Simple fun

Sporting News, The, August 9, 1999 by Dave Kindred

As to why Barry Sanders will come back, why Lance Armstrong came back and why Cal Ripken Jr. will not yet go away, the answers are as complex as we want to make them. We can talk of dedication, commitment and sacrifice. We can talk, if we're in a curmudgeonly mood, of compulsion, obsession and egomania. Better by far, though, to forget the $5 words and go for the little happy word of one syllable.

Fun.

These are lucky men because they've realized that what they do best is also how they have the most fun.

I'm thinking of Armstrong's amazing comeback from cancer to win one of the world's most demanding athletic events, the 2,286-mile Tour de France. The bicycle race asks its competitors to be sprinters as well as marathoners, to climb mountains as well as fly on the flats. And do it through summer's heat for a month.

Makes my rear end sore thinking about it. And here's a man whose cancer moved from testicles to abdomen, lungs and brain. Not three years ago, he was as likely to die as to live. His coach, Chris Carmichael, said, "In the course of two weeks, it went from this is really bad news, `You've got cancer,' to the doctors saying, `You may not survive this.'"

At 24, Armstrong moved into cycling's elite by winning the 1995 Tour DuPont in the mountains of western North Carolina. That brought him a $1.2 million deal with the French team, Cofidis. The cancer ended not only that relationship, but for two years seemed to have ended Armstrong's passion for his game.

After surgery and during chemotherapy, Armstrong trained to return to competition in early 1998. First race back, he dropped out early in an eight-day Paris-to-Nice event. The forlorn Armstrong said, "I don't want to do this anymore."

He thought so at the time. He was frustrated and exhausted and it was no fun and if a man who has survived cancer wants to walk away, who's to say no?

As it happens, Carmichael said no. The coach had a plan. He let Armstrong fix a retirement schedule of two races. Then the coach asked Bob Roll to take Armstrong to train in those Carolina mountains filled with happy memories. Roll is a top rider, long Armstrong's friend, a man who understands why he does what he does.

Through those mountains, they rode together, the two of them talking. "We went over every single thing in both of our lives, since we were children," Roll told Simon Gonzalez of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "It gave him a chance to think about what he wanted to do. It was hard training, and it was more than that. It was a hashing over of old grievances and understanding the adventures that would come."

There's a fun word. Adventures. Eight hours a day for 10 days, on lonely mountains in persistent rainstorms, they rode. Armstrong came to understand, as Roll hoped he would, there was every reason to pursue the thing he does best in the world. "The difference was more psychological, more mental than physical," Armstrong would say. "Even in that terrible weather, I was enjoying it and that says something."

Great athletes come with exceptional motor skills. They work to refine those skills until they're all but instinctive. They also have such vivid imaginations that they see a way out of any maze, or, to quote sports' most famous imagineer, Muhammad Ali ...

"A man with no imagination has no wings, he cannot fly.

"A man with imagination has wings, he can fly."

It all works best when it's also fun. At 3, golfer Phil Mickelson cried because his parents wouldn't let him keep playing in the dark. From a piece on physical genius in this week's New Yorker. "Before he was 2 years old, it is said, Wayne Gretzky watched hockey games on television, enraptured, and slid his stockinged feet on the linoleum in imitation of the players, then cried when the game was over because he could not understand how something so sublime should have to come to an end.... He had stumbled onto the one thing that, on some profound aesthetic level, made him happy."

Simple fun. Why else would the rookie Cal Ripken Jr. say his ambition was to play every inning of every game for the rest of his career? Why now, at 38, would he have come back from injury and the saddening death of his father, to have his best year in a decade?

"There's never been a minute," he has said, "when I didn't enjoy playing baseball."

There's another fun word. Enjoy. What comes with baseball is nice, all the money and the notice. But something in baseball itself brings Ripken joy, as something in cycling brings Armstrong joy. And if we go back to last fall, when Paul Attner profiled Barry Sanders for this magazine, we hear Sanders say, "The biggest joy is that I am still able to play the game I have been playing since I was a kid and enjoying it more than I ever have."

So there'll come a time, and it'll come soon, when Sanders wakes up one morning and realizes that the fun in his life has always been what he once said to his father: "Daddy, I want to run from one end to the other," running away from the big boys, his imagination giving him wings.