A Native Son's Thoughts

You have to know what you want to do before you can do it.

And even more often, there's this one:

Practice doesn't make perfect. PERFECT practice makes perfect.

So there's Cal on the Camden Yards ball field, trying to practice perfectly to get ready to be perfect, and I'm lurking in the dugout—I wanna ask about the Fotoball. That's the funny thing that happened to Cal: He landed in all this hype and distraction, the reporters and the shoe deals and about a thousand plaintive kids screaming, "Cal!" "Cal, pleeeze!" "Mr. Ripken!" "Caaal!" He's got hungry little Baltimore to feed with esteem. He's got Powerade and Fotoball. He's got me to deal with, and every other sideshow in the whole Hoopla Nation...because he was raised to pay attention to the game.

Here's the funniest thing that happened to Ripken: Now that the calendar, luck and stubbornness have made him Baltimore's hero, the team, the media and the city's nabobs have decided he's got to be a blue-collar hero.

Oh, young Cal...he was raised a Baltimore, you know....

That's how the local song begins.

...So he grabbed his lunchbucket and went to work every day—the way guys do in this hardworkin' town. He did his job 13 years straight—like the fellas on the swing shift at Crown Cork 'n' Seal....

Well, a workin'-class hero is something to be. But it just doesn't happen to be...him.

At $6 million a year, Cal Ripken Jr. lives in a house the size of a Wal-Mart, near the ninth jump of the Maryland Hunt Cup, in steeplechase country, the Greenspring Valley, along with the other rulers of Baltimore. Ripken goes to work in a chartered plane or in the Orioles' fashionably retro theme park.