PUNKS ON PEDESTALS
Deifying the unworthy far too common
OF tributes and tribulations.
Here’s an idea: The next time the Yankees retire Derek Jeter’s number, the portrait of him on his plaque should look a little bit like him.
If one didn’t know the image of Jeter appeared above his name, one could spend a week guessing who it is and not ring the bell. I thought it looked like the kids’ cartoon character Bob the Builder, one reader was convinced it was Ricky Schroder, others asked if the as-seenon-TV laughter from Jeter and his wife the moment the plaque was revealed — an odd reaction at such a moment — was in response to the unfamiliar face.
After all, if you didn’t know you were standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, you’d know the fellow seated in that stone chair is Abraham Lincoln.
But enshrinement standards in baseball — see: Selig, Bud; Cooperstown — are down. One day, if MLB hasn’t destroyed MLB and grandfathers can afford to take their grandkids to Yankee Stadium even just to view Monument Park, they will explain Jeter was a superb player who, by the way, looked nothing at all like that.
As for sports statues, those standards are way, way down.
The Marlins, this season, plan to unveil a bronze statue of recently deceased star pitcher Jose Fernandez.
One wonders if that would be the case had Fernandez survived last September’s pre-dawn boating “accident” that killed him and two relatively anonymous others.
Alive, Fernandez almost certainly would have been charged with some form of homicide or manslaughter given his autopsy found he was drunk and on cocaine while at the wheel when his boat, according to investigators, at its top-speed — 65 mph — and in defiance of channel markers, crashed into a rocky, near-slip reef, flipping the craft, hull-up.
Two passengers, Fernandez’s friends Emilio Macias, 27, and Eduardo Rivero, 25, both, like Fernandez, successful and loved, also were killed. But they didn’t pitch for the Marlins.
One also wonders whether the Macias and Rivero families will be special invitees to the ceremony when the sheet is pulled from the Fernandez statue. Outside bedrooms, sheets serve other purposes, such as covering bodies at sudden death scenes.
Fernandez also had a pregnant girlfriend; their child will grow up fatherless.
But Fernandez for three sea- sons was a popular pitcher thus he’s worthy of a statue in perpetual salute to his baseball heroics, a statue the families of his victims can view at their leisure and pleasure.
Such modern, selectively ignorant statues have some precedent. There’s a statue of Ray Lewis outside the Ravens’ stadium that doubles as a monument to selective memorialization.
Lewis, after all, bargained an obstruction of justice plea in a trial for double-homicide. He then reached a financial settlement with the victims’ families. What innocent man would even consider such a thing?
As a frequently fined, remorseless and downright proud NFL headhunter, Lewis, as so often seen on TV, stood over his headrattled victims and did chestthumping dances.
Lewis said he wasn’t concerned and was dismissive of the concussion wave the NFL finally acknowledged, as if it couldn’t figure out how being repeatedly smashed in the head just might cause brain damage.
Heck, the NFL, which often fined Lewis for his excessive, illegal violence, was still so smitten by him he was chosen to endorse league merchandise in TV commercials.
Lewis, fined $250,000 by the NFL after those killings in 2000, and Roger Goodell were seen in a bear-hug embrace before Lewis’s last game, the 2013 Super Bowl.
And, of course, ESPN, with no idea the University of Miami man was unable to speak discernible English, hired him.
One wonders whether the families of victims Jacinth Baker and Richard Lollar, as well as Lewis’s head-injured football victims were invited to attend the ceremony unveiling his statue. Or can they, too, just stop by the statue when in Baltimore?
A statue of Jose Fernandez? Over three dead bodies.