By TOM KNOTT

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 24 — We trot out the words courage and hero all the time in sports.

This is what we are trained to do in the hype-filled section of journalism.

We say an athlete shows great courage by playing a game with a sprained ankle.

Then along comes Pat Tillman, a true hero with genuine courage, to show us how trite those applications are in the sports arena.

Tillman is dead now following a firefight in Afghanistan. He did not have to be there, fighting those who mean our country harm. He did not have to be a member of the U.S. Army Rangers, deployed in some faraway land, fighting terrorists. In fact, he had millions of reasons to be anywhere but there.

He was a starting safety with the Arizona Cardinals in 2002, when he walked away from a $3.6 million contract to join the Army Rangers. He never talked about his decision publicly. He never felt a need to be perceived differently from those with whom he was serving.

It was a higher calling for him following the September 11 attacks. No plaudits were necessary. No interviews were granted. It was not about his personal glory. It was about the strength of his convictions.

His was a rare kind of spirit, especially in a culture that glorifies excess, bad behavior and immodesty.

A good number of Americans will do just about anything to be on television, to be a celebrity of sorts, if only for 15 minutes. The proliferation of reality shows is but a symptom of a segment of America seeking the validation of a television camera.

Tillman almost was the anti-American hero in that way, although he represents some of the best stuff of America.

He made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

All war-time death is tragic, his no more tragic than all those who have been felled in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet his death reveals the depth of the person.

Tillman did not walk away from a desk job or a factory job. He walked away from the fame and money of the NFL to embrace a higher purpose in his life.

Who does that? Who is that selfless?

We now know.

All across America’s NFL cities today, teams are securing fresh talent in the draft. Young men with wide smiles will address what they are about and who they are and how they plan to work hard and sacrifice their bodies for the greater glory of the football team.

This is the annual drill in late April, when all the banal words of the draft are dusted off and dispensed anew. Football is said to be a kind of make-believe war, and its vocabulary of bombs and blitzes lends itself to the notion.

But football, however brutal a game, is not war, as Tillman’s death reminds us.

He was a football player at one time. He also was something more noble than that. He pursued a game but was not cast under its intoxicating spell. He knew there was more to life than the outcome of a football game, as his decision to leave the game reflected.

Tillman embodied many of the ideals we cherish but so few of us meet. He was about duty and honor, about integrity and character, about so many of the things that seem almost quaint in America today.

He was not on a football field, strutting around, pretending to be a bad man.

He was in Afghanistan, a long way from the playing fields of America, a genuine hero who was cut down at 27.