We Loved Them Once They Couldn't Push Back

There's a version of respect that only gets spoken at a funeral. You know the type — the kind that arrives too late to do any good, dressed up in the language of admiration but carrying the faint smell of guilt underneath it. We've all witnessed it. Maybe we've all participated in it. Someone difficult, combative, relentlessly themselves is suddenly, in death, revealed to have been exactly what we needed all along.

A writer at Defector noticed this pattern in the aftermath of two deaths that landed close together: Kyle Busch, the NASCAR driver, gone at 41 from sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia, and hockey player Claude Lemieux. Both men, the piece argues, were held as villains of a particular kind during their careers — not criminals, not frauds, but the kind of competitor who made the people around them uncomfortable by wanting to win more visibly, more aggressively, more personally than the sport's social contract typically permits. Both men, in death, received the fulsome admiration that had previously been rationed out only through clenched teeth.

The Defector piece doesn't soften this. It names the pattern directly. And I find myself unable to stop thinking about what it means that the pattern exists at all.

The Villain Tax

There is something specific we ask of people who compete at the highest level, and it is almost never articulated honestly. We want them to win — but to seem like they'd rather not. We want them to be ruthless — but to appear reluctant about it. We want them to be great — but to carry that greatness lightly, with the right amount of aw-shucks in the postgame interview, the right amount of deference to teammates, the right amount of public humility that signals they understand their place in the social order.

Busch, according to the Defector writer, made other drivers feel the weight of his presence in a way that fellow driver Ryan Blaney described as making you feel something. Lemieux was cast from similar material. These were men who seemed to actually enjoy the competitive edge that most athletes are expected to pretend is just a professional obligation. That enjoyment — that visible relish — is what got them labeled. Villain. SOB. The kind of guy you hate unless he's on your team, and sometimes even then.

The villain tax is the cost of being that kind of person while still alive. You pay it in column inches that qualify your achievements, in crowd reactions that mix applause with something uglier, in the perpetual asterisk that follows your name into every conversation about greatness. And then you die, and the tax gets refunded. Posthumously. With interest.

What Death Unlocks

Here's the uncomfortable thing: the Defector piece is right that the admiration flowing toward Busch and Lemieux now is genuine. It's not performance. People really do mean it. The grudges that shaped the coverage of their careers weren't invented, but neither is the respect that's arrived to replace them.

What death actually does, I think, is remove the social risk of the admission. Admiring a living villain feels like losing something — like conceding a point in an argument that's still ongoing. The person is still out there, still capable of being insufferable, still capable of using your admiration against you in some small psychic way. The competition between you and them isn't finished. Your appreciation funds their confidence, and their confidence has always been the problem.

Once they're gone, there's no argument left to lose. The admiration costs nothing now. You can let it be pure.

This is not cynicism about grief. Grief is real. The writer at Defector isn't suggesting the mourners are hypocrites — they're identifying something more structural than that, something embedded in how competitive cultures handle people who refuse to be likable on the culture's terms.

The Thing We Keep Getting Wrong

What stays with me is the question of what we were actually penalizing them for. Not the on-track incidents, not the specific moments of friction — those are just the evidence. The underlying charge was something more like: you are too much. Too hungry. Too unashamed of the hunger. Too willing to let the hunger show.

And now, in the aftermath, the hunger is exactly what gets celebrated. The tributes reach for it specifically. The eulogies linger on the intensity, the refusal to dial it back, the way these men made everyone around them feel the pressure of genuine competition. The thing that cost them the narrative during their careers is the thing the narrative is now built on.

I don't have a clean resolution to offer here, because I don't think one exists. The cycle will repeat. There are people competing right now — in cars, on ice, on fields — who are absorbing exactly this kind of cultural penalty for being too visibly themselves, too openly competitive, too unwilling to perform the humility we've decided winners owe us. And some of them will die, and we will say the same things.

Maybe the question worth sitting with isn't about the dead. It's about who's still here, still competing, still paying the tax — and whether we're capable of settling the account before the debt comes due.