An Entry About Sports

There has been no hot water since Friday. I haven’t had the guts to brave the shower, so I’ve been dousing my hair under could water in the very public, highly knarly kitchen sink. Four days of nearly being taken unawares in my sports bra by the elephant man who lives down the hall. I am puh~hi~hi~hi~hissed.

I went down to ask someone about it, and the woman looked at me as though I were throwing a level one hissy fit. She told me they were trying to get some workmen in.
‘Um…Do you have an estimate on what day they might be done?’
‘They’re working on it.’ She replied flatly.
Oh…Oh, I’m sorry. I guess it doesn’t seem that critical when you aren’t caught between shivering for half an hour or not washing the sweat off yourself after a run. I thought maybe raising my leg to eye level, rolling up my pant and yelling, ‘this is unacceptable!’ might bring the issue home to her, but then she could have accused me of actually throwing a hissy fit, and I thought it prudent to maintain my dignity.

This dignity, however, was totally lost on Friday, during my first ever attempt to play handball. Okay, it wasn’t that bad. It just requires me to bypass years of ingrained habits –like not running with the ball. See, you dribble, which makes me think it’s basketball, but you can also run three steps with the ball, which makes me think I’m cheating at basketball and someone’s going to call a travel on me. When scoring, you’re supposed to jump as high as you can off your left leg, and then launch the ball into the goal with your right hand.

Wha...ha...ha...ut? Well, that’s never going to work.

I tried to explain my issue to Don Julio the next day.
“I’ve trained myself all my life to jump from my right leg or both at the same time –never the left. Softball, basketball…”
He gave me a puzzled look. “But…in basketball you jump off your left leg.”

I checked the internet. He’s right. Jerk.

I’ve always found it funny that I’ve ended up semi-addicted to sports, because my body is pretty crap at balance or controlling important things like my arms and legs. I remember taking a walk around the neighbourhood with my father when I was ten. He asked me to run to the end of the blog and then jog back down. He gave my ungainly gait an appraising eye, shook his head and commented simply: ‘Well, we’re going to have to work on that.’ After thirteen years and three land sports, I’m still trying to correct my running form.

In my first years of softball, I stubbornly persisted in batting left-handed, even though I threw with my right hand. Coaches would argue with me about it, but when I hit triples on the left side, and pathetic ground outs on the right, they let me have my way. I still bat lefty. I went to a batting clinic run by one of the best junior softball coaches in the state, and after a few stations he told me to widen my stance and stop stepping into the pitches like everyone else did. Fancy that, I got really good.

Now that I think back, footwork was one of my major issues in basketball, too. It’s likely that my coach just despaired of ever teaching me the proper form for a lay-up. If I make the shot, who cares, right? Certainly footwork was what stopped me from ever feeling confident at soccer (though part of that was a categorical refusal to make much of an effort to improve my form). I explained some of this to Lili and she thought that perhaps I’m not truly right handed. It’s possible; my mother told I had no obvious hand preference until well into kindergarten, where I suppose I just copied everyone else. She was even convinced I’d be left-handed.

My physical idiosyncracies do not end at unruly clown feet, however. I also have disproportionally bad upper arm strength. I’ve never been able to do a pull-up. Ever. It’s laughable.

And yet, when I went back to that same coach to learn pitching for the first time my sophomore year, I ended up being able to throw strikes well into the forties and early fifties by the end of the season. (Granted – a lot of it is legs and momentum) Years later, my father repeated to me what the head coach had confided to him; that if I had only come to learn a few years earlier, I could have been one of the best softball pitchers in the state.

I guess I’m trying to reconcile why I can simultaneously be such a powerhouse, and such useless bag of klutz. It’s the reason I’ve never thought of myself as an athlete – physical things do not come easily to me. I have to learn movements my own way, find my own technique, and maybe it’s because my body isn’t calibrated like most other peoples.’ Maybe that explains why it takes me for freaking ever to learn anything, why I always hurt in all the wrong places after practice, and why I find it miraculous when I don’t make a total ass out of myself during a game. I feel physically out of my depth when playing sports, even though I’ve done most of them for years. The only exception is crew. Rowing is one of the few times I actually feel graceful. It’s part of why I love it. I don’t feel disadvantaged, slow, or behind like I do in all most other things.

When I’ve done well in sports, it’s because I’ve put twice the time in. The same is equally true in other parts of my life. When I’ve done well in school, it’s because I've attacked it with obesessive focus. In high school I was referred to as “that tall white girl who’s smart” (Seriously, my friend Beth overhead someone explain who I was that way) and was voted ‘most intellectual’ in my high school yearbook. I was, and am, a true nerd. But I wasn’t smarter than a lot of the people in my classes – I just outworked them. When they were going to parties or out on dates, I went straight from practice to examine my textbooks, to write and then rewrite my notes, to make color-coded charts and ignore my friends’ phone calls. Seriously. One year they made a pamphlet about the ‘endangered H beast’ because I literally had seen none of them for a month.

Obviously, I wasn't quite the same way about my schoolwork at St. John's, but I still held the same kind of obsessive quality. It would often reveal itself in my seminar demeanor, or during a particularly intense practice, or when I gnawed at myself in a bout of self-loathing.

My thoughts are getting away from me here; I've started thinking about Don Julio again. I fear I will lose his interest and I fear getting attached to him. I don't worry about this when I'm with him, but the second he pulls away in his car, these two plauging thoughts skip around my head. This is something else though. The real issue is this: My fear is that anything I love, anything that I truly want to accomplish and be successful at will have to take over my life to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t want to live like that, but I don’t want to leave things half done, either. I don’t know how to achieve balance without settling for mediocrity. I don’t know how to make it stop mattering so much.