It is April 1980. I am thirteen. The place is Sea World San Diego, and the families move past the tanks in the heat with their souvenir cups, and on the beach stands Mike Adamle (b. 1949), whom I watch on television whenever the set will give him to me. He does the NFL pregame and half-time shows for NBC with Bryant Gumbel. He cuts into games with highlights. He’s a star.
During a break from filming, he has no reason to stop for a boy. He stops. He gives me twenty minutes, maybe thirty. We talk about sports and about how a man gets to sit at the desk and call the games. I ask him which NFL team has the best organization. He says San Diego. He says I’m very smart and I have a bright future. He could not have been kinder, and I have kept the warmth of those minutes for more than forty years, which tells a man something about what a small kindness costs the giver and what it pays the one who receives it.
I want to read him through Ernest Becker (1924-1974). In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker argues that the human animal knows it will die and cannot bear to live inside that knowledge, so every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of rules for earning the sense that a life counts beyond the body that ends. The athlete earns it in yards. The priest earns it in souls. The trader earns it in returns. Each hero system sets its own terms for what counts, and a man spends his years trying to bank enough of its currency to feel he will not vanish when the body quits. The script does the heavy work. It tells him what a good life looks like, and it tells the people around him whether to clap.
Adamle grows up inside a hero system before he can name one. His father, Tony Adamle (1924-2000), the son of Slovenian immigrants, plays linebacker for the Cleveland Browns through their championship years, then leaves the game for medical school and comes home to Kent, Ohio, to set up a practice and serve as team physician for the high school and for Kent State for more than thirty-five years. The warrior becomes the healer in one body. Marion Motley (1920-1999), a fullback bound for Canton, comes to the house, and young Mike sits on his lap. The boy learns early that a man earns his place through the body, that he hits and gets hit and then patches the wounded, and that the men who do these things deserve a seat at your table.
Mike inherits the script and the wrong size for it. He stands five foot nine. He carries the ball at Northwestern against Wisconsin in 1969 for 316 yards, a school record that holds to this day, and he takes the Big Ten MVP in 1970, and he goes in the fifth round, the hundred and twentieth man chosen in the 1971 draft. Six years in the league, two seasons each with three teams, eleven hundred and forty-nine rushing yards across the whole run. He survives on special teams and on willingness. He blocks for the back who gets the carries. He covers the kicks where the collisions live. The men who keep him keep him for one quality, and they have a word for it. They say he has heart.
Hold that word. Heart means a specific thing inside the football hero system, and it means something else in every neighboring one, and the gap between the meanings tells the whole story.
To a cardiac surgeon the heart is a pump with four chambers and a set of valves, a thing to be stopped and opened and sewn and started again, and his hero system rewards the steady hand and the clean margin, and sentiment in the operating room is a danger to the patient. To a cantaor singing deep song in Andalusia the heart is the wound that makes the voice true, and a man who has not suffered cannot reach the note, and the audience grades him on how much of his own ruin he is willing to show. To a Carthusian in his cell the heart is the room where a man meets God in silence, and the labor of a life is to empty it of everything that is not Him, and the scoreboard is invisible and the season never ends. To a man at a high-stakes poker table heart means he can move all his chips behind a hand he knows is weak and hold his face while he does it, and the table respects the cold nerve and nothing else. To a mother in Seoul driving her son through the examinations heart is the will to grind, the refusal to rest, the endurance aimed at a single test that sorts the whole of a life. To a venture capitalist heart is close to a flaw, the soft spot that keeps a man in a losing position past the point where the numbers told him to fold.
Same word. Six worlds. In each one the word makes sense only against the rules of that world, and a man raised in one of them might watch a man from another spend his heart and see nothing he recognizes as courage at all. There is no neutral ground where the meanings reconcile. Becker would say there cannot be, because the hero system is not a description of reality that men happen to share. It is the thing that lets a man get out of bed, and a man defends it the way he defends his life, because it stands in for his life.
Adamle’s heart is the football kind fused with the kitchen-table kind. It is the small man who plays big and blocks for the man who scores, and it is also the warmth that stops in a crowd for somebody’s boy. He carries the same quality from the field into the broadcast booth and says yes to nearly everything the trade offers. He hosts American Gladiators for seven years. He works the Olympics. He calls bull riding for the Professional Bull Riders. He stands on the sideline for the XFL. He never seems to regard any of it as beneath the dignity of a former All-American, because his hero system never priced dignity that way. The coin he chose to be rich in was usefulness and good cheer.
Then the world that does not run on his coin gets hold of him. In 2008 he goes to work for the WWE, and the wrestling business runs on a different currency, on the worked insult and the crowd’s appetite for a man’s failure turned into theater. He flubs the names. He calls Jeff Hardy (b. 1977) “Jeff Harvey” on the air. The internet that grades announcers gives him the Gooker Award for the worst thing of the year and names him the worst television announcer, and a man who once carried the ball 316 yards in an afternoon becomes a punch line in living rooms across the country. He cuts a promo apologizing. He slaps Randy Orton (b. 1980) in a scripted scene and resigns his scripted job, and he walks out of that world and goes back to the desk in Chicago and keeps working.
Watch what the hero system does under that pressure. The wrestling crowd offers Adamle a deal: stop trying, take the laugh, let the failure be your character. He declines. He runs the Ironman triathlon in Kona at sixty, fourteen hours and change in the heat. The value holds because the value was never the applause. It was the showing up.
The last test comes for the body that earned the coin in the first place. In February 2017 Adamle says he has been diagnosed with dementia and that his doctor sees the marks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and he ties it to nineteen years of seizures and to the concussions of the football years. “It shook my world,” he says. The game gave him his heart and the same game took the organ above it. A man might curse the script that did this to him. Adamle does the thing his hero system trained him to do. He goes public so that other men and their families might know the cost sooner, and he sits on the board of the Epilepsy Foundation’s Chicago division, and he turns his own wreck into use. The warrior who becomes the healer, one more time, in one more body, the way his father did it.
So I come back to Sea World and the twenty minutes. I understand them better now. Inside the hero system Adamle lived by, a stranger’s boy with no name and nothing to offer was worth twenty minutes of a working man’s afternoon, because the system told him that warmth spent on the helpless counts, that you block for the man who carries the ball and you stop for the kid who only wants to talk. Another man in another script might look at that exchange and see twenty minutes thrown away on someone who could never repay them. That is the thing about heart. The word changes its meaning the moment you carry it across the border into the next man’s world, and most of us never notice we have crossed a border at all. I have spent forty years certain that I met a great man at Sea World. By the terms of his own hero system, I did.
