The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
I became infatuated with baseball at the age of eight. I began following the Yankees during the 1976 season and never looked back.
In those early years, there were already signs of where I was headed. For as much as I enjoyed keeping track of the team from day to day, I also yearned to learn more about its history. Indeed, I wanted to discover the history of baseball in general. And for a boy, this often means hearing and reading tales of the super-human deeds performed by legends of the past.
At some point in grade school, I don’t remember exactly when or how, I came into possession of a small, hardcover book that celebrated some of the great ballplayers from the era that directly preceded me: the 
1960s. Men like Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson, and Brooks Robinson had their accomplishments recited and their stories told. I still remember the title of the chapter on Brock, then the all-time steals king: “Every Walk’s a Two Bagger.”
When I got the book, I was already familiar with most of the names it heralded. But I was still young and there were a few strangers staring back at me from the pages. One of them had an ominous name: Harmon Killebrew.
Reading through his chapter, I remember being shocked to find that one of the greatest home run kings had apparently played for the Minnesota Twins, and had retired only one year before I started following the sport. Yet I’d never heard of him. What’s more, the man was prodigious. He had the American League record for career home runs by a right-handed hitter. He’d tied or led the league six times. He’d hit 40 or more dingers an astonishing eight times. And his whopping total of 574 put him at fifth on the all-time list. All these years later, and despite the inflated numbers of the steroid era, he’s still 11th.
Harmon Killebrew was a startling discovery for me. The very name seemed something invented and better suited for an action hero, or maybe even an admirable villain. If anything, he sounded more like a wrestler than a baseball player. But of course Killebrew had always flown under the radar. He hailed from the small town of Paytette, Idaho. He started his career riding the pines for the lowly Washington Senators. When they moved to Minneapolis, it meant he would spend the bulk of his twenty-two year career playing in one of MLB’s smallest markets. And far from many of today’s prima donas, he was best known as a mild-mannered man, a team player who was quick with a smile but didn’t seek out the spotlight.
However, what stayed with me the most from that book were not Killebrew’s gaudy numbers. It was that picture. Each chapter opened with an action shot of that player. Brock sliding into the island of dirt at second base on some artificial turf field; Gibson finishing a pitch with 
his exaggerated back leg kick off the rubber, the striped stirrup on his right ankle in clear view; Robinson wearing dark shades like Joe Cool and making a back-handed stab of some hellacious scorcher down the line. And then there was Killebrew and that swing.
It was overwhelming. It was the personification of power. His back leg bent to nearly 90 degrees, his knee impossibly close the dirt of the batter’s box. His front leg arrow-straight and tilting his torso an almost perfect 45 degree. His hips fully turned to face the poor sap of a pitcher. His arms completely extended, and the bat pointing straight to center field.
And those goddamn forearms.
As a Yankees fan, I was already familiar with the legend of Mickey Mantle’s mighty guns, which he said got so strong from milking cows as a kid in Oklahoma. But these things made the Mick look like a 99 lb. weakling. This wasn’t just a man. This was a hero of epic proportions, a warrior so strong he could carry the world on his massive shoulders. This was Hercules in Minnesota pinstripes. And it was awesome.
Killebrew was a man `til the end. He’d been suffering from esophageal cancer, and when the doctors told him it couldn’t be beat it, he quit pissing around and checked himself into a hospice. He passed away this week at the age of 74.
I was happy to find that in its two-page obituary, The New York Times featured a picture of that mammoth swing. Too young to see him play live, it was always frozen in time, a fearsome and holy thing in black and white. It was picture perfect, a sacred display of power and grace. And to see it once more was a righteous thing.
