Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 473

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life," by Rick Ankiel.

I had what they called a generational left arm, and I knew it from the time I was barely older than Declan. There are plenty of good arms in baseball. There are great arms. There are a few—very few—special arms. I had one of those. The scouts said so. The batters said so. Everyone said so. I couldn’t help but believe them. I wanted to be special. That was the life I had, the one I’d live through that special arm. Until it wasn’t. Mine is the story of what I did with that. It is the story of a childhood that could not be trusted because of a father who could not be trusted, and the story of the arm that carried me away from years of snarling abuse. I was in the major leagues barely two years out of high school, a big leaguer and celebrated phenomenon—that word—at twenty, and at twenty-one the starting pitcher in the biggest game of the only life I ever wanted. 

It is the story of what happened after that. For on that very day, when I asked my arm to be more special than ever, it deserted me. Maybe I deserted it. For the next five years, I chased the life I wanted, the one I believed I owed to myself, the one I probably believed the world owed to me. To the gift that was my left arm. To the work I’d done to help make it special. To the life I thought I deserved. 

My father watched from prison. I was glad for that. I was especially glad for my mother. 

It is the story of my fight to return to the pitcher I was, a fight mounted on a psyche—a will—formed as protection against my own father. There were small victories. There were far more failures. Those pushed me deeper into my own mind, into the dark fight-or-flight corners where the costs in happiness and emotional stability were severe. The fights of my childhood against a drunken, raging father had tracked me into manhood, and now the villain was within me, restless and relentless and just out of reach. For the life I wanted, I thrashed savagely and bled freely. There is a saying that goes loosely like this: Don’t fight the man who does not mind what he looks like when the fight is over. There is no winning that fight. That fight never ends. I stood in for five years, then fought some more. I wish I could have said at the end, “Yeah, but you should’ve seen the other guy.” But when I got done fighting, he looked fine. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

For a long time, we went along. I worshipped him and asked myself not to be too disappointed. And I grew harder. And I asked people to like me. Not out of duty or because of a street address or because of my name or because I could throw a ball. Because of me. The alternative was more disappointment. More violence. The alternative was watching Phil go off to jail too, because of the drugs, because of where that started, selling them and using them with the man who should’ve helped raise him and instead made him an accomplice. I was too small, and then I was too afraid, and even when I grew up there remained the notion that to challenge one’s father was to call out the whole universe into the middle of the street to decide who was the better man. And how long would that have lasted? A punch or two? And what would that have cost my mother in bruises? 

He’d have beaten the shit out of me, and nothing would change. Or I’d have caught him with fists and anger and youth, and he’d laugh and be back tomorrow. So I kept my mouth shut, and usually I forgave myself for it. I wished for peace for my mother. I’d lie in bed and close my eyes as tight as I could and wait for the shouting, the screaming, the cries for help to pass. When he left I hoped it was forever, and I knew better. A day later we’d be in the backyard, me and the guy who had terrorized my mother and left her crying again, lobbing a baseball back and forth, talking about the Braves’ rotation, trying those knuckleballs on each other, laughing when the ball would wobble and sail. We’re safe, I’d whisper. Mom’s safe too. It’s going to be all right. It’s going to change.

I wasn’t just some twenty-year-old rookie with a fastball and a tough-guy act. The shit I’d seen, that I’d put up with, that I’d lived alongside and defended myself against—that was real. That left scars. Think some baseball game at Shea Stadium is scary? Try staying one room ahead of a lousy-drunk father pissed because you swung at ball four in an American Legion game. Try getting caught and made to run laps for it. Try being the one telling your mom it’s fine, it’s OK, because if she stepped in I’d be picking her up off the floor too. Try finding bags of pot where the toilet paper should be or dustings of coke on the kitchen counter and then being told you’re the good-for-nothing idiot.

My whole life I’d carried a shield, forged from the belief of who I thought I should be. What a man should be. That is, impenetrable. It’s what I became as a ballplayer too. I followed the best arm plenty of people had ever seen, and if it wasn’t the best, it was close enough, and that made me invincible. What was I without it? The only place that would have me unconditionally—a ballpark—looked me over and said, “Prove it. Try harder. Want it more. Suffer.” 

Thunk. 

I wasn’t impenetrable. I was transparent. Anybody with a passing interest, anybody in a Cardinals cap and the mildest curiosity, would see who I was, what I’d become. I couldn’t have that. I’d earned the other life, the one I’d had before, the one with the great arm and the future that had caused grown men to whistle and say almost out loud, “Goddamn, would you look at that.” 

And I cried. Sitting in my own living room across from a man I’d met once before, who a couple hours earlier I didn’t know whether to call Doctor or Mr. Dorfman or Harvey or what, the tears soaked my face and then my shirtsleeve trying to mop them up. Of the two of us, only Harvey had known they were coming. 

“It’s OK, Rick,” he said. “You were never taught how to deal with this. Starting today, we’re going to rebuild your foundation, if you want. We’ll start pouring the cement today.”

I nodded OK. I just wanted to throw a ball straight. I wanted people to like me, to think I was a decent person, to forgive me for hiding from the person who’d hurt my own mother. For not smashing a Louisville Slugger over my dad’s head and being done with it.

I wanted to feel better about myself. I wanted to feel good about tomorrow. At the same time, I didn’t want to care so much. I didn’t want to carry a few lousy hours at the ballpark around with me all the time. Baseball had always made me feel special, and then, starting one afternoon, I didn’t ever want to think about it. Before, baseball was the light that drew me through the day, that pulled me out of bed in the morning and sang me to sleep. Now it haunted me. Taunted me. 

I needed a break, and yet the routine was relentless. Every day was filled with baseball, which meant failure, or the brink of failure, or the recovery from failure. Even on the good days, and there were good days, there was no avoiding tomorrow, which I tried to assume the best of. I suspected the worst. 

There were ways I could have coped. I could talk to Harvey. I could practice distraction, optimism, and focus. I could count my breaths and ask my heart to settle. I could go to the ballpark every single day and work, and throw, and believe, until I was physically and emotionally spent. I could smoke dope and drop ecstasy. I could drink beer and pretend I was fine until closing time. 

Because I was desperate to win my career back and be a reasonable human being and forget what an effort it was, I chose all of it. I ran every lap. I showed up for every drill. I threw every bullpen. I read every self-help book.

Harvey showed me how, sometimes simply by asking, “OK, what the fuck you gonna do about it?” Emphasis on the profanity, hard like that, as if to say, It’s a big-boy world out there, Ank, and bad stuff happens, and then you decide: I’m in or I’m out. I answered that question every day, every damned day, and in the end I was prouder of that than I was the home runs and the strikeouts and the money and even the uniform. What the fuck was I going to do about it? Win. Work. Try. Show up. Laugh. Cry. Fight if I had to. I was going to stand up to the big-boy world, all of it, and they could carry me away if that was what it came to. Maybe I couldn’t always throw a strike. Maybe I couldn’t always hit the slider. But sometimes I could.