other sports baseball is a game of individuals. It's a battle between single persons, and there are some people who are so good at that contest, that inspire you to invest crazy hope in and fantasize about being as good as that. Ken Griffey Jr. could do it all, and when I played ball in the neighborhood, I wanted to be him--to have the same potential to affect the game whenever I came up to plate or made a play in the field. Is it necessarily a game-winning home run or other specific action? Partly, sure. But more than that is having the kind of potential within yourself that this great person has. In a game like baseball where you're mostly waiting for something to happen, you idolize the person who can make things happen.
In this regard, consider what our friend Jbert (I think it was him) once remarked about watching a college baseball game. It was really boring because he didn't know the players' back stories. Drawing on reputations to give baseball's tension meaning is absolutely huge for enjoying the game. Indeed, through that lens, idolization is the only way watching baseball can be enjoyed at all. For another example, note how the Japanese fetishize the first match-up between star hitters and pitchers--all the honor and courage that's read into the first pitch, as if it were two sumo champs making their first moves. Baseball is indeed, at root, a fetishizing sport, no? Witness the truly unique obsession with statistics. It's all idols, all the time.
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