Leveraged Intelligence

One Remarkable Day

Part of the continuing Blogger’s Consortium series with simultaneous posts on the topic being done by Ashok, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Helen, Judy, Magpie 11, Maria, Marianna and Ramana – in alphabetical order.  The Grand Old Man of the group, Ramana Rajgopaul, came up with this topic.

I’ve got to tell my readers – I love these guys!!

This evening, I will be going to work lighting for the second and final week of our local High School’s annual musical, this year Evita.  For years, I’ve tried to tell parents how special it is to be involved with their children’s accomplishments as closely as possible, to take an interest and share that interest with them.  This is for the parent, for the rewards are legion; for the community, for the interactions make for bonds that withstand stress and bring creative joy and nurturance; and especially for the children, for they will carry that tradition on when the time is ripe.  It is activity that reverberates through the generations and gains momentum.  It is a counter to the dark hopeless entropy that moribund societies face.

This is the story I’ve told before on this blog, repeated with emphasis of one of those days spent with my father that simply is irreproducible and irreplaceable.  I was a ten-year old baseball player in Salina, Kansas.  A pitcher.

There was a local semi-pro team in 1960 and an extraordinary thing happened to and for them.  The greatest pitcher of all time – and I mean that without exaggeration – came into town for three weeks to pitch for them, the great Satchel Paige.  Paige had pitched for years in the Negro Leagues and he was so good that the great Joe DiMaggio said that Paige was the only pitcher he simply could NOT hit!  He is, to this day, the oldest player to ever play in the Majors, not being able to break the color barrier until after it was done by the great Jackie Robinson.  Paige’s short major league career STARTED when he was 47!

When he came to Salina for three weeks, he was in his later 50’s.  He still had a fastball that hummed and a curveball that dropped off the table.  And this all-time great decided to put on a pitching clinic for all the local little-league pitchers.

He began by talking with us in the most easy, least egotistical manner you could imagine.  There were about ten or fifteen of us little guys there and we hung on every word.

He had a catcher and an umpire position themselves behind the plate and had us stand behind the mound.  Then, he did the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen a baseball player do: he had the catcher place a matchbox on the plate and told the umpire to call balls and strikes over the matchbox, not the plate!  Without a warm-up, he threw about 15 straight strikes over that match box.  He could do it with a curve, with a fastball – I think he could have done it standing on his head.

When asked whether he had off days when he couldn’t throw strikes over the matchbox, he replied that, “No.  I can always do that.  But, on the good days, I can throw it over the corners of the matchbox, on worse ones I have to throw directly over the box.”  Just like that.  No brag.  Just fact.

In later years, I saw him interviewed by Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes.  Bradley asked him about his legendary control and he demonstrated by throwing rock after rock across a pond hitting whatever decoy duck that Bradley picked out for each throw.  He said he had always been able to do that, since he was a child.

After showing us many things, like his move to second – and his lack of a move to first, which he said was just how it was -  he smiled and said no man could do everything!  But, he wanted to know what we would do as pitchers in a special situation.

And he pointed to me!  He said, “Son, here is the situation.  A man is on third.  You wind up and he breaks for home.  What do you do?”

Satchel Paige asked ME a question?  The only question he asked all day?  I said, praying it was the right answer, “You hurry your windup as much as possible and throw the ball outside so the batter can’t put a bat on it and the catcher can bring it back on the runner.”

He looked at me and said, “Boy, no kids get that one right.  But you did!  Let me shake your hand.”  And he came over there and shook my hand!  Satchel Paige shook my hand!

  And you know what was great about it?  My dad was right there.  We talked about it all the way home to tell Mom!

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect…

Great Practice Makes Great…

Good Practice Makes Good…

Mundane Practice Makes Mundane…

Bad Practice Makes Bad

My undergrad mentor once came up with the term eupraxis.  I don’t know whether that is a term he made up or a term he found – but when you get to be an expert in your field, the language is your playground.  It meant “good practice.”  In part, it was his translation of Zen into Western terms.

What might it mean in the West?  Well, when I was in high school, I was always out for some kind of a sport and in the summer, that sport was baseball.  We used to play catch for hours and after awhile, the practice of throwing and catching became second nature.  Somebody threw a set of keys to you, there wasn’t any of this two-handed basket catch stuff.  You could see and track every key, pick which one or ones you wanted, “give” just the proper amount with your hand … and, on a good day, jump straight into the car and put the key immediately in the ignition.

Throw me a set of keys now and I might or might not catch them, may miss them entirely and let them hit the ground or the car or just put my hands over my head for protection!  Sure, I blame it on these progressive lenses I’m wearing.  I blame a lot of stuff on them.  But, the truth is that I don’t practice anymore.  There is no one who wants to play catch with me.

 But, practice alone isn’t enough.  I have noticed Ramana musing about handicaps and mentioning his handicap in golf.  For those readers unacquainted with golf, the handicap is the score you are allowed to subtract from your total when competing with someone else who has a registered handicap, to even the playing field so to speak.  Unfortunately, the numbers don’t actually go high enough to account for the average amount that I shoot over par, so that doesn’t quite do it for me.  My use of the word is more properly the common usage of the term, indicating some kind of disability.  My handicap is my swing!

This was true even when I practiced a lot, shortly after moving out here at the age of 30.  Why, with all this practice, was I so bad?  Because I didn’t know the proper way to play and thus practiced doing pretty bad things over and over until I had bad mastered.  On the golf course, I OWN bad!  However, as you can tell by my smile – that is an actual photo of me playing – you can tell that I practice having fun.  Our Cheerful Monk, Jean, has Happiness as a Spiritual Practice.

My questions, dear readers are these:

1. 1. What do you practice well?
2. 2. What do you practice poorly?
3. 3. And, what do you no longer practice at all?

A Boy’s Hero Worship

Most of us – well most of us that are sports fans – remember the above picture from the famous Coca Cola commercial shown at the Super Bowl where the young boy is in awe of his hero who is beat up and battle weary passing within a few feet of him.  It was Mean Joe Green, a name most of the men from my generation who are worth the skin they are poured into will recognize.  That man was a MAN!  One helluva football player.  And, as he demonstrated after taking the Coke offered by the boy, able to drink a bottle of Coke in one long draft.

Now, as an aside, from what I hear of how many takes they have to do for each scene, I can only imagine that by the last take Mean Joe was probably more inflated than the Hindenburg!  I’m sure that the only thing that made the evening bearable at home was counting the money from the commercial.

But, I digress…again.  If a man’s reach doesn’t exceed his attention span, what’s a blog for?  What I am angling toward is the priceless look on the boy’s face.  I’m here to tell you that I’ve been INSIDE that face.  It all happened when I was ten years old…

No, that isn’t a picture of me when I was ten years old.  That’s a picture of the great Satchel Paige, probably the greatest pitcher to ever hold a baseball.  Here is a very brief description from How Stuff Works talking about how good he was:

Beating the Major-Leaguers

Long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier for major-leaguers, the only opportunity afforded African-American ballplayers to compete with their white major-league counterparts was in exhibition games. No pitcher made quite as dramatic a mark in these games as Satchel Paige.

In two memorable contests played at Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field in 1947, Paige outdueled Indians legend, future teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer Bob Feller. Over five innings pitched, Paige struck out 15.

Paige wrote that he beat major-league barnstorming teams in 17 straight games during the 1930s. This string was broken in December 1935 in Oakland, when he lost to a team of Bay area major-leaguers led by then minor-­leaguer Joe DiMaggio, who cracked the game-winning hit. In later years, DiMaggio said that Paige was the toughest pitcher he ever faced.

In the summer of 1960, Paige pitched in Salina, Kansas for a minor league team, the Etherington BlueJays.  I can’t remember which team I was pitching for that summer, the Kiwanis team or the Moose Lodge team.  Satchel Paige put on a pitching clinic for those of us who were Little League pitchers, starting it with the most amazing pitching demonstration I’ve seen before or since.  He showed us what he called his “bee pitch,” so named because it always “be where he wants it.”  He went to the mound without a warm-up,  had his catcher place a matchbox on the plate and an umpire behind the catcher, and then proceeded to put pitch after pitch – every pitch – over that matchbox.  They moved the matchbox for each pitch.  And each pitch made the damndest hissing sound in the air as it zipped over that matchbox time after time.  When an adult asked him whether he ever had off days, he replied that the difference between a good day for him and an off day was whether he had to gut pitch that matchbox or whether he could nibble at the corners.  Watching him, I had no doubt whatsoever that he meant just exactly what he said!

Then he took us aside and asked us a question: “If you go into a windup with a man on third and you see him break for the plate out of the corner of your eye, what do you do?”  He pointed at me to answer….

Holy crap!  No pressure for a ten-year old.  So, I said I thought that you should hurry the pitch as much as possible and get it to the catcher outside where the batter couldn’t lay a bat on it – so your catcher could bring it back onto the runner coming in.  If you’ve ever pitched, you really should know that, so it isn’t brilliant to say it…but I just knew I had screwed it up…

That’s when one of the absolutely magical events of my life happened.  Satchel said that not only was I right, but kids almost always thought you threw it inside toward the runner.  For getting it right, he came over and…

SATCHEL PAIGE SHOOK MY HAND!!!!

That’s when I was INSIDE that face!  I haven’t washed that hand since.

Tell me about someone that transported you as a child.  They don’t need to have been famous.  They don’t need to have been an athlete.  They just need to have been magical for you!

Photos from How Stuff Works  and Coca Cola