Although I was crazy about the Montreal Expos as a boy, I never liked Gary Carter. He was the obvious star of this team that I lived and died by, performing both the over-sized heroics and all the small things that helped a team win games. However, when I looked at the earnest and ever-smiling Carter, always charging about as if the point of his hustle was for you to notice his hustle, I saw, as Holden Caulfield might have put it, a phony.
The truth is that his teammates didn’t much like him either, and his nickname “The Kid” was derisive. His enthusiasm was entirely out of fashion with the cynical, coke-infused climate of the times and Carter was so conspicuously “Golly-Gee” that it seemed it could be nothing more than self-promotion. This rankled everybody, and when he wasn’t being sneered at as “The Kid,” he was being sneered at as “Camera Carter. “
I was a small, white kid from Ottawa and I wanted to be the opposite of what I was. I wanted to be Public Enemy. I wanted to be the L.A. Raiders. I wanted to be the Georgetown Hoyas. I wanted to be an outsider, a rebel. I adored the aloof, suspicious and impenetrable players, those that seemed indifferent to their great talent and wholly unimpressed with the swooning world around them.
Hopelessly All-American, Carter was the antithesis of the beautiful anti-heroes I imagined these players to be. Carter was a golden boy from California who unashamedly loved to play baseball. He was an honour student and three-sport God, a Christian straight arrow who seemed a boring, glittering shield of virtue. I instinctively resented him, I mean, I didn’t believe him, he was a Ken doll, for fuck’s sake!
Later, after he was traded from the Expos as a proven baseball hero to the New York Mets– where he won a World Series in 1986– Carter was still relegated to the clubhouse periphery. This famous Mets team was comprised of a bunch of bad boys and assholes, and they were loudly celebrated for this. They were New York! They were what winning was all about!
Of course, although Carter was the stable centre of this team, he was still a social outcast. He’d didn’t play cards or drink, let alone do lines off a hooker’s hip. He wasn’t censorious about this, but remained his steadfast self, happily and faithfully married to his wife while all sorts of debauchery and self-indulgence exploded around him. And for this, he never lived within the inner circle of the teams he played for or the fans that cheered for them. Carter never rebelled, but always cooperated, and that strength was misunderstood.
On February 16th, at the age of 57, Gary Carter died of cancer.
In the fullness of time its’ become clear that there wasn’t a phony bone in his body. Most of my other heroes of the time fell into some sort of cataclysm, revealing their venality and duplicity, but not Carter, he was a hero before I knew what a hero was, and I will feel an unyielding shame, as I imagine many of his teammates will too, that I did not more fully understand this when he was alive.