Michael:
On Saturday, we went to see a college football game that took a backseat to a halftime ceremony. Pat Tillman’s #42 Arizona State jersey was retired.
A few days after September 11, Pat Tillman abruptly retired from his professional football career with the Arizona Cardinals and joined the Airborne Rangers. Earlier this year he died, a victim of friendly fire during a raid in Afghanistan.
Emotions ran high at Sun Devil Stadium. Half the crowd seemed to be wearing #42 jerseys or T-shirts emblazoned with the word “Hero”. Signs highlighting his courage as well as his superman-esque jaw draped over the stadium’s tiers. His picture was on the ticket, his number was inescapable. Pat Tillman was everywhere.
Arizona State scored 28 points in the blink of an eye. The game was never close and never contested. The Sun Devils played possessed; no team could have beaten them that night.
Halftime approached with a tangible tension. The ceremony would soon begin. No one left their seats. The contestant in the $5,000 kick a field goal contest promised to donate all his winnings to the Pat Tillman foundation. He missed but received a standing ovation.
The band marched in to patriotic songs and then formed U-S-A on the field. The situation did not feel overdone or contrived. Later, we overheard a youth with neck tattoos bashfully admit to his friends that when the band marched in he nearly cried. He was not the only one.
The emcee started by saying that tonight was about celebrating Pat Tillman not as a soldier, not as an All-Pro safety and not as a patriot but as an Arizona State Sun Devil. That made a lot of sense. They were celebrating one of their own and it felt good. The moving ceremony primarily honored his football accomplishments: All-American, Academic All-American and the only undefeated Arizona State regular season.
Even if Tillman had not volunteered for military service, someday this commemoration still would have happened. He had always been the most loved and most respected Sun Devil. He had never left. His pro career was for the Cardinals, his games played in the same stadium. The native son who remained, the athletic hero who represented Phoenix.
When Tillman enlisted, he embodied the idealized self-image of a community. The down-to-earth Arizonan who was always there would vanish, leaving the people who had depended on his steady defensive play for years. He was going to an unimaginable place, an unknown dot on a map and a place of unbelievable horror and death.
He left his reasons and motivations unsaid. While he trained and later fought we all substituted in our own romanticized notions of why. We placed him on a pedestal. We mythologized him. We may have even forgotten that he was a human being. He was our outlet, our excuse, our understanding of what we could be if we somehow were better Americans. We were being unfair to both Mr. Tillman and ourselves.
The half-time program reminded me that he was born the same year as my younger sister and now he is dead. His widowed wife looked uncomfortable and just tired. We have simultaneously lost and gained a hero, but she has just lost her husband. All the adulation in the world will never bring him back.
Dozens of his Arizona State teammates stood on the field in his remembrance. A camera unfairly focused in on one’s tears. The whole stadium was crying for the loss of an abstract, he was crying because he had lost a friend. For those close to Tillman, this reunion must be so tragic.
For those that did not know him he is a symbol. His death strengthens our admiration and allows us to visualize whatever we would like. What exactly are we imagining when we remember Pat Tillman?
We were touched by the celebration because it remembered him as a Sun Devil. It recalled his accomplishments and his on-field triumphs. It was a wonderful memorial to a man who died too young.
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