Legends Never Die: Athletes and Their Afterlives in Modern America.
By Richard Ian Kimball. Syracuse University Press, 2017.
This review originally appeared in NEPCA News.
On July 4, 1939, New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig
bade farewell in a speech that has found its way into the pantheon of American
history's most famous orations. When Gehrig told a Yankee Stadium crowd of 61,808
that he considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of the
earth," there was nary a dry eye to be seen. All knew that Gehrig was
stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which robbed him of his strength
and life before he reached his 38th birthday.
In a sense, argues Brigham Young University history
professor Richard Ian Kimball, Gehrig was indeed lucky; he became a forever-young
immortal. Kimball's is a study of how American culture canonizes athletes who
die in the bloom of life. In a deft introduction, Kimball places sports stars
that flamed out early within a grander sweep of Western luminaries, including
Achilles, Pheidippides, battlefield soldiers, John F. Kennedy, and Princess
Diana. He invokes A. E. Housman's 1896 poem "To an Athlete Dying
Young" to affirm journalist Simon Barnes' observation that "only the
unfinished is perfect" (3). In Kimball's words, "The black hole of unfulfilled
potential magnifies the energy in the universe of memory" (4). Young
athletes who perish tap into collective mourning rites as few others do.
Kimball is perhaps hyperbolic to claim that sports deaths
help Americans cope with their own mortality, but he is correct to assert that
such passings are imbued with public significance. He illuminates this through
selected case studies, beginning with the only athlete whose early death rivals
Gehrig's in the public imaginary: Notre Dame football star George Gipp. If you
have any doubt that sports matter, consider how Gipp's 1920 parting
subsequently advanced the careers of his coach, Knute Rockne, and the man who
played "The Gipper" in a 1940 Hollywood film: Ronald Reagan.
Kimball packs a lot into just 144 pages of text, with each figure
standing as synecdoches for American society. The deaths of rodeo stars Bonnie
McCarroll (1929) and Lane Frost (1989) hardened gender roles, with McCarroll's
tragic bronco ride leading to enduring limitations on events open to women, and
Lane's demise reinforcing perceptions of male toughness. Call it the difference
between tragic victimhood and brave martyrdom. The sexual spin-off of this is
the 1962 death of boxer Benny Paret at the hands of welterweight Emile
Griffith. Many date the decline of boxing's popularity from this public death,
but a greater irony lies with the savagery of Griffith's blows after Paret
uttered a homophobic slur. Griffith was a known bisexual. That such an
individual was compelled to preserve his manhood with such bloodlust speaks
volumes. NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt represents the other end of public
morality scale. Kimball whimsically references him as "Princess Diana with
a push broom mustache" (100), but his death at the 2001 Daytona 500 took
on redemptive meanings for numerous evangelical Christians, complete with
perceived miracles. Earnhardt's death also provided a template for the
phenomenon of "cybermourning" (10) in the emerging electronics age.
Kimball connects each athlete to popular culture; after all, mourning remains
mostly private unless print, film, television, music, or cyberspace
universalizes and memorializes loss.
Kimball concludes with a look at three baseball legends that
were not "lucky" enough to die young: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle,
and Ted Williams. Each lived long enough for revisionists to tarnish their
images. DiMaggio's persona as a suave sophisticate gave way to stories of his
jealousy, money obsession, and egoism. Mantle's once hidden vices such as his
alcoholism and womanizing became public knowledge. It's hard to imagine a
sadder exit than that of Williams, who was already viewed as a misanthrope. But
that is inconsequential in comparison to the family squabble that led to
Williams being cryogenically frozen after death, his body in one tube, his
severed and battered head in another. One might argue that Mantle is out of
place in this chapter, as before his death he did public penance for his
misdeeds and is now invoked as a cautionary tale—a new life for an old legend.
But such a quibble hardly diminishes Kimball's larger point that athletes who
outlive their fame are heroes for a season, whereas those taken prematurely are
immortals.
Legends Never Die
is a natural for undergraduate classes given its brevity and its easy-to-digest
prose. It would work quite well in a sports history course, but also in classes
focusing on aspects of American culture such as celebrity and fandom studies, identity
politics, folklore, civic religion, and explorations of death and dying.
Robert E. Weir
University of
Massachusetts Amherst
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