There is too Crying in Baseball

GYUMRI, ARMENIA, February 24, 2001-A few years back, basketballer and Nike pitchman Charles Barkley famously uttered for a television ad, "I'm not a role model." Barkley-or at least the agent who signed him for the commercial-was flat wrong. Though his antics were overplayed and his comedic value overrated, on the floor Barkley inspired. Given a potato sack for a body, he used his considerable backside to compete with and to best his taller and more athletic opponents.

And when he retired, having failed to capture that elusive championship ring, you had to feel for him. Not because his career had been wasted. The man made enough money to declare himself a Republican (which he actually did). And not because he would never hear the end of it from Jordan-buddy. At least Barkley isn't running a team in a way that would make the L.A. Clippers blush.

The reason we savuh tanem for Barkley is the same reason that hundreds of Dale Earnhardt followers have spent the past week weeping for ESPN cameras. We feel like we know these people.

I'm not suggesting that it's okay for moviegoers to well up in tears when Gwyneth Paltrow wins an Oscar. Or that Americans should get emotional over Diana's car wreck. These über-celebrities spend their lives behind a mask. Everything we know about them is what their publicists want us to know. Yes, there are unintended exposures, thanks largely to deft paparazzi and principled cops. But generally, people who cried when JFK Jr.'s plane went down are people with limited emotional capital.

Sports is different. It seems easy to denigrate NASCAR fans as redneck minions who don't know no better. After all, their heroes are adorned with all the trappings of the plebian culture: Marlboro, Budweiser and Goodwrench. When we see legions of them caravanning around the South to watch cars race, our gut reaction is to wish these people would get a job. And when we see grown men crying over the loss of a racecar driver, we wish these people would get a life.

But the emotional connection with Earnhardt is a real, albeit one-sided, one. The reason is that Earnhardt was never able to wear a mask. Like every professional athlete, his career life unfolded before his fans.

There is one athlete whose death would elicit my tears. Derek Harper is his name; "best player to never appear in an All-Star Game," his claim to basketball fame. In a 1984 playoff gripper against the mighty Lakers, Harper dribbled out the clock thinking his Mavericks were ahead. They weren't. And when the final buzzer sounded they had lost.

After that game, Harper wept in front of news cameras. He had let down himself, his team, and a city full of followers. There was no buffer in the person of an agent or publicist. Only Harper and his emotion on national television. I saw my hero cry, and I cried too.

For years afterward, I pulled for Derek. He led the Mavs almost to nirvana, only to have a cocaine-addicted star teammate descend to the abyss. He took the Knicks to the NBA finals, only to watch teammate John Starks go one-for-seventeen in the seventh and deciding game. Then he went to Los Angeles, where he was too old and jaded to walk Kobe around in a stroller. I became a Knicks and then a Lakers fan as my main man became a journeyman.

Some people bellyache about behavior such as mine. They say that we should start living in some fictive place known as the real world.

But sports is the essence of reality. Athletes are some of the only entertainers who perform on a naked stage. Their successes and failures are for the world to see. Their emotions are unadulterated. They don't know the game's outcome any more than we do. When athletes are on the court or on the field, they are partaking in an event more analogous to the real world than a two-year stint in the Peace Corps will ever be.

I didn't know Dale Earnhardt, never followed him, and don't really care that he died. But I can understand the sadness in his followers. They spent week after week rejoicing in his successes and lamenting his failures.

When one of our sports heroes dies, there is a justified period of sadness and loss. Then, after a time, we get on with the task of finding another athlete to fill the empty space left in our vicarious existence.