Now I don’t claim to be athletic in the least bit. In fact, most of the time, I normally make jokes about exercising and playing sports… I’ve heard the phrase…
Sports are all about psychology and endurance…
If in fact that is the case…that would explain my C- in “Introduction to Psychology” while I was in undergrad…and my absolute loathing of PE in high school. I wasn’t like some guys, that hated changing in-front of people…no..my fear was actually playing sports…
From an early age some of my fondest memories were playing whiffle-ball with my cousins in my grandparents back yard. I was a slugger in those days…a “left handed terror” at the plate. I had no fear, it was all fun-n-games…and that ment…”knocking the ball out of the park”…ok ok… my grandparent back yard…but still as a kid… IT WAS A LONG WAY!!!
With all that enthusiasm…I wanted to share in the family legacy of being a youth pro…
T-Ball season came around and if i remember correctly my team was the Rangers…for some reason unknown to me at the time, I, Jeremy Allen “Pro Slugger” was stuck in Right Field….
It must be because of my EXCELLENT catching skills, I told myself… I mean really…It’s T-Ball… where I was standing, I was lucky if a ball rolled to me me. The main thing I worked on during T-Ball season wasn’t my “fly ball catching” it was my Bazooka Joe Comic collecting. I went through more Bazooka Joe boxes in that season that I could count at the time.
Moving into “Little League,” everyone on my team had grown … except me… in fact I may have been the smallest player on…ANY team. If the league was in fact “Little” it was because of me.
They might as well have called me “The Only Little Leaguer Lefty” because obviously these pitchers had never thrown a curve ball to a left handed player. In my first and only season of “Little League” my stats looked something like this:
Hits: 0
RBI: 0
Walks: 4
HBP: 37
Run: 12
If you are unsure of what HBP means, I’m sure that stat looks impressive, but in case you didn’t notice… I said this was my “first AND only” season of Little League. HBP meas “Hit by Pitch”. Yes ladies and gentlemen I was hit somewhere around 37 times at bat.
4 or 5 times… You can shake that off as accidents, but 37… it’s time you face the facts that baseball may not be right for you…
After this frustrating experience at baseball I began to notice that there really wasn’t any sport I actually excelled at…in fact, I was down right awful at pretty much everything. Now you may be asking in this sea of baseball refrences, why did I pick Peyton Manning as a title… at this point you are probably chalking it up to the fact that I picked a famous name that I have heard as I was flicking past sports center and thought… Peyton Manning… I can use him to write my article on…not realizing that he plays football and not baseball…
That would not be the case…
In 2004, Manning threw for 4,557 yards, had a 121.1 quarterback rating, and 49 touchdowns. He surpassed the record for TD passes in a season (48) held by Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino for two decades and the previous single-season quarterback rating of 112.8 set by Hall of Fame San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young.
All that to say I know who Peyton Manning is. (No I didn’t copy that off Wikipedia)…*Wink*
Anyways, Jeff my roommate was talking about the profiles of quarterbacks and how if you wanted a great young quarterback than all one would need to do is to find someone whose profile matched that of a quarterback like Manning, someone who is cool under pressure, with a decent arm.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since he said that…and I really think that it comes down to the fact that I DO fold under pressure…I let my nerves get the best of me and then when I start to do badly, I brush it off with this nonchalant altitude of it doesn’t really matte, when in fact all I really want to do is play well…and feel like I’m improving.
That’s why playing disc golf with Jeff has been helpful. He’s pretty encouraging when we are playing and sort of like a coach. When I stop caring he injects some comment in like “come on Jeremy you can do better than that”…sometimes it pisses me off but normally it reminds me that I CAN in fact do this.
So… unfortunately I will never be a Peyton Manning, Barry Bonds, or Ken Climo (the current PDGA Leader), but hopefully I can learn to be confident in knowing that I am slowly getting better and growing as an athlete, even if I can never attach the word professional to it.
