The most important thing to remember.

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Not all football players think they are more important than the team. From NFL.com.

Tillman is the epitome of a hero

By Gregg Easterbrook

Special to NFL.com

(April 23, 2004) -- One of the fallacies of sports is that people who chase a ball for a living are heroes. To play in the NFL, or in any professional sports league, is trying and taxing. The games require dedication, exertion and determination; exhaustion and pain are involved. But nothing that happens on a sports field can fairly be called heroism. People who get paid millions of dollars for chasing balls around while a crowd cheers may be daring and admirable, but they're not heroes.

Heroism is a much higher attainment than anything that occurs in sports. To be a hero requires taking risks and exposing yourself to jeopardy. Heroism requires nobility of purpose, some goal that is outside your own self-interest. And heroism may require sacrifice. Former Arizona Cardinal Pat Tillman, who died April 22 in Afghanistan, was a hero.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Tillman left the NFL at the peak of his career, forsaking a multimillion-dollar contract and enlisted in the Army's elite group of Rangers. On Thursday, he and other U.S. and Afghan soldiers were searching for Al-Qaeda units about 25 miles from the city of Khowst, Osama bin Laden's base of operations in the late 1990s and still a place where Al-Qaeda remnants hide. There was a gun battle and Tillman was killed. Tillman was granted 27 years on this Earth. Many stories about his life are already available at the Arizona Cardinals website Also, anyone may post an expression of condolence there.

Pat Tillman placed more emphasis on the whole of his country than on himself.

Thousands of men and women have volunteered for the armed services since Sept. 11. Each has shown the same noble impulse as Tillman, and each exhibited heroism to the same degree. Walking away from a glamorous sports lifestyle and a contract that paid large amounts of money did not make Tillman any more special than others who have walked away from mundane circumstances. Every person who has volunteered to serve has made at least some sacrifice -- of time, of comfort, of income. So far 110 U.S. service members in Afghanistan have made the ultimate sacrifice. This, not catching a pass or jumping on a fumble, is heroism.

Tillman did not have to join the Army and no one would have criticized him if he did not. Indeed, no one would ever even have mentioned it if he didn't. He joined because he thought it was right, and to do what you think is right even if it means placing yourself in danger is the essence of the true hero.

Tillman's decision brings to mind the same choice made by James Robert Kalsu, one of only two NFL players to die in the Vietnam War. In 1968, Kalsu played his rookie season for the Buffalo Bills and was a budding star. He belonged to the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and was told his duty status could be indefinitely postponed while he was in the NFL. Since the war was then expected to wind down, Kalsu knew that postponing his service would mean avoiding exposing himself to combat. Instead he asked to serve, was sent to Vietnam in 1969 and died there in a mortar attack in 1970 at the age of 25. No one would have criticized Kalsu if he had not gone to Vietnam. He went because he thought it was right.

I looked up some newspaper accounts of the Khowst area where Tillman died. One dispatch called it "a dusty town set on a rocky plain ringed by baked and blasted mountains." The mountain border area of Afghanistan and Pakistan does seem "baked and blasted" -- I've been there -- but the magnificence of creation is also palpable in that part of the world where impressive mountains stretch as far as the eye can see, and the night skies, clear and unspoiled by city lights, seems to reveal the entire universe. Pat Tillman sacrificed a glamorous, highly paid lifestyle to journey to a remote place and fight for the ideal of freedom. The sky of Afghanistan may have been the last thing he ever saw, and it is a glorious sight, fit for a hero.