Favre sacks himself
I'm otherwise indifferent to the entire Brett Favre/Green Bay Packers retirement fiasco (except for its impact on my fantasy football team, the St. Louis Clydesdales InBev), but I have a warm regard for the tradition of athletes bowing out on their own terms.Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith was my sporting hero when I was a child, and I had long anticipated and sentimentalized his eventual retirement. When the announcement from Ozzie arrived in June of 1996, it seemed forced from the hand of the team's newly-hired manager Tony LaRussa, who was uninterested in exploring, from the very beginning, the talents and winning-pedigree of the veteran shortstop he had just inherited. LaRussa favored for the lineup instead a now-forgotten 26-year-old replacement he claimed had "fresher legs."
It was a less-than-ideal situation for the prideful Ozzie to finish out his 15-year Cardinals tenure. The future Hall of Fame shortstop clearly would have preferred playing beyond '96, but the foresight of a midseason retirement announcement allowed for a sort of National League victory tour that was frequently dramatic and emotional. At each stop of the team's remaining road trips that season, Ozzie was honored on the opponents' field-- with gifts of appreciation ranging from a pair of fancy cowboy boots in Houston to a patch of possibly "magical" dog hair from the club owner in Cincinnati-- and the final lap was capped off with, not a retirement day, but a retirement weekend to end the regular season at home in St. Louis, with much pomp, ceremony, and emotion.
Ozzie had a flair that way. (I'll bet he never misses watching an Oscars telecast.) He still had the itch to compete during the next couple years, but he quietly resisted offers from the San Francisco club and others to resume playing. He sensed correctly that his fans desired for him, and for themselves, a graceful, uncorrupted finale with his team of identity. Other notable sports stars-- Favre being just the most recent example-- seem to lack this same sense of time and place to appropriately wrap their careers, and the fans are stuck with these "he said, she said" media and tabloid soap operas involving the player, the team's front office, and then quite frequently, a second or third team.
Favre should have made his retirement decision a year or two ago, or made it clear to the contrary-- without all the hedging and backpedaling, laying out his plans for the future in full understanding and respect for the realities faced by an employer that will have to continue competition on the field long after he's gone off to that big knee specialist in the sky. It's not because he owed that to the franchise, his teammates, the fans, himself, or his friends and family. He owed it to the moment.
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The Radio Hall of Fame passed over Howard Stern for induction again this year. That's a Hall of Fame then that doesn't seem like it's worth much. WHO-Des Moines sportscaster Jim Zabel, a former colleague and a hell of a guy, also lost out in his bid in the category of local/regional pioneer.
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Last weekend, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente accepted the Green Party nominations for President and Vice President in Chicago. Acceptance speeches here. When the law is tyranny, the order is revolution.
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What's next for Des Moines' Gateway Park neighborhood at the bottom of the hill?
posted by CM @ 2:51 PM
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