OLD AGE IS ALWAYS RELEVANT [M, 8-24-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—OLD AGE IS ALWAYS RELEVANT [M, 8-24-26]

 

Tommy John, Phyllis Graham, and Frank Jobe… what do they have in common? No, not Terre Haute, Indiana. That’s only 2 of them. Surgery? No, 2 again. Mathematics? Only 2 again. Professional athletics? No, that’s only 1.

Tommy John died last week. 83 years old.  He won 288 games as a pitcher in the major leagues. Despite that, he is not in The Hall of Fame, even though plenty of pitchers with fewer wins are. Maybe it’s because his pitching career was overshadowed by a surgery he once had on the elbow of his pitching arm, way back on September 25, 1974.

It’s forever been known as the Tommy John surgery. Lots of pitchers have it every year. Some more than once, like T.J. Antone, who has written a book about his three TJ surgeries. But should it not be known as the Frank Jobe surgery? He was the surgeon who performed and perfected it, and thus allowed Tommy to win 166 of those 288 victories on the pitching mound.

Phyllis Graham was Tommy’s professor at Indiana State University, in Terre Haute, where he was a math major, while already pursuing a professional baseball career.

Phyllis was one of my best friends. We had gone to high school together, until her sophomore year, when her family moved away. We were delighted to find each other again in Terre Haute, when she was a new math professor and I was a new campus minister. I officiated at her wedding, and I preached at her funeral.

So, when I was chatting with Tommy John, we talked about Phyllis, and how much he appreciated her as a teacher.

Strangely, the only time I talked with Tommy was not in Terre Haute, even though we both lived there at the time. I was in Sarasota, FL for the funeral of my uncle Glen, my father’s oldest brother, and Tommy was at spring training in Tampa with the White Sox. Being a baseball junkie, I couldn’t resist going over to spring training. [No, I went to Uncle Glen’s funeral first.] Tommy and I had a nice conversation at the outfield fence, where he was glad to have a reason to quit running wind sprints. We compared notes on baseball and Terre Haute and Phyllis and math.

So, have you figured out what they have in common? They are all irrelevant! Tommy John is irrelevant to The Hall of Fame. Frank Jobe is irrelevant to his own famous surgery. Phyllis Graham is irrelevant to education, because mathematicians are no longer needed.

Yes, I read this week that the first profession that will be replaced by AI is mathematicians. Why get a person to solve a math problem for you when AI can do it faster and cheaper?

The great thing about old age is that it will never be irrelevant. Yes, old people are irrelevant, and we will all die. But we will be replaced. Old people, as individuals, are and always will be irrelevant. But old age? No way. Old age, like the poor, is with us always.

John Robert McFarland