Joey at the Bat

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“Joey! C’mon, it’s just a game,” Regina shouted out, as Joey Dunning took a bat to a Gatorade water cooler. It obviously wasn’t to Joey. To Joey, it was an existential crisis to strike out three times in a company sponsored slow-pitch softball game. Companies organize these company functions, so we stupid people can have fun, and we were having fun until Joey took a bat to one of those insulated Gatorade coolers with a beverage dispenser. If Joey hits it once or twice, it’s a thing that draws attention. If he hits it as hard as he can, eight to nine times, it’s a human being imploding, and we watch with our mouths open, like this,” Barry said mimicking the expression. “We pretty much know life isn’t going the way Joey planned, and that this might be one of the worst days of Joey’s otherwise miserable life. What do we do? Do we laugh ourselves to tears? Not at the time. At the time, it’s shocking, kind of sad, and a little pathetic. We’re in tears later, replaying every second of it, every swear word he used, and replaying our reactions to it. One of my buddies actually took a picture of the Gatorade cooler after the it was all over, and he saved it. He didn’t know why he saved it, but the next time something bad happened to me, he texted that picture to me with a caption, “It could be worse.”

“Nothing excites the coward more than seeing a hero fall,” Dave Chapelle once said, “because it justifies their cowardly existence.” That doesn’t quite nail this scenario, because Joey wasn’t anyone’s hero. He was a good-looking guy, though, and a body-builder, who had none of the problems we did attracting women. So, did we kind of relish seeing the worst moment of such a man’s life? We did. All of us did.

The Germans have a term for laughing at another person’s pain. Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to develop a term for laughing at the destruction of another person. And for any offended Germans out there, I’m part German, so I can say that. We laugh when someone trips and falls in the hall and leaves makeup on that carpeted wall. It’s funny, and we all know it. Even when we fall, we know it’s funny, no matter how painful and tragic it is. We know someone, somewhere will develop some material about it that they will share with their friends for years.

I laugh at other people’s pain, and I expect them to laugh at mine. Without knowing the exact definition of yin and yang, we all understand how nature balances itself out through opposite but interconnected forces. As long as it doesn’t involve something debilitating, we all enjoy seeing someone else fall. The bigger the better, and the level of emotional and physical pain one incurs corresponds to the comedic value of the situation. Some say it’s karma, and as a person who laughs at other people’s pain, I know I’m going to get mine, and you know you’re going to get yours. We know karma is going to reach around and bite us in some very tender areas.

We’ve all experienced some levels of karma, but something tells us that ain’t it. That’s just the tip. We’ve done a whole lot of laughing at others, and we know that there’s more to come. We know we’ll get ours. We know there will come a day when we’re old and decrepit, hooked up to some machine that sustains life, and some intern will come into our room, see us gasping for air, and he’ll find it hilarious.

We might expect a little sympathy from a hospital employee, but all institutions have good employees and poor ones. As death creeps up on us, the emotional hysteria will probably lead us to yell something like, “What are you laughing at? I’m dying here, for Cripes sakes!” When we cool down and recognize that we don’t have the strength to fight death anymore, we’ll either acknowledge that we deserve it for laughing so hard at so many others on the worst days of their life, or we might see the humor in it too. Seriously, are you so sick that you’ll probably be laughing with the orderly who’s laughing at your death mask?

“You should’ve seen your face,” that orderly will say, “You were all like …” Barry mimicked the orderly’s imitation of his desperate gasp for breath. 

‘I know,’ we say, chuckling, ‘but you gotta remember I am dying here. No, I’m not saying it’s not funny. I’m just saying that when you’re taking your last breath, it’s probably going to hurt, and if you’re wondering if it is your last breath, you’re probably going to make some embarrassing faces too.’

When that day comes, we might regret laughing so hard at a grown man beating a Gatorade cooler with such intense frustration, or we might not, depending on sadistic we are.

I don’t know how women would handle this situation, but when a guy strikes out three times at a slow-pitch company outing, in front of everyone he works with every day, forty hours a week, it’s our version of a Promethean hell. The story of Prometheus is that the gods wanted to find a creative way to punish him for introducing humans to fire. The gods decided to bind him to a rock and have an eagle eat the liver out of his body for the rest of eternity. Have you ever seen a bird eat? It’s not clean. Even a large eagle has a relatively small mouth, and they don’t have teeth. So, if they’re going to eat your liver out, they have to stick a talon in you to balance you, while they rip it out bit by tiny bit. Yeah, the gods knew how to bring the pain. As the tale of Prometheus tale goes, once this eagle is finally done carrying out that torturous punishment, Prometheus’ liver grows back the next day, and the eagle rips it out again, and again, for the rest of eternity. 

As horrific as that punishment is to picture, I’m willing to bet that most men in the audience here tonight would prefer that torturous afterlife, for the rest of eternity, to striking out three times in slow-pitch softball, in front of all of your friends and drinking buddies. Why, well, as with the repetitive torture Prometheus experienced, we will relive that moment over and over for the next thirty years. You might think it’s over, and you might finally reach a point where you’re no longer staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, reliving it over and over, seeing all of the faces, hearing the silence that followed, and remembering that little kid giggling when you went Al Capone on the Gatorade cooler. If you have mean, sadistic friends like I do, you know they’re going to bring it up, and force you to go through your own version of Promethean hell.

What’s worse, physical pain or mentally reliving your worst day at-bat for the rest of your life. Now, if you’re a regular softball player, like I was, you’re going to mess up a lot. You’re going to make horrendous, humiliating errors, but you can try to erase it next week by making some good plays. Joey, to my knowledge, never played softball, or any other sports, after this game. My bet is that he remembers that moment from 10pm until 1AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to his wife snore, for the rest of his life, and then when he mercifully finds sleep, it invades his nightmares.

Joey was a big body builder type. Most of us go to the gym about two times a week. I’m betting Joey was a five-to-six-day-a-weeker, so we naturally thought the man was built for athletic domination. We could tell that Joey thought that too. He was on my team, and I was behind him in the batting order. I wanted him to do well, of course, because I wanted our team to win, but I didn’t want him to do so well that my little blooper singles would be an afterthought. The ropey muscles on this guy’s forearms made me think I was in trouble. The outfielders backed up for him. We all thought Joey was going to put on a clinic. He had brand new batting gloves that it looked like he purchased just for this company outing. He even had wrist bands. Who wears wrist bands to a company outing? Between pitches, he adjusted the fit of his gloves and fiddled with his wrist bands, just like Major Leaguers. It was so shocking to see him strike out on three pitches that first time that when the other team even ribbed him a little, in a good-natured way, we all kind of giggled. It was all polite and fun.

So, what’s the best resolution we might develop for the inability to hit a huge softball coming at you incredibly slow? Whenever we substitute a good solution with the best, most perfect solution, we often end up choosing the worst. Joey’s solution was to swing faster and harder? In his second at-bat, Joey swung so hard he fell down. Yikes! We could almost hear the nails going into the intangible walls of his nightmares, building a permanent fixture in there.

Seeing as how we were at a company function, and the sense of competition between our teams was fun more than anything else, the pitcher lofted the last two pitches up of Joey’s second at-bat, with the greatest of ease,” Barry said mimicking the soft toss. “The way we might pitch to a five-year-old who is having trouble hitting the ball, and in a scene that will probably play in Joey’s nightmares for the rest of his life, he missed both of them. Would you laugh at this man self-destructing right in front of you?” Barry paused for all the laughing yesses in the audience. “You would? While witnessing the worst moment in someone’s life?”

We all say yes at a comedy club, three to four drinks in, but when it’s someone you know, someone you see at work every day, forty hours a week?” Barry paused to survey the crowd. “We all would. We all do, because we have grievances, petty personal and impersonal grievances. We have grievances against mother nature, God, and the world and everyone in it. If you don’t find failure funny, let me add this. After Joey’s second strikeout, there were groans all over the field on our team and the opposing one. Even the men who envied how easily Joey picked up women, dropped that grievance and began rooting for him. We were all cheering for him. Even though he fell on his ass after the third strike of his second at-bat, someone yelled out, “That’s all-right Joey! Get ‘em next time!” The other team was even saying stuff to cheer him on, being good sports and all. 

Now with the third and final strikeout, let me ask you what do you think would be the worst possible reaction you can think of following a third strikeout in slow-pitch softball? Try to put yourself in Joey’s shoes, and think what reaction might haunt you for the rest of your life?” Barry asked the audience. A few people shouted some reactions out. “More teasing? Laughter? Wrong. How about silence? If you asked me, prior to this display, I probably would’ve said more teasing and more laughter too, but that day taught me that silence, claustrophobic silence is the worst possible reaction you can give to someone striking out in slow-pitch softball. Why? Every other reaction gives us some direction for our anger. If Billy laughs, we can say, “How dare you laugh at me Billy, I was trying so hard, and that was so embarrassing, and you laugh? What is wrong with you? You cold-heartless bastard?” If someone tries to soften the blow, by encouraging us in some way, we can say, “Aw, shut it!” to their condescending sympathy, but silence? Silence causes you to eat the moment whole without lubricants or anything to aid in the digestion process, and it festers in some black hole in our innards for the rest of eternity, and the only outlet we can find is an inanimate object that can be used to retain the temperature of drink products.

As cold and sadistic as we are, we’re not even close to as cold and sadistic as children can be, because they don’t understand how to apply sympathy, and they haven’t experienced enough failure in life to be empathetic. They just think a guy going ballistic on a water cooler is hysterical. “Is he joking dad?” No, now look away.

We try to cover their eyes, but they fight it. This isn’t something they see every day, so they fight to watch it. “Why is he so mad, dad?” they ask far too loud. “Was he mad because he struck out?”

Yes, now for God’s sakes quit staring and join the rest of us, pretending this isn’t happening. The other parents in the audience don’t even laugh at our boy’s innocent, loud questions. They maintain the silence.

Kid won’t let stuff like this go either. “Why did Joey do that?” they ask on the car ride home.

“Joey had no idea he was common. He thought he was special. He thought he’d be a contender, a somebody, some kind of prodigy. Some part of him thought he might be Major League baseball material. He thought that when he was your age, we all did, but he doesn’t play recreational sports the way some of us do, so he never learned that he wasn’t special. He had no idea that by the time he was thirty, the only thing anyone would pay him for was data entry. Missing those slow-pitch softballs, told him that he’s no better than the rest of us, and that was quite shocking to him. 

“Some of us played sports when we were kids, and we played softball in recreational leagues when we aged out of most sports, and we all made horrible errors everyone enjoyed. Sweet little, old ladies laughed at us, “Idiot!” they’d say. Joey, obviously, never went through all that. We made errors that were so awful they were met with silence, and trust me nothing is worse than silence. They don’t even try to cheer us up after a while, because we’re so awful. They allow us to go back to the dugout in silent shame. After that, we realize that we aren’t half as good as we thought we were. Everyone who plays any sport goes through that, but Joey never did. Joey preferred sitting in the stands, laughing at us losers, thinking about his potential for greatness. That company softball game was his big chance, the moment he thought he’d realize all his hopes and dreams of being a prodigy that no one ever heard of before. Joey believed the mythology of Joey that Joey built, and he thought he had potential to be great at something, anything, but he didn’t really do anything about it. He believed something would come along, something would happen, and when it didn’t, when he realized that he was no better than those of us he laughed at for working so hard at stuff that came naturally to him, he took it out on a Gatorade cooler.”

It was a meaningless slow-pitch softball game, at a company outing, and I’m sure that the twenty-something people who were there that day don’t even remember the day, the game, or the fact that we even had an outing. The joke here is that Joey remembers, or that he’ll never be able to forget it. The joke is that in some small way, this meaningless game ruined his life in some meaningful way. I’m almost positive it didn’t. I didn’t talk to Joey before this company outing, and I didn’t after it, so I don’t know the if, when, or how he worked through it. I don’t even know if Joey had to work through it, or if he’s the type to obsesses over such matters. Joey might have moved on as if nothing happened that day, but if he’s anything like me he dreads quiet moments, because they remind him of the silence, he heard that day after the third strike of his third at-bat. If he’s anything like me, those intermittent quiet moments have a tendency of popping up at the oddest times, and I’m sure Joey doesn’t even know why he now has a preference for some kind of noise, music, TV, or anything that makes noise in his background, because of what happened after that third and final strikeout at that company function. You’ve no doubt heard the cliché deafening silence. Yeah, that’s the type of silence that puts an exclamation point on top of one of the top ten worst moments of his life. It’s the type of silence that almost allows you to hear the facial muscles of the players, on both sides, twitch into a cringe.

It strains credulity to me to think that Joey doesn’t remember this day. If I ever asked him about it, and he said, “Huh, I don’t remember that we even had a company outing.” I’d immediately think he was lying. How could he forget falling on his keister the way he did, the way that pitcher lofted him pitches the way we would a five-year-old, the deafening silence that followed his third strikeout, and, of course, destroying a water cooler in frustration? (Even though he hit it eight, nine times, Joey didn’t damage the container, which either speaks to Gatorade’s sound construction of it, or Joey’s ineptitude as a batter, but Joey did offer the owner compensation for the cooler if there was any damage to it. The owner said it worked fine, and no compensation was necessary). If Joey is able to forget all that, because he is blessed with such a short-term memory that he only thinks about today and tomorrow, then all the power to him. It was such a meaningless game, as I wrote, that I don’t doubt that most of the players, and the people watching, have long forgotten about it.  If Joey was able to forget the specifics of his failure that day, or the day in general, it probably speaks to the sound construction of the brain, and its ability to just forget that which could, even in small, insignificant ways, plague us and diminish our quality of life. 

Don’t Drop the Darn Ball

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“I could’ve done that!” we say when we see professional athletes perform spectacular athletic feats on TV. We say this after developing vicarious attachments to athletes after watching sports for decades. We do no not make the same I could’ve done that attachments when they mess up just as spectacularly? Being a fan allows us free movement along the spectrum of our associations with athletes. We identify with them when they succeed, and we distance ourselves from the stink of their failure. 

I got a small taste of I could’ve done that when I dropped a routine fly ball in front of about thirty people in total. I doubt any of them remember that. Check that. One does. One person will never forget it. It wasn’t just a drop. It was the way I dropped it that might haunt me for the rest of my life. You don’t care about that, and no one else does either, because no one cares about me, my softball team, or that game. We do care about professional sports, its athletes, and the outcomes. We care so much that our association them becomes an integral part of our identity. So, when one of our favorite players, from our favorite team, drops the ball we regard it as a personal embarrassment, and if they do it in a deciding game of the World Series, they’ll never forget it, because we won’t let them. 

“Hardly a day in my life, hardly an hour, that in some manner or other the dropping of that fly doesn’t come up, even after 30 years,” Fred Snodgrass said in a 1940 interview. “On the street, in my store, at my home . . . it’s all the same. They might choke up before they ask me and they hesitate — but they always ask.”

Imagine the life of Fred Snodgrass. He made one relatively small mistake as a young twenty something, and for the rest of his life, he’s so embarrassed by it that he probably does everything he can to avoid telling strangers his name. He probably considered legally changing his name at some points, and if he wasn’t so proud of his heritage, and that which he passed along to his children and grandchildren, he probably would’ve, just so he doesn’t have to answer any more questions about the one mistake he made in life. No matter what Fred did for the rest of that game [Snodgrass later made what many call an incredible catch later in that game], that season, for the rest of his baseball career, and beyond, when people heard his name, they’d probably snicker, ask him about that drop, and never let him move on in life because he dropped a ball. 

“I yelled that I’ll take it, and waved [the other outfielder] Murray off,” Snodgrass later told author Lawrence Ritter, author of the 1966 book The Glory of Their Times, “and, well, I dropped the darn thing.”

Can you hear the pain in his words? Even reading him recount a couple seconds of his life, 30 years prior, we hear how painful it was to him. We’ve heard that time heals all wounds, but some of the times it doesn’t. No one would let him forget “Dropping that darn thing” for thirty years, and he lived for another 34 years beyond that. We can assume that some people forgot as the 1912 “Snodgrass Muff” dropped further back into the rearview mirror and future generations forgot or never knew about it, but a 1974 obituary in the New York Times stated, “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.” They (we) wouldn’t even allow the man to have a peaceful death. We can only imagine how his friends and family probably talked about it at the funeral. “Most people don’t know this, but Fred actually lived a happy life, and we’re sad that he died, sure, but at least he doesn’t have to answer another question about that fly ball. At least he can have some peace now.” 

Fred Snodgrass wasn’t the best player on the New York Giants team that won three straight pennants between 1911 and 1914, but he was a solid contributor. He was a young talent that the man some consider the greatest manager of all time, John McGraw, spotted, signed, and kept in his starting lineup for seven years. After his relatively successful career in baseball, Fred Snodgrass became a successful banker, an appliance merchant, and a rancher who grew lemons and walnuts. He was also elected mayor of Oxnard California, and he served on the City Council for three terms. For all of his successes, on and off the field, Fred Snodgrass would never forget dropping an “easy” flyball in the deciding 8th game of 1912 the World Series (the 7th was game called due to darkness), because they (we) would never let him forget it.  

Bill Buckner played Major League Baseball for twenty-two years, spanning four different decades. He had over 10,00 plate appearances, 2,715 hits, won a batting title, and received MVP votes in five different seasons, but all anyone remembers him for is the Mookie-ball that rolled between his legs in game 6 of the 1986 World Series. 

2003 shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, might’ve suffered a fate similar to Snodgrass and Buckner, were it not for a man named Steve Bartman. Gonzalez muffed a routine groundball that could’ve and should’ve gotten the Cubs out of the “Bartman inning” with a double play, so routine that Gonzalez probably executed to perfection a hundred thousand times throughout his life. He muffed the most important one of his life, but few casual fans put him on any lists, like this one, thanks to Bartman. For the record, Bartman’s relatively innocent attempt to catch a foul ball for a souvenir led to a walk, and Gonzalez error led to five unearned runs. Steve Bartman’s life was ruined in a way few fans have ever experienced, and Alex Gonzalez’s name remains unknown to everyone except writers who write columns based on a theme that the Chicago Cubs lost that National League Championship Series, not a fan named Steve Bartman. 

Most people, young and old, know the name Babe Ruth. “The Babe”, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat. He was, arguably, the first national sports celebrity, and some say he saved the game of baseball from the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Long, soaring home runs, are still called Ruthian, 100 years later. He appeared in ten different World Series, and he helped his teams win seven of them, but some contend that Ruth’s ill-advised attempt to steal with two outs in the bottom of the 9thinning of Game 7, cost the Yankee’s a World Series ring. The truth is that the hitter behind Ruth called for a hit and run, but the hitter, a Bob Meusel, signaled to Ruth that a hit-and-run was on. Ruth ran, but Meusel didn’t get the hit. Ruth was then left out to dry as Rogers Hornsby tagged him out and the St. Louis Cardinals won the 1926 World Series. History goes to the winners of course, and some writers have attempted to besmirch Ruth’s name by saying, “He might have been the home run king for decades, and he might have been a World Series hero many times over, but did you know…?     

We all dream of becoming a professional sports athlete. They live the lives that only royalty knew in the past. They have more money than any of us could dream of making, and they have all spoils their culture has to offer, and we live vicariously through their successes. If you’ve ever dropped the ball in a spectacularly humiliating fashion, you received some taste of how awful it feels. They call these plays routine for a reason, because we’ve practiced for such moments hundreds to thousands of times, and professional athletes have performed the routine perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Some of the times, routine becomes so routine that we accidentally take our eye off the ball for less than a second, and we’re already throwing the ball before we catch it, or whatever the reason might be. When we play sports, we make mistakes that take a fraction of a second. Every athlete has makes so many humiliating and embarrassing mistakes that contests often come down to who makes the least amount of them. Athletes are so used to making mistakes that the best ones just move on, but we never do, and we take it as a personal insult when someone from our team tries to move on from one. In Fred Snodgrass’s case, a fraction of a second ruined his life for about sixty years.    

We don’t think about how awful it would feel for an athlete to make a crucial mistake that decides a championship, because we’re fans, and being a fan allows us to move wherever we want in our relationship with them. We want to move closer when they succeed, but we distance ourselves from the stink of their failure. It also gives us a certain joy to mock and scorn them for the rest of their lives, so that they never live the worst moment in their life down. Anyone who has ever dropped the ball, even in a meaningless softball game, has empathy for those who commit errors. We think everyone who was there that worst day of our lives remembers. They don’t, because they don’t care about us, and nobody cares about an insignificant softball game. Those of us on the outside looking in have no idea what it feels like to have someone associate their lives with us. Some of us would give up everything that makes us happy now to know just one day of their life, but as many have said in so many ways, fame has so many downsides that we should be careful what they wish for. Imagine being a grandparent, and a relatively successful business man, living a quiet, happy life, and every third person you encounter says something like this in front of your beloved grandchildren, “Aren’t you Fred Snodgrass? Didn’t you drop the ball in the World Series? Yeah, kids, that play is so famous they gave your grandpa’s play a name, the Snodgrass muff.” Most people would never say such a thing, especially in front of adoring children, but some do, and they think it’s okay, because they were fans, and he let them down. 

There’s Always Someone Better 

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“No matter how good you think you are there’s always going to be someone better. There’s always going to be someone tougher, smarter, faster, and better than you are. No matter what you do in life, there will always be someone, somewhere who’s better.” –Jack T. O’Connor

“What then?” Thomas Sowell.

The Tom Cruise movie messed us up in a lot of ways. The Cruise character was “the best there ever was” in just about every picture he starred in, and the hair and the confident, gleaming smile led us to believe it was probably true. We got the sense that all these Tom Cruise characters had to do was throw their hat in the ring, and they’d be better than the 99% of us who try and cry about it later. The conflict of his movies usually involves him trying to beat the one insolent fella who claims, usually with a snarl and belligerent attitude, that he is just as good as the chosen one. Tom Cruise beats him with that smile and without one of his hairs moving into an improper position. Mingled in Cruise’s tangible superiorities, are relatable intangibles that make us think we, too, could do whatever he’s doing without even trying. We then walk out of the theater thinking if we’re not going to be the best at something, why do it?

I had a tumultuous relationship Tom Cruise movies for many years, until I decided to just sit back and enjoy them for what they are. They’re all enjoyable, action-packed, and fun, but the inherent prodigy, “chosen one” themes have always bothered me. I prefer to think that he who works harder receives the reward. We all know that life doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve all met someone who doesn’t even have to try very hard to beat us, and the only thing we can do is stew in their shadow. It’s always difficult to come to terms with that, and it’s even more difficult to come to the conclusion that we’re not one of them. We’ve all heard the line, hard work has it’s own rewards, but when we have to work so hard to achieve what almost comes natural to others, the reward is almost bittersweet. The question the unnaturals should ask soon after they realize that they’re not a prodigy, a golden child, or the best there ever was, is what then? What are we going to do about it?

“Well, if I can’t be the best at it why do it?” is that annoying answer that keeps coming back at us when he hear the Tom Cruise movie say it, either implicitly or explicitly. If we follow this line of thought, and we leave a profession, craft, or past time that has a prodigy we’ll never outdo, we’ll run into another blessed with more talent and/or experience in the next.

We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to work so hard that we leave blood, sweat, and tears on the cutting room floor to get it. We might do it, but that’s not what we want to do. We want to be blessed by God with such natural talent that others envy us. It’s why we love Tom Cruise movies, and superheroes. We see this when our kids try to pull the proverbial sword from the stone, and we remember how frustrating it was to learn that we were never going to be prodigy. No one marvels at hard work. No one wants to see a Dirk Nowitzki work out or Freddie Freeman take batting practice. No one cares about the little things they do to be the best, and we don’t care how hard they try. We want to be the finished product. We want natural speed, the ability to hit a baseball a mile without any coaching or practice. It’s humbling to learn that we’re just like everyone else, and that if we want it bad enough we’ll have to put in the same 10,000 hours as everyone else. We don’t want to make the humiliating and embarrassing mistakes we almost have to make to learn. We want to be the prodigies who can beat our opponent with one hand tied behind our back. We don’t mind trying to get better today, but we better be the “the best there ever was” tomorrow. To paraphrase The Who song, “You better, you better, you best.”

There’s something inherent in the human experience that prevents us from ever conceding that it will never be us. Even after our prime working years are over, and our days of athletic conquest have long-since passed, we think about how it could’ve been if we did a little of this and a little of that. Humbling experiences did lead us to put in our 10,000 hours on some pursuit, and we did incrementally improve our lot, but we kept running into prodigies who didn’t even have to put in a tenth of the blood, sweat, and tears we did. We admire natural ability as much as we loathe it, and the back and forth  is probably how we developed a love/hate relationship with prototypical Tom Cruise movie.

The Unnatural

I was a short, skinny kid with little-to-no muscular definition in 8th grade. With those physical detriments, I never dominated on the field, but I was quick. I wasn’t fast, as most kids could beat me in the 50 yard dash. In the space of ten yards, however, I had no peers. When harnessed, this talent proved surprisingly effective in soccer, until I met the doofus. I was the second shortest kid in my grade and the skinniest by about 20lbs. The doofus was one of the .0001% of the population who was actually shorter and scrawnier than I was. I was rarely confident, and never over-confident on the field, until I saw that this kid was going to be my toe-to-toe competition for the day. I thought I was going to have a glorious day.

I don’t remember how many times that kid ended up beating me, but let’s just say that it was an embarrassingly high number. Let’s say it was seven times. If it was seven times, it was seven times in a row. This kid wasn’t quicker than me, and his knowledge of the granular techniques of soccer was something, but it wasn’t everything. Yet, this kid always seemed to make the perfect move against me, and his ability to beat me exposed all of my comparable deficits. The reason this kid sticks in my head, all these decades later, is that he proved, over and over, what it meant to simply want it more.

This kid beat me down so thoroughly for that first half that I was sure my coach would be subbing me out. I learned this would not be the case when he said, “I will not be subbing you out.”

The implicit message was that I was going to have to find a way to adjust if I didn’t want to roast in the humiliation of total and unqualified personal defeat. It was a given, by the second half, that I had no chance against this scrawny, little nerd in toe-toe combat, so I just had to factor that into my game. I began running down the sidelines with him. I gave up some precious real estate on the field by doing so, but I followed him, waiting for him to mess up, and I planned to capitalize on any tiny slip-ups he made. He made very few no slip-ups, but my new strategy caused him to run out of real estate most of the time. He tried to kick the ball through me, and it usually bounced off me out of bounds for a throw-in or corner kick. I began nullifying this kid’s superiority, almost by accident.

The final story wasn’t a Rocky or Rudy story in which the lesser finds a glorious way to bring down his personal, miniature-sized Goliath. He continued to steal the ball from me and fake me out in all the humiliating ways he did in the first half, but I nullified him as a force on his team, until our toe-to-toe competition was basically a wash. He nullified me as well as I nullified him, which was a moral victory for me after my disastrous first-half. Even though he scored the only three goals for his team in the first half, he wouldn’t score again, and my team won the game. There was no glory waiting for me on the sidelines, after the game, as this kid continued to dominate me throughout the game, but he didn’t score again. I found a way to look my teammates in the eye when the game was over.

It’s nearly impossible, in any walk of life, to avoid comparing yourself to others to gauge for how we’re doing, and I’m a far better philosopher than practitioner in this regard, but I say don’t get mad, get better. We’re all going to run into brick walls in life, called “the best”, no matter what we do, and the first thing we have to grapple with is the fact that we’re not the best, and we probably will never be. Once we’re done knowing that, and kicking the wall, we need to figure out how to get better. Don’t get mad, get better.

My miniature Goliath and I had a lot to work through. We were both too small and too skinny. If he got tossed around as much as I did, he had an understandable excuse for never wanting to play another sport again. He, obviously, asked himself the “How do I get better?” and he probably didn’t find the answer or an answer, but he had answers every time the ball was between us.

There are always going to be people who are better, and I think one of the reasons we scream and writhe around on the ground is that we expected to be better at this by now. We expected that we would begin our lives as a prodigy, golden child by now. We haven’t done the work necessary to get better, but something should’ve come along by now. This kid isn’t bigger or better, but he beats me every time. It just seems unfair that some are better at sports than we are, and it is when we encounter a prodigy who was born with certain attributes we can’t possibly overcome, but most of the times toe-to-toe competitions are won by those who want it so bad that they’re willing to do whatever they have to to win.

Bret and Greg

Bret Maher was “the best we ever saw” in training class. We all knew his type, and we all know that they flourish in training classes. He was the type who everyone watches. If we were going one-on-one with him, in our soccer days, no one paid attention to us, his opponent, or credited us with a stop. They either deemed the confrontation a Bret success or a Bret failure. Bret was that guy who had all the answers in training class. When he didn’t, it led to witty banter with the instructor. If he was right, that was “just Bret” the most annoying two words in the English language for those of us who attended the two-week training seminar. Yet, when we finally made it out onto the floor, and he experienced the daily grind of the work, Bret was indifferent to bored, and he quickly found employment elsewhere. Either he found out he couldn’t be the best there ever was, or he didn’t think it mattered to everyone else that he was. Whatever the case, the job bored him, and he decided to take his talents elsewhere.

At his funeral, one of his best friends gave a thunderous tribute to a man named Greg Gunderson, “If he decided to become an astrophysicist on Monday, he’d probably be one of the best astrophysicists in the country by Thursday. If you think that’s a gross exaggeration, all I can tell you is you didn’t know Greg.”

“From the minute I met him, I just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said in a more casual moment, outside the funeral proceeding. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a real sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

The prodigious, young Greg Gunderson managed to match his athletic achievements with academic achievements, who proved to be just as successful as an adult, ended up drinking himself to death. How could someone to whom so much was given, seek the comfort of the bottle so often that he killed himself? Some of his friends alluded to the idea that it had something to do with the divorce, but other friends, those who claimed to know him best, said Greg and his wife both realized he just wasn’t cut out for marriage, and his serial philandering proved it. His wife wasn’t even bitter about it in the end, because she had dealt with it for so long. Greg didn’t appear mired in misery about it either. The two seemed to just accept his failure as something he either wouldn’t or couldn’t change, and their divorce, and the subsequent handling of child visitation, was surprisingly congenial. His closest friends were always quick to rule the divorce out on those grounds, so why then?

“Greg Gunderson was just a miserable person,” one of his friends said, “who couldn’t find anything that made him happy.”

“From the minute you met Greg, you just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

None of Greg’s really good friends addressed the questions we had, such as how could a golden child, prodigy with such a gregarious personality be so unhappy? I didn’t know Greg as well as these guys did, but I did get the sense that beneath the personality was an unhappy person. The one comprehensive answer I arrived at is that the human being is such a complex animal with different needs and wants that it’s almost impossible to develop a rule of thumb when it comes to trying to understand another fully. Some of us are a soup who want and/or need limited ingredients, some of us are a stew that call for a couple more ingredients, and others are a mishmash of gumbo or jambalaya wants and needs. There are no mandatory ingredients to a gumbo or jambalaya, but we know something is missing, we just can’t put our finger on what.

Greg’s friends said he didn’t talk about it much, and my guess is he didn’t think about it enough to source the hole in his soul. He just medicated his mysterious misery, and anyone who has ever tried to  medicate their misery knows that it works, in the short-term. It can make us funny, fun, and laughable, until the next morning when we realize we’re worse, and the situation we tried to medicate is worse, because we put it off for another day.

No one could put their finger on what was missing in the delicate balance of ingredients of Greg Gunderson’s internal jambalaya. My guess is it called for a greater sense of satisfaction. We have to know some misery to ultimately know happiness, and we have to know the abject misery of failure to receive some satisfaction for our eventual successes. Greg Gunderson tripped up in life, but those momentary lapses were made on the path to accomplishments. He never, that I know of, knew the type of abject failure that causes one to want to quit with the notion that if I can’t be the best at something why do it? We have to know failure to know success, and if all Greg ever knew was success in his formative years, he probably didn’t experience much satisfaction from it. He probably expected it.

“All he ever knew was success,” his best friend said at his funeral. “He was a star athlete in high school, graduated college with honors, and he was always one of the best employees in his field.”

When they say all he ever knew was success, however, it seems like a bifurcation of the word knew. Prodigies, like Greg, know success at all levels, but do they know it like we do? Satisfaction, we could say, in lieu of Greg Gunderson, is reserved for those of us who work so hard for something that we leave blood, sweat and tears on the cutting room floor trying to get it. When we finally accomplish our goal, we know glory intimately, because we worked so hard to get there.