Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993 TAG: 9312260100
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A brutal year of goodbyes, shock and tears. Always the question: why?
Arthur Ashe thought about that question while dying last winter.
"Quite often, people who mean well will inquire of me whether I ever ask myself, in the face of my diseases, `Why me?' I never do," Ashe wrote in his aptly titled memoir, "Days of Grace."
"If I ask `Why me?' as I am assaulted by heart disease and AIDS, I must ask, `Why me?' about my blessings, and question my right to enjoy them. The morning after I won Wimbledon in 1975, I should have asked, `Why me?' and doubted that I deserved the victory. If I don't ask, `Why me?' after my victories, I cannot ask, `Why me?' after my setbacks and disasters."
And so it is useless to ask "Why them?" for all the others.
Reggie Lewis, Drazen Petrovic, Steve Olin, Tim Crews, Cliff Young, Davey Allison, Alan Kulwicki, Zambia's national soccer team, Heather Farr, Jayson Gwinn and Jeff Alm.
Death seems so unfair when it claims the young, one moment vibrant, the next gone. Victims of bizarre accidents, terminal diseases, sudden attacks and suicide. Every month a tragedy.
Monica Seles stabbed on a Ashe tennis court in Germany, lucky she wasn't killed. James Jordan slain and dumped in a Carolina creek, his son Michael giving up pro basketball two months later. NBA rookie Bobby Hurley smashed broadside in his truck, barely alive when witnesses found him in a drainage ditch.
What depth of despondency made Alm, a Houston Oilers defensive lineman, shoot himself in the head after wrecking his car in a crash that killed his best friend?
"Sport does not happen in a vacuum," said teammate Spencer Tillman. "This is happening in society at large. When you don't know how to cope, then tragic things happen."
Sport once was an escape. Joy was winning, heartache was losing. Nothing too serious, right? Not in this year of sorrow.
This year even the vivacious spirit of Jim Valvano succumbed to cancer.
Voices, memories, "Jimmy V" wisecracking to the end, broadcasting a basketball game one second, cursing his cancer the next. Nearly every sentence he ever spoke took exclamation points.
Yet, he came to wonder why he ever cared, whether he'd wasted his life coaching, why he bothered going to games anymore, why he studied all those stats, meaningless little numbers and minutiae about youngsters he didn't know.
One day it hit him when he read in a book by a British writer: "That is why athletics are important. They demonstrate the scope of human possibility, which is unlimited. The inconceivable is conceived, and then it is accomplished."
"That's it!" Valvano cried. "That's why we strive! That's the value of sports! All those games, they mean nothing - and they mean everything!"
Take any of the great moments of the year. Maybe Dallas romping in the Super Bowl. North Carolina beating Michigan in the harried closing seconds at the Final Four. The Chicago Bulls celebrating a third consecutive NBA title. Greg Norman shaking past failures to win golf's British Open. Joe Carter bounding around the bases like a kid after his bottom-of-the-ninth homer won the World Series for Toronto.
Linger over the last games of Nolan Ryan, George Brett and, perhaps, Michael Jordan. Look at all the grand events on the fields and courts, race tracks and boxing rings.
In the context of the year's catastrophes, they meant nothing - and they meant everything.
An 18-foot bass boat slammed into a dock in the darkness of Little Lake Nellie near Orlando, Fla., on March 22, killing Cleveland Indians pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin, and very nearly killing teammate Bob Ojeda.
A picnic, fishing, a day away from spring training. A few beers. Darkness and disaster. Widows, children, teammates left behind to grieve.
Ten days later, near Bristol, Tenn., NASCAR driver Alan Kulwicki, the 1992 Winston Cup champion, died with four others in the crash of a private plane.
All the risks Kulwicki had taken on race tracks, all the dangers he had accepted in his job, and then this.
Remember how Kulwicki celebrated his championship? The fun he had, driving backward around the oval at Atlanta Motor Speedway for what he called a "Polish victory lap."
So happy, so proud, so deserving. And usually so serious. The ultimate underdog, running his own team on a shoestring budget. Mighty Mouse on his uniform. Ford Thunderbirds he called "Underbirds."
He finally had everything, only all too briefly.
And still the dying wouldn't stop.
Davey Allison, Kulwicki's rival throughout that championship campaign, crashed in July while trying to land a helicopter in the infield at Talladega (Ala.) Speedway - his beloved "home" track.
The easy smile and warm personality, Allison on the verge of greatness. Davey. Bobby's second son to die, 11 months after young Clifford.
Bobby, recovering himself from a near-fatal brain injury suffered in a wreck at Pocono International Raceway in 1988, took it hard.
"If I get killed in a race car," Davey had said calmly and thoughtfully two years ago, "I'm going to die with a smile on my face."
That was before his car flipped 11 times at Pocono in July 1992 and he escaped with a broken right arm and collarbone and a fractured and dislocated wrist. And it was before Clifford died in a stock car crash during practice at the Michigan International Speedway.
Now the Allisons, the survivors, gathered for Davey's funeral with friends. And again the question no one could answer: why?
"It is beyond my comprehension," said Mario Andretti, patriarch of another racing clan. "If ever there was goodness in anyone, it is in that family. The whole family. They are the example of goodness."
If goodness exempted people from death, they all would be alive.
Drazen Petrovic was a national hero in Croatia, a leader of its Olympic silver-medal basketball team, a budding star for the NBA's New Jersey Nets when he died as a passenger in a car crash on a rain-slickened German autobahn June 7.
"I can only remember him as a happy kid, smiling, wanting to win and playing the game he loved," said Chuck Daly, the Nets' coach.
The Nets retired Petrovic's number in November in a ceremony attended by his former Croatia teammate Dino Radja, now with the Boston Celtics.
"It stays with you for a very long time," said Radja, who was with Petrovic in Frankfurt an hour before the accident. "I can still see him at the airport, waving goodbye. We told him we would see him tomorrow at a team meeting, but we never saw him again."
And as Croatia mourned Petrovic, Boston also mourned after Celtics captain Reggie Lewis suffered a fatal heart attack seven weeks later while he shot baskets at Brandeis University.
Boston had been torn by racial incidents for years, but the death of Lewis united millions in grief.
"Isn't it amazing that here in conservative, staid New England, this soft-spoken, gentle young man from Baltimore had to leave us before we could feel it was OK to say that we love each other and care for each other?" said Dave Gavitt, the Celtics' chief executive officer, in his eulogy.
The sense of unfairness, of life taken too soon, touched everyone. Some wanted to fix blame on doctors or on Lewis, as if that would make it easier to accept. Hadn't he collapsed in a first-round playoff game against the Charlotte Hornets three months earlier? Hadn't doctors warned him to stay away from basketball? Hadn't one of the doctors given him an overly optimistic prognosis?
"It's not like Reggie was in a car accident," said former teammate Kevin McHale. "The real tragedy is that right now we should be sitting around saying, `Reggie has a pacemaker and can't play basketball, and that's really sad.' Instead, we have to sit and mourn him."
Blame didn't help. Life and games went on. And this year, so did the casualties.
Cliff Young, another Cleveland pitcher, was trying to light a cigarette while driving a truck in the early evening of Nov. 4 near his hometown of Willis, Texas. He wasn't wearing a seat belt. The truck swerved off the road, struck a tree, and Young was thrown halfway through the sunroof. Just that quickly he died. A passenger wearing a seat belt survived with minor cuts.
And once again the Indians had to deal with the pain of losing a member of the family.
"I had that same heart-wrenching feeling of sorrow and helplessness," said general manager John Hart, thinking back to Little Lake Nellie during spring training. "We are looking forward to calendar year 1993 going away. You just shake your head and you wonder, `Why is this happening?' "
The haunting, unanswerable question.
Why did the plane go down with nearly the entire Zambian national soccer team, leaving that poor nation to grieve for its only sports stars?
Why did golfer Heather Farr, a young woman of grace and spiritual strength, have to die of cancer in November? She inspired so many with her courage, her will to battle through surgery after surgery.
"You go through life, especially as an athlete, thinking you're doing all the right things with your body," Farr said after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1989. "You never expect this to happen. You may get into a car wreck or something, but you don't expect your body to go haywire. This just shows it can happen to anybody."
Anybody, anytime. A world of randomness, ruled by chance or circumstances beyond our control.
Keywords:
YEAR 1993
by CNB