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BGonline.org Forums
Great Passage from a Book
Posted By: Bill Riles
Date: Sunday, 26 April 2009, at 5:57 p.m.
With all the talk about ER's, ratings, triple doubles, sandbagging, which division you play in, etc. I was reminded of one of my favorite passages from a book.
The book is "A False Spring" by Pat Jordan. The passage is talking about baseball guys signed by the pros and released in the minors -- and of the guys back home.
"With time they would discover that their experience had marked them off from their contemporaries, who, no matter how talented, had never gone to spring training, never, even for a week, been a professional athlete. It was as if they'd been privy to a vision, had been blessed with a divine grace that would always remain a mystery to the unblessed. They learned to play to this grace, to build myths around their experience, which, to them, had been no big thing at the time. They had seen no mysteries. But they never let on. They even took pleasure in the manner in which their town's sports-wise people now referred to them. "He was the boy who went away." Vague, yet oddly precise. The boy who went away. That was all anyone knew. He'd gone away and then come back, and whatever had occurred in between, only he knew. It elevated him. He floated on a cloud now, above his contemporaries whose talents would forever be suspect because they had not gone away. Of those contemporaries, people said, "He was good. The best around. But who knows for sure. He never went away." Implied was a flaw in their talent, which, unseen by familiar eyes, had been all too glaring to the scouts who had rejected them. Of course, some of those contemporaries had rejected the scouts, had declined offers to go away. They had preferred to end their careers in high school or college rather than gamble for a far riskier but more gratifying success. So they simply stopped playing the game, hoarded their small winnings and saw the devalued with the years. When they eventually realized their mistake, the enormity of it (for an athlete anyway), it was too late. For in trying to preserve their small successes untainted by failure, they had tainted not only those successes, not only others' memories of their talent, but also their very own character. They lacked courage. Everyone had seen it. They had been so afraid of losing that they had lost more than any of those athletes who had gone away and been released and had come back home. Now they knew the nature of that divine grace they would never possess.
Those who had gone away had learned, many for the first time, how to lose. And what they'd lost was the first, the purest and the most precious dream they would ever have. They'd lost perpetual youth, innocence, the dream of playing a little boy's game for the rest of their lives. In their minds no dream would ever equal that, and so no future loss would ever effect them in the way that first one had. When they returned home, then, it was with an indifference to loss and with the grace to shrug off defeat in a way those who never challenged that dream could never do."
I think this relates, in some strange way, to those local and on-line backgammon studs who never test the tour. And to those who do, but play in divisions below their skill.
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