A resort town in high summer isn't a place where you expect to find the meaning of greatness.
The trim clapboard houses, dire no-parking signs and ice cream cones melting in the hands of impatient children are indicators of unexceptional normality. Alexander the Great and all his successors in the realm of human magnificence would feel lost among the dads in shorts strolling slowly down Main Street, staring in the shop windows, trying to explain yet again why they've brought the brood to the shrine that is Cooperstown.
You don't imagine greatness to be at home in an upstate New York getaway where the lake glimmers like glass and you can drop a thousand dollars on an autographed Willie Mays game-model baseball bat. Not that every locale of greatness has to be as intimidating as Lenin's tomb, as grandiose as the Vatican or as deeply meditative as Gettysburg. But almost always there's a distancing effect, for the very good reason that the great aren't like you and me. They're aloof, far-off, bigger and bolder, and often glad to be that way, assuming they even acknowledge our existence.
When the great are forced to consort with our kind, as Rupert Murdoch tried to do this week, it's with condescending awkwardness and a kind of artificiality. They're all too much like Mr. Burns, the plutocrat on The Simpsons who can't help but register disdain whenever he's downsized into a society of intrusive intimacy and gauche folksiness.
Which is to assume that Mr. Murdoch and his kind are indeed great. But maybe it's not so straightforward as that. Maybe we're buying into false notions of superiority perpetrated by the pseudo-great. Grotesquely high income levels, the ability to manipulate governments, a breezy attitude to the straitened regulations that govern mere mortals – these are symptoms of megalomania, and synonyms for a kind of worldly success. But are they the same thing as being great? If we can apply the epithet to both Alexander the Great and The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, if we're appalled by some expressions of greatness and moved to tears by others, and if heroes and villains are equally great, what can it all mean?
Thinking people, it must be admitted, consider greatness an unfashionable concept for finding meaning in our unordered world, as out-of-place in modernity as Alexander's one-man approach to empire building. The ancient hierarchies aren't what they were, it's true. But it would be a mistake to think that the pursuit and exercise of greatness have disappeared just because someone invented casual Fridays or taught Vladimir Putin the art of the photo op.
Consider baseball, the sport that more than any other celebrates and enumerates the consistency of human achievement. This is the time of year when the boys of summer exhibit the skills that give Cooperstown its purpose as a place where human greatness can finally be quantified, defined, celebrated and admired. At the end of Main Street, just past the Safe at Home collectibles store, the Heroes of Baseball Wax Museum (with a do-not-touch George Steinbrenner at the door) and the Triple Play Cafe, sits Baseball's Hall of Fame, where former Toronto Blue Jays legend Roberto Alomar will be enshrined tomorrow among the game's immortals.
This is the Hall of Fame by which all others are measured, and it has proved the best at discerning greatness since the first players were selected in 1936. Here you'll find the judgment of history on a man's ultimate meaning as rendered by people who watch a game where every moment is an opportunity for achievement and assessment, where a limitless array of coldhearted numbers is instantly available to back up the eyewitness reports.
A game where men are paid millions of dollars to play with a bat and ball within a few chalk lines and between an endless series of beer commercials might seem to fall short of displaying the limits of human potential. But the same could be said of war or Wall Street, where greatness on closer examination can depend on deviousness and lucky accidents.
Roberto Alomar showed that a baseball game is still a place where greatness can be achieved. This is a man who did his best work in front of 50,000 screaming fans and not only performed his task better than almost anyone else but did so with an acrobatic grace and an intuitive intelligence that made his admirers gasp in joy. Under the kind of pressure that would make the rest of us flee to the shadows of unseen ordinariness, he hit a home run against a seemingly unhittable pitcher that turned around the Blue Jays' fortunes in the 1992 league championship series, leaving an indelible memory that still brings delight to millions of people.
The nostalgic pull of his brilliant career, as recognized by the highly critical judges of Cooperstown, does something that other versions of human greatness don't always manage to do so well: It connects us to him, allowing us to partake in his greatness as if it were partly our own.
But then it is, isn't it? The heroes of sport create an extreme version of participatory greatness, where we share in someone's outsized feats to the point where their success feels like it belongs to us. And a hall of fame reinforces that feeling for as long as the people who stare in awe at Cooperstown's collection of iconic uniforms and bats and plaques maintain a connection with a player – given how Babe Ruth still resonates with people who never saw him play, the power of this emotion and the greatness it feeds off should not be underrated.
Greatness can be accessible, baseball teaches us, and you don't need to amass an empire or terrorize minions to earn your niche in eternity – it's enough that you excel by the standards of the statistics that both define the game and animate the conversations of its rabid followers. Which may explain why you could be the best doughnut-shop manager the world has ever seen and still not claim to be great: The metrics aren't as definitive as baseball's and not enough people care quite as passionately about the courtesy of your cashiers as they do about Roberto Alomar's pivot move at second base.
Human greatness is highly complicated, and without a global network of Halls of Fame to acknowledge its every manifestation we're left with a patchwork of methods to analyze, understand and even appreciate its outbreaks. Here is an attempt at a typology for the world beyond Cooperstown, where the standards may not be as rigorous but the desire to sift the great from the good often seems just as potent.
The Classic
Achilles in The Iliad was a man who was bound for glory. His only aim was to be above every other warrior at Troy, and his desire for superstar greatness was inseparable from the anger he felt at being diminished by lesser mortals, which in his eyes meant pretty well everyone. His arrogance was justified by his performance on the field, but his prideful pouts were so alienating that they undermined the common goals of his fellow Greeks – he was the kind of teammate you wanted to see traded the moment after he won you the World Series. Greatness in the pursuit of glory is never cautious or prudent, and always contains an element of its own self-destruction. If your ultimate aim in going to Troy is to get home safely, alpha-male Achilles isn't your man – better the reflective and resourceful Odysseus, who recognized that survival over the long haul was a better measure of manhood than chasing fame at any cost.
The Prodigy
Mozart had it, and Glenn Gould too – a genius so prodigious and instinctive that it leaves the rest of us reeling in its presence. Greatness of this type can seem sexy in its unstoppable enthusiasm, but it doesn't accommodate itself easily to the more mundane habits of daily life – prodigies can be restlessly and relentlessly antisocial, even as their off-kilter psyche requires constant reinforcement from the wider world. Burnout is almost automatic, so enjoy it while you can, from afar. The Hall of Fame has a few prodigies and sudden flameouts – Sandy Koufax is a classic example – but generally baseball greatness is built for the long-term.
The Charismatic
Pierre Trudeau wasn't Canada's greatest prime minister, professors will tell you, using "great" as a synonym for effective and conciliatory. But he caught our attention and held it as no other politician has, which in a people-pleasing realm like politics is a definite marker of greatness. The numbers guys in sports, like political-science profs, don't want achievement to be confused with personality and playing to the crowd. They're right up to a point – self-promotion shouldn't count, and pirouetting in the presence of royalty (the differently great Queen Elizabeth) seems more solipsistic than leaderly. But sometimes greatness isn't fair: The silent 600-home-run hitter falls short of due acclaim while the shortstop who dates supermodels or does back flips when the camera's on gets an easier pass to the Hall.
Giving the rest of us the pleasure of human connection is part of the great person's job description, which is why we like Will and Kate more than Charles, even as they try to shed the trappings of royal grandeur. Of course, charisma without achievement has its limits and disappointments – think Barack Obama, the overhyped rookie prospect who despite all the adoration (and the premature Nobel) has yet to deliver on his promise in the major leagues.
The Swaggerer
Swagger is simply self-admiring arrogance, and who does self-admiration better than swaggering overlords like Conrad Black or Kanye West or LeBron James? Some great people manage to be modest of course, and find their greatness in humility (though even their very self-abasement tends to be outsized – see Mother Teresa).
But generally greatness needs to project itself as aggressively over-the-top, often in an outlandish scenario of monster houses, egotistical outbursts and slavering posses/boards of directors, to convince itself as well as others that it is truly great.
Any kind of introspection will reveal the hollowness of these exaggerated claims, which is why athletes rely on sports psychologists to supply the confidence and control that their necessary moments of daily failure threaten to disrupt. Because moguls don't acknowledge or foresee the possibility of reversal, their hubris can quickly self-destruct – think Oedipus. But in the meantime swagger is a great source of protection when things go off the rails.
The Leader
Without war, Churchill, Lincoln and Pericles wouldn't be great. At least not without the oratory that war requires. But can greatness really come down to a nice turn of phrase that beautifies bloodshed? This is the hardest kind of greatness to evaluate, if only because the conditions for its expression are so commonplace and examples of its success are so rare.
Statisticians would complain about the small sample size, or point out how confirmation bias makes us focus on the greatness of great men while ignoring their flaws: Maybe Churchill wasn't such a clutch hitter after all and found his eloquence in the bottle a little too often. Maybe it was more the lucky breaks on D-Day, or the unexpected power stroke of the Russians in the Allies' lineup, that gives the bravado of his speeches their retrospective brilliance.
But like old-fashioned baseball scouts who trust to their instincts, we don't care. We know greatness when we see it. The great thing about all three of these leaders is that they didn't let their moods and passions get ahead of their ideas. They explained, resolved and justified difficult things to people who lacked their gifts. And made them feel better when they had every right to feel worse.
The Beauty
This one shouldn't count, but there's no denying that good looks are often confused with greatness. Or maybe greatness is conferred on beautiful people just so we have a reason to stare at them a little longer. Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and George Clooney all have a certain something, but there are oodles of models who overachieve on the photogenic side and still manage to be no more than run-of-the-mill Vogue filler. Maybe looks are only the starting point: True physical greatness is in the eyes, the voice, the seductive allure, the attentiveness.
In sports terms, someone who looks the part will attract more scouts, but you still have to go out and play the game. And some baseball connoisseurs still think the spectacular Mr. Alomar made his leaping greatness look misleadingly pretty – steady Cal Ripkin, the Jimmy Stewart of the infield, deserves more credit for making his fielding plays look easy, for brilliantly positioning himself exactly where the ball would be hit.
The Hero
Is Sully Sullenberger great because he landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River and not a single person died? If you applied baseball's standards, he wouldn't come close, because he may be batting 1.000, but he's only had one at-bat, however amazing. Greatness in sport terms is repetitive as well as spectacular, which distances Hall of Fame heroes from their counterparts who get instant acclaim on the next day's TV morning shows. Still, any self-respecting Hall of Fame would want to exhibit a Sully memento as a reminder of a single inspiring moment – think Joe Carter's Series-winning home run as a parallel, where circumstances dictated greatness as much as the achievement itself.
The Hero, Part II
Greatness at the heroic level implies a choice as well as an opportunity: Most of us don't run into the burning building or jump onto the railway tracks to rescue the fallen child from the oncoming train. Death in a war zone isn't automatically heroic, no matter what Ontario's Highway of Heroes procession route implies. Mr. Sullenberger didn't have a choice in landing the jet, which limits the range of his greatness – "just doing my job" doesn't quite cut it at the highest levels.
A bigger, better hero is someone who faces down common sense to do the uncommon thing. Consider the winners of the Victoria Cross, a pantheon of bravery that makes even Cooperstown look mundane: What superhuman impulse made my cousin Samuel Lewis Honey rush a German machine-gun nest single-handed at Bourlon Wood in 1918?
Interestingly, heroes who are asked by researchers to explain their remarkable acts often say that they gave it no thought, that they did what had to be done (even while most other onlookers are frozen into a survival-instinct passivity). What we see after the fact as great courage or the highest form of morality is simply a kind of uncomplicated clarity. The sports connection here isn't as far-fetched as it may seem: Endless repetition in training allows a great player to perform quickly and transcendently, without the nullifying delay of hesitation or doubt, as Wayne Gretzky beautifully embodied.
The Saint
John Paul II was clearly a great man, whatever you make of his arcane belief system, unyielding nature and unrivalled sense of personal power. But you can't discount those qualities, because they're exactly what made him great – how do you stare down the Soviet Empire, damn Western materialism and uphold orthodoxy if you don't see yourself in some way as God's gift to humanity? Cockiness isn't in keeping with the Vatican's values these days the way it was back in the day of the Borgia and Medici popes. And so John Paul II, to be suitably enshrined among the great, has to be redirected into the humble surroundings of sainthood – not only did he defeat communism, he also appeared to a sick nun in a dream and cured her Parkinson's disease.
Baseball fans who overvalue Derek Jeter for the kindness he shows to clubhouse employees will understand this levelling instinct. Pure greatness isn't sufficient in situations where achievement bends to a moral narrative: Cooperstown voters rejected Mr. Alomar on his first bid for the Hall last year because he once spat on an umpire in the heat of battle.
Official Greatness
Countries designate some people as great, or at least better than the rest of us, which ought to give us pause. Should democracies be in the business of ranking the citizenry, sorting out the elite from the masses? What are we meant to think when Peter Mansbridge wears his Order of Canada pin – that he's a great newsman or a patriotic cheerleader? Do modern Cooperstown standards apply, or do cronyism and political correctness predominate?
Maybe it helps that this is Canada, where greatness is an equivocal thing, ordinariness is prized even at the level of official recognition and not too many people care who's in and who's out. When I listen to the pure and plaintive soprano voice of Suzie LeBlanc singing Acadian songs, I don't stop and ask myself whether the Governor-General has officially anointed her as pretty darn not too bad.
If you're going to do this sort of thing properly, you need to be French, set up a Pantheon and inter the actual bones of the likes of Marie Curie as if they were on their way to becoming gods. Even then, you end up with Nicolas Sarkozy's failed attempt in 2009 to transfer Albert Camus's remains to Paris from a small cemetery in the sunny Vaucluse. The role of the great isn't to make politicians look good by association. But it says something about greatness that it remains powerful beyond the grave.
Ordinary Greatness
Finding greatness in the acts of average people sounds like the fallback position of people who suspect elitism when the best are separated from the rest. Tyrants, robber barons and obnoxious celebrities have certainly downgraded the value of standing out, and there aren't quite enough Shakespeares or Jane Austens around to redress the balance in favour of artistic extraordinariness – creative genius is both rarer and less able to dominate than sheer force of will.
Marx showed clearly how individual greatness of the economic kind derived from the power of the collective. Conrad Black may write books about Richard Nixon, FDR and himself, but most historians have shifted from a great-man theory of how things happen to a more nuanced appreciation of the woman at the sewing machine, the farmer in the field, the poor family finding ways to survive and endure.
Political speeches wouldn't exist if leaders couldn't lavish praise on the courageous triumphs of ordinary people, a.k.a. the electorate. But there's nothing new here. When Pericles delivered the funeral oration for the Athenian war dead in 431 B.C., his encomium was really directed at the city itself and its democratic values – the heroism of larger-than-life figures like Achilles had been replaced by a citizen army laying down their lives for a great idea.
Baseball's Hall of Fame is a kind of democracy too, in the Athenian sense: The best players get in on their merits, according to the ideals of the place, which makes many of the other forms of worldly greatness look unfair and impure. Arguments rage over the best ways to measure the best players, but then raging arguments were also fundamental to Athenian democracy – even if they were questioning the compromises of imperialism rather than touting Tim Raines's on-base percentage.
Still, if you've got free speech and greatness in the same place, you've pulled off something that's not too bad.
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Sully Sullenberger's name as Sully Sulberger. This version has been corrected.