The Running Life

A personal reflection

The author on the mound, the day he lost it. Spring 2003.

It felt, in my early adolescence, there was nothing more ruthless than running.

For reasons I could not understand at the time, I had stopped being able to beat anyone in a race. In the fifth grade, I was among the faster boys in my class, and I delighted in stealing bases during baseball games. One summer, I was actually berated by my coach for stealing without being given any sign, for freelancing it to second base. But wasn’t I safe? Coach Tommy of the Dyker Heights Knights did not care. I hadn’t listened. He was a fleshy, garrulous man, gray-haired and slick-skinned, his Brooklynese impeccable. You took direction from Coach Tommy, or you sat on the bench. I tried to not ignore the signs.

Speed, until age thirteen—it was what I cherished. Like anything, I cherished it because it was available to me, because I was a good runner, very good. My specialty was the sprint. I hated distances but loved pulverizing the ground for fifty yards or so. Then, like now, I had a sort of apish yet efficient way of running, head wagging, elbows firing, a slight hitch that got me where I needed to go. If I challenged someone to a race, I won it. That’s what I did. In middle school, we had national physical fitness tests, and if I resented the mile run—too dull, rounding a track four times—I was primed for the shuttle run, little sprints between set points on a basketball court. I could always post an above average time, swag about for an afternoon.

I didn’t like school very much then, even for the shuttle run. After attending the local public schools and then a Quaker School, Brooklyn Friends, I was moved into Poly Prep, a private school a twenty-five-minute walk from where I lived in southern Brooklyn. A throat-clearing exercise I’ll offer now is that Poly gave me a very good education: the teachers were, generally, quite attentive, and the academics rigorous. The AP classes were of university quality, and I got to take Latin for several years. I would not say Poly, with its white clock tower and twin duck ponds, made me, but it offered the kind of educational foundation that made college, for me, quite approachable. But I could never relate to Poly; it was, in retrospect, my first experience with the American class system, which is far more sotto voce than what you’d find England. I was a local kid who had grown up in a middle-class household, both parents public sector employees. There was one Bay Ridge apartment and no second home: comfort without extravagance. This suited me fine. Poly, meanwhile, educated Meryl Streep’s daughter and Al Sharpton’s children and, after I graduated, Jon Bon Jovi’s son. For one fall, Art Garfunkel’s son roamed the hallways, and my father and I would catch glimpses of him, amazed at how much he resembled, in face and plumage, the folk rock icon. Poly had plenty of New Money, and could be, from the vantage point of the Manhattan private schools—Dalton, Trinity, Collegiate—somewhat uncouth. It was a school for the offspring of unctuous trial lawyers, auto dealer kingpins, and whatever else you did to make money on Staten Island. I was neither New Money nor Old, just an ordinary local with no access to great reserves of wealth or evident talent. I was fine at school but not exceptional, and my love of athletics made me an above average player but never one to captain a team or stuff a trophy case. Poly valued those who, in one form or another, stood out. And absent history class, where I won a couple of awards because I had a facility for memorization and strong enough writing skills, I was not an elite of any sort. I wasn’t jock enough and I wasn’t Ivy League-bound.

Physically, a great crash came around 2003. I was thirteen, getting old enough to have ambitions, and my body wasn’t the body I wanted. I craved dominance, inarguable superiority; if I was going to be someone, and not another bum—in the parlance of Rocky—from the neighborhood, I’d have to make it in baseball. That was it. Books didn’t matter much to me, nor did academics, if I was always competent enough to rack up A’s and B’s and keep a math class to a gentleman’s C. Into the spring of 2003, I pitched and hit, playing first base and outfield while trying to sharpen my curveball under the tutelage of a longtime scout who coached part-time at Poly and gave lessons on the side. Coach DeVita was in his early 70s then, a tried-and-true Brooklyn Italian who had come of age with a Jewish fireballer named Sandy Koufax and kept a photograph in his wallet of himself and Billy Martin, the volatile, if legendary, Yankee manager. DeVita, who had been a minor league pitcher in the New York Giants organization, still threw as hard as his age, mixing in a fastball and knuckle curve during batting practice. He threw left-handed, smacked fungoes right-handed, and awed me with his proximity to the Majors. He didn’t have much of a filter; I remember, as he was trying to show me how to scoop a baseball out of the dirt at first, he told me I needed to have soft hands, like “caressing a girl.” As a virginal, prepubescent thirteen-year-old, I had only the dimmest idea of what this meant.

I didn’t want to fail Coach DeVita, but I felt like I did. Disaster struck when I took the mound for the eighth grade team against one of the Manhattan prep schools, St. David’s, and lost the ability to throw a strike. I walked the first batter, the second batter, then the third. The ball would not travel over the plate. Body and mind were meteorites hurling in opposite directions. I suddenly had no ability to do what I had done for the last six years. The panic was unlike any I had ever known. I was struck dumb. Once, I had been a good enough little league pitcher to make the local newspaper. The pitcher’s mound had been a refuge, the game always making so much sense to me there. And then it didn’t; I was alone, bereft, crumbling in front of the sleepy-eyed parents and my skeptical teammates. Once the game was done, I would stop pitching altogether. I was a first baseman and outfielder from then on, and wouldn’t even stand on the mound during practice.

That summer, the lone year I was a counselor in training at Poly’s Summer Day Camp—the only time, really, I liked coming to Poly—I found myself in a race with a boy named Daniel B., a thick, swarthy kid who was nevertheless certain he could beat me. If I wasn’t pitching anymore, I was still running, and I could, in theory, sprint one out on the track. We lined up with an audience. What we bet, I have no idea—it may have been all pride on the line. We raced on the straightaway. Eying Daniel, I was sure I would win. I still did that, didn’t I? And when we were off, I felt another strange and unsettling sensation, not so different than when I had taken the mound against St. David’s—my body wasn’t performing as it should. The machine, my machine, was sputtering out. I wasn’t fast enough, or fast at all. Daniel B. trundled on. I wasn’t keeping up. He won, won convincingly, and I was taunted in defeat. There went my years as a racer, a winner, “Ross the Rocket,” as my father had once called me. I slunk off.

In high school, I couldn’t run much at all. The mile runs were murderous. On the junior varsity baseball team, a morbidly obese coach mocked me for my slowness, how I was always neck-and-neck with a lurching, overgrown teammate at the back of the pack, a kid who was a half foot taller and certainly outweighed me. I began to fear running altogether. Only on the tennis court could I tolerate it because the bursts were short enough. I opted for varsity tennis and travel baseball in the summer, my big league dreams long gone, the string, in those final high school years, getting played out. At sixteen, seventeen, I had little idea of what I wanted out of life. The death of an athletic dream is the death of a kind of destiny, a glory that can never be matched. It was only when I escaped high school that I found a new calling, writing, and recaptured my lost skill: sprinting.

At eighteen, suddenly, I was fast again. In my final year of summer league baseball, I batted leadoff and could man a comfortable center field. At the time, I attributed this boost in speed to slimming down, at least slightly, and taking fitness more seriously at Stony Brook University, where I was a freshman. I think this was partially true, but not the whole story. A more banal reality, I realized only in retrospect, was that I went through puberty quite late. When I was losing to Daniel B. and struggling over the mile run, I was a doughy, quasi-cherubic boy, devoid of most body hair and muscle tone. Even at seventeen, I was this way. I looked very young for my age. In college, I caught up, and my body started to make sense to me. I could run a mile in a respectable seven minutes. I still disliked long distance runs, but 5Ks were tolerable. I stuck in my iPod and ran loping laps around Stony Brook’s Circle Road, or thrashed around on the treadmill at a dead sprint for twenty minutes. Transitioning from baseball to softball, I found my years in the batting cages transferrable to a game that was, for an ex-ballplayer, much easier. At nineteen, twenty, I was one of the faster players on the field and I hit with more authority than I ever did as a baseball player. It helped that I was, physically, turning into an adult. Perhaps, too, I was helped by caring less. Writing was my passion by then, not athletics, and if I was still occasionally furious on the softball field and beset by certain performance-related anxiety—I really wanted to succeed, always, to a maniacal degree—the stakes had been lowered. I was not trying to bust out of my school, my neighborhood, and be a baseball star. I was not proving anything to anyone. When I ran, I wasn’t racing anyone. I jogged alone, a few miles at a time, and pumped my rock music through my earbuds. During these runs, I often tinkered over a piece of writing or a future novel. These were the real problems to solve, and I was much happier to solve them.