Alll my life, I have been a huge sports fan and participant. When I was growing up, I always thought the toughest decision for me was going to be just which professional sport I was going to play. (Full disclosure: I've ended up as an accountant.) Yet I got so much from the (mostly team) sports I played and I continue to play.
Many of my heroes have been the men who play these sports. And I always feel a disproportionate amount of sadness when one of these heroes is cut down too early in life. I remember hearing of the deaths of Thurman Munson, Len Bias, Pelle Lindbergh, and even those I've never watched like Chucky Mullins and feeling a level of sadness that doesn't always make sense.
The death of Pat Tillman hit me especially hard. I didn't follow his career particularly closely and have no particular connection to ASU or the Arizona Cardinals. But what I did know (that he was a professional football player walking away at the peak of his career to do what he felt was the right thing), made me respect him a great deal. And so when he was killed, it hit me that much harder. Pat Tillman was one of the good guys. And he was taken from this world far too early.
On si.com, there is a tribute to Pat Tillman, told in large part through the eyes of someone who served with him. I don't know how much of it is new information for those who have followed the story closely. But I do know that it is a fitting tribute and one that makes me feel like the loss I felt for this man that I never met and knew very little about was justified.
Pat just had that way, with colonels and coaches and Nobel Prize winners, too, of slicing through rank and reputation, of turning every encounter into nothing more or less than two human beings talking. Hell, the guy introduced himself to strangers simply as "Pat," and if they asked what he did before strapping it on for Uncle Sam, he'd say he studied some back at Arizona State and quickly ask about them, never mentioning the summa cum laude or the Pac-10 defensive player of the year award, and certainly not the NFL. And still, something about him made you walk away wanting to learn more, laugh more, run more, give more.
Who else showed up in a college assistant coach's office at 1 a.m., asking what he thought of Mormonism with such zest that both ended up reading the Book of Mormon so they could discuss it in detail? Who else in the NFL or the U.S. Army took a book everywhere, even on 10-minute errands, read The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Bible and the Koran, so he could carve out his own convictions ... then bought you the book and picked a philosophical fight just to flush out some viewpoint that might push him to revise his, push him to evolve? Gays, for instance. By the last few years of his life, his narrow view of them as an adolescent had so altered that he would argue they were the most evolved form of man.
I don't want to be presumptuous and claim him as one of us. The article points out that he was never easy to put into a predetermined box. But it seems like he shared a lot of the values held by most here.
You didn't talk politics over there, not while you were still in the sandbox. But that night, as Pat watched another orange and white flash-bang shudder the distant town, he shook his head and said, "This war is so f------ illegal." Russ, for the first time, realized how wobbly a tightrope Pat was walking between his integrity and his duty. Even later in their 3 1/2-month deployment in Iraq, as it began to appear that they'd been sent on a nukes-and-biochemical-weapons wild-goose chase, Russ never heard Pat go further than, "This is all bulls---." But surely Pat's fame and fierce independence had unsettled higher-ups from the day he enlisted. They had tried to persuade him to be a recruiting poster boy in Washington rather than a Ranger. Surely, one family member was convinced, once the Army got its first glimpse of Pat's psychological profile -- he was the one who stood outside the Cardinals' team prayer circle, the one who couldn't wait to have a mutual friend arrange a meeting with renowned anti-war leftist Noam Chomsky after his discharge -- it never would have allowed him to become a Ranger if it hadn't had to because he was Pat Tillman.
Above all, Pat Tillman believed in personal accountability. He had no sense of entitlement.
Everybody who thought he'd enlisted purely out of patriotism, they missed reality by a half mile. Sure, he loved America and felt compelled to fight for it after more than 2,600 people at the World Trade Center were turned to dust. But his decision sprang from soil so much richer than that. The foisting of all the dirty work onto people less fortunate than an NFL safety clawed at his ethics. He had uncles and grandfathers on both sides who'd fought in World War II and the Korean War, one who'd taken a bullet in his chest, another who'd lost a finger and one who'd been the last to leap out of a plane shot from the sky. On a level deeper than almost any other American, he'd reaped the reward of those sacrifices: the chance his country afforded him to be himself, all of himself.
I've quoted a fair bit from the article, but really haven't done it justice. It's a lengthy read, but well worth the time.