About 20 years ago, I was talking with a fellow faculty member who, like me, had written about sports for a local newspaper. Somehow the length of professional athletes’ careers became a topic. He pointed out that while Joe Di Maggio lived 84 years, we know him for what he did for only 13 of them. I am referring, of course, to his time playing for the Yankees, which was interrupted by World War II. Ironically, his career as a commercial spokesman for various products and businesses, such as the Mr. Coffee and Emigrant Bank, lasted nearly twice as long as his baseball tenure.
Why am I thinking about that now? Well, although I am in—ahem—midlife, I am still a good bit younger than Joe was when he passed. And I have worked in a career even longer than he spent making TV commercials, let alone playing center field. Even so, my time as a university instructor and writer (I still have a hard time calling myself “professor,” even if it comes easily to my students!) constitutes only a fraction of my life. That will be the case even if I continue for another decade or more.
That work won’t make me famous, nor should it. And one of the few things that I’ve done for longer won’t, either (unless you count the readership of this blog as fame): cycling.
It’s funny, though, that being off my bike for most of the past week seems like an eternity. And I know, intellectually, that I’ll be back in the saddle once my pain subsides. But it’s still odd, and troubling, not to be doing, however temporarily, something I’ve done just about all of my life.
I wonder whether Joe Di Maggio—or, for that matter, Eddy Merckx, whose professional cycling career spanned as many years as Joe’s with the Yankees—ever thought about how short a segment of their lives so defined them.
Since I have mentioned two famous male athletes, I can’t help but to think that almost all who have been able to live off their exploits on the road, track, court, field, rink or other athletic arena have been men, I wonder how many great female athletes—say, Caitlyn Clark or Simone Biles—will have the same privilege, or will be so thoroughly defined by the relatively brief part of their lives when they could dominate and elevate their sports.
