One Mistake
The suicide of performer Charles Rocket last week may not have raised too many eyebrows. His biggest claim to fame was being a performer on Saturday Night Live for one season.
He was also in the films like “Dumb and Dumber” and “Dances With Wolves.”
In fact, his career may not have been noteworthy enough for his death to have made the national news wires.
Well, except for something that happened in the spring of 1981.
On Saturday Night Live’s season finale, Rocket was on stage and did the unthinkable: he uttered the word of all words on live TV.
For that (in part, anyway), Rocket (and pretty much the entire cast) was dropped and the show itself went in a new direction.
Sadly for him, when you hear the name Charles Rocket, you thought of that one moment, that one slip up. That’s of course, if you remembered him at all.
That’s the way the newspapers chose to remember him.
Valerie J. Nelson of the Los Angeles Times opened the obituary with this:
Charles Rocket, an actor and former "Saturday Night Live'' comedian who gained notoriety almost 25 years ago for uttering an unscripted obscenity during a skit on the NBC show, has died. He was 56.
Rocket lived 56 years. Yet it was those two seconds of error that defined him in the eyes of most.
Rocket is by no means alone.
In sports, there are several similar cases.
Mention the name of Bill Buckner, and they will remember that fateful day in October where Mookie Wilson’s harmless grounder went through his legs.
Unlike Rocket, Buckner’s career was a memorable one. He had over 2,700 hits in his career and drove in over 1,200 runs. He might have even been considered a borderline hall of fame pick.
But hear the name, and you think of 1986.
Buckner isn’t even the most troubling story from that season.
Donnie Moore committed suicide in 1989. Three years earlier, when pitching for the Angels, he gave up a homer in the 1986 to the Red Sox’ Dave Henderson that helped to end the Angels season.
No one can believe that the homer and the suicide were closely related. Moore obviously had demons.
But hear Moore’s name, and you connect the two. Type in Donnie Moore’s name and you’ll find countless articles about the year, the game, the pitch.
We all fail in our lives. We all have moments we’d like to forget, words we wish we hadn’t said, days we wish were not there.
Luckily for most of us, those moments don’t come when the world is watching.
Some are not so lucky. You have to feel for them.