Steve Lundeberg

It was my turn over the weekend to come in for a Saturday night shift, which despite the 3-til-11 nature of the workday is not really all that unpleasant most of the time.

The atmosphere is generally relaxed, the phone doesn’t ring much, and there’s college football on the ancient TVs we have in both the conference and break rooms. The worst part, really, is posting all the news to our website after you’re done building the pages; late at night, that’s just a bit of eye-straining tedium most people would rather do without.

On this particular Saturday, I arrived home at around 11:45 just as the wind and rain were kicking up in earnest and the power was beginning to flicker. I was really hoping the juice would keep flowing for at least a while so it wouldn’t interrupt my post-work routine of beer-drinking while TV-watching. Even though Saturdays are comparatively low-stress, a bit of unwinding is still in order.

So I took a quick shower, grabbed a 16-ounce can of Budweiser and headed for the television. What I found to watch, fittingly enough given my brand of beverage, was an ESPN Classic profile on St. Louis Cardinals legend Stan “The Man” Musial (the Busch family of Anheuser-Busch fame owns the Cards).

Given that I’ve been a Stan the Man fan for some time, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know about the Hall of Famer; in fact, I’d seen this exact program probably twice before.

But really, hearing about Musial never gets old, partly because of his fantastic baseball ability, but even moreso because he’s so widely regarded as an all-around terrific person. During a 23-year career that ended in 1963, teammates and opponents alike considered him the best-liked player in major league baseball.

Musial proved you could be a white-hot competitor without coming across as a jerk, a fact that seems to have escaped many players of all eras.

He also understood that he had an obligation to the fans to whom he meant so much, and he even carried around pictures to autograph and offer to folks he encountered as he made his way around St. Louis and elsewhere; so accessible was he that his number was listed in the telephone book, and he happily talked with people who looked him up and called.

Musial used his fame not for profit but to try to positively influence people, among other things serving as the chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.

Passing through St. Louis in September, I made a point to visit Busch Stadium just so I could see the two Musial statues out front. Here’s one of them:

I actually liked the other statue better, but the sun was too harsh and ill-positioned to make a good photo. Part of what I liked about the other one was a plaque bearing the words of former baseball commissioner Ford Frick that described Musial as “baseball’s perfect warrior, baseball’s perfect knight.”

And whether you like the National Pastime or not, you’d do well to tear a page from The Man’s book in the leading of your own life. Striving for the top and being a good person are not mutually exclusive pursuits.

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