Ripken Stands Alone Easy Choice As Top Sportsman In Mostly Negative Year
Maybe in another year Steve Young would have won for the way he got the mountain that was Joe Montana off his back. Or Hakeem Olajuwon would have won for the quiet dignity and resolve he brought to back-to-back NBA championships. Or Mario Lemieux would have won for not simply coming back from cancer to resume playing hockey, which is accomplishment enough, but coming back with such a stunning flourish that he is once again the best player in the sport.
But this year, as The Sporting News has chosen and Sports Illustrated reportedly also has, there is one, and only one, pick for Sportsman of the Year:
Cal Ripken Jr.
He literally lapped the field.
The single best moment in sports in 1995 came on Sept. 6, at about 9:40 at night, when Ripken was pushed from the dugout by his teammates and began taking that heartwarming victory lap around the field at Camden Yards in Baltimore.
On an otherwise bleak canvas for sports, that moment pours through as a splash of color and hope. There wasn’t much else to cheer for.
Certainly not the numbing tableau in Los Angeles, where one of the most celebrated athletes of all time was on trial for double murder. Certainly not the discouraging parade of athletes arrested for violent behavior, frequently against women - or disturbingly antisocial athletes, such as Albert Belle, who has become a kind of Mount St. Helen’s of modern sports, or Dennis Rodman, a strange and solitary fetishist. You certainly wouldn’t cheer for the overwhelming greed of players, as symbolized by Alonzo Mourning capriciously trading himself away from an adoring city that had glorified him on a downtown mural. Or the overwhelming greed of owners, as symbolized by Art Modell imperiously turning his back on 70,000 of the most faithful NFL fans.
The worst thing you can say about sports is that it isn’t fun anymore. The games were always the purest part of the culture. But the games are so far down on the list of things to write about these days. Behind money and violence and strikes and franchise relocation and contentious players and paranoid coaches and wheedling agents and large conglomerates like Nike that want to take over sports and edit them down into 60-second commercials that you can get with a $125 pair of sneakers. That’s why Cal stands out.
He’s none of the above.
He plays every day. He doesn’t get arrested. He doesn’t curse at the fans. He isn’t threatening to leave. He actually seems to like his life.
(Wow. Are you sure he’s in the right movie?)
I’m not trying to make Ripken into someone he’s not. He’s not profound like John Thompson, or glib like Howie Long. He certainly didn’t seek this acclaim - for years he ran from it. But when it was finally thrust upon him, when it was impossible to escape, he accepted it and grew into it. Instead of holding the world at arm’s length as the record beckoned, Cal opened his arms to let everyone in. And happily, Cal became more comfortable, more at ease with fame.
Cal couldn’t rescue baseball by himself; not even Babe Ruth could have after what Bud Selig and Donald Fehr did to the game. But Cal saved it from disappearing down a rat hole. Baseball has become passe lately. Football has surpassed it as the national pastime, and basketball has all the younger demographics. But baseball is still the sport of fathers and sons and myth in this country, and it is no small cultural accomplishment that Ripken was its life preserver. Everyone in baseball, from a jerk like Belle to a prince like Tony Gwynn, stood in awe of what Cal had done. At the All-Star Game, Kirby Puckett pointed to the American League clubhouse and said of Cal, “That man is the most respected guy in the room.”
It was midsummer when the autograph phenomenon began. Baseball was ailing, and Cal became its Florence Nightingale, staying late into the night, signing autographs for the thousands who waited patiently, the line stretching like a snake throughout the stands at Camden Yards. What other modern athlete, on the verge of his greatest accomplishment, would do that - free of charge, I might add.
Then, as Lou Gehrig’s record drew closer and the fever began to spike, they would unfurl a new number every night, and the applause would grow like some great ocean wave coming closer. There were literally years of hype before Cal got to “Streak Week.” It could have crushed him. Surely no one expected him to raise the level of his game with all the madness closing in. In recent years, The Streak had seemed to handcuff him and hold him prisoner; there were many who thought that by the time he sighted the record, Cal would be in the lineup just for old time’s sake. But there he was, hitting homers on the night he tied it and the night he broke it - not just rising to the occasion, but towering above it, like a Stravinsky symphony.
When the banner came down for 2,131, a former teammate of Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, was in the stands as the nation turned its lonely eyes to Cal. The Orioles piled over the bullpen wall, and the ones in the dugout stood up, and the balloons floated into the warm, Baltimore night, and the fans made a long, sustained sound like the roar of an airplane engine. Three, four, five, six, seven times Cal had to come out of the dugout and acknowledge the crowd, and still the cheering wouldn’t stop. So Bobby Bonilla and Rafael Palmeiro - two big-money guys who know what it’s like to be booed and to be called selfish, two guys who can appreciate how special Cal Ripken truly is - recognized the majesty of the moment as only stars can, and pushed Cal onto the field and insisted that he take a lap. And that was where he shook the hands of so many who had come to see him for so long, and in a way it was their triumph as much as his, a return to the good old days when players were truly loved for who they were as much as for what they did, and money didn’t get in the way.
Cal Ripken, local hero, born and raised among these very people, let the fans touch him in a way that athletes never do anymore. And at that moment he became the Sportsman of the Year.