A Grey Day

I was taking the dog out this morning, very early, when I heard the news about Cory Lidle. Apparently, he was flying a two-seater plane along the Hudson River, trying to avoid LaGuardia airspace (above 1100 feet) and took a turn that ended up crashing him into the side of a building. That is a terrible shame, and my sympathies are with Lidle's family, friends, and teammates.

For some reason, a part of me (maybe the part of me that's been hijacked by the 24-hour media pundits) wanted to connect this to other injuries or deaths to athletes. One of the Boston newspapers had a listing of other athletes dying in plane crashes (Thurmon Munson, Roberto Clemente, Payne Stewart, etc.) but this is different for me. To me, it relates more to Ben Roethlisberger's motorcycle crash, Jeff Kent's motorcycle-wheelie (I'm sorry, I mean truck-washing) injury, or even Stephen Jackson's recent gunshots at the strip club. I'm not comparing Cory Lidle to Stephen Jackson, not directly, but I just have that wonder about athletes- guys whose major asset is their bodies, their physical health, taking these sorts of chances away from the field of competition.

There is the argument that athletes are different from us, that they crave the rush of competition, that they're adrenaline junkies and when they can't get that on the field (because of the off-season or retirement, etc.) they have to find it somewhere else. That's why Jason Williams was riding his motorcycle over 80 mph in Chicago, nearly ending his life and putting a major kink in his basketball career. Perhaps that's why Cory Lidle was drawn to flying his own planes. I don't know.

My thought, though, is that athletes aren't really that different. They just have the financial means to afford really fast bikes or private airplanes to indulge in the sort of thrill-seeking that the rest of us would like to try if we could swing it. Also, they're high-profile. For every athlete that gets killed in a plane crash or injured in a motorcyle crash, there's probably 5,000 normal folks that have the same thing happen. The difference is that fifteen seconds after we hear about the crash on the news, we forget about it, because we don't know who it was who died. We know Cory Lidle. We know Ben Roethlisberger. So we remember those, and our minds start to put together these pieces into overall athlete behavioral theories and trend stories. It's just not necessarily true, that's all.

All of this speculation, of course, doesn't do anything to bring Cory Lidle back, or to make the tragedy any less painful for his family and friends. All it does, really, is give the rest of us something to think about and talk about so that we're not so afraid.