Tag: accomplishment

A flashback to a past accomplishment

Even though this blog is my outlet for expressing the frustrations and difficulties that I don’t subject those in my “real life” to, occasionally it’s healthy to bring up something positive from the past too. Especially since writing about it gives my mind a short break from the mental hell that I’ve often been in for many years.

I’ve shared old baseball stories here briefly before. But while I’ll always be a baseball player at heart, a lot of my focus switched to tennis and pickup hoops during my teen years.

Was never a natural at either, but I was a good enough athlete to still improve over the years. Ended up being on the tennis team (and one of the top seeds on the team) throughout high school, despite how I was just a self-taught hack who didn’t have the polish and experience to beat the country-club type kids who’d been taking lessons their whole life, etc etc.

The perfect example of “that” type was our high school’s #1 player when I was a sophomore and he was a senior. Roberto. He destroyed most people in the area and went on to compete for the state championship. A big guy with a huge serve and nasty strong groundstrokes.

You watched him play and thought about how that was a level that most people never reached.

So when I went to college (a huge university), I continued to play recreationally all the time. By my senior year there, I’d honed my baseliner-esque skills as sharply as they could get. But when I entered the yearly student tennis competition, I never assumed that anything too memorable would come from it. Cause there were always a few people around who were just too advanced and skilled for me to handle.

That was what made the following six weeks so surprising.

Here’s how the competition was done: everyone who signed up was randomly thrown into groups of six. You played the other five people in your group, and then the top two (from each six) would advance to a single elimination tournament.

I breezed through those first five matches. And when the tournament bracket came out (which had about 60 or 65 players in it), I noticed that whoever set it up must’ve noticed how I and one other player had dominated so far. Because even though there were no formal rankings, you could tell that I was unofficially the #2 seed in the tournament. While a very familiar name was on top as the #1 seed:

Roberto.

Yep, there he was. Probably in med school at the university already or something.

Both of us kept advancing. By the time the semifinals came around, I was still in my best form and hadn’t even lost a set throughout any rounds.

Won my semifinal in straight sets too. So as I was on my way to the finals…..this huge tournament that I’d never come close to winning anything similar before….you know what’s next, right?

After 10 years of my game slowly improving step by step, it was time to see if I could come full circle and beat the guy who was the standard for tennis excellence growing up.

However…..once I got to the match, there was just one problem: the other player wasn’t Roberto. I’d just assumed that he’d win his semifinal; hadn’t even checked. But this other guy had just knocked him out.

Bet you didn’t see that coming?

Anyway, it didn’t even matter to me. I was there to try and win the tournament; there was no tying my ego to having it be directly through him.

Which I then did. In three tough sets, I pulled it out and won the championship. To absolutely no fanfare and no one watching, I’d just accomplished something that I never thought would happen.

I’d beaten the guy who beat Roberto and (out of over 200 players at the beginning) was the last one standing.

While this wasn’t the athletic moment that meant the most to me (as much as I respect the tennis court, those will always be baseball)…….it was definitely the most impressive.

I really miss that feeling. Success. Feeling like I was at the top of something. Pride. Accomplishment. It’s something I haven’t had for so many years now (and especially into the beginning of this midlife crisis).

Can only hope that someday, I can put together some life redemption that turns me back into that person. Even if it’s just for a short while.

Because I miss him.

The magic of sports

Most of my posts have been about my many struggles (which, unfortunately, still continue, which is a reason why I haven’t written much lately). But after watching the last game of the Little League World Series US bracket this afternoon, I was reminded of how different things used to be, and the baseball season that helped set the foundation for some of my past successes.

This is the short story about the best youth baseball season (well, sports season period) in the history of the universe.

When I was 9 years old, my dad coached my minor league team. You didn’t pick players for the league at that age; they were just randomly assigned. When he brought home our roster, it looked like there were more future doctors on there than ball players. And what was this….not one, but TWO girls? And Billy Hood…..who is that? (sounded like what they’d name the goofy kid from the Sandlot). So, needless to say, there were no initial signs of what was to come.

We won our first game. In the second game, we were down by four runs heading to the bottom of the 6th (the final inning in minor league and little league games) and our worst hitters due up. This was no shock, of course, as we assumed there would be plenty of ups and downs for the year. As luck would have it……the opposing pitcher could not throw a strike. Walk after walk after walk; I can still see the anguish on that poor kid’s face, especially since his coach just left him out there to burn. Before you knew it, our dugout was pounding its feet with the winning runs on base and still no one out. By then the heart of our order was up, and when someone hit a gapper to finish off the comeback, the celebration was on.

Little did we know (at the time) that the tone that had been set for the year.

As it turns out, Billy Hood was like this 6′ tall 200 pound nine-year old new kid in town (with the power to match). One of those icky girls ended up being one of the best hitters on our team. And my dad found ways to disguise our main weakness (i.e. those future doctors who couldn’t hit much). A kid named Matt and I anchored the middle of the lineup, the pitching, and the defense up the middle. And it all clicked; we probably weren’t the most talented team in the league, but we did everything well enough and played at a consistently high level.

So as it got late in the season, we still hadn’t lost a game. At that point we weren’t sure if we would, and had our eyes set on something very tough to do: an undefeated baseball season. Naturally, that was the time when it almost ended.

As any former baseball player knows, you will always have that game where nothing goes your way. And for 5 1/2 innings of our next outing, that finally happened. We were playing one of the worst teams in the league, and we never got anything going. I left a truckload of runners on base myself, and when I stranded the bases loaded in the top of the 5th or 6th with two out and just a one run lead, I was so frustrated that I could’ve cracked the aluminum bat. Because I knew we needed those extra runs (minor league games are very high scoring, so a small lead means virtually nothing).

We went to the bottom of the 6th with just a one-run lead. And even better, Matt and I couldn’t pitch anymore that day (we’d both used up our allowed innings). This left our fate in the hands of an 8 year old who’d barely pitched in his life. Needless to say, we were in trouble. Asking him to save that game for us (in this spot) was way too much….wasn’t it?

Turns out that this chubby next door neighbor had some ice water in his veins. The first hitter popped out. The next one hit a ground ball to me, and as I was throwing him out, I remember thinking “ok now it’s looking like we’ll actually escape”. Next guy: strike one, two, and three, and our newly found Mariano Rivera had just retired the side in order and bailed us out.

That was the point when you knew that it could be a special season.

The year finished up with just a single title game to decide the champion (between the teams with the two best records). So even though we’d gone undefeated, we still had to win that extra game to win the title and finish off the perfect season. Before that final game, I wrote in something like “14-0 champs” (predicting a win ahead of time) in my dad’s scorebook. And, of course, was promptly reminded not to count my chickens before they hatched and all those good cliches, blah blah blah.

He probably felt I was too overconfident. But the thing is, that wasn’t true. I knew we were beatable, especially when it came to these two other teams in the league that I considered dangerous. And had we been playing against one of those, I would’ve never assumed victory ahead of time. However…..we were up against someone else. Somehow this other team snuck into the title game against us, and it was one I didn’t have much respect for. THAT was why I fully expected us to get that one last win that we needed.

You might be assuming…..hmm ok, I wonder if this is when our fair writer learned a harsh lesson about humility at such a young age (and watched this other team celebrate what should’ve been their title). Well, that didn’t happen. We grinded out the same type of wire-to-wire fairly easy win that we had for most of the year, and the perfect season was complete.

This, everyone, is an example of why sports can do so much for a young kid. That season may not have been anything much outside of my small hometown that year, but to those of us who experienced, it was much more than that. It taught us how to work together and how to overcome adversity, and, more importantly, how doing so can lead to accomplishments that you never thought possible. Lessons that are vital for young kids to experience.

And just as important….the memory of it all. Experiencing that one magic season where you somehow persevered in every single game, and ended the unbeaten journey with gloves thrown in the air and lifting the trophy.

It still makes me smile to this day.