MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COWBOYS:

What Do Steve Williams and Dan Rather Have in Common? (Doug Kern, 09/23/2004, Tech Central Station)

The thrill of the home run comes from the extraordinary difficulty inherent in hitting one. As the difficulty goes down, the meaning and value of the achievement goes down as well. A single home run hit honestly is more impressive than a hundred home runs hit dishonestly. And a player surreptitiously taking advantage of Better Living through Chemistry is not hitting anything honestly -- much less heroically.

I addressed many of these problems in my article for The New Atlantis entitled "Our Asterisked Heroes," available here. In response to that article, the estimable Brothers Judd have taken me to task here on the question of artificial assistance to heroism:

"Baseball, in particular, should aggressively defend the integrity of its timeless records by testing for performance enhancers. But Mr. Kern's idea that artificial advantage lessens heroism is probably not true. In a fair fight between David and Goliath we well know that David would get whipped. But he had a sling, which was effectively like bringing a gun to the fight. It hasn't seemed to diminish his aura of heroism much. Similarly, Arthur had Excalibur, Robin Hood his long bow and so on and so forth. We've never been overly disturbed by our heroes exploiting superior technology to their advantage."

With all due respect to the fabulous Juddsters, their analysis is flawed in three ways.

First, superior tools aren't the same as superior performance. We admire the heroism of David's courage, but not his fighting prowess -- no one makes the Monster-Slayer Hall of Fame for using a slick weapon to break the eggshell skull of a freak with a pituitary gland problem.

Second, sports have rules for the precise purpose of ensuring a "fair fight." By the Judds' logic, a heavyweight boxer would achieve something heroic by pounding on scores of featherweights. Mike Tyson, call your office.

Third, David, Arthur, and Robin Hood all achieved heroism in the fight against evil. When smiting the bad guys, there is no such thing as an unfair advantage. But heroism in sports is not a battle of good against evil (unless the Steelers and the Raiders are playing). Heroism in sports is defined by the struggle of man against himself -- against the inherent difficulty of physically demanding tasks. This heroism inheres in winning the battle against your own weakness and frailty, time and time again. When man changes himself through the use of performance-enhancing drugs, he has changed the terms of the struggle. He has, in effect, slipped his opponent a Mickey.

Nothing is heroic unless it pushes the limits of what men can do. When artificial modifications change those limits, they necessarily dilute the quality of heroism. And if sports only offer diluted heroism, we may as well play MVP Baseball 2005 in our living rooms. If we must watch artificial men, we may as well give our thumbs a workout.

Just to be clear, I would rather that what Mr. Kern says here were true, but I doubt it. An interesting test case is the film The Natural, a rare case where the movie improves on the book. The cinematic Roy Hobbs is unambiguously heroic, but he has both physical and technological (or perhaps magical) advantages. He is in the first instance a physical freak, a "natural," unlike the rest of us. Secondly, he achieves his prodigious feats with a bat carved out of a tree that was struck by lightning, Wonderboy, and then, when that one finally breaks, with a replacement that a young acolyte has fashioned. When we're watching though we have no, or little, inclination to disparage his heroism.

Maybe it's the case that we just don't require, nor particularly expect, heroes to be average men. This does make it all the sweeter when a Lenny Skutnick or a NYC firefighter or the passengers on Flight 93 or even a Kirk Gibson in the World Series behaves heroically, but that additional gloss may suggest that such depart the norm of heroism.

At any rate, by all means ban performance enhancing drugs, but it's probably unlikely that kids will view Barry Bonds with too jaundiced eyes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 23, 2004 11:33 AM