A Softball Game

As I was walking through Prospect Park at about this time last year, I saw a softball game. As usual, I admired the easy grace with which the players would reach out with their glove to catch the ball, without moving an inch from their place, and then throw the ball, in an effortless arc, to the pitcher. And as usual, I thought back to my boyhood when such moves seemed impossible for me to emulate. I was usually positioned in the outfield, where balls rarely reached and where I prayed they never would. When they did come my way I rarely, if ever, caught them.

As I walked closer to the game that morning, I was astonished to find that the players were young women. But they threw and caught just like men! I had thought somehow that such motions were a prerogative of the male race, unavailable if not forbidden to women. So another stereotype crumbled. Women can do it too! These were not “masculine” women, so far as I could see, but their moves – their softball moves – were just like men’s. So if they could learn to do it, why couldn’t I have?

And of course, now that I think of it, I could have. Had I received sympathetic, encouraging coaching, or, perhaps more important, had I been less isolated socially, I would have become an adequate player and not the child inevitably chosen last for a team, since there’s nothing wrong with my coordination. But even the humiliation of always being chosen last did not move me to practice so that I could play better. Somehow I thought it impossible for me to play well and therefore I didn’t try. A friend, who was similarly inept as a child, told me that in one of his schools the coach made it a rule that the children chosen last would be the captains of the next teams. So the fumbling children, normally chosen last, were now chosen first. “The last shall be first” took on a new meaning.

I remember one day in the fourth grade – we had recently moved to Newton and this was my first year at the John Ward Elementary School – when instead of participating in a baseball game during recess, I climbed up onto the hill above the game and simply watched it. Bored (of course), I wondered what would happen if I kicked the loose rock in front of me. What happens when you kick a loose rock that stands at the top of a hill? A boy in the fourth grade surely knows the answer: it rolls downhill. It rolled downhill, all right, and broke the leg of the batter.

My mother forced me to telephone him to apologize. In one of the hardest moments of my young life, I called him. “Wait till I get you!” he said to me. He never did retaliate - greatness of spirit exists even among fourth graders – but I lived in dread for a long time.

It’s too late, I suppose, for me to learn to throw a ball correctly and at any rate I’m unlikely to participate in a softball game again. So I won’t ever again be chosen last for a team and then sent to the outfield to pray that the ball won’t come to me. This is, I guess, one of the advantages of old age.