What Is a Hero?

hero (plural heroes)

1. (Can we clean up⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) A real or mythical person of great bravery who carries out extraordinary deeds.  [quotations ▼]
2. A role model.
3. The main protagonist in a work of fiction.  [quotations ▼]
4. A large sandwich made from meats and cheeses; a hero sandwich.
5. (food styling, chiefly attributive) The product chosen from several candidates to be photographed.  [quotations ▼]

What it is not, however, is heroic. When Buster Olney of ESPN decided to call Nyad a “superhero” for her feat, I thought that was, shall we say, a bit much. 

Needless to say, when Olney retweeted that to his followers the usual type of responses came pouring in, my personal favorite being when ESPN radio personality Sarah Spain attacked my Catholic faith and accused me of downplaying Nyad’s feat because Nyad (who I have never heard of before today) was a lesbian.

At the bottom of the page you’ll see a Storify for all of the tweets I got in response, but I don’t want to focus on that and I don’t want to focus on Sarah Spain’s anti-Catholicism.

I want to ask about what a hero is? 

Hero is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, often times in contexts in which nothing that the individual has done even remotely approaches a heroic level. Often times, as in the case of Diana Nyad, it comes in the context of athletics. Of course anybody who knows me knows that I am a huge sports fan but why do sports fans, why does our cultural, why does our modern society ascribe virtues of heroism to sports figures automatically without reason or context? 

It isn’t just sports figures that get applied with this broad brush of heroism in times in which it is not deserved. We often see it applied to celebrities and, increasingly, to politicians as well. But why? While the definition of hero above, when broadly applied, does include somebody who is a “role model” when generally attribute the definition of hero as the 1st definition. But to me, swimming is not heroic. Far from it. Clearly what Diana Nyad accomplished is an amazing feat of physical stamina and endurance. But tell me exactly how a swimmer who has sponsors and a support team is doing anything heroic? Impressive yes, but not heroic.