No More Idols

            In 1998 I moved to Indianapolis, mostly for a girl. I had been doing a year in Jacksonville, Illinois (and if that sounds like I’m describing a brief jail sentence, well it kind of felt like that) and took a new job. It paid all right, but I was just starting out and the move was relatively short notice, so I grabbed an apartment quickly. It was a studio on the northwest side of the city that took six-month leases. It would do for the time being.

I didn’t have cable or satellite, so I was at the mercy of a set of bunny ears for my TV viewing. Despite being so close to the Channel 6 tower it may have actually hit my apartment if it ever toppled over in the right direction, I was down to three or four channels.

While I was busy settling into a new job in a new city, I made time to head to Neon Johnny’s Sports Bar off 86^th Street every five days during that summer. The reason? Kerry Wood was pitching for the Cubs.

Except for a brief stint away from the team to pitch for the Indians and then the Yankees, Wood was a Cub all the way until May of this year, when he retired. He’s not going to the Hall of Fame. He’s not going to have his number retired. Still, it felt like the end of an era for me. In a way, Wood was the last player left from the time when I still idolized my sports heroes.

Wood was a rookie fireballer who burst onto the scene that 1998 season. In only his fifth start, he tied the Major League record by striking out 20 Astros in asingle game. His fastball would push 100 miles per hour, and the Cubs were the surprise contender in the National League that year. That whole summer, a Kerry Wood start held a special kind of anticipation. Would he strike out 20 again? Would he pitch a no-hitter this time? All of those things seemed possible when he took the mound. I made sure to see as many of his starts as I could.  Other Cubs fans gathered as well and we shook our heads in amazement as he overpowered another hitter, exchanging smiles and comments about this rookie that made us stop whatever we were doing when he took the mound.

Of course, being a Cubs fan means disappointment and heartbreak. For the players, it seems to come with the jersey. For the fans, it comes along as the downside to  being able to brag about Wrigley Field (still the best place there is to catch a game) and how you used to listen to Harry Caray and Steve Stone call the games on Channel 9 (and true Cubs fans know what I mean when I say Channel 9, years before it was WGN America or whatever). The Cubs made the playoffs as the Wild Card in 1998, but were bounced in the first round.

While Wood never threw a no-hitter either, he did remain a rock in the Cubs starting rotation Despite a lot of trips to the disabled list over the years as his body betrayed him, he also remained one of the true leaders in the clubhouse. He was always a good citizen, never got into any trouble, and always represented the team and fans well. He even spoke for us fans at times. For instance, when the Cubs’ Diva Sammy Sosa walked out on the team late in his final season with the Cubs, Wood was rumored to be the one to truly end the Sosa era by taking a bat to the primary symbol of Sosa’s egomania: the boom box he had by his locker that blared salsa music constantly, whether the rest of the team wanted to listen to it or not. Trust me, a lot of Cubs fans wish they were the ones swinging that bat.  

This May, word leaked Wood was going to retire. When he began to warm up late in the game (he spent his last few years as a reliever) the crowd cheered. As he went in the game he shook hands with the bullpen coach, which is not something that was part of his routine. We knew he was savoring his last mound appearance. He struck out his final batter, was removed from the game and left to a standing ovation. As he walked off the field, his son ran out of the dugout and hugged him on the field. Wood scooped him up and carried him into the dugout after tipping his cap to the fans. It was one of the better retirement moments I’ve seen. Normally players are forced out, cut by their team and left unwanted. Often injuries prevent them from taking a curtain call. While Wood’s arm was pretty much shot by this point, there was something poetic about him walking out to a standing ovation at Wrigley with his son in his arms. We should all be so lucky to go out that way.

I really don’t idolize athletes anymore.  I certainly cheer for them, but idolize now? No. They’re human beings, they make mistakes, they get hurt, they burst onto the scene and then fade from it. Some do well under pressure and some wilt. They make a lot of money, and some of them handle it well and some of them act like asses. That perspective keeps me from putting them on pedestals, which is a good thing in my opinion. They’re really not that different than the rest of us, it’s just that their work is on display for millions of viewers and then analyzed past the point of reason by empty-headed babblers on sports TV networks and the cesspool of sport talk radio shows.

I didn’t always think this way, of course. Michael Jordan seemed to walk on water to me, and when I was given tickets to a Bulls game as a gift, chills ran up my spine as I saw him in person for the first time, jogging out onto the court in his warmups with his head down, dribbling. Even that seemed amazing to me at the time.

Walter Payton? When I was a kid I used to dream of playing wide receiver for the Bears. Why wide receiver? Because they already had Payton at running back, of course. It never occurred to me back when I was ten that he would retire one day. I just figured he’d still be there, gaining thousands of yards after I graduated from college. 

But eventually, Payton did not want to go through the grind of the season and retired. Michael Jordan had a couple of false-starts when it came to retirement, and ended up trying in vain to lead a crummy Wizards team to glory when he finally decided enough was enough.

I’m still a huge sports fan of course. I still cheer for a lot of players, and there are still athletes like Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, Georges St. Pierre and Lionel Messi that I go out of my way to watch. Wood was the last one still active who used to give me butterflies just in anticipation of seeing him play, back in those summer days of 1998.

While I feel I have a better perspective on these people now, I can’t help but feel like I had a little more fun back when I thought these guys could leap tall buildings in a single bound.