Athletes will always be models of excellence

Sports Illustrated journalist Frank Deford says our current obsession with athletes is no different than the American culture's age-old fascination with all heroic figures. PROVIDENCE

Friday, March 3rd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Sports Illustrated journalist Frank Deford says our current obsession with athletes is no different than the American culture's age-old fascination with all heroic figures.

PROVIDENCE -- In his years as a journalist for Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford has been asked two questions more than any others: First, why are there swimsuits in a sports magazine? Secondly, why don't we have sports heroes like the ones we had when we were kids?

Deford put the first question aside last night and took time to eloquently address the more pressing issue in his lecture on ``The Athlete as Hero in American Culture'' at the 20th annual Providence Journal/Brown University Public Affairs Conference, ``Sport: Is it only a Game?''

Society's current obsession with athletes is no different, he said, than the American culture's age-old fascination with all heroic figures, whom we look to in times of unrest or insecurity.

``The more we become an egghead society, the more we are beholden to technology, most of which none of us really understands, the more appealing athletes are,'' said Deford, who has been cited as the nation's finest sportswriter by the American Journalism Review and has twice been voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review. ``They simply achieve physically as human beings. Is there any better, more evocative term than `natural athlete?' ''

Though some claim that the phenomenon of viewing professional athletes as heroes is relatively new, ``Sports heroes are not new to America,'' Deford said. In actuality, they have been revered for more than a century.
During the post-war period of the 1920s, also known as the ``Golden Age of Sport,'' writers gave athletes ``epic treatment,'' Deford said. Sportswriter Grantland Rice, for example, described a group of football players at Notre Dame as the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Athletes such as Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and Jack Dempsey came along at a time, said Deford, when ``there were feelings of powerlessness, and as society became more complicated and systematized, there was a need for heroes who could leap to fame and fortune outside the rules of the system.''

Over the years, sports heroes have taken many different forms and have often served to break through social barriers.

Deford cited athletes, such as Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, who championed the rights of African Americans. Tennis great Billie Jean King helped change society's attitudes toward women. Arthur Ashe not only helped cross racial barriers, said Deford, he also raised awareness about AIDs, the disease from which he died.

The late Yankee Joe Dimaggio's grace on the baseball diamond, said Deford, debunked the harsh stereotypes not only of Italians, but all Southern European immigrants.

The contention that today's sports heroes are seen as more flawed and less honorable than their predecessors, said Deford, may have more to do with the way society now scrutinizes the lives of professional athletes.

``We examine them so much, carefully peering into their private lives,'' he said, ``that it becomes more and more difficult for anybody to seem heroic.''

Deford said he also feels that too many times today, people confuse being a celebrity with being a hero, which he said, ``is akin to calling someone an intellectual who wins big on Who Wants to be a Millionaire .''

The bottom line, said Deford, is that society, as it has done for decades, will continue to look up to athletes as models of excellence: ``I think the reason we have sports heroes is because sports is the last part of our world that may be heroic, and perhaps even more importantly, that we want to be heroic.

``If the guys who wield baseball bats or tennis rackets are not quite up to the standards of the giants who strode the earth with sabers flashing or hand grenades in their teeth, or if they merely dunk basketballs or sink putts instead of signing the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence, nonetheless, our heroes are ours. They're what we dream of at this moment in time, and they're who we want to be.''