So I tried something this past few months that I haven’t done for a long time – I joined a softball team. It was just a bunch of people from work getting together to play and have some fun. And it was fun, it really was. I mean I haven’t really played any kind of organized baseball/softball since my kids were little, so I really sucked. But I didn’t suck as much as I thought that I would – and what more could you ask for, right? Luckily there were a lot of other people that sucked as well and, for the most part, that was ok too.
I realized something
though, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I remembered something. I used to be into sports a lot so I learned this truth at a pretty early age. The truth is, something happens when you play a sport with people, when there's a competition - you see who
people really are – even when it’s supposed to be just for fun.
Now I understand some of this, I really do. I played a lot of playground sports in
elementary school and being able to dodge a ball or sack the quarterback earned
you a lot of cache back in the day. I
understood that world, I embraced it even and, while I wasn’t ever going to be
an Olympic athlete (well, maybe in dodge ball if there had been such thing) let’s
just say that back in the day, I was never in any danger of being picked last
for a team and I was proud of that (yes, I came from the “Lord of the Flies “
era when the teachers still let us sort that out for ourselves). So I recognize
that having at least a little bit of sporting skill is kind of an important
thing in our society and the desire to not suck in front of everyone (even if
you haven’t picked up a bat for the better part of a decade) is kind of a hard
thing to shake. So, like I said, I get it…at least a little bit.
And then let’s add that it was a softball team on top of
that. Baseball (and softball too) are
challenging. Challenging because it is a team sport, but it’s a team sport made
up of individual actions - individual opportunities at the plate or out in the
field to really shine and show what you can do, or to just really blow it and
just stink up the field. There’s nothing
lonelier than being the guy out in right field that drops the fly…unless it’s
the batter at home plate that strikes out (for the third time in the same game). Like Tom Hanks said, “the hard is what makes
it great,” but let’s face it, there are multiple opportunities for performance
anxiety in a baseball or softball game.
Having qualified all of that, I still found it fascinating
to watch the people around me play this game.
People that I had seen in my work life – some for years, but never in a
casual setting and never in a sports-type of setting. There were some interesting developments and even stereotypes that cropped up.
For example there was crazy-sports-fan-guy…let’s call him Bob. I’ve worked around
Bob for a few years now and I have to say that, at work, I always saw just a
real absence of personality there. He is
always very somber, hardly ever smiling or talking or really interacting
much. But on the softball field he was
the happiest person I’ve ever seen. I half expected him tear his shirt off and paint a number on his chest. He was, dare I say, jolly! Does he just hate his job that much or does
he love playing softball that much? Not
really sure. Blank-Bob was back at work the
next Monday, but I’m glad to see there’s another side of that comes out
to play at least sometimes.
Then there was sore-loser guy. This guy, let’s call him Jack. Jack is a
quirky guy at work and that didn’t really change on the field. What did change though was the crank level.
At work Jack is a pretty friendly, easy-going,
super-helpful-even-if-you-don’t-want-him-to-be kind of guy. And on the field Jack as still trying to be
helpful-even-if-you-don’t-want-him-to-be. But Jack would be first one to argue
with the umpire or mutter at him under his breath and question his calls and
get really bugged about losing (which we did a lot) I surely didn’t see that
one coming from easy-going Jack.
Now I just mentioned a couple of examples of people who
seemed to be the polar opposites of their “work” personalities while on the
softball field. But there were people
too that became, let’s say, even more of what they already were when you put a
bat in their hand.
Take Rick for example (I’m also making up that name). Rick
seems to be kind of a control freak at work and oy! Did that whole control freak thing just ooze
out all over the dug-out and onto the field when Rick came to play. You know the control-freak sports guy? He’s the sort that would tell the "good players" on the
team which person to cover if the play came a particular base (usually if a
girl was covering that base, which I just hate – if I want
back-up, I’ll let you know). In all fairness, Rick was just as hard on
himself. You could just feel the anxiety
rolling off of him when it was his turn at the plate. I couldn’t quite decide what I wanted for
him -to hit the ball and feel good about
himself, or to strike out and learn to chill-out a little bit.
Tina is always super-helpful and supportive at work and,
happily, was all that and even more being essentially the head-cheerleader of
our group. Michael is funny and fun at
work and, just as I would have expected, kept everybody laughing even when we
were down 17-2. And Calvin, who always
seems to have a bag of excuses for what he didn’t do at work, brought that same
bag to explain away every strike-out or fielding error (kind of wish I could have
borrowed that bag actually).
And what about me you ask?
What essential personality trait came out in me when I was playing the
game? Well, I think we already established that I pretty much made my peace with the sucking. Though I would like the chance to practice and see if maybe I could improve from sucking to merely inconsistent. Other than that, here's what I realized about myself. I played catcher most of the
time and, because I felt uncomfortable standing a foot or so in front of someone with out saying anything, I got pretty chatty with the umpire (I may have even been flirting a little bit...or maybe he was, I'm not really sure.). And I was kind of chatty too with the players on the other
team that came up to bat. So basically I spent the game looking for something funny to say and trying not to
screw up too much. I think that with or
without a mitt on my hand, that’s pretty much sums me up.
