Here is a list of my family’s athletic accomplishments: My grandpa played junior college football, my uncle was a varsity wrestler and football player, my great uncle held the Michigan state record for the sprint hurdles and ran at Wayne State University, another one of my great uncles was an Olympic boxer, my cousin just signed with one of the best Division II programs in the country after playing two years of junior college baseball and my step-dad was a starter in junior college and Division II college football.
Me? I quit little league because I kept getting hit by the ball.
Athletic performance, like just about any other trait, is influenced by a variety of genetic and environmental factors. Genes can’t predict athletic success entirely, but they definitely seem to help. Simply looking at anecdotal evidence, for athletes like Peyton and Eli Manning, Ken Griffey Jr, Trinity Rodman, Klay Thompson and Prince Fielder, having an athletic family clearly seems to have a major effect.
On the flip side, there are athletes like Scotty Pippen Jr., Jerry Rice Jr., Trevor Gretzky and Marcus Jordan who haven’t been able to live up to the unthinkable athletic achievements of their parents.
Now I’m not suggesting my athleticism is anywhere near those in the latter category — many of them are or have been professional athletes, while I write for the college newspaper. But in looking at the bigger picture, that’s where I fall. Despite our best efforts, none of us are anywhere close to the level of the athletes in our families.
At the start of my little league days, in about fourth grade, I was about to start my second year of kid pitch. The first year had been mostly uneventful. I was bad, but I kept trying to make the right play if the ball was ever hit to me out in right field. I figured my second year would go about the same, but what my 10-year-old mind hadn’t pieced together yet was the correlation between the growth spurts my fellow ball players had just started and their newfound abilities to throw the ball pretty damn hard.
As the season went on, I accrued a rather large number of bruises. This was mostly because I was so bad at predicting where the ball was going, so I never knew to move when it ended up coming at me. Even in the field, I wasn’t safe from a rogue baseball seeking blood. I distinctly remember one game where I was playing in the infield and a ground ball got hit my way. I put out my black and brown Easton glove, lining up the ball with my hand as best as I could, only for the ball to bounce up a couple inches before my glove and nail me in the face, sending a spider web of shocking pain through my 10-year-old face. I started to develop what was, in my opinion, a pretty fair fear of baseball. Every time I got to the plate I was bracing to be hit, and when the ball came anywhere near me I would jump out of the box like a cat woken up from a deep slumber.
Believe it or not, that was my final year playing baseball. It was also when it really clicked that I would never be an athlete. I was never particularly good at the sport, but it I felt like I was letting my family down by just quitting entirely. I was lucky enough to have my parents and grandma attend almost every athletic event I took part in, and I felt like they had to be sick of me getting the same mediocre result every time. They had taken time out of their lives to see me just do stupefyingly average. It made me feel awful. I would try to work harder in practice and push myself, but I just couldn’t get past some mental hurdle, so I just wound up doing the same just with more effort. It made me feel like I was lesser than all those athletes I was related to.
After parting ways with baseball, I took a brief hiatus from organized sports. I returned to the fold in seventh grade by joining the track team as a sprinter and, while I was awful at it, I decided to continue with my athletic career by joining the cross country team the following year. When I got to high school, I kept doing track and cross country, with a year of swimming thrown in for good measure. I was a very bad swimmer, but I was OK at track and cross country. I was nowhere near varsity status but I could still compete with some of my friends.
While I was never anything other than mediocre at running, I enjoyed doing it. I was able to spend most of my time goofing around with my friends and staying in relatively decent shape. But there was always a part of me that thought I was a failure.
“Why couldn’t you push yourself harder?” “Why’d you let that kid out-run you in the final leg of the race?” “How come everyone seems to be getting so much better than you?” “What kind of loser can’t improve after doing the same sport for years?” Questions like those constantly floated through my mind, even while I was beating my personal records. I couldn’t help but compare myself not only to my peers, but also to all my family members, who at this time in their lives had already accomplished so much.
I wasn’t even safe while watching professional sports. I would find myself in awe and somewhat ashamed while watching young athletes dominate at the highest achievable levels. Even now, as a washed up 20 year old, I watched the UEFA European Championship and got to see 16-year-old Spanish winger Lamine Yamal dominate the pitch and help lead Spain to win the entire tournament. Not only that, but a literal 14 year old — yes, 14 — just made his professional debut in Major League Soccer. He was born in 2009! That doesn’t seem like a real year people can be born in. It seemed like everywhere I looked I saw some younger, better athlete than me.
I felt like I was trying hard at all the sports I competed in, but it was never enough. Even on those final pushes in races, where I began tasting blood and drove my feet hard enough into the ground that it sent shocks through my entire lower body, the physical discomfort and evidence of my struggle were never enough to quiet the thoughts of being a failure.
It wasn’t just those feelings though. Most of the athletes in my family were men, so I felt emasculated by not competing on the same level they did. I had equated masculinity with athletic achievement, so what kind of man was I for doing nothing of note? I couldn’t ever live up to these expectations I had set for myself, so I felt like I had been doomed to a fate like an emasculated Tantalus, constantly surrounded by success but never able to achieve it.
I was placing all this pressure on myself to succeed at the highest levels, despite never even getting close to those goals. I had never been good at sports, yet here I was basing large parts of my self-worth on it. I felt like I had to be good at them, simply because people in my family were. There was no real reason for me to be good at sports, yet I still felt like I had to be.
It finally hit me at the end of my senior track season. After competing for six years, my competitive running days were coming to a close. I had managed to cut two minutes off my mile time, a minute off my 800 meters and 40 seconds off of my 400 meters since starting, which on the whole, isn’t too shabby. Sure, it was going from bad to mediocre, but I had still managed to improve and had kept myself in good shape by doing so. I may not have been a varsity athlete, but I had a good time, and that’s more than many people can say about their time in athletics. My time in organized sports was coming to an end, and I was finally able to see that maybe I didn’t need to put all those expectations on myself.
I never needed to be good at sports. It would have been nice, but my family just wanted me to do something I enjoyed and never actually pressured me to succeed at the same level of my relatives. I had created this false perception simply because it seemed like the thing we did. I had never thought to actually ask my family if they wanted me to be a better athlete, I just assumed it. And you know what they say about assumptions.
I can play sports simply for the fun of it. I want to get better, but that doesn’t need to be an overwhelming desire that overpowers everything else. I can play pickup basketball, run or lift weights just for myself and that is enough. I don’t need to live up to what my family has done. I am my own person, and I am my own bad athlete.
Statement Contributor Miles Anderson can be reached at milesand@umich.edu.
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