ON LIONIZING KEN CAMINITI

A colleague wrote an angry e-mail to me the other day.

"Why do you think there is not one shred of shame, let alone outrage, over
the lionization of Ken Caminiti?" she asked.

"This, to me, is one of the worst things about the state of professional
sports.

"The man was a crackhead - caught the last time leaving a hotsheets motel
on 59 where his crackhead friends were still smoking - and driving
erratically before dawn.

"Okay, he could once hit a ball, but we call him 'gutsy' in a headline? The
team has a hero's memorial service and talks wistfully about how he missed
his three children? Where the hell was he when his three children needed
him - smoking crack in a sleazy motel?"

No, she isn't a baseball fan. But she does have a point.

It's just not the only point.

.Part of the lionization comes from the human kindness of honoring a person
in death. It's not the time to dwell on his weaknesses or the pain he caused.

.Part of the lionization comes from our juvenile desire to make our sports
heroes into gods.

.But I think the most important part of the good words about Ken Caminiti
comes out of a different dynamic.

Desperadoes?

Two of my favorite stories demonstrating the dynamic involve deputy
sheriffs, who are not widely considered members of the most sensitive class.

In the early 1980s, the Seattle Times sent me out to sparsely populated
counties in eastern Washington to find marijuana growers and to learn about
law enforcement efforts to catch them.

National media were painting them as violent desperadoes, but the local
deputies knew better.

I spent considerable time with a deputy who had been trained by the Drug
Enforcement Administration. We flew over wild mountain country, then he led
a seven-car caravan up dirt roads for 30 miles for a bust based on what he
had spotted.

"These aren't bad folks," he told me on the way up. "They're like the
bootleggers in the 1930s. These are hard times, and this is a way they can
make money. They're the same people we bring food to on snowmobiles after
blizzards."

Sex-Changed Deputy

Still, it was his job to arrest them. The difference between him and the
national media: He knew them.

Several years ago in San Antonio, the Bexar County sheriff announced that
the head of his traffic unit was getting a sex-change operation - and that
after he had the operation, she would return to her position.

The sheriff cited (erroneously) the Americans with Disabilities Act in
support of his decision to keep the deputy, but the real reason he kept the
lieutenant is that he had been a very good officer and was a very good person.

I know this because of the reaction of his fellow deputies, typified by one
who said the announcement was "a complete shock to all of us" but who also
said, "He's a damn good lieutenant and a damn good supervisor, fair to
everybody."

It's hard for me to imagine a group of South Texas deputies welcoming a new
officer in their midst who had a sex-change operation. The difference: They
knew this one.

When we know someone - whether it's a cocaine addict, a marijuana grower or
a transgender person - we don't define that person by his or her deviation
from the norm.

We put their weaknesses, their faults and their profound differences into
the full context of who they are. If that person was, overall, a good
person, we don't deny his or her faults or differences, but we don't
magnify them either.

So we can dwell on Ken Caminiti's failings, or we can lionize him. Or we
can take a different message from his death.

We can, at least briefly, understand that when we define people by their
weaknesses, we don't know them any better than we do the sports stars we
make into gods.