We don’t need to agree on exactly what those values should be or how we should go about defending them to honor Tillman’s memory. He lived in a world where Sunday’s game was supposed to be paramount and where most of us believed Tillman–handsome, athletically gifted and soon to be very rich–was living the American dream. Yet he was the rare star athlete who comprehended that there was a larger, far more critical conflict than anything that could be played out on the gridiron. And the even rarer one who felt a deep, personal responsibility to it.
Many of my readers have urged me to recognize Tillman’s sacrifice in my column and have offered their own memorializing thoughts as well. (One, Mark McKee of Albuquerque, N.M., suggested what I thought was a fitting NFL tribute: a “Tillman rule” that would penalize infantile, self-aggrandizing behavior–like cell-phone antics–on the playing field). But Tillman chose not to elaborate on his decision so I am reluctant to tread far beyond the obvious. I doubt, though, that he would consider himself a hero. Nor that he would want to be elevated over all the others who have died in our post-9/11 wars, most without the same options Tillman had. Even before I heard the news of Tillman’s tragic death, I had been thinking a good deal about athletes and heroism, about the bygone days when some athletes were rightfully regarded as heroes. The occasion for my meditation was the impending anniversary of one of the greatest and certainly one of the most enduring moments in sports history. It was 50 years ago today–May 6, 1954–that Roger Bannister became the first man to break the four-minute-mile barrier. (My interest in Bannister and his historic mile was further prompted by Neal Bascomb’s superb new book, “The Perfect Mile” [Houghton Mifflin].)
Bascomb suggests the fervor surrounding that quest–led by the Englishman Bannister, the Aussie John Landy and a youngster from Kansas named Wes Santee–stemmed, at least partly, from the perfect symmetry of the challenge. It was schoolboy simple: four laps, four quarter miles, four minutes. But while the concept may have been simple, nobody viewed the challenge as anything but extraordinarily daunting. In fact, many at the time believed the feat was physiologically impossible, that the body would implode and death would be the record’s reward. At the very least, the four-minute mile was viewed with the same kind of awe as other monumental conquests of the early second half of the 20th century–reaching the summit of Everest, breaking the sound barrier, setting foot on the moon.
We got a rare glimpse of the kind of frenzy that a record pursuit can stir up when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris’s longstanding home-run mark six seasons ago. The excitement was given a boost by the personal appeal of both players. Both McGwire, the brooding and sensitive slugger, and Sosa, heir to Ernie Banks’s joyous “let’s play two” legacy, had a throwback appeal. Their rivalry–and their camaraderie–revitalized baseball, enabling us to recall the game’s heyday and why baseball was once indisputably our national pastime.
But that era of good feeling didn’t last very long, and their moment hasn’t endured. Indeed, even by that season’s end, their milestones already felt diminished, though few of us acknowledged it at the time. That McGwire and Sosa didn’t just break the record, but pulverized it, somehow lessened the accomplishment and the joy we felt. And by the time Barry Bonds trumped everyone, only the souvenir hunters in the bay (both bays, San Francisco and E) truly celebrated his accomplishment. It just seemed all too easy. And we learned long ago that someone who leaps buildings in a single bound must come from another planet. Or perhaps have suffered a lab accident that bestowed special powers. Or, at the very least, sold his soul to the devil for that newfound prowess.
By contrast, Bannister’s achievement endures as an epic triumph–even over the fog of a half century, even though the mile is seldom competed today on the world stage, even here in a country where track and field is virtually moribund except as an Olympic phenomenon. Perhaps that’s partly a byproduct of a host of aging and overly sentimental sportswriters who may not recall that race themselves, but recall it writ large in their fathers’ telling and retelling.
But I suspect there is far more to it than that. Once upon a time, before the sport was tarnished by drug cheats, track represented the purest of all athletic endeavors. And while Bannister was an extraordinary man, he was quite ordinary in one very important sense: he had other obligations. Some 36 hours after his record-breaking race, Bannister was back at St. Mary’s Medical School pursuing not glory, but his studies to become a doctor–a regimen so demanding that it limited his training to about 45 minutes each day. His great accomplishments on the track would not prove to be the sum of his life.
I can’t tell you, as tempting as it might be, that Sir Roger Bannister and Cpl. Patrick Tillman had all that much in common. Or even, generations and cultures apart as they were, that they would have liked each other, though I prefer to believe they would have. All I can really say is that that they were both greater men than they were athletes, men who understood the difference between performance and service–and for that I salute them both. And in a week when I might otherwise have been stuck writing about the dysfunctional Lakers, the NBA’s baby boom, Pedro Martinez’s contract whine or George Steinbrenner’s latest, foolhardy rant, that’s actually saying a whole heckuva lot.
