Month: January 2005

Although I didn’t play basketball seriously until I started teaching high school at twenty-seven, it became my favorite sport and a week seldom went by when I didn’t play once or twice for the next thirty years. Never a good shooter, I learned to rebound, to block shots and to pass to players who could shoot. I became a good team player, and the teams I was on were more apt to win than to lose.

For a while my love of b-ball even transferred to professional basketball. Although I lived closer to Portland, Seattle, my hometown, still held my allegiance for quite awhile. I was one of Seattle’s most ardent fans the year “Downtown” Freddy Brown, Dennis Johnson, Paul Silas and Jack Sikma, among others, won the NBA title. Slowly, though, my allegiance turned to the Portland Trailblazers due to the iconoclastic Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas, and perhaps, most-of-all, Clyde Drexler, a classy, soft-spoken player.

Unfortunately, this allegiance to the Blazers hastened my growing disgust with the NBA in recent years. The Jail Blazers as they popularly became known in Portland came to represent all that is wrong with professional athletics. Many of the players, as noted in the Oregon article, were just plain criminals who apparently felt above the law because they were “stars.” When caught breaking the law, they inevitably blamed the police rather than accepting any responsibility for their own actions.

Rasheed Wallace, a gifted athlete who miraculously hadn’t had any run-ins with the law, was an absolute disaster on the court, collecting more technical fouls than any other NBA player for several years in a row. Despite his obvious raw talent, he lacked the self-discipline you’d expect in a junior high athlete.

Unfortunately, when I started looking around, such behavior didn’t seem confined to the Blazers as trash talking and showboating seemed to dominate the game. I soon realized I didn’t want watch a game I wouldn’t watch with my grandson, and I found it impossible to cheer a team when I couldn’t identify with a single player on the roster.

This distaste for professional basketball soon spread to other professional sports. Apparently even my definition of sportsmanship is archaic. Too many players seem to have an inflated sense of their own worth. They taunt opponents, forgetting that you can only know your true worth by the measure of your opponents, that to demean your opponent is to demean yourself.

Shall we watch
what we want to become,
or just become
what we watch?

Baseball was my first love in sports, though I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps because big brother Bill loved it. Perhaps because the kids in our neighborhood played baseball in the street all summer long. Perhaps because we lived a short distance from Sicks Stadium home of the Seattle Rainiers and could hear the roars when Al Lyons hit another home run.

I used to skip lunch in the 1st and 2nd grade to buy bubblegum cards, and my brother and I scrounged bottle caps so we could get into Sicks Stadium for free as part of the Knothole Gang. When we couldn’t afford the game, most of the time, we’d listen to the play-by-play on the radio while listening for distant roars.

Fifty years later I still remember the names of favorite players. Though Sammy White was a personal favorite because both he and I played catcher, my real hero was Al Lyons. He hit a club-high 23 homeruns, but I suspect it was really his name that captured my heart. Al was my father’s name, of course, but Lion seemed the perfect name for a brave-hearted baseball hero.

I was thrilled when dad brought home a mitt he bought at a pawnshop. The old-fashioned mitt had little padding and no webbing to speak of, but I spent hours rubbing it with saddle soap. I used to pretend that the name indelibly imprinted on the strap was the name of a famous ballplayer, though I probably realized even then that it was really the name of some poor down-and-outter forced to abandon his dreams of becoming a big-leaguer. Even after I replaced that glove with a modern third-baseman’s glove with lots of webbing, I kept it and ended up using it to play softball many years later in the army. In fact, I kept that glove until we moved last year, knowing for years that no one but me would ever want to use it again.

I’m not sure when I first lost interest in playing baseball, though I know it was after we moved to California. Perhaps because my older brother went off to high school and seldom played with me anymore. Perhaps because no one played baseball in the streets, and I was forced to join Little League in order to play and I resented some adult telling me that I needed to change my hitting style or that I was too slow to play third base. Perhaps because I could never switch my allegiance from my beloved Rainiers to the Giants, no matter how far we’d moved away. Perhaps just because I got hit in the head once too often with a fastball and decided I had more future as the smartest kid in class than as the kid brother who wasn’t smart enough to get out of the way of an inside fastball.

Younger, I collected heroes,
Robinson, DiMaggio, Williams
Now I re-collect distant memories.

Deciding I needed to do some light reading for awhile, I picked up my brother’s Christmas gift, Ichiro on Ichiro. As it turns out, I find light reading harder than my normal reading. Not sure why, but I’ve actually had a hard time finishing the book even though Ichiro (and Edgar Martinez and John Olerud) almost single handedly revived a long-dormant interest in baseball. On the other hand, perhaps it’s not too surprising I had a hard time reading the book since I watch sports to get outside my head, to avoid thinking.

Of all the baseball players I’ve followed in the recent past, Ichiro has certainly been the most fascinating, perhaps because at the same time I’ve grown increasingly interested in Taoism and Zen. Ichiro’s approach to the game is both fascinating and appealing.

The book is written in a question-answer style, with questions posed by Narumi Komatsu answered by Ichiro, both of which end up being translated by Philip Gabriel. Perhaps it’s the style that makes it difficult for me to really get caught up in the book, but, despite some interesting content, I found it difficult to stay with it. Here is one of the more interesting quotes I found, one that certainly applies to life in general and not just to baseball:

Once you started living in Seattle, did you feel any pressure from living in a foreign country?

I feel pressure because I can’t speak English. I have to be careful about all kinds of unexpected things. Because the mentality and way of doing things is so different. But even if that puts a little pressure on me, I also find it stimulating. It makes you feel alive. A monotonous life without any tension or excitement is something I’ll leave for later on in life. I’m prepared for all sorts of trials, but actually I’m finding it more fun than anything else. I want to experience all kinds of things-many different experiences.

Although I think Ichiro’s going to find out that old age, at least if my life is an indication, is not without tension or excitement, I like his whole approach to baseball and life.

It’s refreshing to find a player who treats his equipment with respect, who finds it important to sit and clean his glove after each game. Even more importantly, he seems to respect the game itself, respects both his teammates and his opponents. He’s a perfectionist who demands more of himself than he does anyone else, but he can still admire opponents who challenge his ability to meet those goals.

Unfortunately, I didn’t need to read the book to learn most of what was interesting in the book; I learned it simply by watching how Ichiro conducts himself on the field, the only place to learn what any player really believes.

Maybe I’ll save the book and give it to the first grandson or granddaughter who shows an interest in playing baseball. I’d love to see all of them emulate Ichiro.

It used to bug me when I was playing Monopoly to land on Chance or Community Chest because it seemed totally unrealistic to suddenly receive $100 from the bank or some unknown benefactor. After yesterday, I may have to re-examine that perception.

A few months ago, I got a letter asking me if I would be willing to have one of my blog entries published in a collection. At first, I worried it was some kind of “con” and was hesitant to reply, but finally did so, saying I would be happy to be included.

Well, yesterday I received my check for $100 from Pearson, a part of Penguin, so I guess it wasn’t a con after all, and I can now officially claim to be a “writer,” though I still won’t claim to be a “poet.”

Realistically, of course, I’ll probably spend more than $100 purchasing copies of the book for grandchildren when it’s published, so my net gain will be a minus. It’s still nice to know that someone actually thinks something I’ve written is worth publishing. I’m assuming I’ll receive an email when the book is actually published, and I’ll pass that information on to prove I’m not hallucinating here.

Though I’ve considered adding ads to help defray the costs of keeping this site running, I never dreamed that someone would happen along and give me a $100 for doing what I love to do.