{"id":28440,"date":"2020-12-16T08:33:37","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T13:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=28440"},"modified":"2020-12-24T13:05:51","modified_gmt":"2020-12-24T18:05:51","slug":"heroes-die-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/16\/heroes-die-first\/","title":{"rendered":"HEROES DIE FIRST"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>The<\/strong><\/span> <strong><span style=\"color: #993366;\">guys<\/span> <\/strong>who are eight to 10 years older than you, they\u2019re your idols. You&#8217;re not in competition with them. They\u2019re different: wiser, polished, cooler.<\/p>\n<p>Dennis Ralston died last week at 78 from brain cancer. He was on the Davis Cup team in the 1960s. I wasn\u2019t a huge fan of him, because he was tall and I was short. Ralston was 6-2. His teammate, Chuck McKinley, was my guy, 5-8. McKinley died of brain cancer, too, at 46 in 1986. I didn&#8217;t know that until a minute ago. I don&#8217;t follow tennis that closely.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a great 1:56-minute video of McKinley playing Roy Emerson at Roxboro Middle School. Technically, Harold T. Clark Courts, Cleveland Heights, 1964:<\/p>\n<div class=\"arve-wrapper arve-normal-wrapper arve-youtube-wrapper \" itemscope itemtype=\"http:\/\/schema.org\/VideoObject\" style=\"background-image: url(http:\/\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/ZJYmGGwwSd8\/0.jpg);\">\n<div class=\"arve-embed-container\"><iframe id=\"arve-iframe-1\" class=\"arve-inner arve-hidden\" data-src=\"\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/ZJYmGGwwSd8?iv_load_policy=3&#038;modestbranding=1&#038;rel=0&#038;wmode=transparent&#038;autoplay=1\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen><\/iframe><button class=\"arve-inner arve-play-background arve-iframe-btn\" data-target=\"arve-iframe-1\"><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZJYmGGwwSd8\" class=\"arve-hidden\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZJYmGGwwSd8<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>My mother<\/strong><\/span> bought me a ticket. She wouldn&#8217;t buy an extra one for herself or my father because tickets were expensive &#8212; $10 a day ($84 in today&#8217;s money). The setting: a 7,500-seat bleacher rig where the Roxboro running track is. The U.S. lost to Australia.<\/p>\n<p>OK, you never heard of Ralston. Try Bob Dylan. I hope to outlive Dylan, born in 1941. I idolized him. I hope I don&#8217;t croak before he does. That wouldn&#8217;t be right. Heroes dies first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The guys who are eight to 10 years older than you, they\u2019re your idols. You&#8217;re not in competition with them. They\u2019re different: wiser, polished, cooler. Dennis Ralston died last week at 78 from brain cancer. He was on the Davis Cup team in the 1960s. I wasn\u2019t a huge fan of him, because he was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28440"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28495,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28440\/revisions\/28495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}