Not that long ago, I read an interesting survey taken from both men and women between the ages of thirty and fifty from varying professions and persuasions. The question posed was, “Do you believe that had you started at a young age with the proper coaching, training, practice time and resources that you could have became a professional athlete?” Across the board, a whopping ninety-seven percent responded yes. To that, I only have one thing to say…
Get real.
We all possess a talent or ability that we are able to perform well and sets us apart from others. It may be singing, dancing, accounting, mechanics, engineering, building, music, public speaking or even writing, but for the most part we all have a skill we are able to perform and get paid for it, sometimes quite handsomely. For a small percentage of us, that talent and ability lies somewhere in the field of athletics.
Sadly, a lot of us have trouble accepting the fact that we simply do not have the capabilities required of a professional athlete. Don’t get me wrong, athletes, musicians, dancers and many others have to train hard, practice long hours, be disciplined and dedicated to succeed. But there are talents in their DNA that most of us simply do not possess. They play at a level with which we are not familiar.
We like to tell our children and grandchildren they can be anything they would like to be when they grow up. While that may be true to a certain extent and I would be the last to suggest dumping on a child’s hopes and dreams it is, for the most part, simply not the case. If a little girl wants to be a ballerina but has no sense of rhythm, it’s not going to happen. If a little boy wants to be a doctor but gets sick at the sight of blood, you might consider steering him in another direction. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. The only thing was, I couldn’t grasp the concept of long division or the multiplication tables. I still can’t, not without a calculator or counting on my fingers. So the chances of me being a jet pilot, let alone blasting off in a space capsule, were slim to none. Like Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies, who wanted to be everything from a brain surgeon to a movie star to a double-naught spy, it just was not going to happen.
As far as the theory of starting at an early age, I started playing baseball at age seven. It was real baseball right out of the chute back then, no coaches pitching or roaming the outfield, no safe/soft baseballs and certainly no hitting off of a tee. It took a couple of seasons but I eventually became a light-hitting first baseman. First basemen aren’t meant to hit light. They are expected to hit for power, but I didn’t quite have it. The last year I played was when I was thirteen. By that time the kids who pitched had learned to throw curves, sliders, change-ups and weren’t shy about putting one in your ear if you crowded the plate. By that time I couldn’t hit a curve ball to save my life. I couldn’t hit much of anything else either. They stuck me in right field and that was my last season of organized baseball.
That fall, I went out for the eighth-grade football team at school and fell in love with football. Like a lot of thirteen-year-old boys, I dreamed of playing college and pro ball. By the tenth grade I was the starting center on the B-team and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet. When I moved up to the varsity the next season they put me in the defensive backfield. I loved the freedom and the contact of playing defense, the only problem was that I ran about a 5.8 second forty-yard dash. By my senior year, I moved back over to offense and was the third-string center. I lettered because I played on the kickoff and kickoff return teams and we returned a lot more kickoffs than the other way around. I have always said that if I had it to do over, I would have applied myself more in the classroom and on the field. But in my heart of hearts, I knew even then that I simply did not have the physical tools to play even junior college ball.
In my late teens and early twenties I became obsessed with Southern Rock and was convinced that, given the right equipment and time to practice, a few of my buddies and I could become the next Lynyrd Skynyrd. I got a Harmony box guitar for my twenty-first birthday, learned to pick out a few chords and eventually a few songs. I then bought a cheap electric guitar and amp from a buddy and was sure I was on my way. My friend Donnie and I put together a makeshift studio in his basement, plugged a couple of small microphones into his eight-track stereo and recorded a few songs. Donnie sounded good. He recorded “Heart of Gold” and “Saddle Up The Palomino.” He sounded like Neil Young. I recorded “Jumping Jack Flash” and “LaGrange.” I sounded like crap. When some of our other friends heard the tape, they all fell out laughing when I came on. It was then that the ugly truth hit me right between the eyes. I was never even going to be on the stage at Sisters Two beer joint on Highway 42, let alone the Omni or Alexander Memorial Coliseum.
It was the same thing with dancing. I always thought I could cut a pretty good rug freestyle and even learned a few steps here and there. Then the first time I tried to line dance, I looked like an uncoordinated chicken on roller skates and wearing leg irons. Once at a wedding I had a very nice young lady try to teach me the waltz, but it’s pretty embarrassing when the lady that you are dancing with has to lead.
After I realized I was not cut out to be the next Mick Jagger or John Travolta, I began to play church softball. I played catcher and absolutely loved it. I had always wanted to play catcher but none of my coaches would let me because I am left-handed. They didn’t care about that at all in church softball, as long as you could play the position. And I could play it. I could catch, I could throw and I lived for a play at the plate. There weren’t any breaking balls or sliders in slow pitch softball, so I could hit, even with some power. I once hit the scoreboard at Ousley Methodist Church. The only problem was that the scoreboard was in foul territory. It didn’t matter to me. It was behind the fence, it was a scoreboard and I had hit it right slap in the middle.
Then a few things happened that opened my eyes. I started going to the batting cage a couple of times a week on my lunch hour. One day I decided to step from the softball machine over to the one that threw baseballs ninety miles an hour. I kept whiffing at air and putting quarters in the machine. I finally managed to foul a couple off and when I quit, I could hardly move my hands and arms. From then on I stuck with softballs.
I always thought I had a pretty good arm, until my brother-in-law and I went to a Braves game at the old Atlanta Stadium one night. I stepped into the cage they had set up in the mezzanine, paid my dollar and threw three baseballs at the wooden cutout catcher thirty feet away. There was a radar gun set up and the three balls I threw were 65, 64 and 63 mph respectively, although I did manage to hit the catcher in the mitt, the mask and the cup. We went to our seats, which were in right field above the Braves bullpen and watched John Smoltz warm up. Pitch after pitch, the ball kept hitting the mitt with a hard and resounding pop. The catcher never moved. I remember being mesmerized and thinking, “Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be able to throw a baseball like that.”
A similar situation happened a few years later. In 1984 we saw Kevin Butler beat Clemson in Sanford Stadium with a sixty-yard last-second field goal. The next day I took my football and kicking tee to the old Stockbridge High School stadium. I set the tee on the fifty-yard line and began to kick. The ball flew about thirty yards. I eventually moved up to the thirty and aimed at the goalposts. The ball landed on the goal line. I moved up to the twenty where I could clear the crossbar. This was with no screaming fans, no snap count, no three hundred pound behemoths trying to block the kick and no pressure of the outcome of a heated cross-conference rivalry game on the line. I moved back to where Butler had made his kick. The uprights looked like two toothpicks stuck in the ground a mile away. I took my football and went home.
Speaking of John Smoltz, one night I was at a game at Turner Field with a buddy. The seats were great, behind home plate and about twenty rows up. Smoltz was on the mound. At one point my friend, who was a triathlete and very confident, looked at me and asked, “Do you think you could hit Major League pitching?” I looked at him and laughed out loud. “I’ll take that as a no,” he said. “And I suppose you think you could.” I said. “Yeah, I’m sure I could get wood on it,” he said. I just laughed again. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure I would pay twenty bucks to see him stand in against Smoltz or any other big league pitcher.
In the early 2000s, the PGA Championship was played at Atlanta Athletic Club. My buddy Barry and I went for one of the practice rounds. Tiger Woods and Mark O’Meara were on the fist hole when we arrived and we hustled up to the second tee and positioned ourselves on a small hill directly behind the tee box. The second hole is a 542-yard par 5 that was playing as a par 4 for the tournament. The hole doglegs slightly to the left, over trees. When Woods teed off, his drive went left. I told Barry, “He yanked it left!” “He’s cutting off the dogleg,” said Barry. My jaw hit the ground like Wile E. Coyote’s after the Road Runner had just smoked him. Barry looked at me and said, “Now you know why I sell brick and you work in a printing plant.”
I recently had the pleasure of playing golf at Lake Oconee with my friend Dave and his neighbor Tom, both of whom were professional athletes. On the seventeenth tee, Tom looked at Dave and said, “If I finish bogey-bogey I’ll shoot my age.” Now as soon as I would have said that out loud, I would have folded like a cheap tent. Tom tried to do so as well, double-bogeying the seventeenth. We both assured him that he was okay and he could par the eighteenth.
He stepped onto the eighteenth tee and striped a perfect drive down the center. I had driven into the left rough and hit a long iron to just short of the green. Tom hit his second shot to about ten feet below the pin. Dave had hit his approach to the left side of the green. I pitched my ball to just inside of Tom’s. Dave lagged his up pretty close and I told Tom, “Let me go first and I’ll show you the line.” I putted to about six inches left of the hole and tapped in for bogey. Tom then stood over his putt and knocked it about five feet past. He was now looking at a downhill put on a lightning-fast green for a par and a milestone. He took his stance and drained the putt.
And therein lies the difference. Anyone who can do anything like that is simply wired better than I am. Dave made his putt and we all tapped putter heads and congratulated Tom. I told him it was a great thing to witness and I was thankful to be there when it happened. I then told him the only chance I had of shooting my age would be if I live to be a hundred and nine. We laughed but I wasn’t kidding. My game is one with which I am all too familiar.