Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 7, 1995 TAG: 9509070097
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
As Ripken himself noted, this has not been like any of the more dramatic quests for new records, involving home runs hit or games won. This record for consecutive games played embodies the heroism of showing up, of doing a job faithfully, of taking one's daily tasks seriously, of being at least good enough to stay in the game a long time.
It is a record almost out of sync with the times, which demand quick cuts, telegenic moments, a constant supply of new ``heroes'' and a large quotient of self-promotion. Ripken broke the record on Wednesday by walking onto the field silently and standing in the same place he has stood hundreds of times before.
Surely this could not have happened at a better time for baseball. Last year's strike challenged the loyalty of millions of fans and broke it entirely for many in their ranks. The strike saw most baseball owners acting as if they owned this national institution, which they do not, and could thus treat it purely in profit-and-loss terms.
When it mattered, most of the owners didn't care a whit about all the local loyalties and traditions that baseball's business managers milked cynically and shamelessly when it served their purposes. Fans felt they had been treated like fools, and of course, they were right.
Ripken, as Heywood Hale Broun noted in the New York Times, is a wonderful counter to all this. He played his whole career with one team, the Baltimore Orioles, embodying the sort of loyalty that has mostly been the province of the fans. He is also, as Broun pointed out, ``quiet and self-effacing'' and is ``by no means among the highest-paid members of the profession.'' If the owners and the players had wanted to invent an antidote to their image problems, they would have invented Cal Riken (though they probably couldn't have agreed to do so even if the life of the game depended on it).
It should not be said, however, that Ripken is just some schlep who played a lot of games. On the contrary, he demonstrates something almost ignored in our celebrity-saturated culture: that you can be loyal, methodical, quietly principled and still achieve - to use the popular word - excellence. As fine a description of Ripken's enormous skills as you'll find is in George Will's book, ``Men at Work.''
Will took to task the authors of the 1988 edition of ``The Elias Baseball Analyst'' who described Ripken's consecutive games streak as ``a record of will, not skill.'' This, as Will insisted, misunderstood both will and skill. ``Skills must be willed into action by an intensity that does not well up spontaneously,'' he wrote. ``Such intensity must be cultivated.'' At a more prosaic level, Ripken simply would not have hung around the major leagues long enough to break this record had he not been both hugely talented and consistent.
Will reminds us that the argument about whether Ripken's achievement is a victory of the ordinary or of the extraordinary may be misplaced. The consistent application of ordinary virtues is in itself extraordinary. Some skills may be innate, but greatness is not; it is achieved. In the case of the record Ripken has broken, the achievement itself cannot be written off as a fluke, the product of a single hot and lucky year. It is the creation of long and patient struggle involving nearly as many defeats as victories and the transformation of routine into an art.
Sports arouse interest for many intrinsic reasons, but they are also, especially in the present day, a primary source for parables. My hunch is that as time goes on, it is the ordinariness of Ripken's triumph that will loom largest.
Our era does not lack for examples that glorify the brilliant, the celebrated, the lone achiever, the entrepreneurial, the short-term risk taker, the adventurer. These we see in the papers and on television every day.
But such figures are far removed from the kind of heroism that most of us are called upon to strive for - the heroism of loyalty and commitment, of steady work, of the painstaking perfection of skills, of effort in the face of difficulty.
For that reason, my other guess is that Ripken will not be a figure of nostalgia, the last in the line of a certain kind of public hero. On the contrary, the cult of Ripken - surely it will now grow - reflects a desire to glorify a different set of public values from the ones to which we've grown accustomed lately.
You might think of Ripken as embodying (in a nonparty sense) the democratic virtues, as against the virtues of aristocracy, celebrity or instant success. Ripken's message is that working hard doesn't make you a chump, that loyalty can be requited, that treating the people around you with respect ennobles, that the act of meeting ordinary, daily demands can transform itself into an extraordinary achievement.
Some argued that in a supreme act of self-effacement, Ripken should have contented himself with tying Gehrig's record and taking Wednesday off in tribute to the ``Iron Man.'' This was a terrible idea. If any era ever needed a hero of this sort, it's ours. The best way for Ripken to honor Gehrig is to keep embodying the virtues both of them preached through example.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
- The Washington Post
by CNB