A minute mote isn't sufficiently tiny. The biggest isn't big enough.

The rich get richer; the poor get poorer. Some drive Cadillac Esplanades, and some seek a Cooper Mini. The mid-sized sedan? Snore ...

Is it any wonder we are becoming a polarized society?

We live in a big land and we love our wide open spaces. We long for big homes. We go for big ideas, Big Macs, big deals. We dream big.

We like our heroes big.

And this could be indicative of a bigger problem.

Adults can tell the myth from reality, discerning the dollar-infused, bought-and-paid-for, legend-in-their-own-mind athlete from the real deal. That's harder for today's youths.

Maybe it begins with our flippant use of the term "hero" to begin with.

"The word hero is used far too freely," University of Warwick (England) philosophy professor Angie Hobbs told WebMD's Jennifer Warner for her 2004 feature "Do We Need Another Sports Hero?"

Skip the wax

The initial notion of sports figures as heroes goes back to ancient Greece, Warner pointed out, when "hero" literally referred to someone who was semi-divine: born from one mortal and one divine parent. Greeks eventually viewed sporting champions as being "born of the Gods."

But it wasn't much later that the objects of our adulation took on well-spun, pasteurized personae, often being larger in stature.

In Roman society, imperfections in hastily sculpted statues and busts were deviously hidden and smoothed out with wax by commissioned artists. This provided the effigies of heroes and dignitaries with a nice glossy sheen until the bright (and warm) light of day, when the wax inevitably melted and ran. Eventually it was written into every contract that products would be completed without wax, or in Latin, "Sin Cera." Thus, "sincere."

Sand and grit

Size mattered in the early days of our nation, to be sure. It took big men to tame the Big West. Mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan swung an axe blade the size of a Smart Car.

Somewhere, lost in the evolution a hero's proportions, was the importance of a proportionately big heart, however.

I tend to hold with a friend who once took the hard line on what he thought a hero should be: someone who knowingly risks danger or sacrifice, not for singular glory, but for the greater good. Thousands of nameless soldiers on the beaches at Omaha come to mind. But where did the term hero travel from the sands of Normandy to salary arbitration?

Indeed, Hobbs explained that athletic traits revered most in sports heroes (speed, strength, and endurance) mimic traits that were necessary for success in battle. Still, I wonder how many soldiers at D-day returned from the campaign in Europe and charged fans for an autograph.

Jesse Owens bridged the gap. Owens used not just physical prowess but mental determination and courage to defiantly confront the dangerous precept of White / German supremacy before Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

Years later, he was relegated to racing against horses at running exhibitions that played out like circus sideshows.

Toppsy turvy

But perhaps most alarming is the exponential escalation in the proportions of our sports heroes of late.

When I was young, way back in medieval times when autographs were free and didn't end up on EBay later that same day, the most popular image of your idol was on a sports card, like a Topps baseball card. It fit in the palm of your hand, and they came ten for 10 cents, with a piece of gum tossed in for measure.

If kids in my neighborhood got real lucky, you might get one bonafide star in a real pack for every nine utility outfielders. At best, Carl Yastrzemski or Roberto Clemente might stand, bat-in-hand, a full three inches tall in the photo. They made football cards too, and my 2-by-3-inch Bart Starr card and was the envy of the block.

The only people collecting these cards today are "card collectors." Bubblegum cards no longer include bubblegum, and the best cards around today are still the "throwback" edition Johnnie Unitas and Willie Stargell cards. I wonder why?

Big as life

Today, baseball cards have grown up into huge cardboard, stand-up placards that stand 6-feet-6 tall in the corner of your adoring child's bedroom, dwarfing every trophy on their mantle.

With every new purchase of larger and larger HDTV's professional athletes get bigger and bigger. What used to chase quarterbacks across a small screen Zenith now dances in a widescreen end zone.

We stand transfixed--an Orwellian portrait of a gape-mouthed, sheep-like population drawn to the image of a large screen image like moths to a flame.

We are mesmerized. Even the athletes themselves are drawn to it. Football players streaking down the sidelines take their eyes off the goal line and stare up at their own image on the big screen in the ultimate exercise in narcissism.

Cybereality

It's a sad truth when Hollywood convinces one of its stars that they are the character they portray. Some think it novel, however, when an athlete legally changes his name to reflect an on-field image.

In the Basketball Hall of Fame, scale is everything, and guests push and shove to press their faces against the glass separating them from the gunboats that were Shaquille O'Neal's shoes, which might otherwise double as affordable housing.

We want our heroes big and invincible. Check out the simulated body types on Madden Football or similar MLB Baseball or NBA Basketball videogames -- 350-pound NFL linemen are suddenly svelte and agile; a long, lean receiver morfs into a muscle-bound Spartan warrior.

On one baseball videogame, the Boston Red Sox slugger David "Big Papi" Ortiz loses 50 pounds, former MVP Dustin Pedroia goes from about 5-7 (if that) to 7-5, and lean Yankee's hurler Mariano Rivera looks like a Klingon.

With the proper grounding and understanding of the difference between mythology and reality, it seems certain that any dangers might be mitigated, but the want for bigger and better is not lost on our athletes either. Able to take pills to become bigger, more and more athletes are doing so.

Caught in the act, our protagonists are laid bare, and when they descend from their pedestals, our sense of self-esteem takes a plunge as well.

Inflatables

"We put them up on the pedestal, and then often through their off-field activities and behaviors they self-destruct in some way and then fall from the pedestal," sports psychologist Stanley Teitelbaum told Hobbs and WebMD.

"To the extent to which we identify with our heroes, their success filters into our own self-esteem and enables us to feel good via our connection with them," says Teitelbaum. "Correspondingly, when they fail, we kind of stumble along with them in our own self-image and self-esteem."

Inflated egos have always been present. Babe Ruth was well aware of his own worth, and Dizzy Dean once said, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it." I've always felt, "If you can do it, there ain't no need fer braggin'."

Problem now is that everything else is becoming inflated as well. Biceps, lifestyles, salaries...Just maybe, from time to time, we simply need to let a little air out of our inflated vision of what constitutes a hero and scale down to real-life size our swollen notion of idolatry.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were Topps bubblegum cards for every recreation league instructor that coached on well beyond the years of his children's involvement just for the love of coaching, showing up an hour before each practice and unloading equipment out of the back of a pick-up truck and staying out to work with kids deep into the thicket of the twilight?

That's a pack of sports cards I'd buy, with or without the bubblegum.

Imagine a world where kids propped up Fathead poster boards of their soccer dads, or where action-photo posters were of mothers, behind the wheel of the minivan at 4:30 a.m., driving a sleepy child to swim practice before a day of school.

Imagine a society where there was a hall of fame that included equipment managers, and groundskeepers, and booster club officers, and volunteer bus drivers, bleacher painters...

Or firemen.

Or teachers.

A society is often judged not by the size of its heroes or their likenesses, but by the depth of their heroes' courage and scale of their deeds.

Photos of my heroes fit in my wallet, and a couple of them are 12 and 14 years old, respectively. After all, every child is, in the truest Greek sense of the term hero, semi-divine.

It's fine to cheer our teams in the "big game" or revel in a "big play," so long as we remember to set things in their proper scale -- to understand that the biggest games are played by ordinary men and women with extraordinary talent that have ordinary days too. We must distinguish between the myth and the reality, especially for those too young to discern for themselves. If not, then we have "big" problems.

Alongside our "Ruth-ian" feats and image of Paul Bunyan-like athletes, we need to remember to celebrate those brave, bold life-sized souls who toil in anonymity and embody the truest sense of the term hero...without the wax.

Sincerely.

- chn -