The common wisdom had it that the
Wall Street Journal, my estimable former employer, hired as reporters people
steeped in financial knowledge, the better to negotiate the subject’s
complexities. The common wisdom was wrong.
I was
Exhibit A in that regard. I don’t know what the paper is doing now, but when I
was signed on in 1963 as a 25-year-old I was as green as they came
businesswise, not knowing a stock from a bond. When I expressed anxiety about
my deficiencies I was told not to worry, that if I kept my eyes and ears open
I’d pick up what I needed.
Business and finance were merely “subject
matter,” a senior colleague assured me then, and no harder to learn than any of
the myriad other things journalists are called upon to cover. If one has the reportorial
essentials—mainly curiosity, a low tolerance for B.S. and a willingness to
pester people with unwelcome questions—the world would yield up its mysteries,
or at least some of them, he said.
He was right and I happily spent
years as a general-assignment reporter, writing about subjects as varied as
business (of course), education, high fashion and theoretical physics. When I
turned my hand to fulltime sports columnizing beginning in 1983 I felt no qualms
about competing with men who had far more seniority than I on my new beat.
Sports, after all, were just another subject, and in many ways not much
different from what I’d been doing. Indeed, on some of the stories I dealt with,
I thought my broad background gave me a leg up against people whose main
concern always had been with who was on, or in, first.
A couple such stories have been in
the news in recent weeks, and although they’ve been covered mostly on the
sports pages they really weren’t about sports. I refer to the ones involving Manti Te’o, the
Notre Dame football hero with the dead imaginary girlfriend, and Caleb Moore,
the snowmobiler whose death in an ESPN “X Games” stunt enthralled and appalled
television viewers. Both were more about human nature and the way we live than
about wins, losses or anything else that usually takes place on our fields of
play. As such, they’ve pretty much been butchered by the people who’ve spoken
or written about them.
For sheer strangeness, few recent
stories have topped that of Te’o. It
seems that the Hawaiian linebacker carried on a two-year online and telephonic
affair with an island woman whom he came to regard as his girlfriend even
though they’d never met. When he was told she’d died of leukemia on the same
day last September as did his grandmother he duly informed news-media folk, and
earned props for soldiering on in the face of adversity. That narrative gave a push to his strong Heisman
Award candidacy, the first for a Domer in many years.
It turned out that the girlfriend
never lived—that she was the invention of a warped, male “family friend” of
Te’o’s who’d spoken and typed her lines-- but after he learned this Te’o kept it
to himself as Heisman announcement day came and went. Thus, when the hoax
became public he was vilified. Indeed, for a couple of weeks last month you
couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on a TV set without hearing him mocked and
denounced, and in a national poll by the website of the business magazine
Forbes, which probably should concern itself with more-serious matters, he was
voted the second “most disliked” American athlete, behind only the serial
cheater and liar Lance Armstrong.
My first reaction to the flap was
that it was wildly overblown, that while Te’o was an imposing lump of muscle he
also was a young man of 22 subject to all the limitations of his tender years.
I certainly wouldn’t like to see all the dumb things I did and said at 22 (or later)
broadcast coast-to-coast. Further, his failure to leap to set the record
straight about the matter is easily ascribable to his reluctance to look the
fool. My guess is that he thought that if he kept his mouth shut the thing
would go away, an error he’s shared with many older celebrities including a
President or two. Give the kid a break, for chrissakes!
Upon reflection, however, I began
to wonder how unusual was the crux of the story, which was that someone could become
so enmeshed in a so-called “virtual” relationship that he could come to regard
it as real. This, after all, is the
digital age, when people boast they have hundreds of online “friends” even
though they’ve never met most of them, and when it’s not uncommon to see a
group of people sitting together around a restaurant table totally engrossed in
their own, hand-held electronic devices.
One of my pet peeves is being
waited on in a store and having the salesperson be diverted by a phone call and
transferring his or her entire attention to the caller. To some, any jangling phone or streaming text
line is more compelling than a live human being, no matter how close. Fess
up--you may be one of them.
Caleb Moore’s tale was, of course, more tragic
than Te’o’s, but no less misinterpreted. It was treated widely as an anomaly—something
that’s unexpected and out of place. In
fact, the kind of mishap that killed him was the logical consequence of his
activity and inevitably will occur again.
Further, and more importantly,
daredevilry is not the exclusive province of such high-risk sports as auto and
motorcycle racing, downhill skiing and the entire “X Games” schedule (the “X”
is short for “extreme,” as in “extremely dangerous”) but is evidenced more
often in the ordinary work of the likes of police officers, fire fighters and
combat soldiers, occupations pursued by millions. When most people hear gunfire
they run away from it, but the cop or soldier runs toward it. Good thing, too; such people are necessary for
our protection individually and as a society.
That risk seekers are different from you and
me is obvious, but for reasons rarely investigated. Something I once read
explains it nicely: they are anhedonic, which means they’re unable to experience
pleasure in ordinary ways. While most
people find ample delight in, say, a ballgame or a corned beef sandwich, for
psychological or chemical reasons others need a real kick to get their juices
flowing. This, by the way, also explains why people will take up with dangerous
recreational drugs with the full knowledge that they could be their downfall.
A daredevil like the 25-year-old Moore does
what he does because of the danger involved, not in spite of it. He said as
much in an interview with the New York Times given shortly before his crash.
Recalling the first time he did the fatal stunt as a 19-year-old, a full
backflip off a ramp on a 500-pound machine, he said “it was the most exciting
moment of my life¸ and the most heart-pounding, too.”
Minutes after Caleb Moore’s
accident—while he was en route to the hospital—his 23-year-old brother Colton,
also an “X Games” snowmobiler, tried the same trick on the same ramp. He wound
up in the hospital with a separated pelvis. Released a day later, after Caleb
had died, Colton said he’d be back in action as soon as he was able.
