What are the limits of your body? When you are new in the world and just moving around, you are testing your boundaries and your limits every day. And you practice. And there you are, you’re doing it like nothing.
We are celebrating the Olympics globally. That it must be shrouded in the layer of corruption it is is almost unworthy of the thought. But let’s strip aside the show and the blizzard of money that all of this represents, and let’s say that these are the finest athletes in their specialties in the world right now. We have now professional athletes competing as well as collegiate athletes and independents Who just happened to be athletes and live off that somehow. I’m sure some of them even have jobs. Well, you get sponsored.
But let’s forget about this for a minute. Let’s go back to the primordial ooze. How high can I jump? How far down below my toes can I reach? How fast can I run? I can run fast.
To be an athlete. What this means is only that the competition is the thing that is important. Everything else in your day is all well and good. If you’ve got a game to play on your itinerary, you are good to go. You are an athlete.
Athletics are a sweaty business So we shower and change clothes a lot. Or we bathe a lot and wear different clothes. If you are an athlete, your clothes are really important. There are the clothes you wear when you do your athletics. Very important. And then there are the clothes you wear outside of athletics. I suppose there are variations of that. You dress for evenings out, you dress for just relaxing, you dress for meeting friends, whatever. There is some elegance to being an athlete and you just have to live with that.
If you are an athlete you carry a bag. You have to carry a bag because you have things. If you are a baseball player, wow, baseball is a really messy sport. Forget how many balls you actually need to try and play baseball, you have your glove, your uniform, your cap, maybe your cup, your spikes, your socks, your plethora of different sleeves and body armor that you might need, the ointments you use for your glove or your bat, the thing you use to paint below your eyes, and of course the shower things you need for afterwards because you will bathe and change clothes, twice.
And then there’s the money. And we are talking Jesus Christ level money. If you have got the body to generate really elegant baseball launches, if you have that compact and demanding forward progress that gets you through the line, if you are simply unstoppable in the lane, they pay you in Picasso’s. They gives you blocks of land. You have access to the ultra world. You’re not only live like a rockstar, you understand how to make this thing go on forever and ever and ever. You’re not even like an old Joe Lewis who was still taking punches just to pay the IRS. Where were we giving him any slack? He was an athlete. Cut him some slack.
But if we forget all this, and especially we forget that it is all this materialism that drives this insanity to be faster, to throw farther, to be quicker, to be more powerful, to be more graceful, to be more perfect basically. To be as perfect as a person can be. And I will even go so far to say that the specimens of ballistics that we have created lately with our movement sensitive computer awareness is truly stunning. Animals in nature don’t look like this unless in absolute life and death missions. And these people are living their lives like this!
I want to say this. I am an athlete. But like all things, I’m a backhanded athlete. I’m not one of those really cool guys who invented the extreme sports. I could just do everything. The thing was though that I had no athletic training. I had never in my life had it be the most important thing in the world that I got to a ball game. I knew people like that. I knew intelligent people who had a background in collegiate sports that raised their children to be athletes based upon a future of working in collegiate sports. It just so happened that he got drafted and had a pretty good career as a collegiate ball player. You can’t take that away from him. Maybe the implication was that I should quit my family and then go with these people but I don’t remember being invited nor do I remember particularly being trained. If I have to put a word on it, he was kind of like Bauer and I was their sim. I don’t know. I really have no idea what they were waiting for. But the point is that nobody ever said that this was my training regiment and I had to follow some plan. He had one of those. When Papa came home at the end of the day, he would ask about the workouts. It was important that they were on the same page that physical training was vitally important. Brilliant.
I have a second model parent story that is not necessarily athletics but I want to add it here because it’s the same level of perfection of parental relationship. In this case it was about musicians. The father was a musician but was also a bookkeeper. What was vital was that the boys prepare themselves for a trade in advance in addition to their music. It wasn’t necessarily academics that meant anything, musicians were professionals. It was just important that they had a legitimate trade away from the arts just in case. Brilliant stuff. Worked out perfectly for all of them. Two of them were players, one of them became a millionaire. They were great players. They are great players.
I know there are a lot of people that whine about what they didn’t do when they were younger. But for me it really is bothersome. I really really had a body. I had that thing that could launch baseballs. I had those reflexes. I was a ball player. I played cats with my father growing up. Not trained. But he would throw footballs and I would catch them. I had the understanding of dealing with a football or a baseball. And to be honest, the genes were in there. Family of builders. We come from a very physical region. You know, his father was a doctor. We are bodies. He could hit, I could hit. I could really hit. 400 yards for a golf ball and 500 ft plus for baseballs. I was world class. I just didn’t have any nutrition or regimentation or absolutely anybody getting behind me as an athlete.
So what I think I am saying as a matter of an addition to the public consciousness is that athletes and athletics are awesome. I think aspirations in any art is wonderful but I think the pure importance of finding the physical limitations of our bodies and to try and find how far we can run or how high we can jump or how strong we are or how quick our reflexes are. I think we should not miss out on the opportunity to do this and I think we should really make it a thing of great importance for everyone in the world. We should genuinely make it but no culture anywhere should be denied their children’s right to grow strong. Well, there’s no reason to let anybody starve but if we’re talking about athletics being important and athletes being important to us, I definitely think that this should be a universal. It should be a right. If you are a human being and you come into this world, you’re going to be an athlete. Maybe you’ll be a musician as well. You will for sure be a tradesman. And for sure there will be people checking up on your progress because it’s very important. How fast did you go? How long did it take? Did you finish all the repetitions? Did you remember to take a break?
I hope this experience is good for all involved. I know they have lots of artistry and pageantry. There’s a great show of lights and many opportunities for selfies and photos and content and salesmanship and deals and whatever. But then there is like hey, I made it to the Olympics. What happened happened. Some of us got these gold medals and some of us got these other medals. And others just have what we came with but we’re still standing there. And no matter how jaundiced I am at the frivolity, you have to appreciate it. One would think it’s almost sacred or at least should be. We certainly play it up as if it is. Maybe it should be and as they said forever and ever, maybe this should be the physical aim of the world instead of war. Maybe if we have border problems, we just have a track meet and see who could throw the javelin the farthest.
