Competitive sports aren’t for everyone

I am a failed sports fan. I don’t know statistics nor how to keep box scores. I don’t understand the strategies for trading baseball cards. I don’t even tune into pro sports teams until a playoff berth is in the offing. I cannot (talk the talk) with other guys who are not failed sports fans.

And yet, each April, I attempt enthusiasm for the opening day ritual of major league baseball, as much for the return of spring as for the return of the home team. And each October I watch the World Series, as much to celebrate the autumnal equinox as the baseball championship. I feel obliged to play along.

Out of this sense of obligation, I signed up for the Sunday morning baseball clinic. “It’s low key”, said the organizer, a Little League coach. “We teach the rudiments- batting, fielding, throwing- and gave a good time. The parents just come and watch.”

Sounded just about our speed.

Spencer had no aspirations beyond playing wiffle ball in the back yard. These were the rudiments and the advanced skills, as far as he was concerned. But to me the clinic seemed like a good father-son activity and would intrigue him with the prospects of playing in Little League, a prospect by which I had decided he should be intrigued. We would rise together at 6:30 a.m., do a little bonding over a diner breakfast, and scoot over to the clinic where he would become enamored of the game, just like I hadn’t at his age. It was really the hot chocolate at the diner that clinched it for him. This was an omen.

I haven’t been coached since I was on the White Sox in sixth grade and I’m not, admittedly, very good at being a coach. So this seemed like a way of getting Spencer the coaching I thought he needed without blowing it by the over-invested father. Fathers are supposed to play catch with their children, but not simply leave it at that. Playing catch is preparatory for the great American Little League ritual, I kept telling myself.

At our first Sunday morning clinic, I was reacquainted with the two distinct voices of coaching from my childhood: “Hey what’s the matter with you” and “Atta boy!” I have been coached by both voices. “What’s the matter with you?” is why I was quite content with the torpor of a shady spot in right field, and why playing catch out front with my brother was all the organized baseball I really wanted. I needed no more competition than attempting to zing my dad’s palm with my fastball.

From the start, Spencer was lost at the clinic. He wasn’t wearing a T-shirt with a pro team insignia, nor even a baseball hat – much less a baseball hat perched jauntily along the eyebrows. Every other kid was there to try out for Little League. And none of the other fathers were reading over the Sunday paper next to me. They were watching little Chip field hot grounders, make throws to first, run the bases, take a tough stance at the plate. They were yelling “Atta boy!” or “What’s the matter with you?”

Spencer thought base running was a fun enough game, until it clicked that its object was to avoid being tagged out. Fielding flies was fun – just like the wiffle ball in the back yard – until he realized that three other fielders wanted the same ball that was descending so perfectly to him. And they wanted it more than he did. Spencer yielded. He would just as soon have been reading the comics with me, over on the sidelines. I was ready to make an admission: I hated Little League. I liked the idea of Little League more than I liked the actual little league. And I didn’t care if my son never put on a uniform or graduate from wiffle ball.

To my wife, a star field hockey player and tennis player in college, competitive sports and team camaraderie are the acme of social relations. So she has been faced with a disorienting discrepancy: her belief that team sports will expand Spencer’s friendship options versus Spencer’s feeling that a baseball game is an interruption of a friendly game of catch.

We are starting to understand the difference between the stereotype of what boys need from competitive sports, and what it means to our non-competitive son to play. He was more intrigued by the arc of the ball off the field house netting than with the interplay of individual and team effort.

We lasted three weeks at Sunday baseball before I let it drop. If it wasn’t helping Spencer to realize any of his talents or desires, then it wasn’t a useful exercise I could only say “Atta boy” to his own distinctions being made between the playing he loved and the competition he neither understood nor enjoyed.

We starting ritualizing Saturday morning to the local billiards parlor, where we played nine ball for an hour or so, dropped quarters in the juke box and a few video games, and then headed home. Father and son are on about the same level of proficiency, despite my height advantage; call it a level playing field. The important thing is that I started picking up on my son’s signals, honoring his choice of game, and not my own, or even the stereotype of just how “boys will be boys.”

Todd R. Nelson lives in Castine