GUIDE | The Reluctant Fanatic
IN A WORLD WITHOUT HEROES
It’s been a while since professional sports stars could be role models. That’s changing. BY NICHOLAS HUNE-BROWN • ILLUSTRATION BY DAN RAFTIS
FOR A BRIEF BUT FORMATIVE PERIOD— shortly after I had stopped idolizing Gobo the Fraggle, but before I knew about Billy Corgan—I was fairly certain Thurman Thomas was the greatest individual to ever tread the earth. The Buffalo Bills running back was a genius in the backfield, the hero of the not-quite-good-enough football team that broke my young heart four times in a row in the early ’90s. There he was on Sunday afternoons, juke-stepping linebackers and careening off the secondary, breaking records and leading off the sports reports that were beamed into my Toronto living room from television stations across the border. To an eight-year-old doomed to love the Bills, it was simple and straightforward: he was a hero. 72 SHARPFORMEN.COM / MAY 2014
A kid’s hero worship of a sports star is a specific kind of love. You love your parents, you love your sister, maybe you have some nascent lust for your babysitter, but the adulation for a muscled stranger, some adult man you’ve never met, is a strange new thing. When you idolize an athlete, you don’t just want to hang out with him; you want to become him. You imagine yourself as Wendel Clark—your consciousness somehow transplanted into his 200-pound body—scoring the game-winning goal in game seven of the Stanley Cup finals. You emulate your hero’s every move, wearing your jersey half-tucked like Gretzky, jogging around the playground with your tongue hanging out like Jordan. You try to know everything there is to know about him, memorizing his stats, watching his replays, in a bid to somehow eliminate the distance