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Jewish World Review Oct. 8, 2001 / 21 Tishrei 5762
Philip Terzian
First, by all accounts, is the departure of Cal Ripken from the
Baltimore Orioles after two decades. Ripken has had a mediocre season, by
his standards, and exercised good judgment in announcing his retirement. But
his fans are wholly indifferent to such details. He gets a standing ovation
just for coming up to bat. People beg him to stay, hold signs, slip him
notes, and interrupt his speeches with cries of "Don't go!" Both Washington
newspapers have published special supplements on the event -- "Farewell,
Cal" (Times), "Iron Icon" (Post) -- and the Post section had a touching
photograph of a boy, overcome with tears, being comforted by Ripken after
autographing a baseball.
From whence does all this come? You could argue that baseball fans in
Washington and Baltimore haven't had much to cheer about in recent years,
and Ripken's achievements have been a lifeline to grasp. For his part, the
Iron Man is mystified by all the adulation. Ripken has wondered out loud
whether the emotion is for him as an individual, or has some indefinable
significance: "That is one of those things I still have to figure out about
this whole process," he says.
Some would argue that baseball, the onetime national pastime, tends to
pluck the mystic chords of memory in ways that football and basketball do
not. There was nothing like this when Joe Namath or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
retired. Then again, in the realm of professional athletes, Cal Ripken is
the closest you get to a sterling character. While he is regarded as
something of a loner on the Orioles, he is genuinely courteous to fans,
gallant on the field, and (so far as we know) leads a blameless private
life. Indeed, the record for which he is best known -- 2,632 consecutive
games -- is a testament to dedication as much as talent.
Meanwhile, as Cal Ripken heads for the exit, Michael Jordan has chosen
to emerge from retirement (again) in the uniform of Washington's pro
basketball team, the Wizards. I may well be the only living American who has
never seen Michael Jordan play a game -- either live or on TV -- and cannot
pretend to be excited about this news. I would rather watch cockfighting
than the NBA any day. But it would take a heart of stone not to be amused by
the spectacle of Jordan purchasing shares in the Wizards, arriving in
Washington as a much-advertised "director of basketball operations," and
then gradually trading his Italianate suits for a uniform.
The sports writer John Feinstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal
recently that it is often difficult for famous athletes to surrender the
limelight, and that is probably the case with Jordan, who quit in 1999 while
still a great player. Cal Ripken has been in a slow decline in recent years,
and perceived it was time to go; Jordan, by contrast, walked off the court
in the knowledge he had some good seasons left to play.
In Washington, however, he has his work cut out for him: The Wizards
(19-63 last season) are indescribably inept, and Jordan is not young and,
presumably, a little rusty. He will certainly play to the financial benefit
of the Wizards -- people have been camping out for season tickets to watch a
team that seldom filled half its seats -- but at some peril to his
reputation. Looming over every professional athlete who can't let go are the
spectres of has-beens from the past: Joe Louis stepping into the pro
wrestling ring, Babe Ruth in a Boston Braves uniform, Muhammad Ali stinging
like a butterfly.
Saddest and most instructive of all, perhaps, is the case of Jaromir
Jagr. Jagr, a 29-year-old Czech, is generally regarded as the best player in
hockey, and when he was acquired by the Washington Capitals this summer, it
threw the Capitals (who are nearly as bad as the Wizards) into instant
contention for the Stanley Cup. The problem is that hardly anyone in
Washington pays any attention to the Capitals, or to ice hockey generally. I
am exaggerating, of course; but if you examine the sports pages during the
past month or two you would find thousands of column inches on Air Jordan
and the Iron Man, and not a syllable about the best hockey player in the
world, now resident in Washington, D.C.
In a sense, this reversal of fortune has prepared Jaromir Jagr well for
life in the nation's capital. Take the Clintons, for example. The
55-year-old former President has yet to figure out what to do with the
balance of his life, and was last seen working the crowd at the memorial
service for victims of terrorism at the National Cathedral. The former First
Lady got herself elected to the U.S. Senate -- and from New York, no less --
but has been swept from media attention by the events of Sept. 11. Politics,
like the sporting life, is sometimes
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