His Athlete of the Year Was Always in Running

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Also, the season to pick your athletes of the year.

Picking your player of the year is easy. Your player of the year may be (shudder) Albert Belle or Deion Sanders or Dennis Rodman or even (heaven help us!) Andre Agassi.

Sportsman of the year in this heyday of Generation X may be a little more delicate. Cal Ripken Jr., of course, is everybody’s first choice. Cal is the Protestant work ethic personified. Nobody has to worry about Cal. He’ll be there. You can forget about shortstop for the next thousand games or so. That type of player.

But I have a candidate for this coveted honor too. Oh, don’t expect to hear about his popping off in print or ever running for political office or visiting sick kids in hospitals, but he has his credentials.

My candidate is--a little traveling music, professor!--Cigar!

You heard me. Cigar. The racehorse of the decade. Athlete of the year, for sure.

Cigar’s credentials on the track are impeccable, unchallengeable. He’s the best racehorse since Affirmed, Secretariat. He wins races everywhere, against anybody. He is 10 for 10. Man O’War stuff.

But, then, consider the off-track stuff. I mean, he’ll never embarrass you any more than Cal Ripken would. Cal Ripken is never going to bust up any barroom mirrors. And neither is Cigar.

There are other pluses. Consider:

He has never beat up a girlfriend.

He has never assaulted a cop.

He has never been picked up for drunk driving.

He has never been barred from the game for drug use and never had to be reinstated six or seven times.

He won’t get any shoe contracts, TV shows or write his autobiography and hawk it on talk shows.

He won’t mind being a role model.

He never sold or used crack cocaine.

He never told a reporter to get out of his freaking face in a postgame interview.

He never spit at the fans after being kicked out of a game for fighting.

He never held out to renegotiate a signed contract and threatened to give less than his best if he didn’t get it.

He never missed a practice.

He never criticized a coach, i.e., the trainer, and never criticized a teammate (i.e., a jockey).

He never screamed epithets at a female reporter trying to do her job and or tried to throw her out of the paddock before a race.

He makes millions for everybody--owner, trainer, jockey, bettor, racing association, television, racetrack and racetrack concessionaire--but all he requires is a pail of oats.

He plays hurt, winning even when the vet is sometimes concerned about his hoof, his breathing or his temperature.

Sound like a sportsman of the year to you? If he were human, we’d run him for president.

If Cigar isn’t a satisfactory candidate, how about a few others who won’t get many votes? For instance:

How about the caddie who pulled the four-wood out of the bag for Corey Pavin at the last hole in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock and told him to go for it?

How about Barry Switzer betting all his blue chips twice on a busted flush in that Philadelphia game when he sent Emmitt Smith into a wall of waiting tacklers weighing roughly a ton and a half? Switzer’s contribution to sportsmanship is not so much that he scorned to punt even deep in his own territory, but that he may have spared the world Jerry Jones strutting through Super Bowl week in Phoenix next month.

How about pitcher Tom Glavine giving up the chance to end the World Series with a one-hitter, and, instead, telling the manager he had nothing left so Atlanta could get a reliever in there and safeguard its first Series championship? Sportsmanship is also team first, me second.

How about all the owners who sat tight with their pro football franchises where they were and didn’t shop them around the country like a hot diamond? There must be, oh, two of them?

The sportsman of the year can be four-footed, but has to be one-faced, as good as his word, and as American as--oh, say, a Cigar.