What Everybody Ought To Know About Albert Pujols

Today is the opening day of the NFL season.  Many football fans view the event as a national holiday.  Many fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers view it as a religious holiday.  I love football as much as hockey, so why am I thinking about baseball?

I’ve been thinking about greatness, what it means to be great.  So often we apply such a label to athletes based on their near superhuman abilities.  Of course, you can’t take sports records with you, so the true measure of greatness must at some level come down to relationships and how you are able to impact others.

Athletes these days make 90% of their headlines for being screwups, jerks, or worse.  The good ones don’t publicize their charitable efforts.  When they do, ESPN and friends really don’t care as much about Ladanian Tomlinson feeding hungry Californians by the truckload as much as they care about the next Terrell Owens fiasco or Shawn Merriman allegedly choking Tila Tequila or Oregon running back LaGerrette Blount sucker punching some taunting fool after the game.  And that’s just the past few days!

OJ Simpson used to be considered great.  Now he’s that psycho-murderer who got away with it but still managed to destroy the life he had left.   It seems we have no problem erasing one’s athletic legacy if their off the field life goes awry.  We need to let the good off the field stuff outshine physical achievements the same way.

One of the interesting things about fans is how we root, root, root for the home team.  Sociologists love studying sports.  Fans are ambivalent, lovers of their heroes one minute yet haters of those bums the next.  Fans live vicariously through their team.  Try this quick psychological experiment the next time you hear someone talking about their team.  If the team won, they often say “we won,” as if they were part of the effort.  If their team lost, listen to how often the same fan will say “they lost.”  We like to associate ourselves with winners, with victory, with greatness.