It’s been 22 years since I last wore a jock strap. It was the summer of 1989, and I was playing American Legion baseball with my cousin and a number of other young men at ballfields throughout Staten Island. I was getting ready for college, where I would leave the pitching mound for the sports desk of my school’s newspaper. Before long, I was covering sports on a daily basis.
Twelve years ago, I left daily newspaper work for public-school teaching. At this point, I was no longer interviewing athletes and other individuals during the summer months. Instead, July and August became a time for rest, rejuvenation and reading. Certain summers have also offered time for those medical visits that were put off during the school months. This has been one such summer.
But this year, I didn’t have just any old medical procedure. No, this year was special. This was the summer in which Daddy ensured that he could not become anyone else’s daddy. This was the week that saw a husband trudge through the front door, asking his wife for a pillow and an ice pack. This was the year that found a 40-year-old man wearing a jock strap for the first time since Rick Astley was churning out pop hits and Michael Keaton was Batman.
I haven’t needed the cup, mind you; just the strap, to help ease my way back into manhood. I am learning, as I begin my fifth decade, that there are certain medical procedures that help foster the increased humility that seems to come with age. There are parts of the body that, when prodded, do not leave me feeling like the king of the world, or even of my zip code. This trend, I’m sure, will only increase in scope as the years roll along.
For those of you who would like a little more color to the description, I will give you just this: When the Novocaine wears off a few hours after you leave the urologist, it feels as if you’ve awakened five days after being beaten below the belt with a baseball bat. You never felt the intense pain; just the heavy, please-get-me-some-Tylenol-right-now ache. It subsides, a little each day. But walking is hard. For someone who prefers running four miles to lying in a hammock, it’s probably harder on my state of mind than anything else.
But as I fight the stir-craziness, I’m forced to sit down, relax, and do the things that an on-the-move, to-do-list guy often doesn’t allow himself to do. I have sat down and made playlists for my iPod. I’ve read the newspaper. I’ve watched A League of Their Own with my girls in the backyard, at dusk, while eating ice cream. I’ve read with my girls, and watched them perform G-rated Katy Perry dance routines. I’ve sat down with my wife and planned our summer trips.
It’s not easy being laid up, but there are much more difficult things in life than this. Perhaps the hardest part of all was figuring out how to explain to a 9-year-old why this procedure was even necessary for Daddy. She was too old to just gloss over it, but too young to know everything. So after a brief, scientific discussion about the birds and the bees, she nodded, telling us that all those nature shows we’ve been making her watch make so much more sense now.
So if we got through that dicey discussion, surely I can make it out of this jock strap. It will take some time, I’m sure. But hey, maybe once it’s over I can find myself a men’s baseball or softball league. I’ve got a head start on the equipment already. And you know, as a pitcher, I can even handle it if an opposing team starts to heckle me.
The most creative way to get at a pitcher is to do to him what Yankee fans notoriously did to future Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in his later years. “Who’s your daddy?” the Yankee faithful shouted to Martinez, ever since the day he lost to the Yankees in September 2004 and told reporters, “I tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” New Yorkers jumped all over this, and Pedro smiled all the while as 50,000-plus asked him this rhetorical question every time he entered Yankee Stadium.
I was born the same year as Pedro. Beyond that small similarity, our baseball skills have nothing in common. He is a legendary hurler; I am a teacher and writer. But I do think I can handle the heckling just as well as he could.
“Who’s your daddy?” you ask? Most definitely not me. I’ve got the scars to prove it.
Showing posts with label Batman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Batman. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 23, 2010
The Tear-Jerkers (One Sixty-Two: Day 92)
Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.
Day Ninety-Two: David Wright, New York Mets
For the past few years, Amy and I have shared a Friday-night ritual with the girls that we all have come to love. We call it Movie Night. After dinner, we sit down in the living room, pop a film into the DVD player, and watch it together. I fetch the ice cream, Amy turns off the lights, and the girls cuddle up with us.
It started one Friday night in August three years ago when I showed the girls the old 1966 Batman movie, featuring all the actors from the delightfully campy ‘60s TV show. The girls had watched plenty of Disney, Pixar and Sesame Street films with us before, but this might have been the first time I’d actually selected a movie for them. Somehow, the Adam West-Burt Ward madcap feature appealed to the girls, and they wanted Daddy to pick another movie for next week.
So the Friday-night ritual was born. By now, we’ve exhausted our own collection of age-appropriate films as well as our local library and the county library system. Some Fridays – tonight being one of them – we find ourselves watching a film we’ve seen already. (The girls get a second look at The Tale of Despereaux today.) Other weeks, we branch out further than we thought we would, even into the realm of foreign films (The Red Balloon and White Mane, to name a couple). Still other weeks, we move into the documentary realm and watch episodes of Planet Earth. Whatever the choice, we can’t go wrong because of the simple fact that we’re all spending time together.
Being that most of our films are G-rated, they typically end happily. We don’t lean toward many tragedies in our Friday-night club. However, if the girls wanted to stay up a little late tonight, they could watch a genuine tear-jerker right before their eyes.
Right now, the sad tale is playing out in Los Angeles, and it was in Phoenix earlier in the week preceded by San Francisco last weekend. It’s the tale of the 2010 New York Mets, and it’s getting ugly fast. The Metropolitans were in the thick of the National League East divisional race during last week’s All-Star Break. But after losing seven of eight games on the West Coast, New York now finds itself 7½ games out of first place. A few more losses, and the Mets will be sitting in fourth place.
If you read the news, you see all kinds of speculation about changes in the Mets’ front office and dugout. I certainly have no idea what the team’s owners will do. But I do know what it’s like to sit in the midst of a serious slump. It starts to feel, after awhile, like you’re on a long train to nowhere. Every pitch, every inning and every game seem designed to leave you on the bottom looking up.
David Wright is one of the more talented hitters in baseball, and he’s certainly been the Mets’ top player this year. But even Wright finds himself caught in the current that has carried his team backward this past week. Wright is 6 for 30 since the All-Star Break, with just two extra-base hits and two runs batted in. The amazing thing is that Wright’s .200 average during these past eight games is actually higher than the team average of .189.
The Mets need some hits, and they need some wins. That’s easy to say. What’s much more difficult is to actually do it – to turn the losing streak around, and bring a much happier ending to your season.
My girls are a little young for PG-13 movies. But when they’re old enough, I’m sure we’ll sit down one night and watch Titanic together. They’ll fall for the love story, they’ll cry over the senseless deaths, and they’ll marvel at the magnitude of the tragedy. In sports, the metaphor of a “sinking ship” is often used to describe a franchise whose fortunes are falling fast. The metaphor’s use intends no disrespect toward those ships that really have gone down. It’s just a way of visualizing the mounting strikeouts in the scorebook, zeroes on the scoreboard, and losses in the record books.
Right now, that metaphor fits the New York Mets better than any team in baseball. In order for that to change, someone has to steady the ship. The Mets need a W, and they need someone to set things right. W; right. David, it sounds like you’ve been called on deck. Grab a bat, my friend. The movie isn’t over yet.
Day Ninety-Two: David Wright, New York Mets
For the past few years, Amy and I have shared a Friday-night ritual with the girls that we all have come to love. We call it Movie Night. After dinner, we sit down in the living room, pop a film into the DVD player, and watch it together. I fetch the ice cream, Amy turns off the lights, and the girls cuddle up with us.
It started one Friday night in August three years ago when I showed the girls the old 1966 Batman movie, featuring all the actors from the delightfully campy ‘60s TV show. The girls had watched plenty of Disney, Pixar and Sesame Street films with us before, but this might have been the first time I’d actually selected a movie for them. Somehow, the Adam West-Burt Ward madcap feature appealed to the girls, and they wanted Daddy to pick another movie for next week.
So the Friday-night ritual was born. By now, we’ve exhausted our own collection of age-appropriate films as well as our local library and the county library system. Some Fridays – tonight being one of them – we find ourselves watching a film we’ve seen already. (The girls get a second look at The Tale of Despereaux today.) Other weeks, we branch out further than we thought we would, even into the realm of foreign films (The Red Balloon and White Mane, to name a couple). Still other weeks, we move into the documentary realm and watch episodes of Planet Earth. Whatever the choice, we can’t go wrong because of the simple fact that we’re all spending time together.
Being that most of our films are G-rated, they typically end happily. We don’t lean toward many tragedies in our Friday-night club. However, if the girls wanted to stay up a little late tonight, they could watch a genuine tear-jerker right before their eyes.
Right now, the sad tale is playing out in Los Angeles, and it was in Phoenix earlier in the week preceded by San Francisco last weekend. It’s the tale of the 2010 New York Mets, and it’s getting ugly fast. The Metropolitans were in the thick of the National League East divisional race during last week’s All-Star Break. But after losing seven of eight games on the West Coast, New York now finds itself 7½ games out of first place. A few more losses, and the Mets will be sitting in fourth place.
If you read the news, you see all kinds of speculation about changes in the Mets’ front office and dugout. I certainly have no idea what the team’s owners will do. But I do know what it’s like to sit in the midst of a serious slump. It starts to feel, after awhile, like you’re on a long train to nowhere. Every pitch, every inning and every game seem designed to leave you on the bottom looking up.
David Wright is one of the more talented hitters in baseball, and he’s certainly been the Mets’ top player this year. But even Wright finds himself caught in the current that has carried his team backward this past week. Wright is 6 for 30 since the All-Star Break, with just two extra-base hits and two runs batted in. The amazing thing is that Wright’s .200 average during these past eight games is actually higher than the team average of .189.
The Mets need some hits, and they need some wins. That’s easy to say. What’s much more difficult is to actually do it – to turn the losing streak around, and bring a much happier ending to your season.
My girls are a little young for PG-13 movies. But when they’re old enough, I’m sure we’ll sit down one night and watch Titanic together. They’ll fall for the love story, they’ll cry over the senseless deaths, and they’ll marvel at the magnitude of the tragedy. In sports, the metaphor of a “sinking ship” is often used to describe a franchise whose fortunes are falling fast. The metaphor’s use intends no disrespect toward those ships that really have gone down. It’s just a way of visualizing the mounting strikeouts in the scorebook, zeroes on the scoreboard, and losses in the record books.
Right now, that metaphor fits the New York Mets better than any team in baseball. In order for that to change, someone has to steady the ship. The Mets need a W, and they need someone to set things right. W; right. David, it sounds like you’ve been called on deck. Grab a bat, my friend. The movie isn’t over yet.
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