For the formative years of my life as a sports fan, Steve Carlton was the single constant on the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies. He was cold, precise, mostly implacable, and spent his days in dismissive dominance of opposing hitters, with a sailing high fastball that set up a biting slider. The vast majority of his strikeouts -- and there were more of those than just about anyone before him, especially lefties -- consisted of feeble swings in the dirt, with the hitter seemingly on his way back to the dugout before the ball even reached the catcher. When he was on his game, it's as if the hitter wasn't even involved. Visually, he was incredibly striking, and I memorized everything about his motion, just because you always expected him to do something special when he was on the mound.
He also spent his last years as a pitcher, after having reached 300 wins while still relatively effective, shuffling around like an itinerant salesman among the competitive backwaters of the American League. For the most part, Philly Fan tried not to watch; it was too painful, like watching an older relative succumb to a crippling disease.
In a very long heyday rivaled by, depending on your tastes and analysis, no one who had ever held the position, Willie Mays patrolled center field like he invented it. Arriving at a ridiculously early age, he put together years where he was simply the best offensive and defensive player of his league, and while he never quite caught the public adoration of the San Francisco Giants fans in the same way that he did in New York, he was still respected and feared for his prowess late into his '30s.
In his last years as a player, he famously had problems keeping his feet in a World Series for the Mets, creating a soul-crushing buzzkill that people still talk about today, partly because of the relatively limited national awareness of baseball players due to limited country-wide television coverage (at the time). If you were to stop baseball fans of a certain age on the street and ask them their most vivid memory of Mays, far too many would remember the old man helpless on the ground for the You Gotta Believe Mets.
One more. Reggie White was the dominant defensive end of his age, a remarkably quick and powerful force that got to the quarterback with consistency and force. On the dominant defensive unit of their (and given the weakness of their offense, potentially any other) era, he was the biggest star, and someone who usually commanded a double team and a constant one-on-one camera. The man had years of well over a sack a game, and whenever he got heat early, you could count on other members of the defense picking up sacks like less accomplished members of the pride, as Mufasa White doled out the spoils to his lieutenants.
After leaving Philadelphia in a remarkably ham-fisted contract negotiation that did him and the odious Norman Braman no favors, White got his Super Bowl title with the Brett Favre Packers. You could make the argument that he had more to do with the title than Number Four. (You'd also be wrong, but in the current climate of 24/7/365/4, no one would blame you.)
After a retirement that didn't take, White returned for an utterly forgettable Panthers team. In his last year as a professional, he recorded 5.5 of his career 198 sacks, or roughly 40% of his output in a typical year. When he finally did retire, most fans either shrugged with the reminder that he had still played football in the first place, or sighed in relief that he wasn't going to disgrace his legacy any more.
And that, if you'll forgive the overly long set-up, is the crux of today's biscuit: your legacy.
For most of us workaday clock watchers, the legacy isn't really what we're doing to put food on the table. No one, it is seriously hoped, will have their manager reworking the highlights of past performance evaluations for the eulogy; that will be determined by our children, be they creative or physical or both.
So none of us will have the curious experience of having to think about that aspect of our postmortem existence... unless you are a professional athlete.
Is there any wonder that they screw it up so badly?
Brett Favre will be known to an entire generation of fans not for his strong arm, occasionally startling accuracy, creativity while scrambling, durability, iconic joie de vive or any of his other laudable characteristics. He won't even be known for the picks, the dome field weirdness, or the wild high early negative points.
Instead, he'll be known for the shambling mess that will be the next uniform he wears, the remarkable trainwreck that was the end of his time in Wisconsin, and the narcissistic wankfest that he's conducted over his cosmically insignificant career plans.
Whenever an athlete does what Favre is doing right now in the future -- and there will be many, given the ever-increasing lack of perspective past one's navel -- he'll be pulling a Favre. (By the way, the only thing keeping this from staying with its rightful inventor and owner -- Roger Clemens -- is the fact that steroid investigations have overwhelmed that story.) Maybe he'll also be known for the relentless media mouthjobs while the general public soured of the act long before the media caught wind; that, too, seems to be a telling characteristic of the age.
But here's the next and ugliest piece of the story for Packer Fan, who has to feel like the pig on the spit at an eternal luau over this... Favre doesn't give a rat's ass about his legacy, and probably thinks, in his heart of hearts, that anyone who does is an idiot.
We know that athletes don't really have rivalry hate, for the most part. All that we ask is that they pretend a little, or maybe just not rub it in our noses quite so much. But this disregard for how one is perceived later is new, and speaks to the essential hubris of the age, in that they all think they're going to become part of the media and fix things later. (Witness how Michael Irvin is no longer a desperate drug fiend, Deion Sanders is no longer a relentless money-hungry mercenary, and Emmit Smith is no longer intelligent.)
We accept this from people who aren't household names, or from anyone with a clear need for the money, especially if they haven't achieved much in the way of off-field endorsements. But Number Four was supposed to be above that, given the team that he played for, the endorsement dollars that he made (is he still hawking Prilosec heartburn pills? Give him credit for irony), and the constant media mouth jobs he's received.
At the end, herein lies the lesson, once again: athletes only care about the money, and think anyone that talks about this other stuff is at best naive, and at worst, disingenuous.
Because, really, who among us is ready to rest on our laurels in their mid to late 30s, under the idea that we aren't any good at it any more?
So by the time you read this, maybe Favre will be on his way to some place where the laundry will look garish and stupid -- I'd send him to Baltimore, myself, or maybe Al Davis, who still remembers fondly his own Jerry Rice years in Oakland, will make the move.
He'll play for a while there, and find that fewer and fewer people will care about his exploits or his career plans. In five to ten years, he'll have his jersey retired in Green Bay from people who, though the media will never admit this in a month of Sundays, weren't all that into him, given the number of back-breaking and season-ending picks he threw over the years.
And maybe, just maybe, people will start to remember how he played, rather than how he ended.
But I'm thinking the Willie Mays route is more likely.
Oh, just when it was safe to go back to Blogfrica... the prodigal interception machine is going to meet with the Vikings and Brad Childress about their quasi-vacancy at QB, given that Gus Frerotte and Tarvaris Jackson don't exactly inspire confidence.
