The Hero in Pop Culture
Bats, Balls, and Idols

I grew up in neighborhoods where, if one weren’t a good athlete, one had better be witty or extremely wily or at least fleet of foot. “Very problematic,” I can hear a certain kind of psychologist muttering as he reads this, but it never seemed at all problematic to me, who was a respectable if never first-class athlete and a kid with a hardy appetite for games.

A block behind the apartment building in which we lived, down along Lake Michigan at Farewell Beach, the football team of Sullivan High School practiced. Sullivan’s was not a winning team. Its coach was a barrel-chested, short-legged man named Ralph Margolis, who used to swear at his players with Yiddish expletives. The word shtunk—denoting an ungrateful fool, an unpleasant schlemiel—was easily his favorite. The only players the coach never called shtunk, at least while I was watching, were two brothers named Gordy and Ronnie Green.

The Green brothers were so heavily muscled that it seemed to me they must have lifted weights with their faces, for their cheeks, their foreheads, even their hair seemed powerful. Gordy Green was a fullback, his younger and somewhat smaller brother Ronnie a halfback. They were Jewish tough guys of the kind that appear in Isaac Babel’s Benya Kirk stories: true brutes, or so it seemed to a small boy of eight or nine standing on the sidelines watching them crash into the line, tossing up clouds of dust, trotting back into the huddle unharmed from crushing collision after crushing collision. I admired them without qualification.

Living in Chicago, I had a swell opportunity, over roughly a decade, to watch, in Michael Jordan, an athletic genius play just about every chord the athletic heroism scale allows. If it is still permitted to cite him, Bobby Knight (the Bloomington Strangler) has called Michael Jordan a greater basketball player than we, our children, and our grandchildren are ever likely to see. It’s probably true. Michael did things on the basketball floor that I, a pretty good boy fantast, hadn’t the imagination to dream of doing. He staged more come-from-behind, playing-ill, last-second, overtime victories than I can remember and that are probably good for a now-aging couch potato’s heart.

Yet Michael—the divine Michael, as I used to think of him—talked too much, and too clichedly. I was delighted he never politicized himself, perhaps a tempting thing to do in Chicago, the headquarters of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, that permanent transient. He never whined, kvetched, bitched. But he did talk an awful public relations gibberish, always so careful to say the right—and usually highly boring—thing. (The one exception was when, asked to give advice to his teammate Dennis Rodman, Michael advised him to wear trousers as often as possible.) My guess is that he spoke with such relentless dullness because he didn’t want to queer the deal on all his endorsements. People said that, at his peak, Michael Jordan generated something on the order of $10 billion for the economy. Still, the heavy marketing of Michael took away from his heroic stature. Something there is about capitalism, too, that apparently works to diminish heroes. Pity.

What made a young boy admire two much older boys—boys who had then seemed to him men—when he had been told time and again, and in fact quite believed, that it wasn’t muscle but brains that counted in life? The first qualification for a hero, in the eyes of a small boy—and not, I suspect, in those of a small boy alone—is the ability to fend off fear. The Green brothers seemed beautifully equipped for this, or so it seemed to me. Far from seeming in any way fearful, they, it occurred to me then, were themselves worth fearing. At that time, without the least hesitation, I should have traded whatever chance I might have had for a good mind for one of their powerful bodies.

From round this time, too, I recall another athlete named Sid Cohen, a softball player extraordinaire. Tall, lean, sandy-colored hair brushed en brosse off his high tanned forehead, he was an elegantly fielding first baseman who seemed to blast a homerun every time he came to bat. I saw him play on a field without walls, and his booming homers were never power-alley jobs but instead towering shots that flew well over the heads of right fielders, no matter how deeply they played him. Sid Cohen drove a cream-colored Plymouth convertible and seemed always to have a beautiful girl waiting for him. He was the Achilles of Farewell Beach, but, near as I could tell, with two perfectly good heels.

It was not long after my admiration for the Green boys and Sid Cohen had set in that my interest in athletes went national. This came about through my reading of a monthly magazine called Sport, which I began to do with great intensity around the age of 11 or 12. The magazine was devoted to the subject of its title, but even more, in those days, to uncomplicated hero worship. Sport had nothing to do with criticizing athletes; its editors and writers were as far as possible from being, as a long and justly defunct statesman once put it, “nattering nabobs of negativism.” If you were written about in Sport, you were, ipso facto, written about as a hero. Nor, best as I can remember, did the magazine go in much for personalities. A characteristic line, from a piece on the Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, that has rattled around in my head all these years had it that “Yogi likes plenty of pizza in the off-season, when he can generally be found hanging around his friend Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto’s bowling alley.” The same article, written today, might inform us that its subject, with the aid of kin-network therapy, had survived his second divorce in fairly good shape, though he greatly regrets an unfortunate deal on a condominium complex in Acapulco, a leveraged buy-out, in which he had invested heavily.

To Sport, too, I owe my first interest in history, for the magazine ran a series of articles under the rubric “The Sport Classic” about great athletic heroes of the past. I recall being much moved by articles on such figures as Jim Thorpe, Bill Tilden, Lou Gehrig, and Red Grange. The theme of these articles was that great athletes were great-hearted; even famous horses—Man O’ War, Whirlaway, Sea Biscuit—were great-hearted. How one acquired a great heart on one’s own was a bit less clear. Sometimes it seemed one was born with it. But more often you worked hard, faced adversity straight on, didn’t let life in its harsher aspects defeat you, and if you came through often enough under pressure-laden circumstances, lo! you made it—you were a hero. This still seems to me not so dumb.

A boy’s hero worship almost invariably latches onto heroes whose accomplishments are essentially physical, warriors and athletes chief among them. Not only do these men—they have, historically, overwhelmingly been men—choose to disregard pain but many of them risk premature destruction, which, as Maupassant says in his story “The Horla,” is “the source of all human dread.” The most rudimentary form heroism takes is that of defying death; and for this reason we honor as heroes those men and women who have knowingly risked—and frequently lost—their lives. One of the reasons that one tends to admire heroes is that they have qualities that one does not have, or at least that one is uncertain about having. Here is a distinction between heroes and today’s “role models.” The former are worth admiring because they are (almost certainly) better than you; the latter aren’t truly that much better—that is, apparently, the utility of them—so that it should be no great trick to emulate them. Role-models seem to be people who didn’t get into trouble; heroes acted magnificently under pressure. Big difference, I’d say.

Heroes have been less easy to come by with the passing of years. For one thing, we know a lot more about the athletes, entertainers, and politicians now than we did half a century ago. And most of what we now know tends to diminish them—usually, to the point of disqualifying them as heroes. We now know about the philandering of every U.S. President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including even those who had lust only “in their heart.” We now know, with some precision, how stupid most actors are. I’m very pleased never to have heard Gary Cooper speak off the screen; I much regret having heard Paul Newman do so. Something there is about the current age that works to cut ostensibly heroic people down to size—a little less, even, than normal human size.

As I grow older, I find that I am simultaneously less trustful of heroes and increasingly in need of them. To worship false heroes is quite as foolish as worshipping false gods, and in hero worship as in other activities there is no fool like a less-than-young fool. I take some small satisfaction that such hero worshipping as I have gone in for has never entailed subscribing to a hero’s doctrine as part of the deal. One carries enough luggage throughout life without having to lug around another person’s ideals. On the other hand, true heroes remind me of life’s possibilities—of how difficulties can be overcome, of how often perseverance pays off, of how lovely life can be when fear is conquered, of how gallantry is the highest form of elegance.

Had I at any time in my life been a true hero—had I won the big game, or survived the jungles of Vietnam, or gone into the burning building to save the infant—I wonder if I might regard myself differently than I do now. At a minimum, I would have had the self-assurance of knowing that, under pressure, I had come through. As things are now, I only hope that, should the occasion for heroism arise, I might come through. A vast difference between the two—knowing and hoping. Contemplating heroic lives, lives distinguished by physical or psychological courage, and sometimes both, helps to fortify one’s own soul and to inspire one to be a little better than, deep down, one worries one is.

Joseph Epstein is writing a book about snobbery in America.