Sport Stories
Hope
by Calvin Hill
I arrived at Yale in 1965, really never having experienced any failure in athletics. I never lost a football game in high school. I was the pitcher on the baseball team, and a long jumper, and things pretty much always went my way.
As a high school All-American quarterback, I thought I was probably as good at that position as any freshman east of the Mississippi. And then the first day I was on the Yale campus Emmett Dowling walked up to me and said, "Hi, I’m Brian Dowling’s father and you’re going to be catching balls for my son." At the time I just attributed that to an over-zealous
father. But, sure enough, within a week I had been shifted from quarterback. I was used to being the center of everything, and that was traumatic, particularly since I was moved to middle linebacker—literally from one side of the aisle to the other, as we say in Washington. I was also third-string fullback.
While that was happening, I was also finding out that I was not the smartest guy in my class. My roommate ended up second in the class, and because I was used to being at or near the top, I was competing with him. We had several courses together and I was studying all the time and he didn’t seem to study at all and his grades were better than mine.
I finally found somebody who I was smarter than. I made a point of seeing him at least once a day for the next four years. But for the first few weeks on campus, I was reeling.
And then one day, I was walking to catch the freshman bus. We had a game against Cornell, and I had made a decision that if I didn’t get there on time, maybe I wouldn’t play football anymore. I could spend that time in the library and at least compete in the classroom. I got there, and sure enough, the bus had gone. So I was moseying back toward Morse and Stiles colleges when all of a sudden out of the athletic office building a head jutted out of the window and hollered, "Did you miss the bus?" I sheepishly said yes. It was Bob Kiphuth, the legendary Yale swimming coach whose teams set many world records—truly one of the great coaches in the history of amateur sports. He yelled, "Wait a minute, I’m going out there."
Now, I couldn’t explain to him that I didn’t really care if he was going out there or not. So I climbed into his car, and as he drove we chatted and I revealed what was happening to me, emotionally. And when we got to the Yale Bowl, he pulled to the side and talked to me about competition. He related what I was going through to some of the situations he had been in, and said I should never give up, never give up, never give up—that it wasn’t a question of being the first to cross the finish line but rather being the best I could be. A few hours later I scored my first touchdown as a Yale running back. And that talk also soon translated into better performance in the classroom.
That’s the main thing I took from sports: the idea of competing and never giving up hope. Metaphorically, that’s what life’s about. Facing a series of challenges and pushing forward one step at a time, always trying to go in a positive direction, and never giving up hope. Whenever I see athletes in action, whether in the Olympics or the Para-Olympics, my spirits are lifted by those lessons of competition.
When I was at Yale in the late 1960s there was tremendous upheaval and division. And one of the things that was fascinating to me was how all of these people, irrespective of what side they were on on various issues, seemed to rally around the football team. The Greeks, of course, cancelled wars when they held the Olympics. In sociological terms one might say that sports have a totemic function in getting people of different persuasions to rally around one thing. When George Allen first tried to convince me to come to Washington to play for the Redskins, he said, "You’ll be shocked at what happens in this town on Sunday." Bitter opposites all rallying around one team, because it’s something they love in common. That I think is very important.
Former Dallas Cowboys running back Calvin Hill is also the father of nba basketball player Grant Hill. These remarks were spoken at an October 1995 Yale conference.
Control
by Christopher DeMuth
Scuba diving is a deeply pleasurable sport that requires calm discipline. Without mastery of some important skills—proper descents and ascents, buoyancy control, navigating techniques, the ability to recover without alarm from a flooded face mask or lost breathing regulator—an exciting adventure can turn deadly. A diver must always remain under control, even when unexpected problems crop up. Good divers, like good pilots, monitor their instruments constantly, move with steady economy, and understand that virtually any hazard they encounter can be managed with proper training; both are rewarded with the exhilaration of mastering a strange and wonder-filled environment.
The famous first rule of scuba diving is Keep breathing and never hold your breath; but the second rule, Plan your dive and dive your plan, is almost as important. It can be fully appreciated only after one has actually set out from a boat or shore point for a particular underwater destination, with a fixed supply of air, only to discover how easy it is to become disoriented in the dynamic underwater environment. That’s why beginning divers practice with compasses, swimming rectangular and triangular courses back to their point of origin while noting currents, shadows, sand patterns, and natural references as guides to location and course.
Last December in the Caribbean, my family made our first deep-water dive. Down at 140 feet we discovered a forest of tiny garden eels "growing" from the sandy bottom—looking very much like the inspiration for the witch Ursula’s enslaved souls in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Everything was muted dark gray by the deep, bluish, light, and the water pressure squashed some of our flexible equipment flat as cardboard. Enjoying these wonders safely required careful control of air consumption (which is much faster at depths than near the surface), monitoring for symptoms of nitrogen narcosis, and a slow, timed ascent to prevent "the bends."
That evening we took our first night dive, along with an instructor. Right from the start, there was trouble. Our lights were not all working well, and even with a good beam of light the first experience of diving in pitch-black water is stressful and disorienting. We had buoyancy control problems, in part due to adding wet suits for warmth, in part due to breathing in a less relaxed, systematic way than usual. Then, about 15 minutes into our exploration of the reef at a depth of 50 feet, disaster struck. Our 15-year-old daughter had the terrifying experience of having her mouthpiece separate from her regulator (evidently due to being hit by another diver’s tank), leaving her without oxygen and feeling an explosion of bubbles about her head from her free-flowing regulator hose, all in the dark waters. Her 13-year-old sister was the nearest diver. Once she appreciated the predicament, she supplied her desperate companion with air from her alternate regulator. In understandable panic, the two ascended rapidly, out of sight to the rest of the group. My wife and I will not soon forget the moment we noticed the girls’ absence, then spied two tiny lights bouncing about in a cloud of bubbles far above us.
The girls turned out to be okay, but confused about what had transpired. After we regrouped at the surface, our instructor eventually declared the dive "out of control" and directed us to swim for the shore lights off in the distance. Ascending the ladder to the dock, one of us declared she would never again dive at night. We had a family debriefing, which included recognition of the importance of using in an emergency the skills we had learned in theory during our classes. The mental replaying of the evening’s terrifying events kept us lying awake in bed until about 3:00 am.
The next day, however, we all resolved to attempt another night dive immediately, and it was a great triumph. Breathing and body control came naturally the second time around. We were escorted throughout by a seven-foot-long tarpon—a beautiful shiny metallic creature whose presence was strangely comforting. We spotted lobsters and shrimp and watched a spotted moray eel devour a fish whole. For the fun of it, and as an expression of our recovered confidence, we all moved back from the reef at about 70 feet, switched off our lights, and waved our arms about—producing a brilliant display of photoplankton energy that was sufficient to illuminate the other divers in the inky deep. We navigated accurately and calmly back to the dock, feeling relieved and exuberant.
The diving experience is simultaneously thrilling, relaxing, and fascinating. Your senses are honed, and you concentrate with intense focus. There is intellectual challenge in applying concepts of physics, biology, navigation, and photography. You become aware of your body in new ways, appreciating precision and control. Most of all, diving makes you a good observer. Amidst the astoundingly detailed beauty of the ocean, and the complex reef ecology, you experience much more of your surroundings when you go slowly and look carefully—a lesson for our terrestrial lives, too.
Christopher DeMuth is publisher of The American Enterprise.
Theater
by Sebastian Coe
For the vast majority of us, sport kindles memories of triumphs and tragedies; it cloaks a field of dreams. Sport is theater, and through it we can see the human condition cut to the bone. Sport has pace and stillness, drama, comedy, and tragedy. It conveys more vividly than any other branch of everyday human activity the elation and despair in every person’s emotional range.
Sport gives us some of the most powerful visual images of the twentieth century. Its words and phrases also infuse the languages of the world. Many of these expressions have to do with aggression, violence, and fair play, perhaps because sport serves as a kind of metaphor for war.
Aggression and physical contact are part and parcel of many sports, and players are proud of it. In dressing rooms around the world, at all levels of sport, men and women vow to take no prisoners as they prepare for battle. But all of this lies at the heart of competition rather than conflict.
Be it competitive or social, organized or impromptu, a team game or a solo pursuit, sport touches people. It is recreation or entertainment for all ages and all regions. I would argue that it is a kind of universal language—an Esperanto that unites people of every creed, kind, and color.
Closest to my own heart is the Olympic Games, unquestionably the colossus of modern sport. In two successive Olympics I competed for my country, running both the 800-meter and 1500-meter races. Attempting a double win changes an already tough competition into an all-out war of attrition. This is the time to draw on all those long, hard years of apprenticeship. Finally it all comes down to an implacable will to win. In Los Angeles I survived seven races in nine days, and, oh, how welcome was that finish line in the final.
I still hold two world records. My 800-meter record has stood for 15 years, the second oldest on the track and field books. My 1000-meter time is almost as old. I am very proud of these marks, and vanity wants me to hold them. But the oldest reality in sports is that records are there to be broken.
Olympic double-gold medalist Sebastian Coe is now a Conservative member of Britain’s House of Commons.
Loyalty
by Karl Zinsmeister
In the neon world of sport, rowing is a softly glowing candle. It offers little glamor for participants, and hardly any rewards at all to spectators. But from my first moments on the water I knew I had stumbled onto something pure and arresting.
To begin, the bare mechanics are quite interesting. My Yale crews averaged around 6’4" and more than 200 pounds, and eight such people plus one coxswain (who, with a body weighing about half as much, steers and orchestrates) must be stuffed into an exceedingly frail craft whose total heft is barely more than a single one of the men riding in it.
When I began racing, the lightness that made fine racing shells so coveted was achieved through meticulous hand building in thin-shaved woods and stretched fabric. Later, the best boats were made from costly carbon fibers and other products of aeronautic engineering. Always, designers struggled to reconcile the demands for lightness and speed with the requirement that the boats not be wrenched apart by the throbbing exertions of their occupants. Keel-less, bewinged by whistling 12-foot oars, aimed by a rudder the size of a credit card, powered by three-quarters of a ton of human engine oscillating rapidly on sliding seats, a racing shell is a taut 60-foot missile, ever seemingly on the verge of explosion.
Then there are the physical demands of rowing. A highly conditioned human body is capable of tremendous bursts of adrenalized exertion for up to about three minutes (at that point, its stored oxygen reserves are exhausted). Or it can function in a reduced "marathon" state for longer periods of time. Rowing’s strenuousness derives from the fact that it combines these two modes.
Each race starts out as a fierce anaerobic burst (with much more oxygen being consumed by your muscles and brain than your lungs can possibly replace). Then, to avoid passing out, each rower must shift down to an aerobic mode (where effort expended matches oxygen taken in). Exactly when this happens is dictated largely by your genetically determined metabolic rates; aerobic "freaks" with large, efficient lungs and hearts have an advantage. Finally, the race ends with a mad kick back into the anaerobic mode. The goal is to cross the finish line just before the resulting oxygen deficit shuts you down.
Cyclists, speed skaters, Nordic ski racers, and other athletes who straddle the territory between endurance and "sprint" sports face harsh individual demands similar to those of rowing. But unlike most other conditioning-intensive sports, rowing is a team undertaking. Indeed, eight-oared rowing may be the ultimate team sport. While each oarsman must face the personal pain of the race absolutely alone, he must do so in perfect synchronization with a clutch of other men. One small failure by any of the individuals involved will doom the entire effort. (A shell manned by seven world champions and one poor performer may not beat a good high-school crew.)
The final attraction of rowing is the happy fact that these mighty exertions, in these brittle boats, are made on the water, in the pastoral silence of very early mornings and late afternoons. I have skimmed lightly over canals, rivers, lakes, and saltwater bays, as well as the mammoth man-made pools of international race courses. I have rowed through the hearts of cities, I have rowed with black porpoises leaping around me, I have rowed through ice floes, and past ancient religious temples at sunset. I have even sunk a few times (not a great feeling considering you are tied into the boat). And consistently there was a loveliness to being afloat under graceful human propulsion.
With its complicated mix of sensory pleasure, raw power, personal tests, and collective interdependence, rowing soon had me in its grip. My freshman crew was the first in recent memory to beat Harvard (rowing’s superpower). That earned us a 3,000-mile trip to the sport’s mecca—the Henley Regatta in England—and eventually the finals of our event. My sophomore year I ended up in the heavyweight varsity boat, and that July I again journeyed to Henley, to race for the event’s highest prize.
But somewhere in the course of that sophomore year, a shift in the relative positions of my academic and athletic lives took place. I was uncomfortable in the social environment at Yale, and had lacked direction in my academic work. Originally, it was rowing that saved me. With its heavy year-round physical and mental demands the sport kept me challenged, and I put most of my energy into training. In the beginning, rowing was pure inspiration for me. Our dawn practices were an adventure, success an unexpected gift. Every day on the water brought new possibilities.
But once I made the transformation from striving novitiate to established member of a crew engaged in the sometimes grim job of winning a national championship (we did), rowing lost a measure of its joy. I began to feel ground down, caught in a giant machine. Almost simultaneously, I began to pull together the threads of my academic career. Soon I had laid out a large research project that would bring me to Dublin’s Trinity College for a year, and then back to Ireland’s National Library the following summer to write a thesis I could be proud of. One fever waxed as another waned, and I set off permanently down the path toward a life of the mind.
As I stepped into Trinity’s historic courtyard to attend my first class in Dublin the following fall, rowing was the last thing on my mind. But as I was tripping along the waxy cobblestones I suddenly had company: a fireplug of a man from the Trinity rowing team. He had recognized me from my races at Henley, and I was being recruited, hard. As I listened to his sweet Irish patter I thought to myself, "Man, this guy could sell vacation homes in Lebanon." By the time I had crossed the wide courtyard I found myself telling him, like a lost adolescent encountering his first Hare Krishna in La Guardia Airport, that, okay, maybe I would row a little bit with the boat club.
My promise to myself to take a break from the sport was broken. But surely I could idle along just for the pleasure of it. I wouldn’t have to engage as I had the two previous years.
My recollections of early training in Ireland are a blur: Surging through spongy mists which seemed to suck at my exposed skin. The coal-caked banks of moldering Newry Canal. Incredible safari-portages to transport our fragile craft around concrete weirs (vestiges of Victorian organization and restraint that crisscross Ireland’s waterways). And lots of weightlifting and group runs.
Notwithstanding its epic stature in the works of James Joyce, the Liffey is a narrow, tortured snake of a river. In places it is little more than a stream, thick with marshy grasses and dangerously protective mother swans. Racing 60-foot-long shells on such a watercourse was often a hair-raising adventure.
My Irish teammates, however, were imperturbable. Session after session was rescued from anarchy at the last minute by arrival of the missing body, or missing tool, or missing boat. I could never quite tell who was in charge, but the hard sweaty work of training did get done. The contrast with the Yale crew—where we had professional riggers as well as coaches, large motor launches, indoor circulating rowing tanks, dozens of eight-oared boats, a training trip to Florida when the ice froze, buses, food service, straight rivers—was, shall we say, sharp. Amused and impressed by the ad hoc energy of my Irish comrades, I was increasingly drawn into our joint enterprise.
Racing season began memorably when we represented Ireland at the spectacular Nile Regatta held annually in Egypt. Two days after Christmas we had a fine row in Cairo, dodging floating donkey carcasses and other debris and finishing second, bow to stern behind a massive American crew from the University of Washington. The Huskies are infamous even in the U.S. for their virtually paramilitary training—complete with group living quarters, jarhead haircuts, and single-minded lifestyles. I couldn’t fault their prudence when they broke out peanut butter and other imported "safe" food at regatta banquets, but I sure did get a few snickers out of seeing these athlete-warriors from the land of rugged individualism quizzing their guardians: "Hey coach, can I eat this?"
Motley and frayed as we Paddies were, we gave them a stiff race (and stiffed the rest of the crews, including England’s Leander Club, entirely). I was thrilled with our performance, fueled though it was by unspeakable edibles purchased in the stalls of the Egyptian markets.
I began to realize how far our crew might go in the months to come. But breakthrough was not achieved easily. We sifted through myriad lineups, several coaches, a gaggle of controversies over strategies, boat rigging, personal sleeping patterns, and religious philosophies. It still was not clear to me who was in charge, but it began to matter less and less. There was too much raw talent and determination in our little conspiracy for it to stagnate.
Meanwhile, I was rediscovering how much fun rowing could be, and how strong a cement shared purpose was. I had developed a deep respect and fondness for my adopted crew mates. Where American college rowing teams are official, professionally administered functions of the university, Irish boat clubs are just that—clubs, run by the members. They have long and sentimental histories, informed by heaps of crumpled mementoes and generations of club minutes, with their own annual dinners and drinking sessions, even an original repertoire of startling carousing songs.
I was an outsider to much of the mythology and ritual that supported the boat club’s social structure, but I revelled in its purposeful close-knittedness. There were many training expeditions full of taletelling and potent humor. I spent a cozy Easter idling in the country house of one teammate, hiking Ireland’s Bens amidst the birth-sticky lambs. Boat mates escorted me on loving pilgrimages to Bewley’s and the Long Room. I feasted on home-raised mutton with one comrade, and wiped my feet on its fleece on the way out his door.
When it came to our racing, we were deadly serious. Our season really began in earnest at Trinity Regatta. In what I recall as our first taste of end-of-season racing form, we rowed a sharp, rising performance, losing to the Neptune Rowing Club by three-quarters of a length but still leaving the water with some feeling of accomplishment.
Looking back, it’s clear that one of the important bits of good fortune which made 1980 the remarkable time it was for us was located on the opposite bank of the Liffey. Archrival Neptune had a superb crew that year, and—happily—they were good right from the beginning of the season. The sound lashings they administered us early were, I believe, helpful in pulling ourselves up to an international competitive standard. Week after week we measured ourselves against our green-clad nemeses. Time after time we came up wanting, but by less on each occasion. A powerful momentum was building.
The four weeks following Trinity Regatta were among the most exciting of my athletic life. I have been in crews that were undefeated from February to July, but I tell you that is nothing as compared to being in a boat that starts out unsuccessfully then suddenly gels. One of our volunteer coaches that year once compared getting a boat to "swing," as oarsmen say, to eight men trying to throw a single javelin. He might have said eight men trying to throw a single javelin while effectively blindfolded, under the direction of a ninth, non-exerting person—the coxswain.
But rowing is more even than finesse. It is controlled violence. My own attempt to analogize what’s necessary for good rowing would be something like this: at medium power and speed, rowing is pure rhythm and fluidity. Eight hearts beating in time. But at full tilt it is as if some quirky aeronautical engineer had invented a human-powered helicopter which, given sufficiently frantic efforts by an octet of bulky men, was occasionally capable of short bursts of wild, careering, high-speed flight—just along the treetops. But subject to instantaneous crash given the slightest let-up.
Flight is not easily achieved, but it provides unspeakable exhilaration on those rare occasions when it is. June 7, 1980, was one such day. At Blessington Lake we synchronized all those ineffable inputs and achieved a magnificent, singing, 1 1/4 length victory over our worthy Neptune foes.
Over the next month, we would row many such pieces, and win many races. Dreamlike, our season was resolving into everything we could have hoped for. We were very, very fast; and we were going to Henley.
When we arrived in England, I learned something interesting. My old Yale teammates had had another fine season, and in pursuit of the world’s most famous regatta medal they too had journeyed to Henley. A true surprise meeting from across the ocean. Then my Trinity boatmates and I settled into encompassing quarters with the local dentist and his family in quaint Henley town. Our real business was at last at hand.
Over the next few days, I began to float, dazed by concentration. The world seemed increasingly empty, even as it filled to overflowing with close-pressing flesh. Relatives vanished. Coaches disappeared. The universe shrank until it contained only myself and eight other men.
At this point we were racing, like all championship crews, on capital we had banked long before. Our long year of difficult training capped by the brilliant June workouts stood us well, and we won our first three Henley races easily, going faster each time. We had made it to Sunday, Henley’s final day. And our opponent was...Yale. It was obvious to everyone at the regatta that the winner of our semifinal would take home the prize that evening.
It was, I believe, not until then that I finally took stock of my position. Only once before, on a lonely run many months earlier, had I seriously considered the possibility that now faced me. When I fled Yale the previous summer I could never have guessed that I would be facing old teammates, coaches, memories both sour and dear, at the end of the next season—from a seat in a superb crew occupying an opposing lane. It was a bittersweet, almost shocking little trick of history that had brought together these two poles of my life.
In the course of my splendid year at Trinity I’d forgotten the complications and frustrations I had left behind in New Haven, and I’d nearly forgotten it was to Yale that I would return in two months. I longed to show my old teammates what a proud, spirited world I had moved into. I felt a ferocious loyalty to my adopted comrades, and ached to translate my private admiration into public acclaim. I was by then a Trinity oarsman, heart and soul.
Yale’s 1980 Henley entry had crushed all of its American competition that year. Pale and comparatively undersized, we must have seemed improbable behemoth-slayers. But I knew—in the most intimate way possible, namely months of communal life in both camps—that there was little categorical difference in talent between our crews. And surprise would be on our side. Never before, never again, would I feel so flushed before a race. My Irish teammates were every bit as hungry. They had been eliminated in previous years’ competition by Yale crews.
Surprise was indeed ours. At 12:25 on July 6, 1980, we rocketed off our starting platform. In what I still remember as one of the most sublime half minutes of my life, we took nearly a length lead on the start. It was the only time they were headed that entire year.
We were careering. We were way above the treetops. Our coxswain was screaming for us to pass their bowsprit, but our relative positions seemed to freeze. Like two great stags with intermeshed antlers, we were locked. We stayed that way for a mile—five agonizing minutes.
As we approached the public enclosure, I am told there was an avalanche of primal noise from the huge crowd. Yale began to creep closer. I felt as if my temples were flexing, fibrillating to the alternate pressures of blood from the inside and sound without. They were drawing within a few seats. Our stroke rating was in the clouds. Some later claimed there was a choppy stroke in the mix. I have no recollection.
There is a mountain of hyperbolic melodrama attached to sport today. But I tell you: when that race was finished, I was paralyzed. I didn’t know who won, I wouldn’t for several minutes. My first concern at that moment was to regain control of my body, to clear my head, to force down the hysteria I felt choking me. I was afraid to swallow for fear I’d gag. Every milliliter of oxygen was precious.
As I slumped—gasping, drooling, knees locked—I listened to our stroke, Jerry Mackens, suffering in front of me. We drifted. It was very quiet. It came to me: that beautiful, floodlit, musical race. We had lost!
Later, a teammate seated near the front of the shell would tell me that "if the lead didn’t change hands on the last stroke, then it was no earlier than one of the last three strokes." Our times, by human standards, were identical.
After we put the boat away for the last time, I realized how little I had understood what was happening to me during the course of that year. I spent the last 40 minutes of my season of "disengagement" from rowing sobbing violently into a towel.
Karl Zinsmeister is editor in chief of The American Enterprise and a former national champion in college rowing in both the U.S. and Ireland.
Teacher
by Michael Novak
It is not easy to become a good person. Honesty, loyalty, controlling one’s feelings, becoming disciplined, learning to hit the mark consistently—these must be learned in order to have a good and successful life. Those are also things that athletes must do. That’s why the stories of hard work, determination, heartbreak, and success that surround sports are often metaphors for seeking the moral life.
The athlete must learn to absorb failure. He or she must learn to clear the high bar not only in practice but also when it matters. One must adjust to the feel of the wind, the cramp in one’s calf, the worries on one’s mind. A winner must rise to the level of pressure.
In such ways, sports teach us about living. They train us to meet obligations, to heed duties, to obey commands. But there is more to moral life than that, and sports show the broader picture. Sports train us in self-mastery. We learn to build up skills and habits over time, to meet difficult challenges head-on, to make ourselves better people.
The essential task of becoming a moral person is to learn to carry out good acts naturally. Doing something good as if it were "second nature" is also the crux of succeeding at sports. This is hard work. Often it begins with changing one’s attitudes and working on "motivation." One has to want to change, and to be willing to work for constant small improvements over a long period of time.
In certain ways, sports offer a better way for learning morals than, say, laws do. By drawing lines, law defines what not to do; sometimes it also defines what one should do, by prescribing necessary rules. In sports, too, one must learn the rules. But a good athlete must go far beyond the rules. He must add accuracy and grace.
And there are other moral themes in sports. Sporting is competitive, and lucky is the great athlete who has great competition. For unless another pushes him to new heights of achievement, he will never know how good he might have been. Humans cannot help falling short of heroic efforts when heroism is not called for. The benefit of a truly great nemesis is that he forces you into a deep struggle with yourself—what the Greeks called agon, from which we get our word agony.
It is not really your arch competitor against whom you compete; he merely forces you to struggle against yourself. A naturally blessed athlete who has never been pushed hard has been cheated. That is why powerful competition is a gift, and why a stalwart foe lives within you forever, even if you hate his challenge.
Something similar happens in moral life, except there it is less often another person against whom one contests than "another self" (or, as the Scriptures have it, "principalities and powers" that act within us). Here the appropriate image is that of a personal wrestling match. Until we come face to face with serious trouble, our moral virtue is untested, unknown even to ourselves. Then some change "tries the soul." And we learn what moral strength is, and whether we have it.
Sporting events like the Olympics remind us us of sport’s moral heritage. The Olympics were never conceived of by their Greek initiators as simply entertainment or spectacle. They were a testing ground for virtue, for productive habit, for accomplishment—an exhibition more of the beauty of the human spirit than of some distortion of the body. Even today, beneath all the hoopla, the Olympics continue to be a great celebration of human spiritedness and the classic moral values. There may be nothing else on television that so concentrates our attention on the deep strivings and crucial qualities of human living.
I sometimes wonder what we would do for the moral education of our children if they did not have sports. Where else do modern youngsters learn so much about enduring pain and defeat? Where else are they driven to strive for perfection? They work hard in school, of course, but often enough they do just enough. As for chores around the house, valuable as they are, they rarely have much urgency in a modern setting. But in sports, the young find in themselves a longing to do things just right. It can be beautiful to watch. I never saw the faces of my children set more seriously than when they were on playing fields.
Sports are worth taking seriously. For any undertaking which aims for perfect acts of excellence and beauty provides a great goal. The lessons learned in sports are not easy to carry over into the rest of life. But how much poorer we would be if we lacked sports in which to learn them at all.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Joy of Sports and 25 other books.
Camaraderie
by Blake Hurst
I grew up close to my grandparents, but when I reached the stage of adolescent rebellion, a big part of mine (which was comparatively mild) consisted of rejecting my grandmother’s views on alcohol, tobacco, hair length, and, especially, politics. She was a Southern Baptist, teetotaller, and a yellow-dog Demo-crat. I wasn’t. But even at the peak of my rebellion, there was one patch of common ground between us: we both loved the St. Louis Cardinals.
Grandma was a lifelong insomniac, and listened to our Redbirds on St. Louis’s kmox late at night when they played on the West Coast. I often stopped by her house after the chores were done to catch up on the previous night’s game. We would commiserate and grieve together, and rejoice when they played well. For more than a few years, baseball was the only safe topic of conversation between my grandmother and me.
During those difficult years after I was a child and before I became a man, sports served to bridge the gap between us. Later, our baseball bond was supplemented by the birth of my daughter—my grandmother’s first great-grandchild. The last time my grandmother was well enough to travel, my parents took her to St. Louis to watch the Cardinals clinch the pennant. It was a thrill for her, and one I enjoyed through her retelling.
Grandma is gone now, along with my shaggy locks and any chance of the Cardinals winning a pennant. Although my views on alcohol, tobacco, and teenage hairstyles have changed as my family has grown, I’m afraid my grandmother, from the place in Heaven reserved for Southern Democrats, still winces whenever I enter a voting booth. But I still root for the Cardinals, and when they finish their games on the West Coast long after I’ve gone to bed, I miss my grandmother the next morning.
Blake Hurst lives in Tarkio, Missouri, and is a regular contributor to The American Enterprise.
Corruption
by Herbert London
When I played college basketball at Columbia from 1956 to 1960, I was obliged to wear a tie and jacket to every game. Violation of this rule meant you didn’t play. Coaches could institute rules because it was assumed they were parental surrogates first and coaches second. Whenever I deviated from the rules, I was reminded that at Columbia I was expected to act as a gentleman.
Today, we have gone so far down the path of permissive behavior that for those who can block, tackle, run, catch, and throw, even felony offenses are rationalized and excused. Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys is charged with drug use and liaison with a prostitute; Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls attacks referees; Mike Tyson, former heavyweight champion, served a prison term for rape and is facing new charges for assault.
As long as Americans are willing to tolerate a separate standard of appropriate behavior for athletes; as long as coaches avert their gaze from the egregious behavior of their best athletes; as long as the ncaa continues to make excuses for the "indiscretions" of athletes; as long as kids who can dunk and run to daylight are coddled from junior high school to the professional ranks, bad behavior among many athletes will continue unabated.
Herbert London is John M. Olin professor of humanities at New York University.
Trust
by Jeff Kemp
(as told to Jeff Taylor)
Playing sports can provide both intense highs and intense lows. It can cement people together, or it can send them spinning apart. I know, because I’ve had each of these experiences.
One of the best examples of the positive potential in team sports is the play-action pass. Four things make it work: a unified vision of the goal, careful attention to details, trust between the players, and a commitment on the part of all involved to sacrifice.
The greatest successes with this play that I’ve been part of came while I was quarterbacking the San Francisco 49ers, where we scored many touchdowns with it. I would begin the play after the snap by turning my back to the opposing team, knowing that my linemen were not blocking for me. I would then fake a handoff to running back Roger Craig.
Roger had to sell the defense on the fake run. He would lock his arms as if holding the ball and bulldoze into the line of scrimmage. He couldn’t use his hands to ward off hits, as that would give away the fake. The more effective he was in his job, the more linebackers would come up and nail him in the head. Roger never got anything on the stat sheet for this play.
Meanwhile, the offensive linemen would drive out at the legs of their opponents. Their goal was to convince the defenders the play was a run, which meant getting kneed in the head, stepped on, and basically trashed.
The wide receivers would pretend to be blocking the cornerbacks. Their ruse will only succeed if all game long they have been throwing their bodies around on every real running play. Jerry Rice was one receiver who never loafed through a running play, and that unheralded blue-collar work would set up opportunities for his team. The instant the free safety would bite on the apparent running play, I’d come out of my fake. Then my job was to get the ball to the receiver as he sprinted deep downfield, at a time when the line wasn’t really pass blocking for me. I had only a few seconds. No one was picking up the outside linebackers, and I knew I was going to get hit. Typically, the ball had barely begun its 50 yard flight by the time the defenders on the left side of the field figured out it was not a running play and delivered me into the grass.
I would end up laying there under some 300-pound guy enjoying the experience of getting a good hit. More than a few times I had to judge whether the play worked from the bottom of a pile. At home, a roar from the crowd meant success. On the road, you wanted to hear silence. Both were great sounds.
Careful execution, mutual trust, and commitment to sacrifice were what made this play work. For me, there are timeless lessons in that for life.
I learned a different kind of lesson a couple of years later. It was 1988, I was playing for the Seattle Seahawks, and starting Quaterback Dave Krieg was injured. Our next game was against my old team, the 49ers, and I got the start. I had a great week of practice and went into the game with big visions.
Walking out of the pre-game meal on Sunday morning, a coach came up to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and said. "Hey, Jeff, I just wanted to let you know that I’m excited about you being our quarterback." Shows of affection and concern like that are rare in the nfl, and I felt valued and honored by the gesture. It gave me even more confidence for the game.
My first pass was on a third down with eight yards to go. With everyone expecting you to go to the air, that’s a tough completion. Wide receiver Steve Largent ran a slant pattern, and I drilled him in the hands and stomach. He dropped it. The previous year, Steve set the all-time nfl receiving record. He was also one of my closest friends. So I’m thinking, "What’s up, Steve?"
After that, Steve didn’t make any mistakes, but I did. I had the worst game of my life, and we were down 28-0 at halftime. In the locker room I walked up to the coach who had been so upbeat about my starting to mention some ideas that might work better. He wouldn’t even look at me. He turned 180 degrees and motioned for another quarterback to come over. He put his arm around him and started to tell him what to do in the second half.
The change made sense. Football is a business where you’ve got to perform. What hurt was that for a month afterwards the coach wouldn’t even answer when I said hi to him in the hallway. It was as if I were valueless.
Today we would probably get along fine, but this painful experience magnified for me the difference between the unconditional love God has for us all and the conditional way people sometimes value one another. It reminded me how, in a high-pressure situation, people can discard relationships solely on the basis of short-term performance. That is not a problem limited to sports.
This left me determined never to forget the intrinsic worth of each person—the same basic lesson I learned in a very different way while running play-action passes with the 49ers.
Former nfl quarterback Jeff Kemp is now executive director of the Washington Family Council in Seattle. Jeff Taylor is a reporter for Investors Business Daily.
Release
by Robert Royal
In Dostoevsky there are references to a mysterious disease called "brain fever." Modern science probably recognizes no such malady, but parents of teenagers do. Random energies, especially for the boys, are suddenly too large to fit into a normal-sized room, or even a house.
I’ve found, however, that sports are a useful antidote. After a couple hours on the football field, topped off with a dozen wind-sprints, there’s not much will left for teasing the six-year-old, talking back to mom and dad, or breaking up the furniture.
This fall, my son went through two months of enforced absence from his athletic regime when he dislocated his elbow during football practice. The consequences, medical problems aside, were not happy. His younger and older sister took the symbolic place of tackling dummies. Though there was much more time for schoolwork, grades actually waffled downward.
This spring he’s playing lacrosse, and all’s right again with the world. He’s well organized. Cheerful. The other day he handed me two Latin tests, graded 100 and 96.
"You know, they’ve done surveys, and boys who are athletes do better in their schoolwork during the sports season, when they’re busy, than in the off-season," a coach told me recently. For many parents, that’s social science belaboring another obvious point. But a happy one.
Robert Royal is vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Perspective
by Kwaku Ohene-Frempong
I came into an athletic career in a roundabout way. I grew up in a small town in West Africa and my parents had no formal education. But from early on, the most important thing I could do to please my parents was to do well in school, and so I spent a lot of time studying.
My first experience with sports was recording scores on a blackboard at village soccer games. I liked athletic activities, but when I went to high school I didn’t intend to take part in sports at all. Partly this was because I was quite small at the time. Then I went through a year when I grew about nine inches and filled out, and all of a sudden I was running faster and jumping farther than other people. My school had a very good track team, and I went to their practice one day and watched the long jumpers. After a while I asked the coach if I could try it once, and I jumped 22’4". I was more surprised than anyone.
But athletics have always been secondary to other things I’ve wanted to do. I’ve participated because I thought sports enhanced my life in general; I never really thought it was essential to do well. But as I got into higher and higher levels of competition, I began to realize that what I did on the field was important to people around me, maybe more so than to myself. Others had an investment in what I did as a player on the soccer field or the track, and I began to feel a sense of responsibility. Therefore, I began to take athletics seriously and to excel.
The first time I represented my school in a high school track meet as a long jumper, I fouled six times. Yet the coach didn’t kick me off the team, and that same year I became national high school champion.
For me, the lessons of sports have been less in the winning than in the failures and losing. Winning moments tend to pass rather quickly in my memory. But trying to understand why I did not do as well as I thought I should have in a particular situation, or how I might prepare myself to face the same situation another time: these are strong memories.
We should remember that when our team wins, somebody loses. Any time we win, we are indebted to the other side for giving us the emotions and elation of winning. And when we lose, we are providing them with these emotions. The losers create the winners, just as the winners create the losers. And the lessons that are most meaningful are the ones learned by those who lose.
When I get honored for my athletic career, I always have a sense of insecurity about it, as if it’s not deserved—because it was never my goal per se. Sports were the thing I did while going to school to become what I was really aiming for.
Yet the two activities often connected. Exerting myself to the point of fatigue and sweating is exhilarating. I bring that to my work, and everything I do. And sports may have something to do with rooting that in me.
Also, I think I often have more trust and natural fellowship with a former athlete than I do with a non-athlete—simply because I have a sense that he or she is a person who has been through a lot of ups and downs and knows not to quit. When you go into the locker room at halftime with your team down four-zip, you don’t say, "No point in going back for the second half." You march out there and try again. I watch others who seem so frustrated by any small setback in their lives, and sometimes I wonder if they had had the same opportunities on the athletic field that I did whether they wouldn’t be able to put things in better perspective, and know that it never makes sense to just lose hope.
In the last 20 years, I have worked in a field where I have de-emphasized the fact that I was an athlete. I work in sickle cell disease with children who cannot be athletes unless we find a cure for their disease. Of course, they’re like everybody else in society, and their heroes are all sports stars. Yet I must send notes to their schools that say they cannot participate in high-level athletic competition. If I’m going to serve as a role model for them, I always feel I should do so as a doctor, a friend, or something else. I don’t want them to think of me as an athlete.
Still, the person I am today has a lot to do with what I was able to gain from athletics. Sometimes I feel sorry that everybody cannot have the same athletic experiences that I did.
What athletes are trying to do on the field is almost always the same. They’re pushing themselves beyond what they believe is their capability. They’re organizing themselves to solve problems on the field. They may win or they may lose. I hope that those of us who are outside watching them—and who are supposed to be encouraging them—don’t make them feel as if their effort is not worth it unless they win. If we look at athletes after athletics, and see the successes they have in the rest of their lives, that’s where we may find the real purpose of sports.
Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, an All-Ivy soccer player and national champion hurdler in college, represented Ghana in the 1972 Olympics. He is now a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and
president of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America.
Irrelevance
by Evan Gahr
Here’s one unusual group never featured on television talk shows: "Guys who don’t like sports." Sounds bizarre, almost unfathomable, but they do exist. I’m one.
I’m completely oblivious to the athletic events that so consume most guys. World Series? Doesn’t that happen in October?
Our culture encourages people to assume that their every personal feeling has grand social significance, but I’m here to say that my indifference to sports means nothing. Being the rare guy who doesn’t follow sports gives me no "special sensitivity" to marginalized people, because I’m not marginalized from my fellow men. Most are clueless.
Other guys take it for granted that I’m an avid sports fan. At social events they’ll say, "Yo, dude, that was a great game last night." I stare blankly. But they go right on talking about someone’s home run. No one even notices.
If guys don’t notice, women usually find my sports-less existence rather endearing. It probably helps that I don’t patronize them. I don’t try to prove my sensitivity by claiming to prefer activities based on mutual cooperation rather than competition. Since there is something a bit unmanly about disliking sports, I try to make sure women understand I haven’t been entirely emasculated. I say, "I don’t like baseball. Got that, sweetheart?" Usually that ends the discussion.
How did I get to my sports-free state? It goes back to childhood, but there’s no wrenching tale. In elementary school, I was an avid New York Rangers and New York Mets fan. Then around eighth grade, for reasons that I still don’t really understand, I lost all interest. There was no epiphany, no dramatic turning point. The attraction just dissipated.
At about the same time, I developed a passion for current affairs. Not that it was a trade-off. Pundits often talk about politics like it’s a sport, but it’s not. In any case, I never regained my interest.
When two friends finally dragged me to a Mets game the summer of my college freshman year, all the excitement was gone. (The fact that I was taking codeine on a dentist’s orders—and spent several innings on my way back from the concession stand trying to find my friends—may have had something to do with that.) But other games have been equally uninspiring. Sports just plain lost their appeal for me. "Monday Night Football" just means that "Nightline" is on extra late. The one interest (besides women) that unites guys from all walks of life is irrelevant to me. But that doesn’t bother me one bit. Don’t try to feel my pain—because I don’t have any.
Evan Gahr is a columnist for the New York Post.
Discipline
by Mark Gerson
When I taught U.S. history in a Jersey City, New Jersey high school last year, I discovered rather quickly that the most important factor in creating a positive classroom environment is discipline. Even something as mundane as talking in class is very destructive, because it creates a climate that gradually destroys concentration.
Discipline is possible only when students believe their teacher knows what is best for them. That requires trust. Among inner-city students like mine in Jersey City, such submission does not come easily. The combination of extreme egalitarianism, conspiracy theories, and racial tension gets in the way.
But it is possible to build trust and discipline. Because inner-city culture places such emphasis on physical prowess, a teacher can engender confidence by its display. Early on, I told the students that I would sponsor after-school games of pick-up basketball in which I would play. Everyone was welcome to participate, but they had best be aware that my team would invariably win, and that I could whip any of them in one-on-one if challenged.
I scheduled the first game two weeks in advance so that the students could get excited about it and brag about how they would destroy me. And they did. "You ain’t got no game, Mr. Gerson. You be playin’ with those white boys in Short Hills who don’t run to the hoop when a black man steps on the court—they run home to Mommy and Daddy," said Jamal.
"All right, tough guy," I replied. "We’ll see next Tuesday."
Tuesday came, and we all changed in the locker room. The trash-talking was so merciless that I wondered if my own team would try to show me up as well. The game started, and they were playing a style of basketball I detest. I like a controlled, passing, team game—and they were launching three-point shots when teammates were wide open under the basket. They would grab a rebound and race the length of the court only to miss a wild, though sometimes acrobatic, shot. Not my game at all, but one that I saw I could use to show them I was a better player.
I hit a couple of threes early on, but they were unimpressed. In playground ball, shooting is déclassé; one is supposed to beat his man off the dribble and go strong to the hoop. Fine. Walt was guarding me and talking up a storm. "Mr. Gerson, you ain’t got nothin’. You can’t beat me. Go back and play with the white boys."
I was getting aggravated because Walt was being rude to his teacher, but I couldn’t give him detention in this circumstance. Instead, I grabbed a defensive rebound and dribbled down the court, stopping only to tell Walt that I would fake right at the top of the key, cross over, and leave him in the dust as I streaked the other way to the hoop. He grunted, indicating that he did not take me seriously. So I approached the top of the key, dribbling with my left hand, made a quick move to the right, taking Walt with me, then sliced back to the left and to the hoop for an easy lay-up.
Walt was obviously embarrassed as his teammates began to shout that he had been beaten by a white boy. Walt said that he was going to get me the same way. That would be impossible, I knew. Walt, like many undisciplined players, dribbled way too high. His high dribble was practically an invitation for a steal, and I told him so. He ignored me, and came at me halfway between half-court and the three-point arc. He tried an acceleration move, and I stuck out my left hand and knocked the ball loose, then recovered it and passed it to Jamal streaking down the court, who slammed it home in an uncontested dunk.
When word circulated that "Mr. Gerson got game," I had passed the first test necessary to earning their trust. Having bested them at their game on their court, I could not be dismissed easily in the classroom. I continued to use basketball to accumulate trust. Throughout the fall, I used a classroom game that a well-behaved class could play at the end of the period: Stump Mr. Gerson on the nba. The rules were simple: If any student could stump me on a question relating to the nba and I could not stump him back, the student would earn an "A" on the next test. But if any detentions were given during the class, there would be no game. The students wanted to play—they relished the opportunity to earn an easy "A" and show up their teacher—and they often disciplined classmates whose behavior might have canceled the game.
They would come in with obscure questions that I could not answer—how many points did Patrick Ewing score in a particular game in 1989?—but their sense of basketball history was poor. No one knew, for instance, that Oscar Robertson went to the University of Cincinnati or that Wilt Chamberlain played his first professional ball with the Harlem Globetrotters. So no one ever won the game, though not for lack of trying. They asked fathers and uncles and any other knowledgeable adults about basketball history, hoping to be prepared for my questions.
Two of my students, Walt and Jamal, played on a school team and were fans of the nba game as much as I am. So before their season started I bought them each a copy of John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are, the classic book about Bill Bradley’s senior season at Princeton. We had studied Senator Bradley in current events, so Walt and Jamal were able to place the book’s subject in perspective. I instructed them to read the book carefully, and to study how Bradley—perhaps the greatest college player of all time—practiced his game. Bradley was the quintessentially disciplined player, a superstar by virtue of perfecting the fundamentals, and McPhee brings it out beautifully.
The test of Walt and Jamal’s understanding was given on the court. After school, we went to the gym and I told them to shoot like Bradley did on page 24 of the book—in the way he learned from Jerry West and Terry Dischinger. They looked in the book to refresh themselves, and knew exactly what to do. Jamal went first. He took a few quick dribbles, bouncing the last one especially hard off the floor. Then he slammed his foot against the floor and went up for a jump shot. (The hard dribble helps players jump higher, and the foot slamming prevents drifting on the jump.) Swish. Walt went next, and met with the same result.
The trust I had earned on the court made Jamal and Walt believe my basketball advice worthy of taking. And this translated into the advice, and disciplinings, I gave in the classroom as well.
Mark Gerson just finished his first year at Yale Law School. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, In the Classroom.
Character
by Dave Shiflett
"Sports do not build character. They reveal it."
—Heywood Hale Broun
Sports have much to teach the young about character today. Unfortunately, among these things are just how petty, mean, and vicious people can be. Most of my family’s sandlot sports experiences took place in Colorado, where the attitudes can be pretty rabid. Once, for instance, after a star running back transferred to my son’s football team, the coach of the team he had left had the fellow followed by a private investigator to confirm that there really was a change of address that made him eligible for our team. The athlete in question was nine years old.
In Colorado and most other places today, the tradition of referee flogging has gone to extremes. Doesn’t watching lawyers, tradesmen, and homemakers berate a referee for the sin of spotting a ball three inches south of "true" forward motion encourage a destructive attitude toward authority in our children? Occasionally today, parents will also fight amongst themselves, and even in rare circumstances attack children on opposing teams. I know because I’ve seen it.
At the close of a playoff battle with our chief football rival, one of our parents who was working the yardage chains on the field was punched in the face by an elderly gentleman who turned out to be the grandfather of the opposing team’s star running back and the father of their coach. During another game, our boys were showered with spit by some of the opposing team’s mothers. Only once in our sports history did we see an adult actually attack a child. It happened during a lacrosse game for 12-year-old boys. Before the game the opposing coach told his squad that beating our team was the most important thing in his life (I monitored his address from a nearby listening post). His team’s response, however, was a slow start followed by steady decline. When one of his players had his legs chopped out from beneath him on a play, the enraged coach charged onto the field and put our player in a headlock. The boy had to wear a neck brace for a couple of weeks. After that season both our boys gave up organized sports, which was totally their decision. We are glad they played, and cherish most of the memories. We were equally glad when they hung up their cleats and the older one took up rock and roll.
There are so many examples of serious character problems among professional and college athletes today that the idea of the team "lineup" is taking on a whole new meaning. The list of athletes who have been dragged into the criminal-justice system recently is long, including such luminaries as Michael Irvin, Darryl Strawberry, Steve DeBerg, Jose Canseco, Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Moses Malone, Barry Bonds, Scottie Pippen, Bobby Cox, Warren Moon, and Mike Tyson. The Washington Post points out that between January 1, 1989 (when O.J. Simpson pled "no contest" to spousal battery) and November 1994, 140 pro and college football players were reported for violence toward females. A study by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, which reviewed 107 recent college sex-assault cases, found that while male athletes made up just three percent of the student body, they were involved in 19 percent of these incidents.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 1994 that up to 75 percent of the players in the National Basketball Association were on drugs in the 1980s.
When Lawrence Phillips, star tailback at the University of Nebraska, attracted national attention last year following his assault on a former girlfriend, while several other players also faced assault and attempted murder charges for various incidents, Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne responded: "We’ve been portrayed as a Miami. Maybe we are, I don’t know." That’s a serious charge. A Miami Herald count found that fully one in seven of the football scholarship players at that school had been arrested while enrolled at the university.
What kind of message does all this send to young athletes? Basically, that loutish behavior is excusable if you’re a good athlete. During the Harlem celebrations that attended the release of boxer Mike Tyson, a journalist asked the convicted rapist if he was sorry for his crime. Tyson booster Reverend William Crockett leapt in with this stunning defense: "Remember that lady who drove her two children into the river in South Carolina? Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Remember Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the building in Oklahoma City? Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate people and put them in the refrigerator? Mike Tyson didn’t do that." Now those are character standards worth shooting for.
These apologies for athletes of bad character may be having an effect. At the end of last year, a survey was conducted to find the 20 athletes Americans most admire. Three who made the list: O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Tonya Harding.
Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia.
Love
by Dave Dravecky
Ever since backyard games of catch with my dad, baseball was my life. It’s what I watched on TV when I was indoors. It’s what I played when I went outdoors. It’s what I read about when I sprawled on the living-room floor over the Sunday paper.
My life was wrapped up in baseball. And my life as a ball player was wrapped up in my arm. It wasn’t long before that arm gained the attention of the neighborhood. When they chose up sides for sandlot ball, I was the one they all wanted on their team.
They wanted me for one reason—my arm.
It wasn’t long before that arm caught the attention of the entire school, when, as a teenager, I pitched my first no-hitter. My name started showing up on the sports page. Before long it made the headlines. All because of my arm.
That arm attracted the attention of major-league scouts, and the part of me that was my boyhood became my livelihood. My ability to provide for my family was not based on how good of a personality I had, how smart I was, or how hard I worked. It was based solely on what my arm could do on game day.
My arm was to me what hands are to a concert pianist, what legs are to a ballerina, what feet are to a marathon runner. It’s what people cheered me for, what they paid their hard-earned money to see. It’s what made me valuable, what gave me worth, at least in the eyes of the world.
Then suddenly my arm was gone. How much of me went with it? How much of what people thought of me went with it?
I don’t know. But I do know this. I should have grieved over the loss of my arm. It would have been the natural thing to do. It would have been the healthy thing. But I didn’t. Instead I had a cavalier attitude about it. I joked around before surgery and waved the arm in the air, playing like it was saying goodbye to everyone. After surgery I called out to my friend: "Maybe now I can get a decent parking space; ya know, in one of those handicapped spaces."
In time, my grief would surface. But for now, I buried it deep inside where nobody could see it; so deep not even I could see it.
There was a sense in which it was a relief to have the arm amputated. I had been in such pain over the past year, and all the medication and radiation had done a number on me. I was so weak and weary from it all that having the arm taken off was like dropping a heavy backpack after a 25-mile hike. I felt better immediately.
I also felt apprehensive. I wondered how my son would react when he saw me. Would he be afraid? Would he feel sorry for me? Would he keep his distance? And what about my daughter? Would she be embarrassed when we went out to eat? How would she feel when people stared? How would my wife feel? What would she think about a man who couldn’t tie his own shoes? Would she still find me attractive, or would she be repulsed to see me in my nakedness with my carved-up body?
When I came home from the hospital, I realized that all Jonathan wanted was to wrestle with me and play football on the lawn. All Tiffany wanted was to hug me. All Jan wanted was to have her husband back. They didn’t care whether I had an arm or not.
As important as it had been to my boyhood, as important as it had been to my livelihood, my arm meant nothing to the people in my life who mattered the most. It was enough that I was alive and that I was home.
Dave Dravecky was a star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants until doctors discovered cancer in his pitching arm. It was amputated in June 1991. Taken from When You Can’t Come Back, by Dave and Jan Dravecky, Zondervan Publishing House.
