Professional Athletes and Military service

“We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”-Winston Churchill

For those who don’t know me very well here on GoingFor2.com yet, I have a deep appreciation for men and women  everywhere that take the oath of service and put their lives on the line. I am also a Veteran of the US Army and served in Iraq under the 1st Cavalry Division and later the 3rd Infantry as a Cavalry Scout in Baghdad Iraq. So to me, no matter how slow the sports world is at a certain point we can all reflect back on those who did more than just score points, block shots or hit home-runs.   Some even put their lives on the line for the better good of our nation and the world. These players and service men and woman are the reason we can play a kids game and talk about it for years to come. I think I will focus on a few players who let go of a promising career or stopped it short in order to full-fill an obligation they felt was more important than sports.

Hopefully most reading this will know or remember who Pat Tillman was. Tillman was a linebacker originally at Arizona State and was the last one to secure a scholarship to play on the 1994 squad. Immediately he was told he was undersized at 5’11 but helped lead Arizona State to an undefeated season his junior year and a birth in the Rose Bowl. Also, he was named the PAC-10 Defensive player of the year in 1997; not to mention he held a 3.85 GPA in marketing and received multiple academic and athletic awards in 1996 and 1997; the Sporting News Honda Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 1997; and the 1998 Sun Angel Student Athlete of Year. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2010.

Drafted 226 in the NFL Draft, Pat went on to play with the Arizona Cardinals and showed his loyalty to the team later by turning down a nine million dollar contract from the St. Louis Rams to stay with Arizona. His loyalty was on full display with that decision and sets the stage for people to understand why he would give up lucrative football career to serve his nation and make less than $1,000.00 a month until he reached four months of service as an enlisted soldier. Pat and his brother Kevin Tillman both signed up at the same time, went through basic together in FT. Benning Georgia and later to Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). Upon completion both were assigned to 2nd Ranger Battalion Ft. Lewis Washington. He went on to participate in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, then to Ranger School where he graduated in November of 2003 and subsequently deployed to Afghanistan at FOB(Forward Operating Base) Salerno. On April 22, 2004, while engaging Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and under the fog on an intense firefight Tillman was killed in action from friendly fire, in other words, his own guys killed him by accident. I saw this report on CNN in a dining facility in FT Irwin California. All of the soldiers I knew at the time were proud to know that a major sports figure would do the same thing as a lower middle-class kid from the mountains in Tennessee. His awards included: Silver Star, Purple Heart, Meritorious Service Medal to name a few. In addition to his military awards, Pat Tillman received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN in 2003, as part of that year’s ESPY Awards ceremony.

The Georgia Peach also known as Ty Cobb, arguably the best player to ever play the game of baseball. A pure hitter to all parts of the field, good on defense and tenacious on the base-pads was an unforgettable player.  It was known that Ty would sharpen his cleats to inflict as much damage as he could when stealing a base. He once said, “Baseball is War”. To watch him play or read about the way he went about playing the game one could conclude he really thought he was on a battlefield. But in a time like today where athletes throw certain words around like war, shedding blood, sacrifice, brotherhood and being a soldier, most have never served and will never see a battlefield and experience war or bloodshed on a real level. Ty used the same words as well, but Ty and other baseball players during World War I, used to have drill instructors and the players would take the ballpark with bats on their shoulders like a soldier carrying a rifle. In 1918, Cobb joined the Army and served in the Chemical Warfare department during World War I. No surprise the meanest man in baseball would want to join a unit taking on a new weapon with great killing potential like poison gas, a tactic considered a war crime at the time by the 1899 Hague declaration concerning asphyxiating gasses.

Cobb only served a little over a month or so in an actual combat theater but was exposed to gas agents while doing a training exercise and was laid up for weeks with a hacking cough and colorless discharge, some of the same guys on that exercise died as a result of the exposure.  Cobb said after returning from France: “I hardly had time to get used to the idea [of being in the Army]. I’m proud to have been in uniform in some small way and to see our great nation dispel the enemy in such miraculous speed.” Although Cobb swore to quit Baseball after his return from War he showed up in a Tigers uniform in 1919 winning his 12th and final batting title. Cobb earned the rank of Captain in the US Army but in baseball he earned: .367 career batting average, six-time stolen base leader in the American League, four-time RBI leader in the American League, League MVP 1911, twelve-time batting champion and the triple crown in 1909. Two guys almost 100 years apart doing the same thing, sacrificing sport and life for our nation.

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