It is hard to overstate the phenomenon that was "The Bird," though plenty of media will make the effort. I think younger people will have a hard time understanding all the gushing over Fidrych, because unfortunately they haven't ever seen anything like him--an athlete who played, in the truest sense of the word.
It wasn't just a job for Fidrych, and though he put on a show, by all accounts it wasn't an act. He really enjoyed what he did. He wasn't cutting an opponent's throat, or humiliating them, or cheating, or aggrandizing himself for profit. He just played a game to the best of his ability, and his ability was rare. "He could throw a baseball through a keyhole from 60 feet," is how one competitor remembers it.
I had a conversation with Filip Bondy of the Daily News not long ago about the lack of playfulness among modern athletes. He lamented the departure of the Mets' Pedro Martinez, who had fun with the press and the fans, and knew never to take things too seriously, best exemplified, of course, when he was asked how he'd pitch to Babe Ruth: "I'd drill him in the ass."
Those kinds of quotes are as rare as the Bird nowadays, replaced by the premasticated mumblings of a class of people who (publicly anyway) want nothing to do with fun. It's what we've sown by turning kid athletes into de facto professionals before they turn 12, with every public utterance purposely boring, a la Jordan or Tiger or Tom Brady, or purposefully, and artificially, "outrageous," a la Terrell Owens and Bill Romanowski. In both approaches lie the same goal--to be marketed, or to use one of the dreariest words of the age, "monetized."
Maybe, as we enter a time more like the 1970s, another era where Mammon failed us, the monetization of the self will no longer be the paramount goal of life. And maybe the monetization of sports will be seen for the boring, joyless pursuit that it's become.
