We are in the summer season of the sport-ification of our lives: the World Cup following the NBA Finals, during Major League Baseball, playing into the Full Obsession of Football — on all levels of society. The human body is on full display: some of us remember the line “The Joy of Victory, The Agony of Defeat,” where judging was as relentless as the final score.
And inevitably, the physical agony of injury is the essence of broken hope. Playing hurt lives a sort of faith amidst the defeat of expectation. Whether in sports, school, work, or parenting, what we have worked, trained, and devoted our lives to can simply fail us, because we fail to control everything we live through.
Falling short is a measure. Being held short by fate is without justice. Both reveal our frailty. Both point us toward the grace of God that we have no clue of — until it is all we have.
Bo Jackson lived his body. That exquisite connection was simply true. “Bo knows” his body:
Then the world betrayed the beauty of Bo Jackson’s overwhelming manifestation of his (and by projection our) body — his hip was broken, displaced, and finally replaced. Bo did not let a break end a life in the glory of his body: he replaced the wrecked hip and tried to go on. We watched as he walked with a hitch, was fully devoted and finally compromised by the impossibility of perfect performance, despite the incredible gifts God had given him.
Just like Bo Jackson, Roy Hobbs was “The Natural” athlete as described in Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel. Though fraught with allusions to Arthurian legend — the baseball bat as Excalibur, the athlete searching for the Holy Grail while living in a profane world — there was a real-life athlete as the genesis of Malamud’s fantasy. Malamud’s story was based on the Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus, who was shot by a woman obsessed with him. We all collide with life events, but a few of us live in full connection with ourselves in the world — and are derailed by it. There is the SAT-perfect-score-in-high-school student who believed in the justification of his GPA, until the first college grade is a D. Some devote themselves to The One to live the rest of their life with, and the relationship simply falls apart. And I wanted to play for the Giants — working out every spare moment one summer in downtown Buffalo — until actually playing revealed how thoroughly I sucked.
The Cub Eddie Waitkus returned from being shot and played for six more years of high-level but unexceptional play. In the novel, Roy Hobbs spent the years after being shot changing from a pitcher to a hitter and making one last leap into full devotion in sport, only to come up short, again. In the film adaptation, Hollywood’s Hobbs redeemed himself (with the help of an angel, played in the movie by Glenn Close). His towering home run, with the blood of the Holy Trinity on his decade-old gunshot wounds wicking through his jersey, made his stoic love of baseball, and his angel, have a fulfilled final scene.
Like Waitkus, Malamud’s Hobbs hit no home run upon return: he struck out.
Like Bo and Roy, we try to compensate. In 1972, I was in full compensation mode. My family was slow-motion wrecked by World War II, alcohol — all because my father lived a hope-ending family injury in 1911. When my father was just one, his mother died while aborting his sibling: she could not abide another child with my grandfather.
No matter the brilliance and devotion of my father (a Wall Street lawyer whose parents had not attended ninth grade in Britain) or the gifts of God that Bo and Roy had, playing through injury does not fulfill us: it simply copes with our broken reality.
My broken reality was my broken family, and football was my coping. My inability meant that playing was my only hope. And I played. But in a pass play as I slipped sideways to pass block to the right, and in the push-off of my left hip, I popped it. Out of its socket. My sight- and sound-ending pain replaced the mechanical execution of the offense. But I could not not play, so I got up and peg-legged to the huddle and finished to another loss. Not because of my injury, but because the team was awful.
Meaningless. Except 52 years later, I was alone in my office on a Saturday afternoon, took a quick turn, and that same hip left its home, bringing the searing white pain of 1972 alive again. As before, it abated. We never recover to purity from injury. We go on, maybe forget, maybe reset to other triumphs of the will we can believe that we obtain.
I think we live all the life we are given. And its broken parts — the injured hopes, the revealed inabilities — are either injustices to be cursed or simply what we have been given, like Bo and Roy. We want to have reason behind our outcomes, but there is no reason for any gift. If we cannot have reason, we are desperate to at least understand random reality. But how do you understand grace? Without the gifts of ability or its loss, we could actually believe we are in control. Until we are not. Like Bo and Roy.
