Sports Appreciation Day: An iron man with feet of clay

"Somewhere out there in the stands, there might be some kid who came to watch me play today," he would say, "and I don't want to let him down."

Garvey didn't miss a game for parts of eight seasons, playing through illness and injury, becoming the Lou Gehrig of his day. His popularity skyrocketed. He was named the MVP of the 1974 All-Star Game after being named to the team as a write-in candidate, which was his formal introduction to most fans.

The end of the innocence came soon enough. Eventually, Garvey's telegenic wife Cyndy, who had become a minor television star in Los Angeles mostly because of doors opened by her husband's iconic stature, sued him for divorce, a scandalous notion for a guy whose reputation was the color and texture of starched white dress shirt.

In 1989, two years after his playing career was over, she wrote a tell-all book that detailed Garvey's serial philandering, burying his idyllic image in the public square once and for all. Then two women filed paternity suits and Garvey admitted to fathering the children out of wedlock.

The laudable had become laughable. Sutton was right. Garvey had more faces than a room full of schizophrenics in Halloween masks. It was a charade. Millions felt betrayed, and rightly so. He has made money from our collective naïveté.

Devotion turned to dismay, then disgust. He'd finished his career playing, reliably as ever, for the San Diego Padres, leading them to their first pennant in 1984. His embarrassing paternity suits shortly after his retirement prompted one of the greatest bumper stickers in sports history: "Steve Garvey is not my Padre."

The contrived illusion was Hollywood all the way. All style, no substance.

That said, some might wonder why, when the Dodgers had a bobblehead giveaway at a home game a couple of years ago, I mailed a friend in Los Angeles a $25 check and bought his Garvey doll from him. It occupies a perch of supreme prominence in my home office and serves as a cautionary reminder.

Forget Sosa, the Tour de France or Marion Jones. For millions who grew up in California two or three decades ago and bought what Garvey and the Dodgers were hawking, there will never be a better singular example -- 10 inches tall and cast in plaster and plastic -- of a player who seemingly represented all that was right, and all that can go wrong, when trust is violated.

Right, Steve? A hard tap to the side of Garvey's ceramic head emphatically answers that question.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Then why buy the bobblehead in the first place? It's complicated. Warts and all, Garvey symbolizes the purity of the game at a point in time, a piece of personal history from back when box scores and an AM radio were the keys to the sports kingdom for millions of kids. So, he's a touchstone of sorts.

Garvey, who has practically disappeared from public view, still commands my respect. He might have been a hypocrite, but he showed up for work every day with his lunch box, ready for his stint on the assembly line. He was the rock of five different World Series teams. He cared about his fans. He played the game the right way.

He was also spectacularly flawed. Now that I think about it, Garvey surely had something to do with my chosen occupation, not to mention the formation of my overall sportswriting and sports-watching bent.

Sometimes, writers and fans think they know the players. Most of the time, we don't.

The bobblehead doll serves as a reminder that admiration is best served with an appropriate sprinkle of cynicism and a dollop of reserve.

Isn't that right, mister bobblehead? A flick to the bill of his miniaturized hat says it all.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.