Mike Lupica and Allen Barra, an incongruous couple if I’ve ever heard of one, both mention W.C. Heinz this week. Barra has a tribute to Heinz in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps the lasting legacy of Bill Heinz is something he told me in a phone interview 15 years ago. What, I asked him, was the greatest lesson he had learned in nearly half a century of sportswriting? His answer was surprising. “In the end, all of us — fans, writers, coaches, athletes — have something in common: We’re all losers. Everybody is a loser, let’s face it. None of us wins all the time, in games or in life, not Joe DiMaggio, not Muhammad Ali. And none of us is going to live forever.”

Not even Roger Clemens…

This reminded me of what Roger Angell once said about failure, and why, when he started writing about baseball, he was drawn to the Mets and not the Yankees because, he contended, there is more Mets than Yankees in most of us. Most of us can generally relate more to failure than success. Pat Jordan was a failure as a pitcher and then made a career out of profiling so-called “failures” (though he writes just as convincingly about success stories). Check out Jordan’s latest, from last weekend’s Play magazine, on two young golfers.