My Father's Son
7 minute read
My father drove a black Chevy Tahoe. It suited him. The boxy frame, the ruggedness, the decade-long practical use he made of it driving circles around the suburbs of Chicago to different jobsites. A Sopranos fan might liken it to the model Tony uses to shuttle himself back and forth from murder to meatballs in the early seasons.
It served its purpose. Point A to Point B dependably, with some room for the requisite tools and paperwork for a large, middle-aged, contractor on the move. When the White Sox weren’t playing over the radio on “The Score,” riders were subjected to U2’s Joshua Tree or the Best of the Beatles. Over and over and over again.
Despite the neutralizing efforts of Mom’s air fresheners, Dad’s car also emitted a chronic smell of McDonald’s French Fries in various stages of staleness. Today, if I catch a whiff of fries or hear the chorus line of “With or Without You,” I find myself transported to the backseat of that Chevy Tahoe. And I think of Dad.
The consistency of Dad’s car extended to our “post-game” talks. I played everything as a kid: hockey, soccer, basketball, golf, and baseball, of course. It didn’t matter what sport we were driving home from and hell, it certainly didn’t matter how I’d played. As dependable as the stereo system tunes, Dad asked me the same two questions.
Did I try my hardest? And did I have fun?
Whenever I answered yes to both, Dad momentarily took his eyes off the road, met mine in his rearview mirror, and smiled. “I’m proud of you.”
Those two questions revealed a lot about Dad’s sporting philosophy. As a walk-on, Dad leveraged a tenacious defensive playing style to earn a starting spot as a freshman on the Stanford basketball team. He was a man of floor burns and foul-outs, staying on the floor as a starter for four years and leaving as both team captain and PAC-10 all-defensive team honoree. He built his career on attitude and effort; control what you can control, forget about the rest.
Until Dad got sick, I never saw him compete. Sure, he was always playing; I watched him utter choice words under his breath after airmailing a sculled sand wedge or reach his long arms out to jar a puck loose while playing pond hockey. But I always wanted to see the playing style his high school and college friends spoke of in reverence: win at all costs, balls-too-the-wall.
When Dad got sick, he showed me a different kind of strength. No matter what cancer threw his way, he never once complained, never once exclaimed “why me?” When family friends came to see him in the hospital, he pretended the tubes connected to his chest and mouth were elephant trunks, trumpeting to the laughter of his goddaughter. At a dentist’s appointment he caught a child staring at the staples running like a crown across his forehead from a recent operation. “This is what happens when you don’t floss,” he said, laughing at the look of horror on the kid’s face. Sport may have revealed a lot about Dad, but cancer revealed more.
Sport may have revealed a lot about Dad, but cancer revealed more
When Dad was transferred into hospice care, a former teammate wrote about how he planned on honoring him during the next alumni basketball game: “I will be wearing my surfer shorts (surf trow)…continuing to commemorate that which you taught me as a freshman when you showed for shoot around in surf trow – bring it ever day as hard as you can, but have fun doing it.” That letter left a deep impression on me. My prophet practiced what he preached in his Chevy, and I wanted to be just like him.
Losing a parent splits your world into two distinct time periods: there’s a before and there’s an after. The more years that accumulate since Dad passed, the more difficult I find it to reconcile my childhood and the life I live now. Even the lessons and memories that Dad bludgeoned into me, his impressionable son sitting in the backseat, lose their definitiveness and shape at times over the years.
Moving to the bullpen tested my relationship to Dad’s principles. Up until that point, the glorification of effort provided me a competitive advantage over others. As a starting pitcher in college, I was able to tailor the week’s throwing, conditioning, and weightlifting to serve two distinct purposes: 1) continuing to improve throughout the season and 2) preparing myself for the next start. The seven-day cycle satisfied my desires to train and perform. It also allowed me the freedom to stick to Dad’s teachings to “always win every sprint” in practice without compromising my play on the field.
But when I took my seat in bullpens across small-town-Appalachia, I discovered firsthand the curse of the reliever. It’s a life of damned if you do’s, damned if you dont’s. While starters have predictable schedules, bullpen pitchers are akin to doctors “on call.”
A few walks and a few bloops? Get loose, fast. The starter takes a line drive to the shin? You’re in, buddy. Good luck.
Relieving to me was a challenge where the optimal path in each moment was murky at best. Doubt quickly smoothed over my competitive edge with each decision I made throughout the day. Should I win every sprint in conditioning before the game? What if I have to pitch later? What if I don’t pitch later? Should I have thrown more during our throwing program earlier in the day? Should I start doing light stretching in the third inning? In the fourth?
Effort to me was simple. It was a grass-stained jersey. It was the feeling of my legs bursting with lactic acid, muscles straining to lift a personal record, hours spent logged in an empty gym.
Occasionally, I guessed right. I took the pedal off the gas during conditioning, timed my warmup perfectly with the game script and stepped onto the mound loose and fresh, dispatching hitters with ease. On other days, it all came out wrong; I dragged legs of lead up to the mound while my arm clanked around and sprayed fastballs everywhere but the strike zone. Every time I toed the rubber after an incomplete warm-up or a heavy conditioning session earlier in the day, I couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that I’d showed up to a test unprepared. Look at my ERA that first season, you’ll see what I mean.
By the middle of the season, I dreaded the ambiguity of bullpen life. Every throw I made when playing catch, every time I stepped up to the line for conditioning, I felt I had to compromise the principles foundational to the relationship I had with my father. Win every sprint. Did you try your hardest? I wasted away the first summer: rudderless, confused, frustrated.
Try your hardest. Try your hardest. Try your hardest. Since his death, I’d never reconsidered the relationship I had with Dad’s teachings. Effort to me was simple. It was a grass-stained jersey. It was the feeling of my legs bursting with lactic acid, muscles straining to lift a personal record, hours logged in an empty gym. I feel most in line with my father’s principles in the moments like that, immediately after heavy exertion.
I’d failed to recognize that my understanding of effort narrowed over the years. Effort is making the most out of the situation you’re in. Sweat can help, sure, but isn’t always the answer. I saw my father draw strength to fight through his relationships and his sense of humor. Why couldn’t I apply effort and exhibit strength through other sources as well?
It’s often said that baseball is a game of failure, but that’s bullshit. You don’t get to the Major Leagues by letting ground balls trickle through your legs, walking the house, or going 0-4 every night. The world is simple in professional baseball: if you can’t learn to get the job done, your organization will find someone who can. See, baseball is a game of adjustments, and the most important ones normally occur between the ears.
That first summer I realized that promotions to the Major Leagues aren’t handed out to the person who bleeds the most. For relief pitchers, they’re given to those who are best able to balance their training and their performance, who learn to refine their own personal routines, and read both their body and the role they’ve been assigned to.
But, above all else, success as a relief pitcher is dictated by the ability to turn off the static in your soul; how effectively you quiet the nagging voices screaming that you’re not 100%, how quickly you release the buildup of scar tissue from your recent poor performance where you walked three guys in a row. When you step over that white-chalked line, you better damn-well be completely present in the moment.
My first pitching coach in rookie ball said that transition was like “flipping the switch.” Other teammates referred to that sense of freedom and focus as “blacking out.” Call it what you want; I couldn’t do it my first year in the ‘pen.
Gradually, I taught myself. I sought out advice from coaches, practiced daily meditation, stole and tinkered with routines of other teammates. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, so what? I learned to recognize when I should apply effort as sweat and when I should apply it as focus.
I learned to take pride in performances where I was less than 100%. When my fastball was a tick slower than usual, my back tight from a night spent trying to snatch a few hours of sleep while slaloming through West Virginia hills on a coach bus. Regardless of the outcome or level of exertion, I could extract a lesson from each practice session and outing. That was effort, wasn’t it?
Success and fixes aren’t permanent in baseball, especially for relief pitchers; there’s no finer line in sports between dominance and sucking. But on those days when I squeezed the most out of my potential, I would take my seat in the team bus and submit to my urge to play “The Joshua Tree.” I would let my teammates filter past, close my eyes, and feel the bus lurch forward. If I tried hard enough, I could smell the McDonald’s fries, could feel the way Dad looked at me through the rearview mirror.
“Yes, Dad,” I would tell him, with 100% certainty. “I tried my hardest.”