This year, I’ll turn 50. Like a lot of Generation X’ers who
are creeping toward, or already settled comfortably into middle age, I’m
noticing something rather shocking.
The script I had invented for my teenage icons is not coming
true in my advancing adulthood. In
short, when I was 17, I thought most of my rock heroes would be dead by the
time they were 40 – going down in a blaze of rock and roll fantasy colored
explosion of sex, drugs and alcohol. At
the same time, I thought football legends like Junior Seau and Kenny “The
Snake” Stabler would live forever – yes with creaky knees and bad backs - but
still alive with that swagger and bravado they wielded as football gladiators.
But that’s not how it’s working out. Now, the rockers of my
youth are outliving their Caligula-esque lifestyle in order to die of
old-people diseases. Yet, the football
heroes of yore are walking around or dropping dead with the ticking time bomb
of CTE in their heads.
Already in the last couple of months, the most badass
and wild rockers from youth are falling in front of my eyes –not from the drugs
and booze and sex they were canonized for in younger days – but from infirmaries
of the aged.
David Bowie didn’t die in some ultra-exclusive VIP Sex Club
in the French Alps surrounded by Swedish models and mounds of fine Peruvian
cocaine. No, he died quietly with friends and family by his side after a long
battle with cancer.
Glenn Fry didn’t smash his 30-foot speed boat headlong into
a pier while swilling tequila, gunning the engine and flashing his famous
devilish grin to a 19-year old co-ed from Florida State on his lap. He passed
from rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid
arthritis?!
Lemmy from Motorhead didn’t douse himself in 151 and
immolate on stage in front of screaming fans as one last tribute to rocker
excess. Nope, he also succumbed to cancer as his bandmates said, “at home
playing his favorite video game.”
It may sound ghoulish, but a lot of guys my age sit around
and ponder: “Wow, David Bowie made it to almost 70! Pete Townsend is still
playing, and I guess, Keith Richards has crossed-over some line between life
and death and will continue on forever!”
But when we shift our gaze from music to football, the
picture turns darker. We stop wondering how they lived this long and instead
wonder not if, but when the sustained battery their heads took as players is
going to inevitably lead to premature death – by disease or by their own hand.
It’s weird but on any Saturday afternoon while channel
surfing, one can stumble across some rock and roll retrospective about a band
like the Eagles and when they get to the second segment basically titled “…then
the drugs took over,” we think, “well of course they did – it was the 70’s!”
And then when the show ends, we still can count most of the band members; Don
Henley, Joe Walsh and Randy Meissner among the living.
But a few channels over we can watch the pre-HD grainy video
of NFL Films and see Stabler getting demolished by Jack Youngblood and wonder:
is that the hit that first started his brain to turn against him? Or view
Junior Seau crash into Thurman Thomas like a white shark hitting a seal and now
realize, “God, did that ultimately lead him to blow a .357-sized hole in his
chest?
It seemed impossible to image back when I was a kid, but it
is likely to turn out that the excesses of a rock and roll life aren’t as
deleterious as a football life. Perhaps “Live Fast, Die Young” is more the
mantra of football players than it is for stadium rockers.
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