Things People Say When You're Dead

Will people say nice things after you die?

One would assume so. It certainly is part of our contract with a civilized society.

But I learned as a young person to read between the lines. I learned this after Billy Martin died on Christmas Day 1989.

Billy died in a wreck outside his farm near Binghamton, N.Y., not far from my hometown. He was just 61.

You couldn't grow up loving baseball in the 1970s without knowing Billy Martin. Billy was crazy. He would fight anyone anywhere over anything.

While the Yankees were never on my radar, as an undersized kid, I had a certain admiration for battlin' Billy. He fought writers, fans, teammates and owners. He once fought a marshmellow salesman in Minnesota. Billy was crazy.

He would say and do anything, usually at the same time and the wrong time, and at great personal cost to himself.

In hindsight, his best fight was really his worst. In 1985, Billy went at it with big Ed Whitson, one of his starting pitchers. The pair started up inside a Baltimore hotel bar and traded punches in the lobby, parking lot and in the hotel.

Billy was a sick man. And he was probably a horse's ass if you had to rely on him for anything. The night before the Whitson fight, Billy had to be separated from a patron at the same hotel bar.

But you don't say those things when someone dies. Billy's death was met with the usual euphemistic gymnastics.

Billy was a "passionate fighter" instead of a drunken brawler. The paranoid attacks became part of Billy's "spunky tenacity." Billy was "a winner," rather than the guy fired from every manager job he ever had. Usually leaving controversy in his wake.

It was around this time that I realized you can be whoever you want to be in life and people are required to dress it up at your funeral.

Interestingly, Theodore Roosevelt had much in common with Billy Martin. Both liked a good fight. Roosevelt was an adept boxer who held regular sparring matches in the White House -- until he was hit so hard it blinded him in the left eye.

But despite these similarities, Roosevelt did not lose control like Billy did. Teddy wanted to be a part of institutions from the inside, so he could lead fundamental change for the outside.

Teddy was as brilliant as Billy was crazy.

One of history's greatest Americans, Roosevelt is loved and claimed by both Democrats and Republicans. The kind of person who inspires people to special sentiments.

One of my favorite quotes was delivered in the days following TR's death in his sleep on Jan. 5, 1919. I like it because it shows a great thought and care to express the most appropriate sentiment deserving such a great man.

No euphemisms here.

"Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping," said Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. "For if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."