Sports Make Me Feel Old

The last of my childhood heroes said good-bye last week.

Ken Griffey Junior was my hero, and not just in a sports worship kind of way. He was the only historically dominant hitter of the past 20 years never associated with steroids. His refusal to jump in the same moral sewer with those he competed against (Bonds, Sosa, McGuire) is the reason he finished his career number 5 on the all-time home run list rather than number one. He chose integrity over the drugs that could have kept him healthier (in the short term) and added a few years to his career. The world needs more people like that.

His retirement last week, at age 40, has made me reflect. It also made me feel old. Most of the consequences of aging I was prepared for. I knew that a day would come when my joints would ache some days for no apparent reason, that I'd start to get fat if I ate everything in sight, and that I'd find today's chart-topping music extraordinarily dumb. What no one ever told me is that someday I would lose my childhood heroes, and no one would replace them.

One of the fun things about being a baseball fan was checking the box scores every morning to see if my guy hit a home run. That part of the game is dead to me now; I still love my team, but there's no individual on it who is anything more to me than a baseball player who happens to play for my team.

This has now happened to me in every single sport. I lost Dan Marino in football, and it's never been the same. It was exciting again when my old college pal Shaun Alexander was dominating the league, but now he's out of the league too. We graduated together at Alabama and shared some great conversations along the way. And he's now too old to play. So what does that say about me?

I've now lost, to at least some degree, a reason to care in almost every single sport. For different reasons, I identified with both Andre Agassi and his wife Steffi Graf, but since they've retired I can't maintain an interest in tennis. Evander Holyfied has been too old to be a serious boxer for a decade, and no one else has summoned my interest. The basketball player I most modelled my game after, Allen Iverson, retired this year as well.

Of course, I knew the day for all these things would come, but I somehow expected that when one favorite player left, another would be there to pick up my rooting interest. It worked that way, to some degree, when I was a kid. Before I was an adult, it wasn't that hard to find people to model myself after. No one ever told me it no longer works that way once you have an office job. I'll never again have cause or opportunity to dream of being The Next Ken Griffey Junior, or anyone else. I'm now past the age where my favorite player can double as a role model. There may be other players I admire for various reasons, but it will never quite be the same.

Soon, I'll be reduced to rooting for the few remaining players roughly my age, as some lame attempt to squeeze out the last remnants of my youth by proxy.
After that, I'm not sure what happens.

I just know I'm not prepared for it.



post script:

The aging phenomenon is, I think, one reason why college sports loyalties never die. There's a link between you, your favorite school, and everyone else who chooses to go there, that never goes away. Our colleges don't change very much, even after we leave, and we take comfort in thinking that whatever attracted us to our school of choice attracted its current players too. So we can continue seeing ourselves in these athletes, giving us a personal link that eventually goes away at the professional level.

While pro sports eventually make us feel old, college sports do the opposite. It's a much more uplifting story. If only football season would hurry up and get here...