Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Still, as I returned for my sophomore season, which presumably meant a promotion to junior varsity, two ideals were forming in me, one in my arm and another in my heart.

  Baseball was the easy part. Not the game itself, but the mechanics of it and certainly my love for it. That spring came quickly, though the weather was wet and cold and so too was the field house at Central. On the first day of practice, the infielders spread out over the gym floor, the outfielders reported to the batting cages on the mezzanine level, and the pitchers went to the mounds—wooden risers topped with carpet—alongside the cages. The place was so alive with baseball I couldn’t help but grin. Baseball talk, baseball sounds, baseball smells, baseball everything; it meant another Michigan winter would soon be over and another baseball season was coming. The year before, Bob Holec, the varsity coach, had gathered the pitchers and held up the front page from that day’s paper. The photo was of Jack Morris, the Detroit Tigers’ ace. Opening Day at Tiger Stadium had been postponed because of snow, but Black Jack was on the mound anyway and about to deliver a pitch. In his right hand he held a snowball. Holec pointed at Morris’s elbow, then his front shoulder, his hips, and his stride leg, all mechanically perfect. “This is what we’re looking for,” Holec announced. We nodded at Morris’s supreme snowball-throwing form and headed to our stations. A year later, I thought of that photo again.

  My heart was not so easy to manage. Something fierce and barely manageable was rising in me, manifesting itself in the game and on the mound.

  I didn’t want to play, I had to play.

  And then I didn’t just have to play, I had to win.

  And I didn’t want to win simply to prove that I fit in, but to prove I was better. Way better.

  The notion of fitting in, once enough to push me onto the field, was becoming too passive. Sports—baseball mostly, but anything counted—were a way to fight back. Already, barely halfway through high school, I’d given so much of myself away by being the nice kid—laughing at jokes about me, pretending nothing hurt, hoping people would like me—simply to convince outsiders not to look too hard at my condition. Off the field, I’d ducked confrontation because I perceived myself an easy mark. I was so vulnerable I’d made myself compliantly invulnerable. Chad once got beat up trying to defend my honor when I wasn’t around. I’d never thrown a punch at someone who spoke unkindly about my hand, but my brother, four years younger, had sucker-punched a much bigger kid for it. Unfortunately for Chad, the kid got up. For me, the fights came disguised as games. But I wouldn’t fight for my dignity. That, I carried home with me. Rather, I’d found a place where I could stand up for myself, where the fight came disguised as a game. There, I wasn’t ashamed of how I looked or how I felt about it. There, I’d fight anybody—batters, teammates, even myself. I’d lost control of it.

  A couple summers before, during the annual CANUSA games between Flint and Hamilton, Ontario, I’d been selected for the Flint baseball team. The town turned out, the results would be in the newspaper, and I was excited to be the starting pitcher. The plan was for me to go four innings. We were way ahead when the coach came to me on the bench.

  “Nice job, Jim,” he said. “We’re going to let somebody else pitch.”

  “But,” I answered stubbornly, “I have a no-hitter.”

  He looked at me uneasily, nodded, and left me to the game, which I finished. When it was over, the one boy who hadn’t gotten into the game, the one who was supposed to pitch the last few innings and gain his own CANUSA celebrity, was Mark Conover, my best friend on the team, the son of the first coach to give me a chance. While I was chasing my own achievement, he’d been denied a chance to play. During the game, it hadn’t occurred to me. Afterward, I was crestfallen. Had it been that long since I was the one being left out? Achievement had a hold over me, no matter how it was gained.

  The accommodations I made off the field were becoming my fire on the field. If people were going to search me for deficiencies, which I was sure they would, they wouldn’t find them at the end of my fastball, or in my ability to field a bunt, or on the scoreboard. If they expected the kid who’d hide in his own right front pocket, well, baseball pants had no front pockets. And if they wondered if I’d shrink away, I was standing on the mound, ten inches taller than everyone else.

  For those hours, I’d mostly forget how I was different, and forgive myself for the parts of me I’d already given away because of it. Those were the limitations and influences that were more inhibiting than any physical challenges, a greater handicap than missing four and three-quarter fingers. Once I’d begun to make peace with the physical creativity required to get through a day, the next challenge came in believing more was possible.

  With a baseball in my hand and a cap pulled tight around my head, I could be different, but not in the way it might have seemed when I got off the bus. The second glances, the awkward handshakes, they were gone. I could push back as hard as I wanted. I could compete and fight and not care how I was perceived. More was possible. In fact, it was probable. That’s what I carried off the bus.

  BOB HOLEC WAS born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Flint, raised on the East Side, and graduated from Central in 1965, two years before my father graduated from St. Matt’s. They played ball with and against each other and Holec knew my mother, the North Ender. Holec was a scholarship catcher and linebacker at Colorado State, returned to Flint as the junior varsity baseball coach in 1971, and took over the varsity five years later. He knew his baseball.

  In Holec’s program, sophomores played junior varsity baseball. After an early practice, however, Holec took me aside. He told me I’d be practicing from then on with the varsity. I thought about that.

  “I think I’d rather be with the JV,” I told him.

  My friends were on the JV. I was so skinny. I wasn’t ready. It was too fast. I wasn’t good enough.

  Holec shook his head.

  “You’ll adjust,” he said. “It’s best for you and us.”

  I seriously doubted that, but I nodded. The next day, carrying only a fastball and a floppy curveball, I reported to the varsity side.

  I won six games as a sophomore. And I got a hit. We were co–City champions. The juniors and seniors on the team were supportive enough, generally seeing to me as they might a little brother. Of course, I had a little brother, and I knew how that went sometimes. The starting catcher, an older kid named Craig Stephens everyone called “Bubba,” even had a nickname for me: One-Point-Five. I lacked the temerity to ask, but I assumed it had something to do with my disability. One and a half arms? One and a half hands? I didn’t know. Maybe it represented the single, small, and generally useless bud of a finger on my right hand, followed by the decimal and the five fingers on my left hand. Anatomically inaccurate, but clever. Or, perhaps, Bubba had thought bigger and gone with the one full left arm and the half (give or take) right arm. I laughed along rather than demand an explanation, which was my nature, and quietly hoped the nickname wouldn’t stick. I figured I was ahead of the game when they didn’t issue me a uniform with number 15 on the back. Besides, it was slightly better than the usual backhanded nickname—Lefty—and infinitely better than Captain Hook.

  The next spring, Holec again came to talk. I’d grown some. My dad had bought me a membership at the YMCA and all winter I’d walk from school to the gym and home, through the cold and slush and darkness. Along the road, Holec had passed me in his car a few times and waved. I did a lot of thinking on those walks about the game and how much I adored it. I wanted to be better. I had to be. Even then, trudging along the uneven sidewalks of East Flint months away from baseball season, the need to show people what I could be would rise inside me and settle in my jaw.

  Holec looked me over, both of us now sure I was a varsity player.

  “You’re the ace,” he said.

  I won seven games and batted .367, even hit a home run. We were City champions.

  By then, word had spread about the one-handed pitcher at Centra
l. Considering how desperately I’d sought accomplishment, the attention made me uncomfortable. They’d come to see the kid with the fastball, to write about the player colleges, and scouts were beginning to recognize and chart, but mostly they’d come to see the one-handed kid who dangled his glove from his unborn hand and somehow pitched and fielded and hit. I wanted to play, to be good enough to win, and leave it at that. They wanted to see me slide the glove from one hand to the other and make a play. They wanted to cheer the effort. Screw the effort: I wanted to win.

  They were nice, the people who came and applauded. Already, though, from the beginnings of a purely personal struggle to get on the field, there came to me a sense that I was being viewed through the prism of my condition. First I was one-handed and then I was a ballplayer. It felt flimsy, like the means to an excuse. Worse, it felt a little like pity. I was overthinking everything, projecting my own insecurities onto the people who’d come to the games and afterward shake my hand, but I couldn’t help it. The joy of the game—of winning the game—was temporary, holding up just long enough to wonder who all these people were.

  I’d look at my glove and consider what everyone believed was such a feat. When I was younger, when nobody was watching and it became obvious I’d need my left hand for both the ball and the glove, instinct had guided me. I hadn’t set out to do any more than play catch with my dad. Then I wanted to be a little less clumsy so I could get into the neighborhood games. Only then did I have to be fast and sure, not to amaze but to catch a ball and to get an out at first so I’d be picked for a team the next day.

  The glove switch was less ingenuity than survival, followed by repetition, and then a great hope that nothing too crazy would happen. It helped that I loved a baseball glove: the way it fit on my hand, how a new one smelled and looked, and what it felt like under my mattress, imagining its perfection come morning. Even the names—Wilson, Rawlings, Mizuno—sounded stout and trustworthy. It wasn’t just me, either. When someone from the neighborhood showed up with a new glove, it was an event. Stiff and perfectly brown, the glove would move around the group, each kid giving it his blessing before passing it along to the next.

  So I spent a lot of time with my glove, rubbing it up with Dad’s shaving cream, working the pocket, making it just right, remembering to bring it inside at night. For its deficiencies, my right hand was a perfect breaking-in tool, pounding a perfect pocket. And I figured out a way to make my glove work for me. Popping the ball from the glove into the air, getting the glove off my hand, and then catching the ball with my left hand was inconsistent and time consuming. It wouldn’t work. Trapping the glove and ball between my forearm and body, removing my hand from the glove and then gripping the ball was okay, but getting the glove back on was slow and unreliable. Sometimes, as the ball came shooting toward me, I looked less like a ballplayer than a guy wrestling with an angry throw pillow. But I had a rubber-coated ball and a brick wall and nothing but hours to kill. I kept throwing and the ball kept coming back, and so many times I’d just take it in the knee, or off my bare hand, or throw my glove at it, anything to avoid chasing another ball across the yard. Day by day, year by year, I drew closer to something reliable, so by the time I walked into Bob Holec’s gym I’d hardly give it a thought anymore.

  Like an unschooled jump shot born on a playground that nevertheless becomes trustworthy, the glove switch was unconventional. Of course, there was no convention to be had. I made it up as I went along, finding ways to get on the field and stay there. The glove exchange was going to be critical, I already knew. After a million tries and nearly as many clumsy failures, I discovered that by hooding the glove—pocket down—over my right hand, I could get my left hand back into it quickly. The exchange, from glove on left hand and ball in glove to my bare left hand, was the tricky part. So, I’d twirl the glove toward my chest by turning my left pinky toward my right arm, which allowed me to take my hand out of the glove. As I removed my hand, my right arm would cradle the glove and keep it rotating, so the glove would turn upside down and the ball would fall from the glove into my hand. By the time the glove was resting on my right hand, it had spun more than 360 degrees, as though turning on a spit that ran from the heel of the glove through the tops of the fingers. The opening of the glove—where I’d insert and remove my left hand—always faced to my left, toward my good hand. It mostly worked.

  Then I had to find the proper glove.

  If the glove’s opening was too tight, which was often the case with the smaller gloves, I couldn’t get my hand in and out smoothly.

  A glove too big or floppy would lose its shape during the twirl stage and the ball wouldn’t come out. That wasn’t a huge issue between pitches on the mound, where, generally, there was little rush. At first base or in left field, however, the ball had to come out clean. I fumbled with it a lot. There were times when I’d sense a problem on a comebacker and in case of emergency start running toward first base, thinking some sort of movement would be better than standing around, and more than once in exasperation tossed the whole glove and ball to the first baseman. I’d let him sort it out.

  In spite of all these requirements, I’d still buy gloves according to how they looked on the shelf or whose autograph was burned into the palm. I had my priorities. By late in high school, however, Rawlings had identified a glove for me that was small in size but loose in the hand. My Connie Mack coach, Ted Mahan, was influential to me in larger ways—the game he taught and how he attacked it, for two—but he also was instrumental in locating a proper glove. As a catcher and captain at Michigan, Mahan had become friendly with Michigan alum Ted Sizemore, who played twelve seasons in the major leagues before going to work for Rawlings. Mahan introduced us and Sizemore delivered the perfect glove, which changed everything, until I went to college and discovered Michigan had a Wilson contract.

  As gloves came and went, I forever worked on my fielding. I couldn’t have that part of the game be a weakness. I practiced finishing my delivery so the follow-through nearly brought my left hand back to the glove waiting on the end of my right arm. Throwing against the brick wall, I’d sneak up as close as I could, challenging the speed of the exchange. Hitters bunted on me a lot, so I’d barehand what I could, or block balls on the third-base line with my glove still on my right hand, eliminating the glove switch. None of it was elegant, nor was it meant to be. I didn’t care what it looked like, as long as it looked like an out.

  As opposed to the ever-evolving glove adventures, I picked up a bat as a young boy, gripped it as best I could, swung it left-handed, and stuck with that for as long as I played. I wrapped my left hand around the handle and wedged my right hand—such as it was—slightly under that and then against the bat’s knob. The knob was a big part of keeping a strong grip, so my right hand wouldn’t come off and send the bat flying, which it occasionally did anyway. As a sophomore I’d unintentionally flung a bat into the opposing team’s dugout, where everybody looked big, unhappy, and maybe unwilling to aid in the return of the bat. As I started uneasily toward the dugout, the bat came flying back and tumbled to a stop near my feet. Hitters let go of bats now and then. Still, I couldn’t help but be embarrassed, like the very outcome everyone had expected had indeed been a helicoptering bat. And now in the middle of a ballgame, making my way back to the batter’s box, I was one-handed again.

  I could hit a fastball. The idea of my swing was to get the bat heading on a plane toward the ball, which was possible even without a sure grip or great front-side strength. When I started seeing better breaking balls as I got older, those adjustments were difficult. I couldn’t manipulate the bat that way. But I believed I could hit and pestered every coach I ever had to give me the chance.

  Besides, ballplayers pitched and had a position and hit. I wanted to be a ballplayer. I was a ballplayer. So, when Holec sat me down after my junior year for another talk, I figured it would be about developing another pitch during the Connie Mack season, or getting stronger, or taking care of my arm.


  “Jim,” he said, “any thoughts about playing football?”

  Football?

  “Your dad was a heckuva player,” he said. “You’re a good athlete. We need a backup quarterback.”

  Quarterback?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never played organized tackle.”

  “Think it over,” he said. “Practice starts first week of August.”

  Connie Mack ball was about as cool as it comes. We had home and road uniforms, along with jackets that looked impressive at parties. Players came from all over the county, some headed to college programs. It was my first experience with and against such high-end competition. We won a lot of games and I made a lot of friends. The season went for most of the summer, so I was hardly thinking of anything else when the phone rang one morning.

  “It’s Coach Holec,” the voice said.

  “Hey, Coach,” I said.

  “It’s the first day of football practice.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Get your butt out here.”

  So I became a backup quarterback and a punter, practicing every day and playing occasionally when the starting quarterback was hurt, holding secret desires to quit and never come back, but drawn to the romance of game night and a loud, passionate locker room that was so unlike baseball.

  Again, the simplest tasks took time. The exchange from center required thought, as did a handoff to the left, when the back of my hand—not the ball—would face the running back. For the snap, my left hand was the top hand, placed deep—and rather intimately—under center. I’d lean right so my right forearm was low enough to guide the ball to my left hand. My center was extremely patient. For the backhanded handoff, I’d grip the ball close to a pointed end and offer it up like an ice-cream cone. I could throw, though. I could always throw.