Frank's Place: We need sports heroes, flawed as they are
The door in my boyhood bedroom was hollow plywood. When it was opened fully and touching the wall, it created a dark little gap that was a perfect target for the socks that became basketballs in my make-believe games.
The door in my boyhood bedroom was hollow plywood. When it was opened fully and touching the wall, it created a dark little gap that was a perfect target for the socks that became basketballs in my make-believe games.
On the rear of that flimsy door, which faced the twin bed where I dreamed at nights and sometimes on lonely days, were the tacked-up photos of sports heroes.
That cast changed so often and that wood was so thin that the holes soon grew too wide for the tacks, and the door, like my teenage face in just a few years, became riddled with unsightly pockmarks.
Time has dissolved many of the heroes in that gallery. And some, like the door on which their magazine-paper representations dwelled, were first disfigured.
Wilt Chamberlain was there. We'll never know if he really bedded 20,000 women, but that boast diminished this perfect athletic giant.
Joe Paterno was there. We'll never know what he knew in the end, but the Jerry Sandusky scandal has left him stranded forever in a moral limbo.
Muhammad Ali was there. We'll never know why he did it, but his mean-spirited taunting of Joe Frazier left a permanent scar on an otherwise beautiful legacy.
Sports heroes serve a practical purpose. They help youngsters look beyond family and their immediate surroundings to a world of new and greater possibilities. We need them. And because we do, we invest them with qualities they often don't possess but which we wish we did.
"Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do," Mark Twain said. "We find not much in ourselves to admire. We are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes."
In time, if we develop a little self-confidence and wisdom, our heroes typically descend from the heavens and we learn that hard lesson, that they walk among us, with all of our mortal faults and frailties.
The subject of heroes came to mind last week when Carson Wentz's performance in the Eagles' rout of Pittsburgh ensured that his photo would soon appear in bedrooms all over the region, and when later that same day Arnold Palmer died.
Palmer's photo hung on my door too. The Pennsylvania-born golfer was a remarkably magnetic figure, a trait he translated into a level of wealth and fame that was greater even than his spectacular career warranted.
Who could resist being captivated by his smile and sincerity, his brute strength and relentless drive, and by those moments when he hurtled himself fearlessly toward the finish line?
Golf was an alien game when I first encountered Palmer on TV, probably as he was winning the 1960 Masters. I was hooked instantly, avidly following his always higher highs and lower lows in mundane tournaments that his presence alone infused with excitement.
I was Palmer at Augusta as, with my father's 9-iron, I took my first swings in the side yard. For the first decade or so of my serious golfing life, I putted knock-kneed like Arnie, a heartfelt homage that proved no more successful than the many putting styles that have succeeded it.
I'm not sure how old I was when I first recognized a troubling aspect about my hero. There seemed to be something stern, even angry behind Palmer's eyes, something that suggested unfinished emotional business.
Among the torrent of praise-filled condolences Palmer's death provoked, I was struck by Gary Player's. A Hall of Fame golfer himself, Player apparently saw the same thing I had.
Noting the golfer's many qualities - his "charisma, charm and patience" - Player also pointed out that his rival could be "difficult and demanding."
Whatever mystery Palmer's eyes contained almost certainly stemmed from a complicated relationship with his father. He deeply loved Deacon Palmer, but he feared him as well. That dichotomy evidenced itself in the tears Palmer almost always shed during any late-life discussion of his father.
"I would describe [that father-son relationship] as loving but volatile," Palmer's daughter Amy told GolfChannel.com in 2014. "I don't think we ever got through a meal without some sort of argument. Sometimes it escalated into a very significant argument and we left in tears."
When at 16 Palmer found his inebriated father roughing up his mother, he tried to intervene. Deacon Palmer grabbed him by the collar and threw him aside. That night the boy ran away, only to return at dawn.
Palmer was like all heroes - both worthy and flawed. As a boy, he'd needed heroes too, fixating on Bobby Jones. And maybe, because conjuring them can help us obscure reality, he needed heroes more than most.
Palmer was not unique. The relationships between most sons and fathers are far more complex than they appear. Take mine, for instance.
I loved my father too, but he was not without his troubles, many of them self-inflicted. Like Palmer's my parents argued too. Sometimes their nighttime spats in an adjoining bedroom got loud and disturbing.
That's when I'd close that thin bedroom door and my heroes, those all-powerful heroes, came to my rescue.
@philafitz