Every once in a while, my nerd world of pop culture covered by the FOG! faithful, and the ostensibly non-nerd world of sports – upon which my livelihood is based – collide in hilarious ways.
There was the time that someone figured out which superhero team is best at baseball, complete with scouting reports on the Justice League, X-Men, Avengers and JSA.
Or when the San Francisco Giants baseball team joined the city in honoring a child’s Make A Wish Foundation excursion as Batkid.
Recently, as baseball star Derek Jeter was nearing the end of his legendary career, the New York Daily News donated money to Jeter’s charity. The amount: $22,222.22.
Surprisingly, Two-Face didn’t show up to steal the check. As if he isn’t real, or something.
Way to slack off, Harvey. This score was tailor made for you. Plus you know Batman isn’t going to jump out in front of all those people to stop you in the act.
Hmph. I guess even supercriminals need a break. Maybe he was sipping on a Dos Equis on vacation in Twin Falls, Idaho.
But hey, it’s fun when fantasy world and real life collide in such a way.
Just like when Tina Fey, on an old episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, described a fund-raiser at New York’s Academy of Natural Sciences as the kind of event where you expect a Spider-Man villain to come crashing through the skylight at any minute.
On Halloween 1989, I had a Batman costume, as he starred in the biggest movie of the year. It was fun to run around the house in a cape and cowl. My uncle Greg joked that around town you could see the real Batman working in Philadelphia every night.
At least, I think he was joking. Our neighborhood was scary enough with crack dealers and gang violence. Some vigilante justice, at the height of the Guardian Angels patroling city streets, wasn’t unfathomable. I still think about a Caped Crusader running on rooftops near my house.
But sometimes, it’s not jokes at all.
I remember how, 13 years ago, I watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center fall on the Today show from my dorm room. It was registration day at Harvard, and schoolmates – many of them from the New York area – were still on the way. Boston, an origin for the two hijacked planes used to wreck the towers, was locked down and the public overcome with terror.
Among the many thoughts in my head that day, watching the chaos unfold in New York, Washington D.C. and Shanksville, Pa., was this one: We need Superman.
On that dark day, what I would have given to see a bundle of blue and red hurling itself against collapsing steel, or overpower the hijackers on board and deposit a plane on the Hudson River. To have seen him catch people in his mighty arms, carry them to the ground, offer a salute and a smile, and zoom upward into the fire.
We had lots of real-life heroes that day and in the days ahead, from police officers and firefighters and paramedics, to Welles Crowther, an equities trader who became known as the Man in the Red Bandanna. He is credited with saving at least a dozen lives, turning back again and again to get people out of the South Tower before he lost his own life in the tower’s collapse.
A popular song at that time? Five for Fighting’s “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” in which even the Man of Steel wants to cry. Our love affair with superhero blockbusters began the next year with Spider-Man, and our post-9/11 world filtered best through Batman in the Dark Knight Trilogy.
Since that fateful day, has the American public been looking for a savior to right things? I can’t truly say, but I know I wanted to look up in the sky and see someone fighting for us, see more than ash and despair. Maybe we’re still looking.
However, I’m not really looking at the seemingly four-color world of sports for a hero, either. After years of nearly constant scandal in sports, maybe fewer people are too.
But we still look up, and sometimes we find a reward. Such is hope.
When Jeter collects a Two-Face score of a charity check, I find my reward. It still makes this nerd smile a little inside whenever a player boasts his quick return from an injury by saying he’s “part Wolverine” or I read a headline about who can stop Megatron.
C’mon, man. We know who stops Megatron. We all know who.
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