Athletes make for the best tragedies. There's something about an overpowered beast wrecking himself for your petty entertainment that brings out the epic glory of success and failure. The sheer potential of it has produced a host of biographies about big, strong people and their weaknesses.
Mickey Mantle may have had more natural talent than anyone in baseball, but a string of injuries and personal failures left him an alcoholic wreck by the end of his life. Jane Leavy's warts-and-all biography The Last Boy is a sympathetic but unflinching look at one of the great, flawed heroes of the national pastime.
In Chicago, you can't say anything bad about Walter Payton. When loyal Bears fans read excerpts from Sweetness, another depressingly honest biography, the backlash was so great that Mike Ditka said he would spit on author Jeff Pearlman. In response, Pearlman reassured everyone that he deeply loved the highly driven running back who bullied his own body into fame, ill health and drug addiction.
And there's no tragedy quite like pro wrestling. I'll never get over the slow, horrible childhood revelation that pro wrestling is scripted. What's worse, the thumping gods on screen are genuinely hurting themselves in the name of operatic fakery. You'd figure that a graphic novel about Andre the Giant would be reliably sad, but it presents such an understanding portrayal of the larger-than-life wrestler that I couldn't help but like the guy, even with all his faults.
You'd think books like these would leave me disillusioned, but the advantage of watching idols fall is you get to see them as humans. It makes you appreciate the things they were able to do.
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