by Barry Stagg
May 1996
TITLE: John McSherry
John McSherry died on television on the opening day for major league baseball. The home plate umpire in Cincinnati stumbled, fell and died of a massive heart attack as television crews and commentators fed baseball fans replays and commentary on a dying man's death throes.
The candy floss and illusion of baseball fell away for a brief time as fans and players alike saw the inevitable lying starkly prone and public in plain and unedited view. Death will find us all and it found John McSherry in his work boots on an artificial grass rug in Ohio on Opening Day.
Too many have made professional sports into a secular religion with idols and commandments and myths and shameless blind faith. This was a day for the stripping away of the flimsy circus tent that passes for reality for the worshippers of a game gone too far into its own myth for the good of its lovers and actors. Baseball often behaves as if it is a faith gone starkly crazy, overdosing on fundamentalist dogma - making madness and filth out of blind allegiance and wishful thinking. Sobering reality touched down with a sickening thud in the cold afternoon light of Opening Day. The death on the battleground of an umpire who looked and acted the classical role was a shock to the senses of all.
The strength in the situation was in how the players and other actors realized intuitively that the game must pause for a day -to let the grieving partners of this huge man remove and honour his remains. It was akin to the way in which a fallen comrade is removed from the battlefield. The memory and the man are honoured in death but the battle pauses and then resumes. Thus on day two of the baseball season the game went on between Montreal and the Reds on the plastic grass at Cincinnati.
In the moments of introspection which must surely fall upon players ,coaches ,managers and umpires alike, the various forms of death in sport come to mind. Death in baseball takes the form of injury, failing skills or inadequacy. A player retires or is released or fades back to the minor leagues and each way a professional death is recorded . A player can approach the killing grounds of death many times in a professional career. The virtual reality of death comes with a torn arm muscle or a knee-cap destroyed . It waltzes in the skin of newer and faster teammates. It lingers in every clubhouse at season's end and in the cruelly deceptive sunlight of Spring Training. The unconditional release of a player is understood with sadness and finality and numbness by player and fan. Yesterday's hero cleans out his locker and checks his pension plan.
John McSherry was a big man who would have fit the classical mold of "Umpire" during any of the eras of baseball. He lived the game. He worked to be good at his craft. He revelled in the glory and contentment of the royal lot that is professional sport. He projected character and life and fun into a pastime elevated to the uncomfortable status of profitable business.
John McSherry held true to the ethics of his sport and his profession until almost the very end. Then he died. He died on the field and he died for real. He brought home the pain of reality- nasty uncomfortable, paramedic-style reality- to the stars and fans and dreamers and self-delusionists who are the slaves to this addiction and joy we call baseball or football or hockey. John McSherry could not hold on until the curtain came down and the television cameras went blank. He went down like Kennedy in the motorcade-in public-on display-with our dreams suspended in the frosty air swirling around him .
The game goes on as it must . The Expos lead the Atlanta Braves after six games of the new season. Another young umpire makes it to the majors.The call for firing a manager or two is already ringing through the airwaves all over the baseball continent. Still, reality has bitten hard and painfully , early and hard for the rest of us who await our own mortality. The umpire dies and the game goes on.
Until next month: Be proud , Be thankful, Be Prosperous.