Alright. So I probably shouldn’t have posted what I did. I knew it would get a reaction. I wasn’t trolling or anything, but I totally wasn’t getting the hero worship in all this. Yes, it’s premature and tragic, but the reaction seemed so disproportionate, and my remark was a reminder that maybe, just maybe, people were being a bit over the top. While he was cut down in the prime of his life, it was after his legacy as a ball player was firmly established and his career had ended. That is how people knew him— as a ball player. And that’s how they viewed him. So we weren’t deprived of him playing at all. We weren’t even really deprived of him as a public figure. His family was deprived of their father, which is the tragedy to me (not to mention the lives of others lost).
The reaction would be more understandable to me if this were a Roberto Clemente type of deal where he was killed while still playing and on a humanitarian mission. In today’s age— with mass media of all sorts— I guess we should expect more of these reactions. To me, I’m hit more in the gut when a musician dies, though the ones who affect me are the ones who have lived their lives and made decades of music to be remembered by. David Bowie would be a recent example for me. That is more tangible to me than fleeting sports moments, but to each his own.
As for tags and things, I’ve posted exclusively from Tapatalk for probably a year and a half now. If you can tag with Tapatalk, then it’s lost on me. I didn’t do any rape tags, and certainly didn’t do any shitty racist tags, although I didn’t see any of those either. Can’t the mods see who tagged?
