Finding ‘it’ in our heroes
Red Schoendienst died recently. He was a major league ballplayer, beginning in the 1940s. He later managed.
As a youngster of 9, 10 and 11, he was my hero. He played for the Braves when they played in Milwaukee. I was a Pirates fan. Nevertheless …
I bet most of you never heard of Red Schoendienst. He was never a household name. At least in western Pennsylvania. His obituary stories said he was “revered” in St. Louis, where they take baseball as seriously as we take the Steelers, and where Red spent most of his career with the Cardinals.
I believe it. Schoendienst was someone you could admire: he played hurt without complaining. In 1958, he played with tuberculosis, though he didn’t know why he was chronically tired until after the season was over.
The Braves played in the World Series that year and the Red hit .300 in a losing effort against the New York Yankees. He had tuberculosis, mind you, and still played, splendidly!
Now I wouldn’t have been an admirer had Schoendienst been a mediocre or bad ballplayer. But there were other good even great players back then whom I might have latched on to. Dick Groat and Bill Mazeroski were Pirates. I rooted for them, but I never took them to heart. Up the scale, there was Mantle. The Braves’ Eddie Mathews and Hank Aaron. And Ted Williams, of course.
But it was Schoendienst I loved. I wanted to play second base because he was a second baseman. I imitated his batting stance, though I never imitated a peculiar habit of his: in the field, between pitches, he would take his glove off. He did this all the time. It made me anxious. “Get that glove back on, Red,” I would say to myself, fearing a groundball would come careening his way while he fumbled to get his glove back on.
Needless to say, he always managed to be ready. At least I think.
I took to Schoendienst because I thought he was graceful, because of the way he stood in the batter’s box, batting helmet and spikes gleaming, the nuanced rhythm of his hands moving the bat back and forth in front of his face until the pitch was thrown.
His lifetime batting average was .289. He was a .400 hitter to me. Schoendienst was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1989 by the Veterans Committee, which is a lot like reaching Cooperstown by the backdoor. To me, Red was a first-year eligible inductee.
I thought, to use words that had great relevancy back then, that Red Schoendienst was “cool” and “neat.” He looked “good,” in the same way my other boyhood hero, basketball’s Jerry West, looked “good.” Both were infused with style and grace.
I later recognized the same thing in Mickey Mantle and Williams. Truth be told, it was the thing that first attracted me to John Kennedy. In the case of JFK, people called it charisma. It was a certain something. Reagan had it, though not for me. A whole generation grew up loving and admiring Reagan. I suspect a lot of that was about “style” or “grace,” or whatever “it” is called.
Pretty superficial. But there it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
If he was right, he was only partially right.
Charles Lindbergh was probably the greatest hero of the 20th century. He was wildly acclaimed in 1927 and for years afterward, for his solo flight across the Atlantic. The crowds in Paris when he landed and later in New York, huge and enthusiastic, were harbingers of a lifetime of hero worship for Lindbergh. His shameful dalliance with Hitler prior to World War II cooled the ardor but never extinguished the flame of admiration for “The Lone Eagle.”
Babe Ruth never has lost his hold on the American imagination. He was beloved alive; he’s beloved now by a certain slice of the population. If any athlete was ever charismatic it was the Babe. He was a hero to millions.
The late Joe McGinnis wrote a marvelous book called “Heroes.” It was about the ’60s and ’70s and McGinnis’ search for heroes in the America that had suffered three assassinations, the lies that were told about Vietnam, and then Watergate and the shame of Richard Nixon.
For McGinnis, the hero was a thing best put on a shelf, in a closet, with the door bolted shut. No one believed anymore. He added, “The truth was, we did not have heroes any more because there were no heroic acts left to be performed.”
McGinnis noted: “The poet Paul Zweig said that the hero is ‘an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect society’s values, sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community.'”
That comes pretty close to the definition of courage. It’s a role, given the right circumstances, that might fall to any of us.
Of course, the Zweig formulation, which speaks to real heroism, has nothing whatever to do with my boyhood ideal or my childhood idol.
Besides, this Zweig fella probably never saw Schoendienst — the way he batted, the way he fielded. The great Schoendienst is dead. My hero is gone.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.