Taking nothing away from President Bush, just named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” I’m disappointed it wasn’t Patrick Tillman, the National Football League defensive star turned Army Ranger, who was killed at 27 in Afghanistan. We could do with some reminding that it is a mistake to confuse celebrity with honor. Our sports have grown so sophisticated that we forget that athletics were originally simply practice, and sometimes a substitute for war itself.

Famous athletes have always had a special resonance for how the nation feels about a war. There were no true celebrities at the time of the American Revolution or the Civil War, but the crack shots of the Continental Army were celebrated, as were the best riders and marksmen of both Blue and Gray. As the news industry matured, those who were good at games were as well known as those who made good at politics or the theater. Theodore Roosevelt made a point of recruiting famous athletes for his Rough Riders: Dudley Dean had been quarterback of the Harvard football team; Hamilton Fish was captain of the Columbia crew squad; Robert Wrenn was tennis champion of America, and Joseph Sampson Stevens was polo champion of the world. All saw combat – and Fish was killed.

For the less popular World War I, President Wilson issued young men a “work or fight” order: Enlist, be conscripted, or find a job related to national defense. Major league baseball players were not exempt. Some, including Babe Ruth, seriously considered quitting the game in order to get factory jobs and avoid combat.

By World War II, America had learned: Stars got star treatment, e.g., Joe DiMaggio spent the war playing in exhibition games. Some competitive patriots wanted to fight though – Ted Williams was a combat pilot in both World War II and Korea, while Moe Berg served with the Office of Strategic Services.

Later still, of course, the relationship between athletic celebrity and the military soured, notably in Vietnam. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the Army was a radical break from Joe Louis’s instinctive patriotism and dutiful round of exhibition bouts 25 years before. But the split between big-time athletes and the nation at war reflected a deeper rift. It was not considered unusual that Chuck Bednarik, prior to the era of athletic specialization, the last player in the NFL to play both offense and defense, was a combat soldier in WW II; while Rocky Bleier, a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, was so unusual for his combat service in Vietnam 20 years later that he became the subject of a made-for-television movie.

A recent advertising campaign by Nike cleverly shows great athletes competing in other sports – cyclist Lance Armstrong as a boxer, tennis star Andre Agassi as a baseball shortstop, and pitcher Randy Johnson as a professional bowler.

Tillman lived that for real. He quit the NFL, I think, for the same reason it didn’t truly bother Ted Williams that much to sit out of baseball for a few years. He already knew he could hit anybody’s fastball. But to fly Hellcats and Corsairs in the Pacific, or Panther jets in Korea? “Happiness,” Aristotle reminds us, “is the full pursuit of one’s powers along lines of excellence.” Tillman was an Army Ranger. Like Williams, he stepped up to a challenge greater than professional sports, if less well paid.

In thinking about Tillman, two legendary New York athletes come to mind. The first is Christy Mathewson, the biggest star of the deadball era. Mathewson was 38 years old when he volunteered – not merely for the Army, in 1916. That would have been extraordinary enough, but Matty volunteered for the chemical warfare division – surely the most dangerous and repulsive and, therefore, heroic thing he could think of, kind of like Tillman going to Afghanistan. When the Army wouldn’t send him to France, Matty used his clout to get a personal meeting with President Wilson. “I can’t send you to France, Matty,” Wilson is reported to have told him. “You’re a national icon.”

“I know that, Mr. President,” Matty replied. “And that’s exactly why I have to go.”

I think Tillman understood that. Sure, he wasn’t a nonpareil football star the way Mathewson was the most famous athlete of his day, but that’s the point: Reknown does not equal honor. Tillman was killed by “friendly fire” – what a grotesque oxymoron. Mathewson’s lungs were damaged in a training exercise that surely shortened his life.

In the old Polo Grounds at West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, gone 40 years now, there was a 5-foot-tall block of granite in centerfield, nearly 480 feet from home plate. It was dedicated to the memory of “Harvard Eddie,” Captain Edward Leslie Grant, class of 1906, who while on patrol with the 307th infantry unit of the 77th Division, in the Argonne Forest, was shot on October 5, 1918, and died four days later. Inexplicably, the Eddie Grant memorial vanished when the Polo Grounds was torn down. (How do you lose a half-ton block of granite with a bronze plaque?)

But in a way, that is fitting. If we don’t remember heroic sacrifice without the monuments, we’ve forgotten already. Maybe in 80 years, someone will wonder what happened to the Tillman memorial. Perhaps they will look around, and realize: that’s us. We’re the memorial – to Pat Tillman, and Eddie Grant, and Christy Mathewson, and thousands of others whose names we never know.

Mr. Donnelly is writing a history about Theodore Roosevelt and a novel about baseball.