Heroes come and heroes go, and at some point in your life you realize<a title="Heroes" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077669/" target="_self"> a hero ain't nothing but a sandwich</a>.

I'm not sure when it was I realized that being a good player in a professional sport didn't necessarily make someone a person worthy of admiring. Maybe it dates back to the early '70s when basketball player Spencer Haywood made a great statement about heroism.

He said that athletes weren't heroes. He said parents raising four kids and giving them good values on poverty-level incomes were the real heroes.

I think it was after that that I stopped calling Pete Rose -- yes, Pete Rose -- my hero and just started referring to him as my favorite player. I admire the way he played the game, the effort he always gave. I certainly didn't admire the fact that he said the only book he ever read was "The Pete Rose Story."

By the early '90s, when Rose was long gone from baseball and had exposed himself as somewhat of a scumbag anyway, I was in the market for a new favorite player. For some reason, I settled on Atlanta's Chipper Jones. For most of the last 15 years, Jones has