Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook is doing a neat bit of moral accounting: stripping “hero” of its glamour and returning it to its original cost. The line works because it’s less an attack on athletes than on a culture that hands out the highest honorifics like promotional swag. “Heroic people take risks to themselves” sets a hard standard - bodily danger, ethical exposure, actual stakes - then he swings the contrast bat: “There’s nothing heroic about accepting $5 million.” The dollar figure isn’t incidental; it’s a scalpel. Pay turns peril into a job description, and the job into entertainment, and entertainment into something we reflexively mythologize.

The subtext is a rebuke of confused admiration. We’ve learned to speak in superlatives about public performance because it feels good and costs us nothing. Calling a quarterback “a warrior” lets us borrow the emotional charge of war without confronting war’s consequences. Easterbrook punctures that borrowed valor by conceding what sports do demand: “fortitude or those other qualities.” He’s not denying discipline, pain tolerance, or competitive courage. He’s denying the moral leap from admirable to heroic.

Contextually, this sits in the long-running argument over celebrity worship and the sports-industrial complex: a media ecosystem that sells narratives of sacrifice while the sacrifice is, often, richly compensated and carefully risk-managed. Easterbrook’s real target is the inflation of language. When “hero” applies to anyone with a highlight reel, it stops being available for people who run toward fires, testify against cartels, or absorb consequences on behalf of strangers. The provocation is intentional: if the word is to mean anything, it has to hurt a little to use it.