The Asterisk

The record books of sport brim with the statistics of accomplishment of men and women whose toil and devotion to the craft distinguish them from among their peers.

The spreadsheets of champions give a glimpse but cannot capture the depth, intensity, and commitment required to produce those numbers. But true devotees and practitioners of the sport can glance at the book and take the measure — not merely of a career, but of a man.

They see the years of anonymity, the grind of practice, the monotony of drills, the indignity of insults, and the soul-crushing, demoralizing demon of failure. But the portrait of a man in jots and tittles doesn’t end there for those in the know. They see the mighty fall, yes, but they also see the steady climb up from the mat to the knee to the wobbling, then steadying, stand. They sense the brazen courage in recovery from injury, in the endurance of chronic pain. They know that the suffering garnered praise not only for self, but sustenance for the team, the family, the country.

These stalwarts astride the binding of the book abide the agony as if for the joy set before them and for the benefit of others. The student of the game may nearly divine from between the lines a mind molded from turmoil, cast in the furnace of trouble, cooled in the calm reflection that his all was all he could give, and he would certainly give it.

In the exceptional athlete, we see a glimmer of the soldier — torn in battle — who bucks against medical orders to stand again with his brothers on the front line.

We see a hint of the simple man — undecorated, uncelebrated, unknown, but unbroken — who rises each day with purpose and vigor. He serves his family, his community, his company and his country, as if he served the very God of heaven…in everything, with all of his heart. Cut and bruised and beaten down, yet he rises. He takes the next step, though the last one nearly spent him dry. He moves into uncertainty with assurance that his part must be played, his term fulfilled, his brief span displayed — from ecstasy to despair, and all of the vast expanse of bone and of gristle, in the moist and the dry, and the emptiness between.

For his final entry in the book, he strives to embody the cliché. He leaves it all on the field, and goes out swinging.

And if fate, or the enemy, or time itself, and all three conspire to sap his strength and to make of him a shell and a shadow, enfeebled, even ashamed — he takes this too as a warrior defiant. Bows his head in reverence for the infinite, and murmurs “into your hands I commit my spirit.”

He makes this last stand anchored in his refusal to take matters into his own hand. He submits to the apparent indignity, with dignity. His greatness magnified in weakness, he imagines his frailty caught up in glory. When he leaves the family, the friends, the awed others, and even his enemies, he hands them the record book. Its statistical sculpture — a profile of a life well lived by a man well loved — pays tribute to his character to the very end.

To conjure it is sweet. Survivors linger over its pages, and relish the replaying of its highlights.

And in this act, in the pages of this book, he bears witness to generations to come that he finished the race, too fast perhaps, but clean, and unsullied by the asterisk.