by Akim Reinhardt
A beloved celebrity of the moment, her success brought to mind my own somewhat tortured little league experiences.
I. While not terribly big, my father was nevertheless a super-stud athlete at his highschool in Fresno, California during the mid-1950s. Captain of the football team (he played end on both sides of the ball), member of the track, field, diving, swimming, and basketball teams, he was popular enough to be voted president of the class of `56. And he was good enough, despite being only 145 pounds, to earn a football scholarship to Redding College in northern California, although he would soon lose it in a gambling scandal. True.
So you'd think I grew up in a household that paid attention to sports and that I learned it all from at my father's knee.
Quite to the contrary, not only didn't the old man watch sports, he didn't even understand the appeal. To him, sports were something to do, not something you watch other people do. I think he looked at it like drinking: he liked drinking, especially with others and alone if need be, but why on earth would he turn on the TV to watch someone else drink? Or drive across the city and pay for parking and admission to watch people drink. It didn't make any sense to him.
Fair enough, you say. But then he must've been a great coach when I was a kid, right? The kind of dad who could really teach the fundamentals and show you the tricks to getting ahead.
Again, not really.
Great players often make for lousy coaches. One common explanation is that their prodigious talent makes it more difficult for them to become good teachers, not easier. That the concept of pedagogy is foreign to them. That they are dumbfounded when mediocre players play, well, mediocre.
How could you not hit that ball or make that shot? That's easy, what's wrong with you? It was easy for them, of course. Not so much for the other 99% of humanity.
And that's kind of what it was like with my dad. As I became old enough to participate in organized sports on the rock and glass strewn fields of the Bronx, he was, more than anything, dumbfounded when it became obvious that I wasn't a great, natural athlete. He wondered about my eyesight (which was fine), and told me to concentrate more (which I did, sometimes). But generally, he was at a loss to explain it.