Bogus Gold

Tommy Mischke, a man who offered a sincere and appropriate tribute to Michael Jackson on his radio show the day after his death, seems to have the sense that there is a danger in stretching hero worship out of proper proportion. After a day of umm... extra exuberant coverage of the King of Pop's funeral and associated events, Tommy's column this week provides a proper cautionary note about the dangers of excess in choosing our idols.

He would have been a fine hero at a time when I was looking for one. He was a former Major League ballplayer in his mid-90s living alone in Charlotte, North Carolina. I ran across his name 17 paragraphs into an obscure article in the sports pages and was surprised to learn such a relic could still be around. I dialed his number hoping to find a semi-lucid hospice patient with a couple of vague dugout memories and instead discovered an American treasure.

He had a voice like Shelby Foote from Ken Burns's Civil War series and a delivery to match. He was articulate, eloquent, and highly educated. He was a walking time capsule of the 1920s and '30s.

I could hardly believe my ears. Where had this man been? Why wasn't he being interviewed by Bob Costas?

He saw Cobb play; he sat in the dugout with the '27 Yankees. He graduated from Duke with honors and a desire to be a lawyer, but instead drifted into baseball and ended up playing with the Yankees, Red Sox, Giants, Reds, and Philadelphia A's. There was no one like him. At a time when ballplayers were uneducated country boys, Bill Werber came into the league a literate young man with an athletic gift who could live the ballplayer's life and then tell its stories better than any peer.

It's Mischke. Read the whole thing.