Baseball Players: Boy-Heroes in a Cloudless Sport

The TV sportscaster--blue blazer, orange hair, baritone--is looking for evidence of damage the Pete Rose affair may have worked on the souls of the boys of Cincinnati. The series of childish interviews rolls on the screen, and, as if scripted from some classic American novel, several boys, shrugging, I dunno, I guess, describe disappointment.

Adults can be as disappointed as children when they see professional athletes strike for money or abandon teams to swim with sharks. But most of us, drinkers of coffee, readers of sports pages, are not unduly demoralized by tales of steroids or womanizing or gambling. A sportswriter friend, many years retired, dismisses the idea of sports heroes. “Athletes are an odd bunch--and the worst of the worst are the baseball players--the bus full of men, free from their wives and far from home for a summer.”

Nonetheless I think there are reasons why the boy’s imagination is trained on the glamour of athletes. The kinship between a boy and a ballplayer is immediate and protracted because the ballplayer makes his living in the boy’s world. If the athlete fails us as a moral hero because of his immaturity, that same immaturity is his entire glamour for the child. The athlete is subversive, at war with inevitability, which is the boy’s inclination, too.

The other day I was sitting next to a boy of 10 on an airplane. The boy in turn was sitting next to a man who said he had, a few years ago, been a boxer. During the course of the flight, the ex-boxer modestly described his athletic career to the boy. Then playfully--but as irrefutable proof--the ex-boxer formed a biceps under his suit jacket and offered it to the boy. The boy laughed, but he went for it. It would have been superstitiously wrong for the boy to have refused to connect with the touchstone of American virility. The biceps is the seat of comic virtue in America. Comic book heroes are true; they have no virtue beyond strength.

The athlete is wonderful to the adult for being so uncomplicated. He exaggerates the mystery of childhood. The athlete is wonderful to the child for being so big. He minimizes the mystery of adulthood.

Dad is too complicated during those boyish years to count as a hero. Dad doesn’t figure in the moral universe. Dad is substance--unquestioned dad-ness. He has authority, a quarrelsome or a corny voice, a persona. The athlete-hero is sure to win by comparison, for the athlete is power and form. The athlete exists in the silent universe of pure performance.

Moral authority attaches to the athlete by virtue of his body. The performance of his body is his perfection. Muscular, graceful, young--these physical qualities represent spiritual qualities. It is an idea at least as old as the Greeks: Beauty is moral. For the child there is no more reliable iconography.

In the second grade, in my Catholic school, the prevalent heresy among us was that Christ was the handsomest man who ever lived and the Virgin Mary the most beautiful woman. It was, at any rate, a heresy I shared with Renaissance painters.

The notion that beauty is moral is not without a practical logic. The athletic body gives evidence of discipline, clear-minded effort, therefore spiritual courage.

Jesse Jackson regrets that black children have only athletes to look up to--not a wide enough selection of role models, he says. Children, he says, need the examples of chemists and lawyers. But any kid will tell you that books are what you settle for if you can’t make it athleticly. Kids are clear-eyed about such things.

The sports hero reaches his apotheosis in high school with the crowning of the homecoming court. The election of senior class president marks some shift of power, the ascendancy of a more complicated hero. The sports letter remains important, equivalent to a war record, but there are new criteria.

Most boys must give up the idea of excelling in sports by the time they go to college or join the army or get a job. We join the crowd of spectators. I remember first hearing athletes mocked in college.

As a boy I was never romantic enough or easy enough in my body to fantasize an athletic future. I admired solitary sports--boxing, long-distance running. The sports offered me were the conventional American triad of team sports.

I was not then nor am I now oblivious to the romance of team sports and to the distinctly American charm of baseball--that clubhouse world of hand-signals, hubba-hubba, backslapping and butt-touching.

Baseball was a cloudless sport, there were no shadows. There was no meanness, no villainy. Baseball was a contest of heroes.

In adolescence, I moved away from any serious consideration of sports and of heroes. But baseball still belongs in my mind with summer, with a lost languid season.

Things change. Cynicism could not touch American boys during those long summers before we felt ourselves changing into men’s bodies. Boys collected and traded baseball cards. Memorizing a system of history and myth and rite as complicated as the Trojan War, rehearsing it out loud in the furious pentameter of the sportscaster.

The other day, at a junior high near San Francisco, I was talking to some boys about heroes. Whom do you admire? Whose success? The names they lobbed belonged to rock musicians and athletes. The athletes were not held as heroes exactly. They were--to use that morally vacuous term--role models. That is, the boys wanted to be like a particular athlete only in that they wanted to be as famous, to drive an identical Porsche, to lure a beautiful girl. And they wanted to be rewarded for themselves--for a natural talent. They didn’t want to enter the world, they wanted to sit on top of the world. They wanted to remain unchanged. The sports hero doesn’t change. He carries his talent with him. That’s the beauty of him. That’s the impossibility of him. He does not have to become an adult to be a star.

On TV last year, during the playoffs, I remember seeing a baseball player in the dugout weeping. In a moment, I felt the full pathos of the game--this twilight entertainment of boys in men’s bodies where the stakes are real.