Practice

This past weekend my husband was talking to our son about various life experiences and a story came up from his childhood. As a boy, my husband was crazy about playing sports. Baseball and basketball, mainly, but he loved other sports, too — almost anything he had the opportunity to play, he loved.

Fifth grade was the first time they didn’t accept everyone who tried out for a spot on the basketball team. My husband was a late-bloomer as far as size went, but what he lacked in size he made up for in enthusiasm and his indefatigable willingness to practice.

But even with that passion and practice, he was cut from the fifth grade basketball team. He described with amusing detail how it went: he stood in front of the list that displayed names of those who’d made the team. Down scanned his eye, his finger quickly sliding along. Hmm… Not there. Mistake? Missed it? Down went the finger again, a little slower this time, lingering over each name to see if his was among the precious few accepted.

Not there. It just wasn’t there.

He’d been cut.

Some kids might have tried out at the request of a parent or because of an invitation by a friend, and for them not making the team probably wouldn’t have been much of a disappointment. But for someone who dreamed about sports, knew the names and stats of every professional player, someone who came home from school, got chores and homework out of the way so he could run out to the hoop his dad had put up for him… well, disappointment just isn’t the right word. Disbelief maybe, at first. And perhaps despair would better describe what it felt like not to get on a team he’d hoped so hard, and practiced so hard, to make.

Nowadays anyone who’s ever heard the name Michael Jordan knows he was cut, too. His sophomore year of high school he was cut from the basketball team — an event that spurred him to be one of the best players of all time.

Well, on a smaller scale that’s what happened to my husband, too. He made the team the following year and every year after that throughout high school. In fact, by his senior year he was second team all conference, which means he was among the top ten players in the entire 6 team conference.

Part of that was because he loved to practice. That’s how the conversation with our son ended, with a reminder about golf great Gary Player responding to someone who’d called a particularly difficult shot he’d made “luck.” Mr. Player responded by saying, “It’s funny, but the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

That line may be a cliché in sports circles, but to my son and I, it sounded clever and new. And it inevitably reminded me of how it applies in the writing arena. The more we practice at writing, the better at it we get. Hopefully I’m a better writer now than I was five years ago, but with that same hope I believe five years from today I’ll be better than I am right now.

I love writing the way my husband loved sports. He wanted to play every game, and practice in between until he just couldn’t any more. For me, the only “games” are the books that are in print and unable to be edited any more. Everything else I write is practice.

That’s how I want to encourage others today. To enjoy the practice and know it’s not wasted, to know some setbacks can spur us on to be better.

I’m off to practice…