Basketball On The Internet.

EVERY now and then, you get a stark reminder of your own mortality and the fact you may soon be joining all your childhood heroes somewhere in the great beyond.

It's rarely a fun notion or realisation.

I had it recently a few weeks ago when actor Eli Wallach died.

Eli was a favorite of mine, the rogue villain of two of the great iconic western movies, The Magnificent Seven where his renegades were beaten by a team of gunslingers led by Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson.

You had to have a strong screen presence to go up against that lot and the same again in director Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

That pitted Eli, as Tuco (The Ugly), against {and with} Clint Eastwood (The Good) and that most villainous of villains, Lee Van Cleef (The Bad).

Again, pretty fair acting talent but Eli all but stole that picture.

As a bit of a western fan back in the day, I felt his loss a bit more acutely than I expected.

That pain of loss - even of someone you may never have known - stood out again for me today with the death of another wonderful actor, James Garner.

My father wore a suit pretty much every day of his adult life and often topped it with a hat. Slopping around in tracky dacks would have horrified him as a concept, let alone something he might have contemplated.

I had trouble reconciling his attitude with the western heroes he too enjoyed because those guys were wearing buckskins, denims, riding through deserts, layered with dust etcetera.

Then I saw an episode of the TV series Maverick.

There was Bret Maverick, in his three-piece suit, puffy shirt ... the classic riverboat gambler brought to life by James Garner.

Garner in that role was one of my original heroes, a laid-back and chilled man with a great sense of morality and fairness.

I loved him in Support Your Local Sheriff as a very cool lawman in an out-of-control mining town.

His comic timing was perfect too, as he further explored in the TV series The Rockford Files about the private detective Jim Rockford.

Not all that long ago, I caught him in some nondescript late night movie as an ageing Wyatt Earp and teaming with Bruce Willis, playing one of the last century's cowboy actors in a bit of a caper flick.

Couldn't turn it off.

In Space Cowboys, there he was with Clint playing ageing astronauts in another semi-serious role.

I loved the dignity, commonsense and gentle humour James Garner brought to the characters he portrayed, rarely more evident than in Murphy's Romance with Sally Field.

I really loved what he brought to the screen, whether it was looking after Donald Pleasance's blind character in The Great Escape or playing the older Ryan Gosling in tear-jerker The Notebook. 

Like Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery and a host of actors who informed my youth of what it took to be a man - the best elements of humanity - I will miss the counsel and wisdom I took from his roles and performances.

He made my life better, as did Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and a host of others I could surrender my imagination to while unknowingly taking life lessons from them.

I know it now, and the joy of cinema is you can still see those great performances on DVD, video or just late at night when you were just about to shuffle off to bed and one of the classics crackles to life on your TV screen.

Yes, James Garner's death today at 86 reminds me of my own mortality. But it also reminds me of how much joy and delight he brought into my life and for that, I will forever be grateful.

May he Rest in Peace.