Humility

Clare and Chris stopped by last night to help put the fat in Fat Tuesday, with hot dogs from Lucky Dog followed by paczyki from the Oak Park Bakery.  (If you have to ask, you’ve spent way too much of your life in darkness.)  We then rolled into the living room to watch Olympic men’s halfpipe.  And here I thought we already had enough ways to kill ourselves in winter.

The competition was just what NBC paid all that money for—the once teen prodigy Shaun “Flying Tomato” White now trying at age 31 to win a gold medal in his third Olympics.  For a little added drama, there was the film clip of White being airlifted to medical treatment after a crackup—oh, that halfpipe—last fall in New Zealand.  But the mishap wasn’t enough to win Clare over, not completely.  “He’s not humble,” my daughter said before White’s third, gold-winning run down the halfpipe.

There are two kinds of humble athletes, I think, the Walt Williams and the Walter Paytons; Clare was always more of a Payton.  Walt Williams was this incredibly shy outfielder for the White Sox who could barely bring himself to look into the camera during an interview, which was always punctuated with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” all this despite the fact that Williams had more talent in his little finger than Jack Brickhouse could ever amass during two lifetimes as a broadcaster.  That wasn’t Walter Payton or my daughter, for that matter.

They were more “hard-ass” humble, no-nonsense athletes who wanted to get the job done, let somebody else do the celebrating.  Clare never showboated during her homerun trot any more than Payton did after scoring a touchdown.  Funny, I loved Walt Williams, had my daughter meet him even when she a little girl, but I raised a Walter Payton instead.  Go figure.