The Athletes of our youth

It is funny the way that the athlete infringes on the rationale of the young mind, today I do not get too caught up in dreaming about the wonder of an athlete. I do not believe in their perfection.

I used to though, most certainly.

Michael Jordan was, to a small, white kid in Dallas Center, Iowa, a sort of God.

He breathed life into athletics.

He made it more than real.

He asteticized the game for me, made it conceptual. It worked because of a combination of his own unlimited brilliance and my own limited mind. I did not understand that Jordan loved to gamble, that Jordan had a woman on the side, and I didn’t care that Jordan was a creation of market research. Jordan was, and is, real to me in a sense that transcends those aspects of humanity that we come to understand as we get older - I am a child when I think of him.

For my brother Joe, it was another athlete. Another great athlete, and to this day it boggles my mind how it happened, but to my brother, that athlete was Ricky Henderson.

To another small, white kid from Dallas Center, Iowa, he was another sort of God.

The Upper Deck card where Henderson is wearing the sun-lit Oakley’s, holding the 939th base he stole above his head, with a look of pure, unbridled competition and joy on his face…that was the epitome of Ricky, that was the altar.

If I was deciding today, I would probably pick Henderson as my guy, too.

Henderson is too gifted, too wonderful a sound-bite, too unique a player to not be appreciated by any true sports fan. He is just a little bit more real than Jordan. Of course, I am old now, and I am not at my grandmother’s house watching Jordan hit six three-pointers in the first-half of game one of the ‘92 finals. You couldn’t have changed my mind on that day.

They both were two of the best ever, Jordan gets the nod as the greater in his own game, and rightly so, but that doesn’t diminish Henderson one ounce. Jordan won six championships, Henderson won two. Jordan won five MVP’s, Henderson only one. Jordan was a six-time Final’s MVP, Henderson was once. Jordan went to 14 All-Star games, Henderson went to 10.

They both left the game a few times, Jordan to retirement, Henderson to the minors (Jordan went to the minors as well, but we can forget that), and they both came back a few times.

Jordan had his first comeback, while still in his prime, where he won three more championships. His second, true, late comeback - where he we found out that he just couldn’t turn his back on the game was a little less gratifying, but none the less necessary to understand that Jordan and Ricky they pumped the same blood. He was old, still gifted, but he struggled with the Wizards, and looked human.

Henderson on the other hand won the MLB Comeback Player of the Year in 1999 after he hit .315 with 89 runs scored and 37 stolen bases, Ricky was 40-years-old.

Jordan is the career NBA scoring average leader at 30.1 points per game, and the career post-season scoring average leader at 33.4 points per game.

Henderson is the all-time leader in runs scored, walks (Barry Bonds does not exist), and single-season and career stolen bases in baseball history. He is fourth in games played, 10th in at-bats, and 20th in hits. There is a case that Henderson is the greatest overall offensive talent in the history of baseball. His stolen base records (130 in 1982!?) are starting to look more and more like Wayne Gretzky’s point marks in the mid-’80’s, a statistical aberration that will never be approached, ever, again.

People say that the homerun and hits are the name of the offensive game, but there has to be room for the man who crossed home more times than anyone else in baseball.

Charlie Metro’s quote about Henderson is about as odd a piece of praise as you will ever hear, it is cloaked in the guise of scouting but it is really a mystery-tale:

“I did a lot of study and I found that it’s impossible to throw Rickey Henderson out. I started using stopwatches and everything. I found it was impossible to throw some other guys out also. They can go from first to second in 2.9 seconds; and no pitcher catcher combination in baseball could throw from here to there to tag second in 2.9 seconds.”

Metro was in baseball for over 40 years. He says, “I found it was impossible to throw some other guys out also,” but he is talking about Ricky and only Ricky.

It is a less-bashful but more serious quote than Bird’s now mythologized line about Jordan being God disguised as a basketball player.

Jordan was more like a perfectly created basketball player than a freak of athletic nature. He was really more of a competitor than a true natural athletic beast, even though he is, of course, in the top 10 percentile of athletes to ever walk the earth. His numbers were excellent always, and for me that killer instinct was most perfectly captured in the 1997 NBA Finals, game one, in Chicago, against Utah when he buried a shot over Bryon Russell - this is not the Game 6 winner in 1998 - and the whole crowd knew it was in, and Jordan was fist-pumping before the shot hit twine.

Jordan’s career has been rehashed and rehashed and that’s not the point here.

The point is that Jordan and Henderson were, to my brother and I, the first examples of a great athlete who was better to us than the numbers - even if the numbers were there and real.

When we were young we had Henderson baseball cards and Jordan basketball cards to the ceiling, they’re still in that house, somewhere. We didn’t bleed with them day-by-day the way we do now with our teams, or at-least as I do with the Twins. We had lives outside of sports, as we do now, but they were more entwined in our life then. They were more a part of us. Jordan and Henderson were more like our favorite pet than our favorite athlete. We identified with them so much that they became like family, even if they never knew it.

I remember when Jordan came back the first time and there was fear that he wouldn’t be as great. I remember him hitting the game-winner in Atlanta. I remember him scoring 55 in NYC - I watched that game with my mom, and cheered like mad when he dished off the game winner to one of his white centers.

But for a moment there, as a fan I was scared for Michael Jordan. I was young enough to not realize that Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player to step on the court. I, a boy from Dallas Center, was scared for Michael Jordan, playing hoops in NYC. I will never, not ever, feel that way again.

It kind of disappoints me that no one will ever capture my attention the way MJ did, I wonder if my brother feels the same way. There is something pure that is lost about watching and cheering for athletes as we get older. Maybe it’s because we can no longer pretend to be them. When I shoot baskets today, I rarely say, “Jordan!” as the shot leaves my fingers. I doubt that my brother slides into third anymore at all, and certainly not head-first like Ricky did.

I bitch more about athletes now, I bitch about contracts and their responsibilities at the plate, their inability to get the bunt down or get the last out in the eighth inning. I watched Chris Paul the other night, and he was amazing to me, but it was more in an analytical way - he was by no means conceptual to me.

When we are young we can dream about things that we do not understand even though they are right in front of us. We can think about our favorite ball player and our parents and our brother and they are right there, but they are new and they are invigorating and they shape and mold us. But, we age and as we gain self awareness we learn that people, in all their forms, are just people. Our parents are still our parents and they are still magical but less so. And our brothers and sisters are still there and they are unique and still amazing to us, but less so. And our friends and relatives and our classmates and co-workers they all come and go and change as years move on, and athletes are no different.

We still can invest in them and heave heavy breaths when they are swinging the bat, or throwing the ball, or shooting the jumper, but it will never be the same as it was when we were young, and enthralled, and our eyes stayed open every second we saw them.