"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you too."--Roy Campanella
Some people have no sense of humor.
As the mother of a couple of athletes, you’d think I’d have toughened up by now. After all, after some 13 years of watching one or the other of them compete in everything from soccer and football to basketball and baseball, I’ve had my share of “parental” moments. There was the time in 7th grade where, after a particularly brutal slide tackle, the oldest lay writhing in pain on the soccer pitch, only to be carried off the field by his very strong female coach. And then there were the countless “HP” (hit by pitch) notations recorded in more scorebooks than I care to remember for a younger son who’s personal motto for most of his Little League career was “hit or be hit”.
For every successful season there was another that wasn’t. There were countless hours spent, in the batting cages or fielding ground balls, only to find oneself warming the bench for most of the game. There were coaches who encouraged and coaches who yelled, coaches who taught through patience and good humor and a few who didn’t teach at all. I’ve seen helmets fly, composures lost and many tears of failure.
I’ve watched a lot of games. And I thought I’d seen just about everything.
Until Saturday.
“Young man,” he said, “Walk right back to the bench and do not say another word. We don’t argue balls and strikes on this field.” The umpire was blustering, puffing out his heavily padded chest and pointing to our dugout.
I sunk into the bleachers as my big behemoth son walked past where I was sitting. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment as the next batter stepped into the box.
Baseball is a difficult sport. It’s hard enough to hit a ball moving upwards of 80 to 90 miles an hour with a metal stick, but in baseball, it’s the mental game that will get you. In the game of baseball, things change in an instant. It is a game of failure and learning to accept that failure is the key to success. Let something bother you; a missed ball, a botched play, a bad call in the batter’s box and you might just as well go home.
It’s not a game for sissies.
As much as he takes after his Czechoslovakian father, my oldest is Italian at his core. He is passionate and emotional, especially about sports and it has been a struggle for him to learn how to control those emotions. He’s had coaches scream and yell and belittle him for showing his stripes and he’s had to learn the hard way.
It’s why I never got very far playing sports. When I was a kid I loved tennis. I was a baseliner and I had the ground strokes to prove it. With my Chris Everett Autograph racquet, I could hit from the baseline like the best of them. There was only one small problem. I never learned to serve.
Oh I tried. I’d toss the ball up for hours, trying to get it in the same spot, but in the matches I’d just freeze. One bad toss and I was done. Let. Double fault. Game, set, match. Loser.
“If you’re going to play the game, you have to learn to fail and move on,” a coach once said to me. I never could.
For a moment the universe slowed down and the only thing I could hear, other than the thud of his cleats on the artificial turf, was the sound of my own voice repeating, ‘Not again, please not again.”
I prepared the lecture I would give him. “You have to stay composed,” I rehearsed. “You know better,” I said to myself, my own embarrassment getting the better of me. Obviously this was my fault, my failing. Surely I must make him understand the error of his ways. The double fault was coming. His and mine.
After the game I wandered slowly over to the dugout, still rehearsing the post game wrap I would deliver when his coach walked up to me.
“Did you hear what he said to the umpire?” he asked.
“No,” I said, worried. My heart was beating loudly inside my chest. Was I sure I really wanted to know? I was holding my breath.
The coach’s eyes twinkled. “Dude,’ he said, ‘I’m 6 foot 5.” The coach’s face broke out in a big toothy grin. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Some people have no sense of humor.”
“You’re right,” I said, exhaling. “Some people don’t.”