Commentary: Bob Feller's story a humble reminder of heroism

The baseball was cool enough when I won it. It became something else entirely a few seconds later. I was recently at the home of Orlando television sports legend Pat Clarke for a gathering of longtime Orlando media types — the sort of room where the hair is turning gray (or turning loose); where everybody remembers when newspapers were thick and 6 o'clock news TV ratings were thicker; where the memories are better than the actual stories. Pat was raffling off some of the sports memorabilia he had collected over the years, and somehow I ended up winning an autographed baseball from Bob Feller. Pretty cool, right? Then Paul Kennedy — another Orlando sports TV legend and a walking, talking almanac of sports — looked at the ball and immediately said something like: "Bob Feller. The guy who enlisted in the military the day after Pearl Harbor." And suddenly I wasn't holding a baseball anymore. I was holding a question: Whatever happened to that America? Not because today's athletes aren't patriotic. Not because this generation is somehow softer or more selfish. And certainly not because any of us sitting comfortably in our homes and offices have the right to question whether somebody else would risk his life for his country. It's simply worth remembering that there was once an extraordinary generation of American athletes who didn't just stand for the national anthem. They stood up for the nation. Feller was 23 years old, perhaps the most overpowering pitcher in baseball and entering the prime of a Hall of Fame career. On Dec. 7, 1941, he was driving to meet with Cleveland Indians officials to sign a new contract when he heard on his car radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The next day, he enlisted in the Navy. The National Baseball Hall of Fame notes that he became the first professional athlete to volunteer after the attack. Think about that. Feller didn't ask his agent about the financial ramifications. He didn't wonder what four missing seasons would do to his career statistics. As he later put it: "I'm proud of that decision to enlist. It was important to serve your country." More than 500 major leaguers served in the military during World War II. Ted Williams lost nearly five full seasons of his magnificent career while serving as a Marine aviator during World War II and Korea. New York Giants end Jack Lummus died from wounds suffered on Iwo Jima. Detroit Lions star Maurice Britt lost his right arm in combat. Some came home. Some came home diminished. Some never came home at all. I wrote about this very subject in the frightening days after Sept. 11, when I called the late, great Art Donovan, the Hall of Fame defensive tackle whose wonderfully irreverent personality sometimes obscured just how much courage resided underneath it. Long before he battled offensive linemen for the Baltimore Colts, Donovan was a Marine fighting in the Pacific. He told me about Okinawa, about loading a 40-millimeter antiaircraft gun and seeing a Japanese kamikaze plane diving toward his ship. He remembered being so terrified he wet his pants. He remembered crying. He remembered believing he was about to die amid the shrapnel and sharks in blood-red water. Donovan hadn't particularly wanted to go to war. But in his neighborhood in the Bronx, there wasn't much debate about what young men were expected to do. "There was never a doubt that we were going to sign up," he told me. "It didn't matter who you were. Even the most famous athletes felt as if it was their duty to go fight for the country." And then Donovan said something I've never forgotten. "The athletes of today have much more to lose financially than we did. The athletes back then didn't have much to lose except their lives." Except their lives. Three words that make our sports arguments about the transfer portal, load management and the tush push seem awfully small. Cecil Travis was one of baseball's brightest young stars, hitting .359 for Washington in 1941 — two percentage points higher than Joe DiMaggio, who went on his record 56-game hitting streak during that same season. Travis wound up in frigid Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans were reeling and the 76th Infantry Division was on their tail. But it wasn't the Germans who got to Tech. Sgt. Cecil Travis; it was the cold. He later recalled shivering all night long for days and days and waking up and walking on frozen feet to try and keep up. Eventually, gangrene set in and part of his foot had to be amputated. That war didn't take his life, but it took his livelihood. Tom Harmon, Michigan's 1940 Heisman Trophy winner, survived two plane crashes during the war, but injuries robbed him of the speed that had made him a star. Rocky Bleier was wounded by gunfire and a grenade in Vietnam before somehow fighting his way back to become a 1,000-yard rusher and four-time Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Maybe patriotism hasn't disappeared at all. Maybe it has simply changed. Let us always remember, there is at least one modern-day professional athlete who made the ultimate sacrifice. Who will ever forget right after Sept. 11 when Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman left his lucrative NFL career to become a U.S. Army Ranger and later lost his life fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. But for the most part, today's athletes weren't shaped by the Great Depression and a world war. They live in a different America, play in a vastly different sports economy and express love of country in different ways. And perhaps Donovan, even in 2001, understood that better than most of us. "Today's athlete, yesterday's athlete, it doesn't really matter," he told me. "In times of war, you're an athlete second and an American first." Which brings me back to the signed baseball. Feller eventually returned from the Navy after nearly four years away. In his first major league start back, he threw a complete game and struck out 12. Imagine what his statistics might have looked like had war not stolen those prime seasons. Feller didn't care. "A war teaches you that baseball is only a game," he once said, "a minor thing, compared to the sovereignty and security of the United States." And he rejected the notion that his service made him heroic. "I'm no hero," Feller said. "Heroes don't come home from war, survivors return from wars." So, yes, I'm thrilled I won an autographed Bob Feller baseball at Pat Clarke's house. But thanks to Paul Kennedy, I'll never look at it merely as a piece of sports memorabilia. Because now when I look at that baseball, I won't think first about Feller's fastball. I'll think about what he was willing to give up. I'll think about Donovan and Ted Williams and Cecil Travis and Pat Tillman and all those athletes who traded uniforms, walked away from stadiums and into wars, and discovered that there are some things infinitely more important than games. And I'll think about a 23-year-old pitcher who heard that his country had been attacked and decided, almost immediately, that the next uniform he put on wouldn't say Cleveland across the front. It would say United States Navy. That's what the autographed baseball became when Paul Kennedy told me the story about who had signed it. Not a souvenir of the way baseball used to be. But a reminder of the way America used to be.