Imperfect Pitch or Just Another Baseball Blunder?
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Tag Archives: Sports
Huntin’ ‘n’ Fission
I’m told that it’s both fun and useful to have hobbies. There are certainly plenty of books, magazines, news articles, classes, clubs and social organizations devoted to leisure-time pursuits, all of them trumpeting the value of such avocations. Some of them are decidedly age-specific: I haven’t seen a large number of free solo rock climbing promotions aimed at senior citizens, for example. There are hobbies considered preferable to persons of certain economic strata, fitness levels, sexes, nationalities and any number of other identifying categories, some active and some quite passive or spectatorial, some of them expensive to learn and requiring extensive training and practice and others free and simple to master. Regional favorites abound, like, say, noodling (catching catfish by hand), which would be hard to enjoy in desert climates unless you happened to be both a big fan of the sport and dedicated enough to stock your own evaporation-protected pond. Some of the more intellectually stimulating hobbies, like competitively designing robotics for cage fights or nuclear plants for home use, are highly entertaining to their practitioners but utterly escape the attentions of us more modest-brained folk as either too highfalutin or just plain incomprehensible. Sudoku, popular with millions of people cleverer than I am, falls into that too-challenging category for me since I’m so mathematically unfit, but I do like some kinds of word puzzles reasonably well if I’m in that rare mood.
Should I take up golf, having decided to move (when my spouse gets around to retiring) to a place on a golf course partly for its–surprise!–affordability and its location in a great town in a great part of the country, and in no small part as well for its great view into the green and leafy first fairway of the course? That would require my learning which end of the club is the grip and which the head, not to mention a whole bunch of other stuff, and on top of that, paying dearly for the privilege.
While I’m still living in Texas I’d certainly be in a logical place to take up hunting, but that doesn’t appeal to me at all, unless it’s with a camera. For that matter, I’m more inclined to practice target shooting with a longbow, something I’ve enjoyed briefly in the distant past, than with a gun as well, being mighty skittish about those things. Being on the fast track to old age, I could probably pick up something more sedentary like knitting and crocheting if I had the patience. My single brief fishing moment post-childhood actually garnered me a cute little throw-back bass (as a kid I never caught anything but one big scary looking White Sucker that even my older boy cousins wouldn’t touch) and was enjoyed in good company while sipping a fine Texas brew; maybe that should inspire me to get busy with fishing.
That’s the thing, though: I just don’t enjoy games and sports, puzzles and pastimes much at all. Whether this arose or was reinforced by my longtime social phobias, perfectionistic fear of being seen as incompetent, dyslexic inability to keep anything I’m doing on a standard track, hilariously hideous sporting skills or any combination thereof is probably irrelevant. You see, there’s no separation of church and state in my life. I spend my days and evenings doing the very things that lots of folk can only do on an occasional basis and to fill their free time.
If I took up drawing, concert-going, reading and writing, cooking, DIY projects, gardening, photography or collecting weird bits of Stuff as a so-called hobby, what would I do with my day job? The truth is simply that I’m a fully fledged frivolous person. If eccentric creative activities and ways of thinking are on the periphery of real life, then I am a bona fide fiction, an imaginary character myself. If on the other hand art is, as I’m convinced it should be, central to existence and well-being, why then I’m just ahead of the curve; I won’t need to retire to any old rocking chair or go in a desperate search for something to keep me occupied, because I already have too many fun and pleasing things to do. Either way, I’m keeping busy.
Frozen Assets and Fallen Heroes
Sad Story All Around
Sylvester from Sylvania, magnificent skier and scout,
Went off to explore the slopes one day, but the minute that he was out,
His girlfriend Sylvia opened the door to another particular friend,
And I needn’t tell you that soon enough, they all came to a tragic end,
For Sylvester’d forgotten it was late spring and roots sticking out of the snow
Tripped him at top speed; with a nasty fling he crashed to the gorge below;
Meanwhile, back home, Sylvia and Sid were having a high old time
‘Til Sydney’s wife showed up with a knife, and that’s the end of this rhyme.
On Thin Ice (Advice to the Peewee Hockey Player)
With special love to all of my Canadian friends!
Out Cold
Do not the hockey puck invite
Your flaxen brow to cleave
By wearing not your shining helm;
And do not tear your sleeve
Upon the blade of someone’s skate;
And don’t assay to test
Opponents’ blows, save if you wear
A Kevlar hockey vest;
Avoid, if you are able to,
A stick thrust at your sternum,
For whacks like this are undesired
Even by those who earn ‘em;
Above all things, I recommend
You not enrage the goalie:
Though wounds are bound to happen here,
Some risks are just unholy.
The Race Well Run
Athletic prowess of any sort is a mystery and source of amazement to me. One doesn’t have to be an Olympian, by a long stretch, to appear nearly godlike to my unskilled and uninformed eye. While I have had moments of physical fitness in my life, they never amounted to anything notable beyond getting me from Here to There and back again.
I think my attention span tends to favor short bursts of intense action rather than sustained practice, just as my brain has always rebelled against both study and studio time over lengthy stretches. When I’m doing a renovation project, it reflects my past days of art gallery installation, which more often than not veered away from the sensible approach of using a full week for the job in favor of three 18 hour days in a row. When I’d end up at 2 a.m. leaning off the twelve-foot ladder to aim the last few lights properly at the artworks, it’s likely no wonder I avoided spending longer periods acting sensible and instead ended up doing everything in a crazy cram-course style.
I know perfectly well that this approach may be inappropriate for these pursuits and is definitely wrong for athletic pursuits, just as well as I know that attempting to draw only in 18-hour sessions for three days straight and then take a nice six-week holiday before coming back, literally, to the drawing board would be ridiculous. So, considering that I have such a direly miniscule attention span for anything but what I love the most, it’s no shock that something I’m truly lousy at and ill-equipped with the strength, speed or grace to perfect has rarely been (and is unlikely to become) a long-term pursuit of mine.
This–along with the few paltry attempts at athletic activities that I have made over the years–explains quite readily why I both admire great acts of physical prowess and art and find them completely alien, athlete and action alike. Yes, I have pressed a few weights, swum a lap or ten, leapt hurdles, rowed against the current, placekicked the pigskin, arm-wrestled, done pushups and pullups and situps, and run a fair number of miles in my time, among other things. But unless I have to do any of it again to save my life, I’d ever so much rather watch someone who genuinely loves being an Action Figure do all the work, and do it ever so much better than I ever could. After all, though I’m no athlete I am a very skilled and enthusiastic spectator, and all sorts of artists deserve a good audience. That way we all get a chance to rise to the level of our highest potential.
Pontius Pilates, or Why I Only Exercise Out of Guilt
Three guesses, my friends. I’ve tried. Not as sincerely as necessary, apparently, because it never ‘took’. I just haven’t found that magic needful item called genuine motivation, let alone gotten any joy from the thing called athletic pursuit. I’m absolutely unable to come to grips with how people get pleasure from exercise.
Never did.
Yes, I get the payoff part, but it’s only by forcibly dragging my horrendously unwilling carcass through the misery of the activity part that I’ve ever been able to even glimpse the answer to that part of the equation. As it happens, I will admit to always having been that classic playground target, the weenie. I am sufficiently strong and graceful–just–to not topple over in a severely mortifying heap of near-death simply from attempting to stand up from a prone or seated position. Possibly I’d still do the human-origami thing if heavily medicated or, okay, actually nearing death, but gimme a break. What I’m saying is more that I swim in the mainstream of the ever-popular Last Person Chosen for every team. And with good reason, mind you. I never kidded myself that I should be bumped up higher on the roster. Got no skills, no nacherl-born talent, no passion for it all. As the deep right fielder for the Bad News Bears* I would be benched in .006 seconds. In right fielder capacity I at least approach minimal lawn bowling skills, but really, not so much. That would be too much like utility in the athletic performance department. Even considering that mad skills for the bowl-o-rama are somewhat less helpful on the baseball field than a hapless weenie might vainly hope.
I found my moments of being nominally adjacent to modest, passable skill in a couple of Physical Education instances. It was only by gritting my teeth through the years of garden-variety youthful humiliations ranging from the mere catcalls and snide showoff-ness of insecure high-level school hotshots that, as usual, are low-level schoolyard bullies to being demonstrably stinky all on my sweet self’s own. My Moments, unfortunately, were also in areas of athletic endeavor that could be easily construed as marginal and/or distinctly useless in the way of getting one, say, a scholarship or a smidgen of popularity. While I was never hungry for the latter, it could possibly have saved my parents a buck or two if I could’ve latched on to the former before high school matriculation.
Not a lot of recruiters drool after modestly successful junior high football kickers (female), nearly-good dilettante archers, hurdlers and high jumpers that jump only So High, and swimmers whose main skill is subduing strugglers in Life-Saving 101. And of course it would have been pointless, since as I may have previously averred, I simply dislike sports-related stuff of nearly every kind. So I’d have a bit of difficulty maintaining any scholarship anyone was dopey enough to bestow on me, don’tcha know.
I will continue to press myself to overcome my natural aversion to motion and activity. I’m aware that my chances of continued living, let alone healthy and happy living, depend on my acquiescence in that, and lord knows I’d love if I accidentally found something healthful that I liked doing along the way. Anybody hear the Exercise Good Fairy flitting nearby?
Only getting frightfully old will exempt me from working toward physical fitness, so maybe I'd best just make peace with decrepitude . . .
* Bad News Bears: a film I will happily admit to never having willingly or knowingly seen even 2 minutes of, but that I know from secondary sources to be an appropriate reference point for my own grotesque ineptitude on the baseball diamond. If you need further confirmation of my level of baseball skill and knowledge, feel free to ask any person that has had any contact lasting longer than the aforementioned 2 minutes with me and I’m quite certain they can vouch for me on it.
Art-Colored Glasses 