Thanks, Your Honor

The National Football League was born in an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 17, 1920. Alan Page was born in that city nearly 25 years later—on Aug. 7, 1945, in the 72 hours between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He entered the world 22 days after the first atomic bomb was exploded near Alamogordo, N.Mex., and the world he entered was defined by that explosion. "We knew the world would not be the same," the bomb's father, J. Robert Oppenheimer, said of that first A-test. "A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' "

"Born between the bombs," affirms Page, the former Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears defensive tackle and 1971's NFL Most Valuable Player, now seated in his office in St. Paul, contemplating the era of his birth. "It's interesting, isn't it, given the significance of those bombs? It's funny you ask, because I have thought on occasion about what it all means. I haven't yet come to any conclusions."

Page has the disarming habit of saying "I don't know" when he doesn't know the answer to a question. It's a quality rare among star athletes and unheard of in elected officials. For most of his adult life Page has been one or the other: a gridiron luminary enshrined in 1988 in the Pro Football Hall of Fame—which was under construction in Canton when Page attended Central Catholic High there—and an off-the-field overachiever elected in November 1992 to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, on which he still sits.

"There's a danger for judges to assume they have all the answers," says Page, who seldom submits to interviews, explaining his reluctance to pontificate. "There's a saying one of my former colleagues used quite a bit in talking about this court: 'We're not last because we're right. We're only right because we're last.' I think that's something that you have to keep remembering."

When Page does speak, his words carry greater moral authority than those of more heliocentric celebrities, the balls of hot gas around whom the world turns. He has the aura of an oracle, an effect heightened by his soft voice (the listener leans on every word) and black robe (from beneath which peeks a pair of Doc Martens). Page tackles subjects, as he did ballcarriers, from unexpected angles. To his way of thinking, the more unsavory NFL players of today—Rae Carruth, Ray Lewis, Mark Chmura, et al.—are quite useful role models for American youth.

"One of the frustrations for me is that this whole role-model business works two ways," he says. "There are models to look up to and models who demonstrate clearly what we should not aspire to. But we don't use those latter models for that purpose. In fact, there's an odd transference: We end up glorifying those people."

I haven't yet told Page that he was my childhood hero, or that we have met before, nearly 26 years earlier, but I have come here to do just that—to St. Paul, hometown of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

"I've never understood the phenomenon of athlete worship, of how we get our athletic heroes," says Page, 54, when Fitzgerald's line is recited to him. "I can remember from the beginning, by which I mean my sophomore or junior year in high school, being looked on as a good football player, yes, but it went beyond my ability as a football player." People who had never met Page nonetheless began to admire him, and he found this profoundly disquieting. "I like to think that I was a good human being," he continues, "but people couldn't know that from watching me play football. So I kind of rejected the whole hero notion early on.

"There were times," he adds, a trifle unnecessarily, "when I didn't sign autographs."

You couldn't buy a number 88 Vikings jersey in Minnesota in 1974. You could buy the 10 of Fran Tarkenton or the 44 of Chuck Foreman, but if you wanted the 88 of Alan Page your parents had to find a blank purple football shirt and have the numbers ironed on. As far as I know, my parents were the only ones who ever did. The jersey became my security blanket—what psychologists call a "transition object," the item that sustains a child in moments away from his mother. I wore the shirt until it simply disintegrated in the wash and blew away one day like dandelion spores.