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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday May 6, 2002 Volume IV Number 18 |
FOCUS - Burn Out
The kids are home this weekend. All three of them. They’ve become adults. Two of them are married now. On those rare evenings when they are together, the chattering begins in the entryway, and doesn’t end, really, until the door is pulled shut and the engine starts and they head out the driveway for home.
It doesn’t really matter if I’m in the room. They laugh and tease, and reminisce and pose questions and mostly just enjoy each other’s company. They compare notes and check in on how the other is settling into adult life, coping with adult responsibilities and generally getting through the week. Once in awhile, I’ll toss in a comment or two, an observation, a memory, a brief anecdote, and they’ll acknowledge my contribution, but they hardly need me to keep the conversational ball rolling.
I don’t stray too far away. I’m listening in. I think they know it, too. They don’t mind. They know I’m proud of what they’ve become. That I admire their independence. That I find a deep kind of satisfaction in knowing they are finding their own way out there, and they do it with energy and good humor and conviction. I think their way of reporting in to Dad is to talk to each other.
They know the old guy is cherishing the moment.
Jim Morris taught chemistry at Brownwood High School in the dusty little Texas town bearing the same name. He lived in the same town since high school. He married his high school sweetheart, Lorri Eakin. She went on to work at the local college in the admissions department. They shared responsibility for their three children. After hours, Jim coached baseball.
Jim often wondered how in the world he ended up in this sleepy little out-of-the-way dusty oil town. Was this his destiny? Since childhood, he had a troubled relationship with his dad – Jim Sr., a Navy recruiter who moved from place to place nearly every year until they finally settled in Brownwood. His mom had trouble with it, too. Jim’s dad was distant, unreachable, disapproving, and untouchable. He didn’t talk to his son, he gave orders. Jim Sr. didn’t have time to sit in the bleachers and watch little Jimmy compete. He was too busy. He was on the road. Jimmy early on decided he didn’t need his dad. His mom made the same choice. Jim’s parents split up and each of them found someone else. Jimmy and his siblings were caught in the middle. But they favored their mother, truth be told.
Jim and Lorri determined to give their children a different kind of upbringing.
From Jim’s earliest days, he loved baseball. He relished the feel and the smell of the leather glove on his right hand and a hardball in his left. He’d observe the older kids in his neighborhood, watch them throw a hardball and handle a hardwood bat. He’d see them run the bases and make the plays. He’d mimic their moves. As he grew, his arm strengthened and every one agreed - he threw unusually hard and straight.
That’s when he also learned the joys of team play and the heady excitement of winning. He discovered that he had leadership qualities. He learned that winning has as much to do with attitude as ability. He found, even as a youngster, that he could affect the attitude of his team-mates with his own. By bringing focus and confidence and determination to the field, they could win games.
He became addicted to the post-game celebrations that followed a victory. It energized his practice and his running. He would hit the batting cage with a vengeance. And when that was over, he’d throw his collection of old scruffy baseballs against a chain-link fence, retrieve them in a large bucket and start over, even when no one else was around, even after dark, strengthening his arm, sharpening his accuracy and consistency, until he was known all over the county as the fast ball king.
His mom would be there screaming encouragement over all the other parental voices, and Jimmy could hear it as a kind of background music enhancing his level of play. There’d be an empty seat on either side of his mother. Dad was gone. On the road, recruiting.
Jimmy learned to hate the words, “OK kids, gather round. Your mom and dad have an announcement.” It always meant another move. Pack up the stuff. Say good-bye to your friends. Your teachers. Your coaches. Your team-mates. We’re off to a new town. A different house. A new school. A new team.
Jimmy would start it all over again.
He despised it.
* * * * * * *
I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it’s something innate. Built into the genetic code, a gene somewhere woven into the DNA. It’s instinctual, on the level of swallows building a mud nest or beavers cutting down branches to construct little dams pooling up the water in the stream and making a home for a beaver family.
I have always believed that a primary role for any good father is to teach his son how to throw a ball.
Through the years, off to college, into the books, I’ve been sensitized. I know now that it’s a sexist thing. I really should have spent more time with my daughters, too, teaching them to throw. Thankfully, they’ve both picked it up on their own. If I could do it again, I’d work more with the girls the way I worked with my son.
But every dad knows. It’s primary. One of the reasons he’s been placed on planet earth is to be there to teach his son how to throw a ball. Simple as that.
You don’t want your boy out there on the play-ground unable to handle a ball that’s fired at him from some corner of the field. He needs to catch it, turn around and return fire. Put a little heat on it. It’s elementary. Rudimentary. Everything else follows from that.
You’ve got to start early. But patience is required. Little boys want to catch and throw from the earliest days. They’ll pick up just about anything, wind-up and toss it across the room without regard to any damage they might do. They try to catch, but the hand-eye co-ordination is yet to be, and if you aren’t careful, whatever you are throwing at the little guy may well strike him in the face, quite possibly the nose. Do that too often and your boy will lose interest in the game.
It’s the first test of fatherhood, really. Most dads are impatient. They don’t like any hint that their boy might not be up to the simple skills of throwing and catching. The wobbly clumsiness worries every determined dad. (Is this a sign?) You’ve got to take it one step at a time, and never give up.
My dad had the gene built in. He bought me my first glove. The JUNIOR size. He’d toss the ball, underhanded at first. I caught a few of them on the nose. Even got a few nosebleeds. That ball is hard. But in time, I figured out how to place an open glove in the position required snatching the flying ball out of the air. And with practice, I’d pull that ball out of the glove, pull back behind my head, throw the elbow of the gloved hand around, turning the momentum of my body in a twist that pulled my throwing arm around like a whip releasing the ball at just the proper moment to give it speed and direction right back at my dad standing there with his glove open and then I’d roll into the full-body follow-through and with laser beam focus follow the arch of the ball until “POP!” the ball hit dad’s mitt. We’d keep the game going until exhausted, we could throw no more.
As time went along, the ball went faster. The arch of the throw disappeared, and became a straight line. Warm up was required. The catching hand, even inside the leather glove, would sting, turn red, and sometimes swell. Catching the ball in the pocket of the glove was essential, a new skill. A direct hit to an open palm inside the glove was a killer… wow that hurt.
The pain made us both laugh.
Then we’d go back at it. Until we were sweating and breathing hard. Back and forth. Back and forth. As hard as we would throw.
We called the game “burn-out.” I just figured that’s what fathers and sons were supposed to do.
So my son Kevin got his first glove early on. Just like me. It took some time. A couple of nosebleeds. But before long, we’d be out there, puttin’ pepper on the ball, sore hands, sore shoulders. The ball soon became a blur. You could hear the POP of the mitts from across the field. And as the ball pierced the air, it sounded like a rocket whizzing toward its target.
You could hear us laughing, too.
I called the game “fifty-pitches.” But it was my version of burn out.
* * * * * *
The Brownwood Owls were not even a mediocre baseball team. Their coach, Jim Morris, reflected the apathy of a football town who considered high school baseball an afterthought. Practice was haphazard. Undisciplined. Until one day when the assistant coach failed to show up, and Jim took to the mound to throw pitches for batting practice. The catcher, who knew something of Jim’s capabilities, encouraged him to show the boys his stuff.
He shook his head. Nope. “My shoulder’s been hurtin’ ever since the surgery. Can’t do it. We’ll keep it tame.”
“Aw c’mon coach. Just this once. Show ‘em what a fastball looks like.”
He said OK with his eyes. That look between a catcher and a pitcher that requires no words.
He wound up. Left handed. Pulled back and fired a strike.
These boys had never seen a ninety mile an hour fast ball at close range. Their jaws dropped.
Soon the boys understood… their coach had been hiding an extraordinary talent.
One day, Coach Jim Morris, tired of the lack of motivation, the slack, the slipshod approach to the game, challenged his boys to commit themselves to excellence. To the pursuit of a dream. To set a goal. To get passionate about the possibilities. The boys in the bleachers on that dusty afternoon in a small town in Texas, on a dustbowl of an infield that stretched to the grassless outfield, looked back at their coach in disbelief. One of them finally spoke up.
“Coach Morris,” he began, “with all due respect, what about you? You’ve got an incredible arm. You can throw faster, harder, straighter than anyone I’ve ever seen. But what are you doing with your talent?”
The Coach was nonplussed. For the first time in his memory, he had nothing to say.
“Why aren’t you tryin’ out for the Big Leagues? What about your dream?”
It’s a true story. The Brownwood Owls challenged their coach. They made a pact. If we finish first in our district, they said, then you’ve got to try out for the Majors.
* * * * * *
I don’t know how many hours I sat in a cheap fabric beach chair watching Kevin pitch Little League in those early years. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve been completely focused on a baseball game from beginning to end (with the exception of Orel Hershiser’s LA Dodger performance in game five of the 1988 World Series against the Oakland A’s). At any point in the six inning contest, I could have told you the count. Every throw mattered. I felt the anxieties of the pressure. The terrible calls. The exhilaration of a strike out. The third out retiring the inning. That was my boy on the mound.
I can not relate to Jim Morris Sr.’s inability to make one of his son’s games. It just doesn’t compute.
* * * * * * *
The birth of a dream energized the Brownwood High School Owls. The affirmation went both ways. Coach Jim Morris started throwing again. His boys got serious about winning. And win the district, they did.
That meant Coach Morris had no choice. He was the oldest man to try out one Monday afternoon for a walk-on spot with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
His fastball was clocked consistently at ninety eight miles per hour by a baffled gaggle of professional baseball recruiters.
Some time later, with
the support of his wife and his little boy, Hunter, he found himself on the
mound of a packed Texas Ranger Stadium as a Devil Ray firing his fastballs at
confused and frustrated major league powerhouse hitters. The oldest Rookie
ever.
The whole movie-going nation is learning about Jim Morris. His story is told in the new popular film by the same name. Dennis Quaid is The Rookie.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
There’s a reason the Baseball remains the American Pastime. I think it has something to do with the duel between pitcher and batter. With every pitch, anything can happen. The pitcher serves up his best. The batter attempts to convert the pitch into a hit. Of the hundred and ten or so pitches in nine innings for each team, few contact the bat and get knocked into play. Even fewer hits advance the batter to the bases. Even fewer still result in a score.
It’s so much like your life as a leader. Either you are the one serving up the pitches. Or you are the one responsible to take what comes in and make something of it. It takes skill and perseverance and determination… either way. The intensity never lets up, really. You are in the game.
Hopefully, you’ve had some help learning the basics. Hopefully, you are surrounded by support, affirmation and encouragement. But ultimately, it’s you and your competitor, eyeball to eyeball. It never stops.
Jim Morris beat the odds. His son was his inspiration.
He taught us something special.
It’s never too late.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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