On Sunday, August 21, at around 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, America’s favorite centaur, Alex Rodriguez, at last returned to the ball field after six weeks away for the repair of a torn meniscus (the meniscus, for those of you who skipped med school and went straight into shamanism, is a thing the knee requires to perform the functions that God and/or evolution made necessary to the pursuit of happiness and/or sexual encounters with human beings who may or may not have starred in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle). A-Rod’s return served as proof, perhaps, that a muscular young man can remain on the DL for only so long – and by DL, I also mean the disabled list – and also that with time and patience, a semicircular band of fibrocartilage, located between the medial condyle of the femur and the medial condyle of the tibia, can make like Billy Ray and Miley and have that painful rift mended.
In any case, when I first read that A-Rod might need just two weeks’ recuperation following surgery for the torn meniscus, I had to laugh, not because laughter is the best medicine – it’s a decent Rx, sure, but Vicodin is a pharmaceutical beej, makes your eyes roll back in your head and puts you right to sleep – but rather because I had just had the same surgery, and recovery ain’t that easy. Doctors do call it minor surgery, and it’s true that like Pacman Jones making rain and bail in a single 24-hour period, you get to go home on the same day in which the incident occurred, but still: It’s surgery. A foreign instrument has entered your body, and just as Jenna Jameson says in the film My Exotic Vacation on the Greek Island of Dildos, you need some time to recuperate. Unless, like Wolverine, you are equipped with the convenient power of self-healing, recovery demands more than a fortnight.
As for me, recuperation has lasted much of the summer, since I had not one but two surgeries, for a torn meniscus in each knee. If your first thought is that this made my limp symmetrical, producing a gait similar to that of Bill Buckner en route to the dugout, then you are very clever but also very wrong. Take it from me: The one time you want to serve your sentences consecutively and not concurrently is during the follow-up to a pair of surgeries. Otherwise, you reduce by 50 percent the time in which Seattle Mariners snoozefests are heightened televisually by the affects of hydrocodone, and increase by 50 percent the pace at which you return to work.
So, owing to my fondness for milking the sympathy vote, I had my left knee scoped first and my right knee second, stretching convalescence into the dog days and providing insight into the absurdity of A-Rod’s two-week aim. Granted, a gimpy centaur might simply have relied on his three good legs while asking Heather Mills for a fraction of the necessary advice, but as of yet, taxonomists won’t confirm that A-Rod is part human/part horse, or even part human/part HGH, and thus the Yankee’s recovery, though hastened by heaven-sent trainers, must surely fall within the usual human parameters, the realm the rest of us dwell in.
It’s always odd, of course, to find yourself in a Venn intersection with a professional athlete, especially one so Broadway, so Hollywood, as Alex Rodriguez, and one so preternaturally gifted. Years ago, at the university I attended, I walked onto the baseball team but quickly walked off, convinced that 92-mph fastballs would interfere with the demands of Spring Break, but here’s A-Rod, slowed by age yet still a powerhouse and still the owner of 627 MLB home runs, 493 two-baggers and at least three starlets bagged. Me? I have a hard time hitting a pinata with an oversized Wiffle bat, and haven’t bagged a starlet since the last time I slipped an Us magazine between the eggs and the carton of milk, but still here we are, A-Rod and I, recovering from the same injury while Curtis Granderson hits home runs.
It should be obvious that I didn’t tear my menisci by playing for a Major League Baseball team, or even for the Houston Astros. Instead I tore them the slow way, via years of running and cycling, pounding pavement while harboring thoughts that if I had twice the heart and half the testicles, I could be like Lance. But again, here we are, or were, a future Hall of Famer and a wistful weekend warrior, worlds apart but in the same monotonous rehab. Of course, I really don’t see A-Rod driving 20 minutes to a PT clinic, leafing through a waiting-room copy of Sports Illustrated – Yeah, Thome really is the nicest guy in the game — and finally undergoing a half hour of therapy near a 60-year-old dude escaping work through the convenient carpal tunnel, and I especially don’t see him plunking down a $15 co-pay afterward and then going to Quiznos for a Flatbread Sammie and a Harvest Chicken Salad, but I do see him doing tedious “tailgaters” (i.e., swinging the leg freely at the knee to increase flexibility), ankle pumps, heel/wall slides, toe raises, wall squats, knee extensions, quad sets, patellar mobs, mini-squats, multi-hip machine exercises in four planes, lateral/forward step-up/step-downs, lunges (knee is not to migrate over toe), isokinetic drills, water walking, lateral shuffles and plyometric training, and being sure to ice 15 to 20 minutes as needed.
Indeed, that A-Rod has spent quality time with his exercise balls, as I have with mine, appears to support the Stars! They’re Just Like Us! postulate, a useful construct that, at least from a temporal point of view, helps narrow the distance between the astral and earthly spheres, bridges the chasm between those luminaries up there and us earthlings down here, with our coupon books and Costco buckets of mustard. True, it is a phenomenon first demonstrated in the coming-together of Zeus and his mortal consorts, and preserved not only in the practice of prima nocta but also in the observance of the Houston 500, yet in the modern era, when second-tier point guards drive Bugattis and when very few Yankees will date someone who hasn’t at least been nominated for a Golden Globe, the screen between the star and the mortal seems as impenetrable but clear as the Full-HD Plasma Display that keeps us apart.
Sure, A-Rod suffered beaucoup ridicule for having had C-Diaz stuff hot popcorn into his pie hole, but still. Think about it. You sat there on the living-room sofa, with a cheese wedge on your head or a The Only Thing Rapier Than Roethlisberger Is His Wit! t-shirt on your torso, watching through plasmic clarity as a Hollywood bombshell stuffed Orville Redenbacher into the mouth of a multimillionaire who probably didn’t even pay for his box – and by box, I also mean that stadium suite – at Super Bowl XLV.
But yeah, definitely: That nine-layer dip of yours was awesome.
It is also true that Twitter – Gon’ go grab a sanwich! — and the personal websites of athletes – Thank you, LeBron, for that swordfish taco recipe — have given us peons a sense of connection, but it is probably a false or feigned connection designed to increase the Q Score and thus the earning potential of athletes who already make more in a minute than you make in a month. Had Joe DiMaggio been able to pass the digital hat by sharing personal info – 55 down and 1 to go, though I’m not sure how I know that! – he surely would have, just prior to taking Marilyn Monroe from behind.
Carrying on that great Yankee tradition, A-Rod is currently earning $85,000 a day, which I am not, while banging Cameron Diaz, which also I am not, and phasing in neuromuscular-control and activity-unrestricted workouts, which I am. The consolation here is that A-Rod likely winces while assuming the doggy position, as it also remains painful for me to kneel. (If you aren’t convinced of my veracity, stick a steak knife in your knee, wait a few days, and then genuflect in serious prayer.)
The stars do occasionally walk among us, and not just at card shows organized by sharks. A smile will cost you a fin, my friend, a handshake’s twenty, and if you give me a benjamin, Mr. Rose will give your boy Jimmy there a firm pat on the ass. We are reminded, during nights in da club, that athletes really are human, that they piss in the urinal and not in the piss-boy’s bucket, and that they, too, are lookin’ for love and/or twat (mostly twat) in all the right places. As for me, I once saw Troy Aikman bum a dip off a dude at a bar in Dallas, and if that ain’t just bein’ folk, then what is?
Sometimes we even mark the same turf. Case in point: I once dated a woman on whose face, I later discovered, a big-league pitcher had splooged. Don’t get me wrong: I was flattered, but also relieved that she had wiped it off.
Still, for the most part, the lines are clearly drawn: You are on this side, they are on that side. Common ground is restricted to venues that respect the partition. You can pay 200 bucks to sit along the left-field line, but if you interfere with a ball in play, you’re back at Parking Lot C, starting your Honda Accord. Derek Jeter might have come flying into your nachos while making a legend-affirming catch, but rest assured, fellow-peasant, he’s headed back to hallowed turf, not to mention a starlet’s cooch, while you’re left picking jalapeno slices off your commemorative Mattingly T-shirt.
Sure, there are other exceptions. Thome hit 600 dingers while serving as the Pope of Everyman Village, and Drew Brees is said to be a really swell guy. (I also understand that Mr. Roethlisberger enjoys socializing at college bars, and if that ain’t just bein’ folk, then what is?) On a personal level, I once sat in a post-game clubhouse with a Texas Rangers right-hander who spoke with me for 45 minutes – off the record or on, didn’t matter – while smoking Marlboro 100s and knocking back cans of Bud Light. Shirtless and slouched, he sported fat rolls that would’ve made the editor at Men’s Health launch into a thousand vicarious crunches, and that made me feel pretty good. There was also the time I went to lunch with a well-known PGA golfer. You pick the place, I had told him, and so we started with Chili’s signature Texas Cheese Fries.
In the main, though, golfers stay on the other side of the ropes for a reason, and it’s not just to have a clear line of sight. The Tiger Woods Saga was supposed to have taught us that the higher they fly, the harder they fall, that not only are the stars like us but that sometimes they’re worse, that their problems are heightened by the scrutiny that accompanies their fame, and that the distance between their former utopia and their current hell makes their misery all the deeper and our schadenfreude all the greater, hell yes!
Our favorite photobomber tells us, however, that no matter the hierarchy of happiness, which is surely the most relative scale there is, the partition remains intact. The pantheon is not to be encroached upon, and trespassers will be asked to leave. We the people may violate (for a moment) their super-sacred space, and if the incursion is successful, we might briefly share their renown. The moment is immortalized in a picture, and the invasion becomes a meme, but afterward, in the time and space beyond the borders of a photograph, the golfer and the interloper retreat to their separate corners.
Tiger, no matter his state of mind, lives in a really big house.
It is believed that the initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries (c. 1600-1100 B.C.) took to hallucinogens, not to Twitter, in efforts to interact with the gods — to elevate man, it is said, above the human sphere and into the divine. The operative fact, of course, is that the gods did not eat the Eleusinian equivalent of crispy pork rinds in efforts to interact with the mortals. No, they lounged in their cirrus estates and cumulonimbus sunrooms while the peasants, bless them, tried desperately to make the climb.
And here we are now, tearing our joints and straining our brains just to find a connection, a space in which the immortal and the earthborn might have something in common. What I know is this: At some point in the recent past, Alex Rodriguez, future Hall of Famer and banger of Hollywood’s best, had to don an assless gown and submit to anesthetic effects of sevoflurane. And there the Yankee lay, for the better part of an hour, practically naked and under the knife, after which he ate some crackers, drank some juice and hobbled into a wheelchair, sitting while someone rolled him out.
Top photo: Flickr
