If you are fortunate enough to reach what I'll call late middle age, the news of the day often brings death close to home. Until recently, my father, who turned 89 in June, would become unnerved by reading the obituaries of younger friends and acquaintances. His attitude seems to have been improved by a puckish pal in his Santa Barbara tai chi class, a man one year older. Earlier this year, he told dad how happy he was to turn 90.
"Why is that?" my father asked, inadvertently playing the straight man.
"Because very few people die at 90," was the punch line.
Laughing in the face of death, well, why not? It's better than worrying, although not the only alternative. "O death, where is thy sting?" Christians are reminded in the book of 1 Corinthians. "O grave, where is thy victory?"
Eternal life is an inspiring thought, to be sure, although humor can be a nice complement to faith. In a 1941 Hollywood classic, W.C. Fields quips, "Drown in a vat of liquor? Death, where is thy sting?"
Yet sometimes the obit page does sting.
The deaths this week of basketball star Bill Russell and actress Nichelle Nichols reminded Americans of a certain age of the passing of an iconic era, and the passage of time in their own lives. Nichols was 89, Russell 88. The weekend also brought sad tidings about Jerry Ceppos, a respected and beloved newspaper editor who succumbed at 75. I worked for Jerry at the San Jose Mercury News in the 1980s. I followed his career as the dean of the journalism schools at the University of Nevada and LSU, and we had reconnected in recent years. I'm grateful for that. Jerry was a principled and caring editor -- a sweet man in a rough business. And he gave back more to our profession than he ever took.
Both Nichols, whom I wrote about a couple of years ago, and Russell were civil rights pioneers. As a San Francisco Bay Area native, I'm biased, but Bill Russell was the greatest athletic competitor I ever saw. If winning is the yardstick, he was beyond compare. Playing center in an era in which a great big man was essential, Russell won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco, a team that never won March Madness before or since; he led the U.S. team to an Olympic gold medal in 1956 when only amateurs could compete; and as the alpha player on the Boston Celtics, led his team to 11 National Basketball Association championships in 13 seasons, the last two as a player/coach.
Bob Ryan, the famed former Boston Globe sportswriter, succinctly summed up Russell's preternaturally winning ways: "In his final 14 years as a basketball player, Bill Russell's team participated in 21 winner-take-all contests (nine NCAA tournament games, one Olympic gold medal game, 10 Game 7s, one deciding Game 5), and Bill Russell's team won all 21." All 21!
In his 1979 memoir, Russell himself described the secret -- one of the secrets, anyway -- to his success. "The most important measure of how good a game I'd played," he wrote, "was how much better I'd made my teammates play."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
