The Tragedy Of Appreciating SOBs Too Late

The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of all those grudges. They were highly and sometimes objectionably competitive men, and as such were held to be villains of a sort during their careers. In both cases, their brilliance became easier to acknowledge after the hesitations and qualifications related to all that were shocked back into perspective by their deaths. Busch died at age 41, due to sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That shockingly untimely death ended a nearly two-decade run as the driver who most, in the words of fellow driver Ryan Blaney, "made you feel inadequate, and [made] you feel talentless because you see him do these things, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know how he does it. I really don’t understand it.’" He was the hardest of chargers, a man who suffered competitors sporadically and fools not at all; before he died, Busch could be equally commodious and disputatious depending on the day. This was the result of the work he'd done and had to do, and his general mood. If that is villainy, then the world is full of them. Lemieux was equally notable on the merits. Over 21 years in hockey, he had compiled four Stanley Cups and 459 goals in combined regular seasons and playoffs; he ranked sixth overall in playoff goals with 80, and was regarded as one the game's elite defensive forwards. This was not what he was best known for, though. He was best known for the vicious hit he put on Detroit's Kris Draper that was so egregious—Lemieux checked Draper from behind into the boards during the 1996 Western Conference final, breaking Draper’s jaw, nose, and cheekbone—that it sparked not just a brawl in that game but a rivalry between the Red Wings and Lemieux's Colorado Avalanche that lasted until well after Lemieux left the Avs and the Wings had turned over their management and roster. ESPN made a documentary about the rivalry, back when documentaries were actually documents rather than self-preening projects. The sentence "You hated his guts until he was on your team" was invoked so often in Lemieux's case that, had it come with a price tag per use, his family would have enjoyed generational wealth through the remainder of this century.