Big Mike: They Can Be Heroes (Almost)

July 12th, 2009

It’s been such a long time since I had heroes. To listen to conventional wisdom, you’d think my life and soul would be deprived and depraved because I don’t swoon over the likes of firefighters, US Marines, Angelina Jolie, Bono, Sarah Palin, the Hugging Saint or even Barack Obama.

The hero-worshipping corner of my brain died when I was 14 years old. Believe it or not, baseball was responsible for its death. Yup. That’s when I first read the book, “Ball Four,” by Jim Bouton. The fringe pitcher for the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros had kept a diary of the 1969 season. In it, Bouton mused on leadership, rebels, tyrants, philanderers, drunks, anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, bigots, bullies and intellectuals. He wrote about prejudiced coaches, lying, penny-pinching general managers and narrow-minded sportswriters. Yet he remained joyous and hopeful throughout, trying to stay in the game by throwing an oddball pitch, the knuckleball. I loved it so much that I re-read it a dozen times.

Bouton’s anecdotes of epic drinking by the game’s greatest stars, serial infidelities, even entire packs of ballplayers scudding over the Shoreham Hotel rooftop in Washington, trying to get a good angle to peep into women’s rooms, disabused me of the notion that baseball players – or any athletes, for that matter – should be venerated. After reading Bouton’s book, I realized ballplayers were just guys who happened to be able to hit and catch balls better than the rest of us, nothing more.

Yet, after losing my awe for the likes of Mickey Mantle, I came to appreciate them all the more. These men excelled at their craft despite battling the same venal, venial and sometimes downright evil urges we all have.

That’s why, when baseball’s steroids scandal came to light, I wasn’t crushed that my “heroes” had betrayed me. I figured, what else would you expect normal people to do? Some of them, I reasoned, would find the temptation to cheat irresistible.

Life is a hell of a lot more palatable and nowhere near as disappointing when your worldview isn’t twisted by delusions of “heroes.”

This all comes up because July 20th is the fortieth anniversary of humankind’s first moon landing. I remember that Sunday as vividly as last weekend. I stood in the middle of Natchez Avenue staring at the moon, wishing with all my heart that I had a telescope powerful enough to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin cavorting on its surface.

A few weeks later, I sat atop Thunder Mountain, a ridiculously-named 150-foot tall pile of debris from a clay pit on the grounds of the brickyard at Narragansett and Fullerton avenues. I watched from ten miles away a blimp and several helicopters hovering over downtown Chicago as the ticker tape parade carrying Armstrong, Aldrin and their poor colleague Michael Collins (who’d had the misfortune of remaining in lunar orbit as the other two got to walk on the moon) inched up LaSalle Street.

In later years, I’d develop a myriad of phobias, not the least of which was of heights. At its worst, my height aversion made standing on a third-floor deck as terrifying for me as, well, being launched into space by the Saturn V rocket (1.5 million pounds of thrust) would be to a normal human being. The sheer courage of astronauts and cosmonauts never was so apparent to me as during those times I’d be wiping the sweat off my forehead and palms because I’d dared to peek over the rail of a back porch.

I did have heroes. Back when I was six and seven years old I swooned over Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom, two of the original seven US astronauts. Every photo of Schirra showed him with a smile on his face. Grissom, only 5’5″ tall, was fully half a foot shorter than his colleagues. In group photos, he was always placed in the middle or in front, as if he were the other astronauts’ kid brother. Those were my childhood criteria for hero status – an easy smile and shortness.

When Grissom was killed in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in 1967, I mourned as if I’d lost a favorite uncle.

In later years, I’d learn that some of the early astronauts were arrogant, pugnacious, insensitive, prone to drink and drive or otherwise benighted. One or two of the astronauts who walked on the moon turned out to entertain notions that I consider laughable. Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14, for example, believes in remote healing, is certain the Earth has been visited by thousands of alien spaceships over the last few decades, and buys into psychic phenomena hook, line and sinker. Brother.

Even though the idea of heroes is as anathema to me as that of ESP, every one of the astronauts comes as close as can be to that pedestal in my mind. I’m a jaded, skeptical, often cynical middle-aged fart yet the idea that humans flew hundreds of miles above the Earth, spacewalked, repaired satellites in orbit, conducted experiments in zero gravity and – wow! – landed on the moon still takes my breath away.

I buy into Albert Einstein‘s dictum: “Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.” I idolize no one. Not Michael Jackson. Not Barack Obama. Not even Albert Einstein. But it gets hard to resist the urge when it comes to the astronauts.