When my brother Ken and I were kids, I always thought of him as a natural athlete. He seemed to have been endowed with a physical prowess, an innate sense of coordination and confidence that made him excel at playground sports. My memory may be embellishing reality, but it always appeared to me that sports just came easily for Ken.
Not so for me. I was skinny and awkward and clumsy. I could barely walk straight, let alone run and jump and compete on any kind of playground team. Softball, kickball, basketball…you name it, I sucked at it. You often hear about kids who were always picked last to join grade-school sports teams; that was me.
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| Me, about a year before I started playing Little League |
So I was beyond mortified when our parents made Ken and me participate in Little League. I was 10; Ken was 11 (he was born 15 months before me). I didn't know how to play baseball, and I didn't want to humiliate myself by making that fact obvious in front of my peers. I also didn't want people noticing—and pointing out—the glaringly obvious differences in skill levels between my brother and me. "Why do you suck at baseball, Rick, when your brother Ken is so good at it?" I wanted to dig a very deep hole and climb into it and stay there until the season was over.
But my parents wouldn't let me wriggle out of it. And somehow, after tryouts, Ken and I ended up getting placed on the same team. It must not have had anything to do with our respective baseball skills—or if it did, it was that Ken's skills would maybe help offset my total lack of them.
The team we were assigned to was called the Sailors. Whomever named the team must've known we would play like we were hopelessly adrift on an unforgiving sea. We couldn't hit, we couldn't catch, we couldn't throw…even my left-handed brother's pitching skills couldn't save us.
But as bad as we were, I was the worst. The coaches must've thought they had made a smart move when they positioned me in right field, where virtually no one ever hits the ball and I wouldn't be expected to make any plays. But the opposing teams quickly figured out that since such a total klutz was in right field, that was precisely the place to aim their bats. A lot of long balls flew triumphantly over my head or rolled snickering between my legs, and the ones I was somehow able to snag and throw made it about halfway to the baseman I was throwing to.
About five weeks into our miserable season, after we had lost every game by margins approaching legendary status, one of our coaches pulled my mom aside and said, rather indiscreetly, "Ken seems so happy-go-lucky compared to Rick. Rick seems to have trouble accepting the losses."
(Below is a video, digitized from Super-8 film, of my brother Ken apparently hitting a home run, but his run from third to home may have been edited.)
He was right. I did have trouble accepting the losses. I hated playing on a losing team.
So I decided to do something about it: I practiced. On a makeshift baseball diamond on our front lawn. On the school playground, after hours and on weekends. With my teammates before and after our regular practices.
And I gradually got better.
Fast-forward to my third year of Little League, playing for a team called Joe Fisher Ford that actually won some games. It was awesome. I had stopped committing embarrassing errors. I got promoted to second base. As a batter, I was hitting well enough that I was able to reach at least first base almost every time. And even when we lost a game here and there, by now I was able to roll with the losses—and learn from them.
By the end of the season, our little team had achieved a fairly even win-loss record, which was good enough for me (take that, naysaying Sailor coach). I felt like I had achieved a personal goal, and it boosted my overall confidence.
Little did I know that while I was basking in the glory of not being such a big loser, my teammates and coaches were conspiring to lift my feet even further off the ground.
They voted me onto the All-Star team.
What the hell?
I was far from the best player on the team. I wasn't even one of the best players on the team. What the hell were they thinking?
I never did get an adequate answer to that question, other than the unsettling suspicion that my teammates and coaches had simply felt sorry for me, but it didn't matter: I was going to be a Little League All-Star!
The effect all this weirdness had on me was to make me strive to deserve the honor. During the All-Stars practices I practiced harder than ever, tried hitting balls farther than ever, learned how to switch-hit so I could unnerve the opposing team's pitchers, scooped up hard-hit balls in the infield and tried throwing them sidearm like my favorite pro players…in short, I was determined not only to do my current and former teammates proud, but to create the illusion that I actually belonged there.
Straight to the chase: We beat our storied opponent, Flav-R-Pac, a team that hadn't lost all season, 11 to 1.
That was 46 years ago, and my feet still haven't touched the ground.
