Goodbye, No. 5
The best advice is never to meet your heroes.
It is a mistake to take physical grace or preternatural talent as evidence of anything other than itself. Your hero likely does not care to know you. Courtesy is the best you can expect—a scribble on the back of a program, or these days a quick, forced-smile photo.
You might be tolerated. Or not.
In “Ball Four,” Jim Bouton recounted attending a Giants game at Wrigley Field as a boy shortly after moving from New Jersey. With his Giants fandom intact, he approached New York shortstop Alvin Dark for an autograph and was met with a terse, “Take a hike, son.”
Being the responsible journalist that he was (Bouton died in 2019), he recorded Dark’s objection to the anecdote in a revised edition of “Ball Four. ”
“That’s not true. I didn’t even know Bouton when he was a kid,” Dark said.
All the evidence points to Joe DiMaggio, who in retirement insisted on being introduced as “the greatest living ballplayer,” as being a worldclass jerk. Mickey Mantle broke a lot of kids’ hearts. Michael Jordan’s brand was unapproachable haughtiness. Charles Barkley might be good to have a beer with, or he might throw you through a window.
This is not just true of athletes. I am not inclined to believe that many successful people are also nice people. To succeed in most fields of endeavor, a little narcissism, a little Machiavellianism, and maybe a touch of psychopathy are necessary. It doesn’t hurt to be ruthless. Mostly, our heroes are not nice people.
But professional athletes may well be a special case. After all, they are paid money to prove themselves physically better than other extraordinarily gifted and highly trained people. Every sport is a zero-sum game designed to generate a winner and a loser, and the people who rise to the top of such endeavors are usually those for whom losing is traumatic.
To be a hero on the field, court or pitch requires a certain cruelty.
From the testimony of almost everyone who ever had any dealings with him, Brooks Robinson was not cruel.
He broke some hearts, and withheld glory from some scalded line drives, but that was his job. This was the profession they had chosen, all of them, and if he could stop your ball and deliver it to first base before you could manage to sprint the 90 feet, well, he won that one. If Willie Mays’ glove was where triples went to die, then Brooks’ was where dreams of doubles evaporated.
I saw him.
When I was 11 years and 11 months old, the Cincinnati Reds played the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. Off the top of my head, I can name the starting lineups for both teams. I can probably give you the batting order and pitching rotations. More than 50 years later, I remember that series— the last in which all the games were played in the daylight—better than any other, possibly better than any other sporting event of my lifetime.
Back then I didn’t know Brooks was from Little Rock and wouldn’t have cared, but my father, who was a few months older than Brooks, had played against him in the minors. He’d never seen a better glove. Maybe the fact they both wore No. 5 on their backs when they played was a coincidence, but I doubt it (5 was also how the third baseman was designated in the orthodox scorekeeping system).
So I knew a little about Brooks before that series. I knew he’d won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1964, and his Orioles had won the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966 and lost it to the Miracle Mets in 1969. In those days,
only one baseball game a week was broadcast nationally, but it seemed that Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek often broadcast from Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. I’d seen a few Orioles games.
But I was no more prepared than the rest of the country for what played out over those six days in October 1970 as the Orioles beat the Reds in four of five games. Robinson hit .429 over the series, driving in six runs on nine hits, two of which were home runs. More impressively, he put on a remarkable display of fielding, spinning, lunging, diving and stretching, turning his rather ordinary-looking body into a machine that devoured baseballs. He handled 23 chances at third base while robbing the Reds of several extra-base hits.
I can still see him back-handing a smash by Reds’ first baseman Lee May behind third base, then leaping and throwing back across his body, extended and torsioned like Baryshnikov. The ball skips on the turf of the new Riverfront Stadium and arrives in Boog Powell’s waisthigh mitt a comfortable split second before May arrives at the bag. (Robinson was better, play-by-play man Gowdy noted, going to his left rather than his right.)
At the victory celebration after the last game, his teammate Frank Robinson convened a kangaroo court session and fined Brooks a dollar for “showboating during the entire series.”
Our culture is very different from the one Robinson and my father came out of, and in many ways, we are better off for that. We are more aware of the need to respect individual differences, we are less insulated from people with different backgrounds and perspectives.
But we are also louder and cruder and more inclined to demand what we feel is our due. Our champions carry themselves with swagger; they thump their chests and glare. Selfishness is a virtue.
I am old-fashioned in some ways. I understand what Deion Sanders is doing and why he thinks he has to do it the way he is doing it; he might be right to think as he does. But I wish more people followed Brooks’ example. I wish we had more quiet superstars who understood that, as great as their gifts might be, they are ballplayers, lucky to work outside, to be cheered and booed and cherished by people who care beyond all reason about their wins and losses.
Joe Falls, the venerable Detroit sportswriter, may have said it best when he wrote of Brooks: “How many interviews, how many questions—how many times you approached him and got only courtesy and decency in return. A true gentleman who never took himself seriously. I always had the idea he didn’t know he was Brooks Robinson.”
I never met him, partly because I try not to meet my heroes, and that’s exactly what he was to me. I wish I’d made an exception.