It happens to everybody, at least those of us who are fortunate to be gifted with a life free of serious illness or injury. At some point, we get old. But, just like in the Letters to the Editor in the old Penthouse Forums, I never thought that it would happen to me. However, even though I live in my own little solipsistic world, the real world continues to turn around me. Two things happened in the past few days to remind me just how old I am, and maybe just how out of touch with reality I’ve always been.
The first thing that rocked me to the core was the death of Dave Henderson. Unless you’re an obsessive-compulsive baseball fan with a long memory, you might not remember the man known as “Hendu” who patrolled the outfield for the Bash Brothers-era Oakland A’s. His lifetime stats were fairly ordinary—lifetime batting average of .258, 197 career home runs—but he was one of the key pieces on a team that should have been remembered as one of the great dynasties of all time. Hendu was the man responsible for moving Rickey Henderson along the basepaths so that Rickey could ultimately be driven in by Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco. He might have been the slowest centerfielder in the majors, but he always seemed to be in the right place to make the right play at the right time.
He also hit what many consider to be the most clutch homerun in postseason history. Watch:
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QOyhcIZQzo’]
That’s what Sport is supposed to be, right there. First of all—did Al Michaels call every important sporting event of the last forty years, or does it just seem like it? What a great call. Next, look at the elation on Henderson’s face. Look at the disgust on Donnie Moore’s. Most sportswriters this week, when memorializing Hendu, have glossed over the fact that Moore, the pitcher who gave up that long ball, ultimately may have committed suicide because of it. Friends and family say that he was just never the same after that moment. How many of us have a moment in our lives like Henderson’s—or like Moore’s, for that matter?
Henderson was drafted in the year I was born—1977. He died at the age of fifty-seven. How is that possible that he was fifty-seven? As far as I know, Dave Henderson is still immortalized in the 1988 Score Baseball Card Box Set, frozen forever at the age of thirty, a full eight years younger than I am now. But a funny thing happened between 1988 and now. It’s called time. The A’s of McGwire and Canseco are now just as distant a memory as the ’61 Yankees of Maris and Mantle were in 1988—exactly twenty-seven years ago. How is that possible?
My heroes weren’t supposed to age. They weren’t supposed to grow old and weak. They definitely, absolutely, positively, were never supposed to die. As I’ve grown older, I realize now that I’ve watched the careers of many athletes begin and end. When I was a kid, Don Mattingly had played baseball forever, and he was going to play baseball forever. It never occurred to me that someday, these men who I had frozen in time in the posters on the walls of my room—McGwire, Canseco, Dave Winfield, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan—that they’d someday be just as old and dead as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and George Mikan and Y.A. Tittle (what? Y.A. Tittle isn’t dead?).
I loved Hendu. I loved Dave Parker, Carney Lansford, Walt Weiss, Dave Stewart, Bob Welch (who has also passed away), Dennis Eckersley, Rickey Henderson—all of them. I knew them inside and out. I knew where they’d played their minor league ball, I knew their lifetime stats—everything. For some reason, a kid from Dublin, Ohio, was mesmerized by the swagger I saw from a team that played thousands of miles away from me. My friends and I bashed our forearms together when we played down at the park. I practiced so that, someday, I could have the same legendary stare that Dave Stewart had underneath his worn, curled-up brim of his cap from the mound.
Now one of them is dead. I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but it does.
The second thing to gut punch me this week was this Junkyard Find on TTAC. I owned that car. Well, not that car—mine was a six-speed manual, not an automatic, and I didn’t have the tasteful “RX-8” stickers on the front fenders—but I bought a 2004 RX-8, brand-new off of the showroom floor at Jake Sweeney Mazda in Cincinnati. It was the first new car that I bought all by myself, with no parent co-signer required. I paid about $22,500 for a car that stickered for just north of $30k, thanks to some end-of-model-year rebates and some deep dealer discounts. I loved that car. I talked about it non-stop. I think it was slightly slower than a modern V6 Impala from zero-to-sixty, but, man, it could handle. It was perfectly balanced. It looked oh-so-JDM. I was twenty-six years old, I was managing the number two T-Mobile store in the whole country, and I had the world on a string, thanks to my dream car in my garage.
Oh, yes, it also blew up.
In 2008, I took it to the first autocross of the season for the Central Kentucky Region. I had just moved to Lexington from Cincinnati, and I was excited to meet some new friends. The RX-8 was the king of B Stock in those days, and some of the local MR2 Turbo and E36 M3 drivers were none too pleased to see a new entrant in their class. At the end of my first run, I put my foot down to accelerate toward the finish…and nothing happened. When I got back to my grid spot, I revved up the motor to see if something was wrong, and white smoke filled the air. I had blown a seal inside the motor, approximately two thousand miles short of the 50K powertrain warranty. Mazda picked up the car from the autocross, with the Hoosiers still on it, and replaced the engine under warranty. I swore that I’d be a Mazda man for life after that. I haven’t bought another Mazda since. Funny thing, life.
And now my dream car is showing up in junkyards with some regularity. It makes me sad. It makes me feel like that part of my life, that youthful exuberance, that version of me that existed before I had children and real bills and responsibilities—that part of me is somewhere in a junkyard, too. I’m coming up on my fortieth birthday soon. How did that happen?
It’s easy to see how the midlife crisis can play out. These things, these memories, these icons…they all fade. They all die. And, yes, someday, so must I. So it makes sense to want to go back to those easier, more innocent times of our youth, even our young adulthood.
But the secret lies somewhere in the experiences, doesn’t it? And you can never duplicate those days gone by, no matter how hard you might try. Even if you duplicate the circumstance, the perpsective is ultimately different. My experiences, my filters, and my careabouts are all much, much different as a thirty-eight year old father of two, and that’s a good thing. I’ll never be as excited with the purchase of any new car as I was the day that I left the lot in my Sunlight Silver RX-8. I’ll never care as deeply about a professional baseball team as I did about the Oakland A’s.
I do care greatly, however, about the U9 FC Kentucky boys’ soccer team and the U6 Winchester Soccer League Titans. I am proud to buckle my kids into the back seat of our Ford Flex every day. And that’s something that twenty-six-year-old Bark could never have understood.
Yes, I’m old, and yes, I’m getting older. Heroes die, posessions crumble. But I’m genuinely looking forward to learning the things that thirty-eight-year-old Bark could never understand.