On Jan. 19 of this year, St. Louis Cardinals legend Stan Musial passed away.
The talented outfielder was one of the best players of his generation, producing 3,630 hits, three Most Valuable Player awards, 20 All-Star game appearances and three World Series titles for the same St. Louis team with which he began his career.
And Musial’s excellence extended off the diamond, known as one of the kindest souls in the game of baseball. Legendary Yankee Mickey Mantle once said of Musial, “He was a better player than me because he was a better man than me.”
Bob Costas, a sportscaster who has covered the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl and many other prestigious events throughout his career, lives in St. Louis and had the opportunity to speak at Musial’s funeral.
For Costas, baseball is his preferred sport and Musial was one of the players he idolized as he grew up as a child in New York. Costas had the chance of meeting and getting to know Musial, and from there, the respect and adoration he had for the man only grew.
At several points during the eulogy, his emotion crept through, as he had to hold back tears. An athlete who many people, including Costas, had spent their whole lives looking up to, was gone.
The fact that Costas, a man I idolize both for what he’s done for journalism and for short people, held an athlete in that high a manner meant something.
Nowadays, it’s hard to become attached to a certain athlete.
Whether it be a trade, free agency or even a positive performance-enhancing drug test, it’s hard to have a player who devotes his career to his team, and a team to reciprocate that to a player.
Take Curtis Granderson, for example. Growing up as a Detroit Tigers fan, there wasn’t much to cheer for. Year after year of losing conditioned me to have low expectations. But in 2006, the amazing happened and the Tigers made a miracle run to the World Series, and reestablishing baseball in a once proud market.
Granderson was an exciting second-year player, bashing 19 home runs and patrolling centerfield with reckless abandon in his high, navy blue socks. And when I came up to ask him for an autograph, he graciously accepted and signed it “To Christian.” He became my role model and hero from that very moment.
When it came to deciding which jersey I would buy in 2009, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind whose name would line my back shoulders. At the age of 15, I was still naïve enough to believe that he’d be there forever.
As fate would have it, Granderson was traded during the 2009 offseason for a bevy of talented players that have helped elevate Detroit as World Series contenders, but I was left with an outdated jersey, learning how baseball, and sports in general, is just a business.
So as television producers rush to get an interview with fake girlfriends and incredulous bicycling liars, let’s appreciate those athletes who’ve made us beam from cheek to cheek while we still can.
ch203310@ohiou.edu
