We’re tied to the athletes we worship by at least two common threads: we live, and we die. Sometimes, it is the latter of the two that we forget while watching athletes amuse us on television. Then, in those rare yet tragically painful moments, a freak occurrence such as a plane crash, in New York, into a high rise happens. There was a moment like that this past week, and for a time, it nearly brought New York to its knees. Then, the sports world found out whose plane it actually was that had crashed.
We reserve the right to honor our athletes who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation, or perhaps those that have died on the field of play, something that always seems to hang over the stadium on game day like a cursed plague. There are always reports of retired athletes who left their prime decades ago, battling the last stages of illness and time, and our reaction is nearly the same to their passing. But when the circumstances are so unusually surreal, such as a plane crashing into a building in New York, it’s almost impossible to really understand the magnitude of what has happened until several days after the event.
New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle loved to fly his plane. With the collapse of the Yankee postseason effort still simmering, Lidle was preparing to rejoin his wife and child in California, where they live. Before he left, he decided to take his plane up, something he had done for a television crew months before. On Wednesday, October 11th, Cory Lidle’s plane crashed into a high rise in Manhattan. Both Lidle and his passenger on board died in the crash.
Sadly, Corey Lidle wasn’t the first athlete to die in a plane crash.
The New York Yankees, whether you love them or hate them, have had another player killed in a plane crash. The late, great Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, the player who would wage one of the best baseball feuds of the 1970s with his antithesis Carlton Fisk, was killed in a plane crash as well. There have been numerous fatalities in air crashes in the realm of NASCAR. In 1993, both Davey Allison and Alan Kulwicki both perished in helicopter and plane crashes, within a few months of one another.
Maybe we hold athletes in such regard, that perishing in something as rare as a plane crash is simply not possible. A star football player passing away from sleep apnea, a young college basketball player collapsing to the court during a routine practice”¦ it just doesn’t sound right to say or even think about. The athletes of sports are Gods in our eyes. To think that they take the same risks that we do every time we step outside our front door. It makes you realize that we’re not so different, after all.
Our hearts go out to the entire Lidle family, to the victims of this terrible accident, and to everyone that has come to know this kind of pain all too well.
