One of the more revealing stories that circulated after Muhammad Ali’s death was a tale of him hanging out in a kitchen in some posh hotel when his handlers told him it was time to go meet the important people waiting in a ballroom.
These are important people, too, he is said to have said.
Ali became legendary for reasons beyond how he treated those of us that live off stage, of course. But his view of humanity is central to why so many felt connected to him.
The same might be said of Gordie Howe, another icon from a bygone era who recently passed away. He, too, used simple and sincere gestures to reach beyond his stature. Tales of his easy charm were passed around our region in the days following Howe’s death.
During the public visitation at Joe Louis Arena last week, thousands of hockey fans came to pay respects and to share with each other the ways that Howe had reached out to them.
It’s true that athletes like Ali and Howe inspired something akin to awe because of wondrous talent and fearsome competitiveness. But they spoke to those that followed them for different reasons. Most notably because they managed to remain one of us.
That standard is nearly impossible for today’s most sublime performers. The layers — monetary and otherwise — that exist between, say, Tom Brady and his fans or LeBron James and his are as thick as continental plates.
A few days before Red Wings fans lined up to bow their heads and touch Howe’s casket at Joe Louis Arena, a throng of basketball fans gathered around Steph Curry to watch him warm up before an NBA Finals game in Cleveland.
Curry, the most popular player in the NBA this season, grabbed our attention the past few years with a combination of ethereal shooting and ballhandling. That he began to dominate a league of outsized humans despite his own very human frame made him more relatable.
And yet … there he was in Cleveland, wearing game shorts and his warm-up T-shirt, engaging in a series of shooting drills with one of Golden State’s assistant coaches. Wherever Curry went on the court, a phalanx of security guards shifted his way.
Fans had to step up on front-row chairs to catch a view, or rise to their tiptoes as they stood just off the edge of the court. Here they were, so close to Curry’s famous pregame routine. But it felt so far away.
It wasn’t just the security, or the various other club and NBA officials scattered around the league’s star of the moment, all of whom were giving off the hard-to-miss impression that Curry was above their station. It was the psychological distance, too.
Our brightest stars are handled and packaged for our daily consumption in ways that Ali and Howe never could have imagined. The process may make LeBron James and Peyton Manning shine, but it scrubs them of the rough edge of humanity, too. At least from our point of view.
This isn’t the fault of our stars. It’s the consequence of how much is at stake if an athlete like Curry says the wrong thing. Does the wrong thing. Reacts to someone in the wrong way. Someone with a cell phone looking for a few more likes on his social media pages.
“It’s the money, man,” said Vernon Harris, a Red Wings fan who grew up in Detroit and made the trek to Howe’s visitation at Joe Louis arena last week.
Harris, who is 70, struggles to grasp the distance between the stars of today and the society that holds them up so high. Even as a young black kid hanging around a predominately white sport, Harris always felt the essence of Howe wasn’t much different than his own.
When he’d go to Wings games at Olympia he could see Howe up close, before the game and often after. He could touch him. Talk to him. And Howe would talk in return.
Today’s stars do plenty to connect with their fans, and plenty more to give back to their communities, in ways that athletes of yesteryear could not. In that sense, athletes now might have more concrete impact because of the funds they can raise for charity.
Yet the deposits of daily goodwill made by icons like Ali and Howe reminds us that the sports universe wasn’t always so fraught with tension. They were allowed to be human. And that made us more human, too.
