Ovi‘s Dick Piercing

It’s a short career, sports superstardom, which means that the world accumulates ex-great athletes at a fairly remarkable pace, one a year at least, as if time itself were an aging athlete out fielding fly balls — Elway, Sampras, Shaq, Ronaldo, thunk, thunk, thunk. At any given moment there’s a significant population of ex-sports superstars milling around in the weird background of culture, the part that’s half after-party and half wax museum. You could throw a dinner for them, the living retired great athletes, and fill a pretty good-sized hall. I’m picturing Yogi Berra trading fake punches with Muhammad Ali, MJ smoking scornfully in the corner booth. Maradona face-down in a cake. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t mean melancholy or emblematic — it’s those things, too, but the tragedy-of-mortality, silent-season-of-a-hero vein of sports lyricism isn’t what I’m after here. It’s just, at a basic level, strange that the machinery of sports cranks out this class of enormously celebrated people cut off from the source of their celebrity, icons whose cultural value lies primarily in serving as mobile reminders of something other people once saw them do. What must it be like, to be a piece of living memorabilia? I sometimes think that the life of a retired sports legend would be like experiencing existence as the Andy Warhol painting of yourself. Or, at the very least, like discovering you’re being haunted by a ghost, and you’re the ghost.