Artistic kids and sports: The homerun wind
Ted Williams said that “hitting [a baseball] is fifty percent above the shoulders.” Yeah, see, there’s the problem. You can be physically athletic and still never excel because of what goes on in your thinkosphere as the pitcher winds up, or as the pass comes to you, or as you approach a hurdle. This is why even physically talented artistic kids can have trouble with sports, but it is also why they can become fans who reap deeper rewards than most.
You can see what it takes, mentally, all the time with pros. I’ll stick with baseball for an example.
Biff Smackum comes up to bat in the bottom of the ninth, tie game, etc., etc., in the World Series. The count goes to full and he connects with a hanging curve and blows it out of the yard for the win. He is dog-piled by his team. The home city goes wild and, everywhere in the town, people light cars on fire to show their joy (?). But let us look into Biff Smackum’s head and then into, say, my head in a similar situation.
The pitcher rubs the ball, then bends at the waist to gets the signs. He nods, then goes into the stretch.
Biff taps the outside corner of the plate, then the inside to check his spot in the box. He brings the bat up and sets himself. Rhythmically, gently, he taps his back shoulder with the shaft of the bat as he waits. The cheering fans sound like a hundred jet engines, but he doesn’t hear it. He watches the pitcher’s glove, hoping for a glimpse; watches his hand go back to see if he can catch the grip — this guy throws a nasty splitter. The pitcher delivers.
Biff’s thoughts run through the count: First pitch was high cheese just in for a strike; then he came with a curve, low, out of the zone, followed with more heat for a strike; I took two balls because he was trying to get me to chase; he’ll try to put me out with his splitter — that’s his coffin nail — wait — look at this — he hung a curve — the red dot that the ball makes with the seams as it spins isn’t staying tight — it’s opening up, which means the ball isn’t going to break sharp. It’s right in his wheelhouse. Biff extends his arms and smack, it gets launched into the night and clears the fence.
Note the focus? The singular goal of hitting the ball? Biff is “in the zone”. Unlike us Coleridgean Caseys at the bat, he’s thinking baseball when he is playing baseball. You can’t generalize too much, but artistic kids usually can’t get to that level of athletic performance, not always because of a lack of physical ability, but because their brains don’t fall into that place — not with a bat in their hands as opposed to, say, a brush or a keyboard.
For instance, here is yours-truly at bat as a teenager in high school. In fact, it is almost a literal transcription of an at-bat that I remember:
I move up to the plate with two ducks on the pond: men on first and third. Two outs, two strikes, last of the ninth. On the way from the on-deck circle, I had played the scene in my head as to how it would be if I knocked in the winning run — pictured the team surrounding me at the plate and pictured the teary-eyed, joyful hugs from my girlfriend who was in a bright pink jacket that made her look so pretty that it actually hurt my chest a little.
It’s windy, blowing out toward left field, carrying the smell of leather and grass past me. Homerun wind. I glance at my dearest in the bleachers, hunched inside her puffy jacket and shivering, and her hair is bright and wild and flame-like against the sunset breaking over the trees.
I take a practice swing, to shake her out of my head, wondering for a second if I swing level when I do that, and then step into the box. I tap the plate and notice the hollow sound, like I always do — different than the one at the away game we played the night before. That one sounded like a bass drum, a little. More of a thud. High-end, like Alex VanHalen’s, but a thud.
I set my back foot, enjoying, as always, the sound of the clay crunching under my cleats. The pitch comes. I try to swing short and fast like they taught me, but the urge to hit the thing over the fence overcomes me and I over swing, two feet above a breaking ball in the dirt. I was looking for a fastball. With two strikes, there was no way he was going to throw a chubby fastball right down the middle. Maybe I thought the baseball gods would deliver me one for having helped a kid pick up his books that day.
Anyway, my girlfriend in pink did hug me on the way to the car. So that’s good. Her perfume smelled slightly like candy. “Opium,” I think it was called . . . wait . . . where was I?
See, I could run, catch, hit, throw — all of that. I just didn’t have the head for baseball greatness. I was always a starter, but never a complete standout. Baseball was a vehicle for sensation and emotion for me — like a metaphoric amusement park — not a focused, logical activity. I was always trying to craft a game into an epic story. Baseball had subtext for me; it was filled with aesthetic and sentimental things that pulled me away from “the zone” — even as a little kid.
As a little boy, I would bombard my dad: “Do you think I will be a legendary baseball player some day?” “I’m really good at diving for the ball!” (I had seen Larry Bowa make a spectacular play the night before.) “If a major league team wants me to play for them someday, can I say no and play for the Phillies?”
When I would practice pitching, my dad would go crazy trying to get me to throw consistent strikes, but I would always want to throw the curves and sliders I had no hope of perfecting — for a while I was obsessed with the archaic “screwball”. I’d try to throw sidearm, because I had seen Kent Tekulve do it.
In games, I would stand on first base, fantasizing about making a climbing catch over the fence in foul territory to end things gloriously. My mind was half on a movie I was directing in my head, half on the game. I was crafting a story out of dreams and possibilities. That’s no way to predict a pitch sequence.
Of course, you can’t shoehorn every artistic kid into this (and, certainly, a similar lack of focus can happen with non-artistic kids) but I think it is true for a lot of them. And none of this makes us artists loftier than great athletes. You could make an argument that it is quite the opposite, actually.
Some of the best writing, ever, is about baseball — about what it means to the American experience. (Think: Field of Dreams or think of the essays in Ken Burns’s Baseball: an Illustrated History.) We artistic wannabe major-leaguers do tend to wax poetic about the game. We see our teams as characters in a 162 act play — our guys are just, clearly, nicer than the other teams. Better looking, even. They’re stronger characters. Our guys wouldn’t kick over a cooler like so-and-so did. And we appreciate the Odyssean struggles of, say, the older player sticking with the game into his forties when others yell for him to get out of the game . . . that sort of thing. That’s not to say most people don’t see that stuff. If there is a difference, it might be that we artistic thinkers just wrap the sport around us like a fuzzy blanket and don’t see the wins and losses as the cool part. It’s the ride that we love — the drama. The smell of grass and leather on the wind . . . the homerun wind.
By the way, in my last organized baseball game, I did get to make that climbing catch in foul territory. True story.
CHRIS MATARAZZO’S ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS APPEARS EVERY TUESDAY.
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And yet I think you can *learn* that sort of dogged focus described in paragraph six, much more easily than you could “learn” to be six feet tall, for example.
True, Alec. But I would argue that there are those who *naturally* focus in one place over the other, though, and that maybe they are, ultimately, going to be better. A four-foot person could be six feet with stilts. but he will never run as fast as a natural six-footer.