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Del Mar, California – July, 2006 "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald There is a saying among old, retired athletes that you can't really discuss great contests unless you've earned the conversation. How can anyone whose sweat hasn't fallen onto the fields, it's thought, fully comprehend the heightened state of existence in professional athletics? How can anyone know those sweet seasons of fastballs whizzing, and cameras whirring and with everyone making gods of young men, unless they too had swallowed it all and then reconstituted the memory of what it meant? And what it means now? Like an old soldier, old jocks will say that unless you were there, you'll never really know. If you were to ask retired professional athletes what they miss most about sports, the honest ones won't speak of the money or the perks or the even the roar of the crowd in their ears. It's the locker rooms, they'll tell you, that hallowed place where your mere presence signifies and sanctifies everything. It says that you've earned your spot. You are a member of The Team – men and sometimes women – for whom you'll do most anything. As they would for you. Not unlike soldiers at war, the locker room is base camp – where lifelong bonds are forged in spilt blood and cast in the grandiloquence of it all. A re-entry into what returning Vietnam vets used to call "the world" doesn't completely erase those connections. But it certainly recasts them into the form of soft memory, that dangerous nostalgia that can rise up like a malaria sweat, flashing and begging. "Look at your life now?" it asks. "Are you happy? Don't you want another shot? One more tour? One more day in the sun?"  Through July Greg Maddux had lost seven straight. Active players see this in the Old Guys; the wistful look in their eyes, the sucking in of the belly. They know that as an athlete, they will die twice – when they leave the game and when the leave the earth. And so they play until someone says they can't. Maybe it's a coach lighting the torch to be passed, a mother calling them home for dinner, a team owner trading men like the commodities they've become. "Aw, c'mon Mom, no one else has to come in." "Son, it's not personal. It's just business." The aging athlete knows the standard precursor line: "Hey (insert name here)…gotta' minute?" Somewhere near the center of themselves, not that far away from the heart that drives the machine, every athlete keeps that inalienable truth locked away until time or tragedy, purpose or profit, sneaks past the guards and opens the box. Suddenly it's dusk outside. People grow up. Games slow. Bodies slow. And finally a day will come. It will be a warm spring when it feels more like September than April, and your locker has someone else's name on it. It's over. And nothing you will ever do can equal what you just lost. Damn, that was something; you stifle a tear and look for confirmation in the janitors and the walls and anyone within earshot. Wasn't it? Yes it was, the public thinks, while pushing you out the door. Now, can you just have a little pride and make room for (insert new star here).
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