Have you ever met someone you really want to dislike but can’t? You know the type. They have almost every bad quality you can imagine, but there’s something about them that draws you in.
There’s a term for people like that: lovable rogues. If you follow sports at all, you see them everywhere. Reggie Jackson was a lovable rogue. He signed with the New York Yankees in 1977 and immediately challenged Thurman Munson for the unofficial term of team leader. He hadn’t even put the uniform on and he was calling himself “the straw that stirs the drink.”
It doesn’t get any brasher. He was the type of guy you wanted to see strike out. You wanted him to trip rounding the bases and pull his groin muscle. As the saying goes: “Not enough bad things can happen to him.”
Yet …
Reggie was among the most entertaining people I’ve ever met. You’d read about him, you want to hate him. But he had a way of charming the socks off you too. I loved watching him hit homers. He didn’t pretend to be humble about it. He’d stand there and admire those shots he hit, toss the bat aside and take his time rounding the bases. He even looked good striking out.
But with all that, I can’t recall him being hit by too many pitches. He was Reggie. He may have defined the word “conceited,” but he had a way about him that you couldn’t help but like.
You can add Muhammad Ali and about a thousand others to the list. They caused controversy and commotion wherever they went, and it was easy to get tired of them. But in the end, you had to admire them — albeit grudgingly at times.
It’s easy to pick on athletes who are like that because they’ve been pampered and enabled all their lives. We used to say that people like that aren’t conceited, they’re convinced. Coaches put up with these fatheads so long as they score baskets and touchdowns, and hit home runs. And it goes all the way up to the professional arena.
You see people like that elsewhere — even the White House. Bill Clinton was one of the most lovable presidential rogues. Slick Willie. It was an appropriate nickname.
Think about his campaign in 1992. He’d already had one sleazy affair exposed. But he got elected anyway. Why? Why did Ted Kennedy keep getting elected to the Senate? Why did Donald Trump get elected president? Why, through the years, have public officials squirmed their way out of scandals and emerged whole? You know the answer to that. You cut your people slack, because, warts and all, they are lovable rogues whose transgressions get overlooked if they’re on the right side of issues that concern you.
But of course, other politicians can suffer the same scandals and drown in them. Has anyone heard anything from John Edwards since his scandal? Before that broke, he was everybody’s darling. He was even John Kerry’s running mate. Now you need a search party to find him. Not lovable enough, I guess.
It doesn’t always work out that people overlook your faults. Former Sen. Al Franken, to me, was a lovable rogue because he could verbally cut people up, wipe the blood off the knife, and put it back in the drawer before they knew they’d been sliced. All done with a huge smile on his face, to boot. But a 15-year old escapade at a party did him in. I guess he wasn’t lovable enough either.
The entertainment industry is full of lovable rogues. What was John Lennon other than a lovable rogue? Mick Jagger? Madonna? Same thing. There is no shortage of them in rock ‘n’ roll.
Lennon stands out because he wasn’t afraid to say things that most people wouldn’t. He didn’t care who he offended. When it came to airing his dirty laundry in public, he was the master. We got it all. And the things he said about Paul McCartney were horrible.
Yet there was also something about him, some aspect of his personality, that made you overlook all that and hang on every word he said.
And in the end, you forgave him. You saw him as a symbol of peace and love, and — along with much of the world — stopped dead in your tracks when he was shot to death. Oh, to have that kind of power over people.
He wouldn’t have had half of it if he was a nice, quiet, well-behaved guy. Instead he was a lovable rogue. That made all the difference.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
