I’ve been thinking about heroes a lot lately and I’ve wanted to find one to write about. I guess my soul needs an inspirational lift from time to time and my spirit needs to share it. Sports, of course, is loaded with acts of heroism, but finding heroes is a harder proposition. Peeling back the pages of the sports section, one is just as likely to find the worst in human nature as the best.
Perhaps it’s my skeptical nature or perhaps it’s that the lights and cameras of the electronic age shine too brightly on sports figures, revealing the unpolished human side. But when I was growing up, there seemed to be plenty of sports stars worthy of my emulation, yet today I can’t think of many I would want my sons to emulate.
As if to emphasize my point about yesterday’s heroes, I attended a special screening recently of “Pride of the Yankees” at Avery Fisher Hall. And there in glorious black and white was Gary Cooper playing Lou Gehrig before an audience filled with celebrities who, for all I knew, came looking for the same thing: a hero to remember and appreciate. OK, “Pride” is an overly sentimental version of Gehrig’s story, but no one disputes that Gehrig was a real hero whose enormous baseball talent was only a thin slice of his substance. By all realistic accounts, Gehrig was a man of confident sobriety who served on Murderers’ Row as the antidote to the excesses of Babe Ruth. On the field he was the Bambino’s protégé, but off the field he was the professor who taught a generation about work ethic and dignity.
Last week was the 65th anniversary of the speech he gave at Yankee Stadium when he described amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) as a “bad break.” Facing certain death, he said, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
It’s not easy to find that kind of hero in any age, so perhaps I was a little harsh on this one. But a few days after the screening, as if by some cosmic coincidence, I heard from Jim Warsaw, a pioneer in sports business who has battled Parkinson’s disease for more than 10 years. He told me how happy he was to be back with his family in Newport Beach, Calif., after a four-day stay in a Boston hospital. It was a private letter, not intended for publication, so I hope he doesn’t mind me taking this liberty, but he wrote that he was “blessed and lucky to be in the position I am right now.”
Perhaps it lacked Gehrig’s eloquence and the circumstances were not as dramatic, but here was a man who in the face of horrible disease wrote about his “huge personal reward in learning to manage my life with optimism, a positive attitude [while] having fun and being passionate about causes in which I believe.”
One cause is finding a cure for Parkinson’s, to which Warsaw devotes enormous time and resources. Another is his dedication to young people, particularly those in sports business. He sold his company, Sports Specialties, the NFL’s first licensee, to Nike 11 years ago, and founded the sports-business program at the University of Oregon that bears his name. The Warsaw school is now among the best sports-business programs in the country. Yet, he doesn’t talk about the school as much as the kids who attend. He says they are driven to create a better industry with a greater sense of social responsibility. “The ability to share, mentor and create opportunity for the next generation of leaders in our business is a thrill for me.”
Like Gehrig’s, Warsaw’s spirit refuses to be defeated. He might not have lent his name to a disease, but for more than a decade he has been an Iron Man for his causes while continually hitting home runs for students.
John Genzale (jgenzale@nyc.rr.com) is founding editor of SportsBusiness Journal.
