Watching greatness diminish is never easy. It's never fun. It's never satisfying. Seeing Willie Mays roam center field in what--for all practical purposes--amounts to a walker, or Ron Jeremy being forced to down copious amounts of Viagra just to get an erection in an vain attempt to have consensual sex with Sylvester Stallone's now-obese ex-wife on a VH1 reality show about people who used to be considered semi-famous, or my lifelong arch-enemy Tricky Dick Nixon forgetting that recording super secret conversations about illegal stuff is usually just a terrible way to not get caught doing said illegal stuff, just doesn't seem right. And not just because of the diminishing itself--we all know that age is a real thing that effects real people--but because of what that diminishing represents.
It's one thing to know Willie Mays is a 45-year-old with a couple of broken hips waddling around a golf course out of the public limelight; it's another to have it thrown in your face while he attempts to chase fly balls around the outfield on national television. We don't want to see greatness disintegrate. We want our baseball players to call it quits while they can still chase down a pop up, our porn stars to stop having sex on camera while they can still get a boner, and our politicians to get out of office while they can still flip us all the bird, not caring if we find out about all the shady shit later. We wanted Tricky Dick Nixon to be able to smile and say: "Peace I'm outta here" on the man's own God damn terms. We want our greatest immortals to get out before their own mortality sets in. Before we can see that everyone is in fact human. Nothing more and nothing less.
It's one thing to know Willie Mays is a 45-year-old with a couple of broken hips waddling around a golf course out of the public limelight; it's another to have it thrown in your face while he attempts to chase fly balls around the outfield on national television. We don't want to see greatness disintegrate. We want our baseball players to call it quits while they can still chase down a pop up, our porn stars to stop having sex on camera while they can still get a boner, and our politicians to get out of office while they can still flip us all the bird, not caring if we find out about all the shady shit later. We wanted Tricky Dick Nixon to be able to smile and say: "Peace I'm outta here" on the man's own God damn terms. We want our greatest immortals to get out before their own mortality sets in. Before we can see that everyone is in fact human. Nothing more and nothing less.
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