`Try to be a good man, and the world will remember'

I was seven years old when my grandfather asked me the question that would follow me around for the rest of my life. It's strange, what the mind sets upon to mark as the moments of your life-but when my grandfather, his voice strained and face worn by 40 years of sales pitch after sales pitch, leaned in close to me and asked me what I wanted to be, my first-grade mind clamped down like a bear trap.

I said carpenter-it was what my Sunday School teacher was, and in a county of farmers and teachers, it was as good a job as any. He smiled faintly, patted me on the shoulder with his calloused hands and said, "Just try to be a good man, and the world will remember."

He was one of the last characters of a breed now all but extinct. Every small Southern town had a Maynard Hale; that ours was the original was of little note. If you've ever seen a big wooden bench painted with a Pepsi advertisement, you've probably met my grandfather. Doesn't matter if it was Littleton, N.C., or Tylertown, Miss.; he was there with a group of four or five old men who worked nine to five every day of their working lives and sat on their bench and watched the traffic all day in retirement.

And he, like any other Maynard Hale, had the ability to make any phrase sound like the gospel.

Try to be a good man, and the world will remember.

I'm 21 years old and I still don't know if that's the truth or something pulled from behind my ear.

I think about those words like an old wound that calls attention to itself on a rainy day, and in the last few years it seems like I've found myself in a tropical depression.

I thought about those words when he died half a dozen years later. I thought about them when I marched out of Warren County High School bound for God knows what I thought I was bound for. And I thought about it last Tuesday when I found out Bobby Phills had died.

Sportswriters had come out of the woodwork to talk about Phills, people who knew him as little more than a footnote in a press packet and a stat line in a box score. It gave them a chance to show off their Ivy League English degrees and quote A.E. Housman like he was a grisly NBA vet.

But the great pessimist Housman and the cynical world of sports journalism are wrong. Maybe they should have met my grandfather.

Try to be a good man, and the world will remember.

It's not about the athlete, it's about us. Our heroes forge a special place within us, and as long as we live, so does the legend. We meet them in youth, cheer with them where life may lead and buy them a beer when they're through.

Yet we tend only to remember that there's a beauty to it after it's gone; otherwise our athletes are a bunch of zeroes on the end of a paycheck.

Somewhere, sportswriters forget that between every Dennis Rodman marriage and every Latrell Sprewell story, there's a Bobby Phills.

And it is easy to be cynical these days, when labor negotiations and holdouts are as much a part of the jargon as two-baggers and dingers were a half century ago. But if the world owes Bobby Phills anything, it's to remember, that beyond all the problems sport has today, there is somewhere a starry-eyed kid from Baton Rouge with busted Converse sneakers that has never heard of David Falk.

Talk about early entry and revenue sharing all you like, but between the lines, all the talking and all the money doesn't keep a $10 million fastball inside the park any better than a Coca-Cola curve.

Maybe I'm just too inexperienced to know that every great athlete was really born before America liked Ike and that all we have now are overcoddled mercenaries, and maybe I am naive, but every time the Hornets tip it up and every time the 'Canes drop the puck in Raleigh, somewhere in a smoky barroom or the vestibule of a church, somebody will be talking about a Chiasson check or a Bobby Phills three-pointer.

Athletes don't die. They remain what they always were, symbols of our greatness. That's what Housman failed to understand and what sportswriters never get. We can't be perfect, but we know what perfection is-we've seen it-and so long as we live, so live those perfect moments.

Forget $30 for a nosebleed seat to an NBA game, it's about one moment in 48 minutes where we all realize just how perfect life can be.

I don't know that there's a lesson behind Bobby Phills' death, but maybe if we just remember the next time Ken Griffey Jr. whines about Safeco Field that somewhere on a dirt court in Texas there's a kid shooting three-pointers till the sun goes down who knows exactly what it's all about, it'll all be worth it.

Sport never was never about multi-million-dollar arenas and collective bargaining agreements. It's always been about the players and that moment when they step between the lines. What we only remember in tragic bits per year is that what sports, like life, is all about is a Pepsi bench in Littleton and a chainlink net in Baton Rouge. It's about the players and it's about the moments.

Maybe that's what Bobby Phills wanted the world to know.

Trust my grandfather, Bobby, you were a good man, the world will remember.

UPON FURTHER REVIEW is a weekly column written by a Chronicle sports columnist. It appears every Wednesday.