I’ve been watching the World Baseball Classic (shut up, I know I’m a baseball nerd, whattaya gonna do about it?) It’s fun to watch Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, with their joyous, don’t-give-a-damn players and endlessly happy fans.
And we smile in glee at the Czech Republic’s improbably second-best team in Europe, second to the Netherlands, who pads its roster with the talented fellows from Curacao. Yay colonization! On the other hand, watching the U.S. play the U.K. was like kibbitzing a funeral. The U.K.’s uniforms, as generic looking as Penn State’s, drew deserved derision.
But I digress. Dick’s Sporting Goods has been showing ads during the tournament that are beyond sweet. They show kids playing ball, and the only captions are about how sports, teams, games, and coaches change lives.
(Jaded, I wince at that part about the coaches. In my experience, on every level, they’re driven by narcissism and, on the college level, greed, that they cover up by talking about how they love to guide young people. Don’t get me started. That’s a whole blog post that Nancy really doesn’t want me to write.)
When I was in high school, we had all of the usual sports for boys. But the only sport we had for girls was tennis. No softball, basketball, swimming, diving, cross country, track, no nothing.
My high school in Ft. Lauderdale produced a couple of male Olympic-level swimmers. There had to be girls of that quality who will go to their graves never having had the chance of realizing that potential. I know I’ve mentioned here that my sister Ann was probably the best athlete of the three of us siblings, yet Morgantown High School had bugger all for her and her friends.
Then Richard Nixon, who is arguably second only to Donald Trump (and maybe Andrew Johnson) as our objectively worst president, signed Title IX.
By the time that Kate had come along, everything had opened up. Nancy and I were fervent athletes, so there was little doubt that Kate had potential. She took advantage of the opportunities, and she learned some great lessons. Dick’s Sporting goods is right, sports does form and inform lives.
She played soccer first when she was five or so, on the Chocolate Ponies. (The next year, in purple jerseys, they were the Purple Ponies.) You’ve never seen cuter little blonde ponytails running up and down the field! At her first game, though, Kate’s team fell behind 3-0, which was no indictment of their abilities. At five, you can imagine how disorganized the game was. One player on the opposing team, a friend of Kate’s, passed her the ball.
She didn’t start the game, but was soon summoned to go in. She didn’t want to. I asked why. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. Oh! The keen sensitivities. So that crisp, blue-skied autumn morning, she learned: you have to hold your head up and keep at it, keep plugging. Of course, another lesson: years later, no one remembers the outcome of that game.
Within a couple of years, as that group of girls stayed together, by sheer luck it turned out that they were a superior group of athletes, beating teams so badly that the coach had to tell them to back off and pass at least four times before shooting on goal. Ah: you don’t humiliate someone just for the heck of it. Sportsmanship is the first part of sports, she learned.
Then not subtly and within a year, sheer athletic ability couldn’t carry the day as everyone learned skills, and games ended not 13-8 but 2-1. The first game of a new season, when Kate was perhaps 10, they lost, and Kate fell on the ground and sobbed uncontrollably.
Nancy looked at me, bewildered, and asked, “Where did that come from?” I said, “My dad.” A new lesson: sometimes you lose, and, no matter how it burns you, you must accept it. Over the years, Kate’s soccer, softball, and basketball teams lost enough so that she grew somewhat used to it. But not entirely. Competitive people never like to lose, and it’s just a question of how you compartmentalize it. I couldn’t and seethed for hours. Kate is much better at letting it go.
In softball, she happened to play on fairly good teams. Her last year, though, the softball talent on Bainbridge sank to new lows. There were three levels: Minors for the little girls, where the coaches pitched; Intermediate, where the girls pitched, but skills were still lacking; and Majors, which should have been the best.
By the time Kate was in her last year, though, at 12, BI softball had sunk into a morass of mud and sheer incompetence. The guy who ran the league, Tony Gaspich, was a lawyer so you know how he ran things. He umpired (badly) a lot, and every game was about him, and he scared every coach to death—which to this day I do not understand. Why give that shithead power?
This was not the Majors league of even three years before: two teams instead of four, and the girls weren’t very good. The two coaches hated each other because they were the same person, and they fought so much that the league president had to tell them to knock it off.
The lesson: sometimes circumstances make for a bad experience, and it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. Kate played her best and tried to enjoy it. Make the best of things, she learned.
That same year, Bainbridge faced our perennial rival, Gig Harbor, a cute town south of here that has a wonderful program; they have an indoor facility and play year-round. We don’t. They have always had the better program, perhaps because they have better coaching too.
So the all-star regional tournament always came down to them and us. And we always lost. In Kate’s last year, we came agonizingly close to winning. It was sad. At the end of the championship game, Gig Harbor’s coach walked up to her and said, “You are hands down the best shortstop I’ve ever seen.”
She wasn’t all that gracious about it, but I can see that: she’d played herself out, but her team had lost. This was another lesson in being gracious in defeat. But it’s hard to be gracious when you are as competitive as Kate, and, alas, as her father and grandfather. (For the record, Dad would have adored her.)
Kate also managed her anger well. A couple of the softball umpires were infamously atrocious ball-and-strike umpires (looking at you, Gaspich). When she inevitably got called out on a pitch too high, low, or inside, she simply turned on her heel and marched back to the dugout. I could tell that she was smoldering, but she never looked at or spoke to an umpire. She says that she doesn’t remember anyone telling her about that. Maybe it was her emotional intelligence.
She didn’t get it from me. When I was pitching and didn’t get a call, I’d snap at the ball on its way back, trudge up and then down the back of the mound as though the temples of Abu Simbel were on my shoulders. Then I'd take off my glove and rub up the ball while shaking my head slowly back and forth. I just know that the umpires were embarrassed by their indiscretion.
One last lesson: Kate played soccer on her high school team and also on a select travel team. On her team her last couple of years was a girl I will call Leean with whom, off, the field, Kate was friends. Now there’s something Kate’s father could never do: be friends with someone who annoyed me heartily in a team context.
Leean was a terrible pain in the ass. She played defense, which means that, in soccer, the game was in front of her, and she was generous in her criticisms and her directions, which Kate said were always wrong. At one game, as I was just arriving, the goalie yelled at her, “Don’t talk to me because I can’t hear you!”
I wondered why the coaches put up with someone so destructive of team chemistry. It turned out that her father, who loudly commented from the stands, was a big deal in the league’s administration. Oh. So Kate learned that hard lesson, too, and not a nice one: sometimes a situation is rigged, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. We all know how universal a truth that is.
Here’s what you do: You stick to your own business, show up faithfully to practice and games, practice like you’re in a game, respect the game that you’re playing as well as your coach, your teammates, and your opponents, and you leave a worthy legacy. Pretty good life lesson. Thank you, Title IX.
A last, wonderful memory. The Bainbridge Island Football Club has an Instagram account. When Kate’s year graduated from high school, a director of the Club, a Scot called Ian McCallum, wrote, “Let’s celebrate our seniors. Why not start with our bright star?” He posted a picture of Kate. I still tear up, including right now.
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