Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of traditional values and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.

"Good Sports & Bad", p. 325; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02) - Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)