Big Mike: Big Sticks And Myths

Been re-reading Dick Ciccone’s biography, “Royko: A Life in Print,” the last few days. The old Pulitzer prize-winning columnist is something of an icon for Benny Jay and me. Whenever we want to give each other’s work the highest compliment, we lie and say, “It was just like Royko.”

Neither of us will ever write anything “just like Royko,” not because — as Benny would self-deprecatingly claim — we’re mere gnats to his magnificent journalistic eagle but, I’d like to think, we’re good and accomplished enough to do what we do just like who we are. Of course, in a purely practical sense, we are mere gnats to Royko’s eagle; the closest either of us will come to possessing a Pulitzer is if we steal one from a winner’s mantel.

It’s an appropriate time to read about a human being who towers above all others. Another colossus has been in the news of late, for all the wrong reasons. Poor old Tiger Woods got the bejesus bludgeoned out of him by his bride, as even the pre-technological inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest must know by now. (By the way, the incident has now achieved the imprimatur of Urban Dictionary.)

TV news bullshitters and other balloon heads are shocked, shocked, that such a superlative golfer and pitchman would do something so mad as plow another woman. You’d think that duffers-cum-shills for sneakers and sports drinks were physiologically incapable of cheating on their wives until this moment.

Why, then, am I not surprised that Tiger got his tail caught in the wrong place?

Because people — okay, men — who are driven to succeed as much as Tiger Woods is and Mike Royko was often are walking hardons. Don’t be shocked.

Woods is the first billion-dollar athlete. Mike Royko was perhaps the greatest newspaperman of his era. Nobody reaches those levels just by planting their spikes on the green or sticking a piece of paper into a typewriter. Men who possess the single-mindedness and compulsive desire to get to the mountain-top have to be, to one extent or another, assholes.

Dick Ciccone is generally sympathetic to Royko and stands on his head numerous times to excuse his assholiness. He artfully dances around Royko’s many purported infidelities. The truth remains, though, that nothing on this Earth was as important to Royko as perfecting his column. Even his wives and kids ran far behind his fingerwork on the keyboard on his list of priorities.

That kind of hunger, that kind of greed to be great extends to all areas of a man’s life. As much as he wants to vanquish all competitors, as much as he wants to stand on other people’s heads and shoulders in order to rise above the rest of us, that’s how much he wants wield his trouser sword.

And speaking of the mountain-top, even so saintly a figure as Martin Luther King, Jr. was a master cocksman. King was equally as driven as Tiger Woods or Mike Royko to be great. We’re all still naked apes, as Desmond Morris accurately portrayed us, and — Freudians and Darwinians might argue — the top ape is the one who gets the most action.

I can’t wait until we disabuse ourselves of the notion that only “good family men” do great things. Never mind Joseph Campbell; myth kills. Now’s the time to kill myths.  George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree. The story of Abe Lincoln walking miles to return a couple of pennies to a customer he’d inadvertently overcharged was a child’s fairy tale. Bill Clinton likely did pull his drawers down in front of Paula Jones. And J. Edgar Hoover didn’t plant microphones under hotel room beds just to hear Martin Luther King snore.

Yeah, it’s talent, drive and determination that separate Benny Jay and me from the Pulitzer prize, from greatness. It’s also the fact that we’re not walking hardons. That’s the myth I’m telling myself now.

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