CRITICAL MASS : Bret Favre unwilling to go gentle into the good night
Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/232068/
Most of us are not required to compete to provide for ourselves and our families. We find a job and so long as we perform at an acceptable level, we generally hold on to it. We might be passed over for promotions, we might be laid off in difficult financial times or fired if we screw up, but most of us need not worry that we will lose our jobs simply because there are other people who might be able to better perform our work.
There is no pure meritocracy in the real world — most bright young things must first learn to make coffee and fetch mail before they’re given a chance to engage in actual business. Just because there are people better qualified and more energetic does not mean that perceived dead wood should yield; you put in your time and follow the customs and you hope good will accrues. Give your superiors no reason to remove you and talent can be thwarted, at least for a while.
We understand the basic rationality and benevolence of this system; if everyone had to prove themselves every day the world might be unbearably ruthless and cruel. We need a safety net; we need our years of loyal service and experience to count for something. Showing up is almost always enough — most of us are not prepared to sacrifice the lives we lead outside the workplace to be significantly better at what we do.
Luckily, most of us are not professional athletes. While they are extraordinarily well compensated, their playing careers are brief and they are constantly being judged and graded, not only by the organizations that issue their paychecks but by writers and TV and radio opinionizers and the interested public. Athletes are special because they possess — for a time — rare physical gifts that enable them to play sports at the highest levels of competition. Most of us could never, no matter how hard we worked or what sort of chemicals we ingested, throw a baseball 90 miles per hour or run 40 yards in less than five seconds. Things that look simple on TV — a slam dunk or a 300-yard drive — are absolute impossibilities for most of us.
So it is hardly surprising that we envy world-class athletes, people who are able to become rich through playing a game. We marvel at the salaries even mediocre players command and we imagine that if we were in their situation, we would be more grateful and cognizant of our good fortune. We would behave with magnanimous grace, be more than satisfied, be fulfilled.
Yet it seems that athletes are never able to appreciate their luck. They routinely betray their talent. They behave churlishly and flout the law. And they don’t know when to leave the stage.
Bret Favre’s Hamlet act has dominated the sporting news the past week or so. After a tearful retirement announcement in March, he’s decided that he wants to play football again. This has put his team, the Green Bay Packers, in an awkward position — Favre has been publicly mulling retirement for years and Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback they’ve been grooming as his replacement, is ready to play. While the general consensus is that Favre, one of the game’s alltime greats, is still a better player than Rodgers, he will be 39 years old in October and it is doubtful he can maintain the level of play he exhibited last season for more than another year or two.
In the meantime, Rodgers languishes; his talent untested, the clock ticking on his career. While some might contend that being a seldom-used backup quarterback in the NFL might be the best job available to anyone — Rodgers signed a five-year contract in 2005 that guaranteed him $ 5. 4 million even if he’d never played a down — his discontent is understandable. Athletes generally want to play, and if Rodgers does play and meets all of the incentive clauses in his contract, he could earn upward of $ 24 million.
It may well be in the longterm interest of the Green Bay Packers to trade or release Favre and install Rodgers as their new quarterback. Still, the sentimental decision would be to allow the grand old man to come back, to retake the reins of his team, and to try to drive them to glory one last time. Rodgers can hold a clipboard.
There’s probably no analogous situation in your office; most 39-year-olds are unlikely to be seen as being at the end of their careers. Athletic lives are short and the longer you are able to play a game at a high level the harder it is to admit that you can’t do it anymore. That’s why we see legends despoiling their own legacies — Willie Mays struggling in a Mets cap, the surreal sight of Johnny Unitas in the powder blue and gold of the San Diego Chargers, Pete Rose’s unseemly late career chase of the all-time hits record.
Spectacles like these offend our sense of aesthetics, upset the romance of our games. They remind us that our heroes are mortal, that they have problems to work out and that the games we watch are shows put on for money. We might think it crass that these gods should play far past their prime and become ordinary players or worse.
But in a way it is refreshing to see them struggle with their mortality, and it may be useful to remember that they are not gods but human beings susceptible to sins of hubris and capable of being hurt. Athletes die twice — the first time when their gifts begin to fail. You or I might expect to become better at what we do with every year of service, we might retain our mental faculties to the end. We might keep learning and adapting and moving forward, mastering whatever new technologies we must.
It’s not the same for them; there’s no dream of carrying on and becoming better. Athletes begin to decline while still young; if a second act is available to them it’s often because things start badly.
Eddie Waitkus, one of the models for Bernard Malamud’s fictional Roy Hobbs, was 19 years old when he was shot in the chest by a teenage groupie in a Chicago hotel room; the Cardinals comeback slugger Rick Ankiel was 21 years old when he threw five wild pitches in one inning of a playoff game; and Josh Hamilton, the hero of last week’s home run derby who famously blew through $ 4 million in bonus money and ended up tattooed, lonely and nearly broke, is 27 years old.
(Hamilton, whose recovery from substance abuse was abetted by former Arkansas Traveler fan favorite Roy Silver, who now runs a baseball academy in Clearwater, Fla., is obviously fragile and vulnerable to relapse. He still doesn’t trust himself enough to go out without a chaperone. Maybe the last thing he needs is for us to make a hero of him. )
We think we would love to have their superpowers, that we would act much differently than most of them. But if you had been truly special — demonstrably different — from most people all your life, you could hardly be the nice, normal, centered person you are. You’d be a freak, part of a spoiled and sequestered elite destined to burn out bright and early.
Sure, it wrecks the symmetry when a player like Favre decides he was mistaken and wants to renege on his promise to go away. We like our stories to have neat beginnings and endings, for characters to follow arcs through time. But life is messy, for A-Rod and Madonna as well as for us; no matter how publicly we may live our lives, there are things we must decide alone. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com