Giving 'Em Fitz: Death and sports - cinematic magic
There is something oddly compelling about the juxtaposition of death and sports.
No matter the genre, whether it's real heroes on the sports pages or fictional ones in movies and books, the premature demise of athletes has long been an intriguing subject.
Perhaps that's because few things are as sad, as fascinating, or as easily understood as wasted youth and promise. An awesome physical gift stilled too early and forever is the stuff of tragedy.
For sportswriters, novelists, filmmakers, and even poets, these deaths have proved a remarkably rich and deep - albeit macabre - vein.
Brian's Song, highlighted by the sob-inducing death of Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo, was the highest-rated made-for-TV movie of all time, watched in nearly 21 million American households during its 1971 debut.
Anyone who watched could grasp the movie's redemptive message of friendship and courage. That's the appeal of these gallant stories: Sports fans, all of whom long for last-minute heroics, instinctively react to end-of-life heroics.
Theatrically, some of the most critically praised sports films ever have had an athlete's untimely death as their climactic centerpiece, including Pride of the Yankees, Bang the Drum Slowly, and Million Dollar Baby. The last won the Academy Award for best picture of 2004.
And while the protagonist survives in Field of Dreams, death still casts a long shadow. In a gut-wrenching scene that leaves hard-bitten men in tears, Ray Kinsella plays catch with his resurrected ballplayer-father.
More recently, death has been a common theme in ESPN's brilliant "30 for 30" documentary series. The profiled deceased have included the NBA's Drazen Petrovic, cancer-stricken Canadian runner Terry Fox, Maryland's Len Bias, NASCAR's Tim Richmond, Hawaiian surfer Eddie Aikau, and Chicago high school basketball star Ben Wilson.
In literature, there are few more touching poems than A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young":
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down.
Townsman of a stiller town.
Given all those commercial and cultural successes, it's somewhat surprising that artists and authors haven't mined the topic more often.
How many more of these stories are out there, untapped? Ghoulishly, on a gloomy Halloween afternoon, I went looking for some.
What about Mike Webster, the all-pro center on those dynastic Pittsburgh Steelers teams who died homeless and demented at 50 after enduring a lifetime of football's hardest knocks? He has since become the poster child for the sport's most pressing issue, concussions.
Or Harry O'Neill, the Darby native who played a single inning for Connie Mack's Philadelphia A's in 1939 and died at the hands of a Japanese sniper on Iwo Jima?
Or Walter "Big Ed" Morris, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who was stabbed to death in 1932 at his own going-away party?
Or Young Tom Morris, the equally famous son of the Scottish golf pioneer who, beginning at age 17, won a record four consecutive British Opens? While competing in 1875, he got word that his pregnant wife was in distress. Morris hurriedly finished the match and sailed home only to find spouse and newborn baby dead. Four months later, on Christmas Day, he died of a heart ailment at 24.
Or Lyman Bostock, the 1970s Angels outfielder, who was shot and killed in Gary, Ind., by a man who'd been gunning for someone else in the ballplayer's Cadillac?
Or Philadelphia-born Chuck Hughes, the Detroit Lions wide receiver who, in the closing minutes of a 1971 game with the Green Bay Packers, died of cardiac arrest? Forty-two years later, he remains the only NFL player to succumb during a game.
Or Oscar Bonavena, the Argentine heavyweight who gamely battled both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier? Bonavena, involved in an affair with the wife of a Nevada brothel owner, was shot to death, apparently by the bodyguard of the cuckolded husband.
Or Sandra Schmitt, the German Olympic skier who died along with 154 others in 2000 when the funicular train on which they were riding caught fire in an Alpine tunnel?
Or Wayne Estes, the Utah State all-American basketball star who, on the night he scored 48 points and topped the 2,000-point mark for his career, stopped to aid an accident victim? Estes was electrocuted when he brushed against a downed wire.
All would be fascinating subjects for moviemakers and writers who recognize that death is often uplifting. As with Estes and others, a confrontation with mortality can evoke the best in men.
Even in Mickey Mantle.
After all the drunken benders, the meaningless sexual encounters, and childish crudity that now define him as clearly as his sunny smile and awesome abilities, Mantle had an endgame awakening.
At a hospital news conference, the dying Yankees Hall of Famer, his famous face creased and drawn, his vitality sapped by liver cancer, his clothes ill-fitting, gazed into a camera and searched for forgiveness there.
"I'd like to say to kids out there, if you're looking for a role model," Mantle paused briefly, the self-loathing plainly visible, "this is a role model. Don't be like me."
Thirty-three days later, on Aug. 13, 1995, Mantle died. "Just a little past midnight," son David observed later, "an hour he knew so well."
Mantle's tragic, mixed-up life has not yet been portrayed accurately in film, though author Jane Leavy brilliantly captured it in her book, The Last Boy. If a Mantle movie is ever made, it won't be easy to watch.
But viewing it dispassionately 18 years later, this famous athlete's death - "the most decent thing he ever did," wrote Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg - definitely has cinematic potential.
So much, in fact, that it might even redeem Mickey Mantle.
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