Death in the Afternoon

When I was teaching high school, we talked about how Hemingway coined the term "grace under pressure,"  and I showed them his episode of A&E's "Biography," which explains Hemingway's relationship to bullfighting, about which he wrote Death in the Afternoon.  In short, Hemingway had a deep respect for bullfighting because he considered matadors to be the individuals who best demonstrated grace under pressure.

One of the reasons I love sports so much is because they afford athletes opportunities to demonstrate grace under pressure.  This week we got two great examples.

Pitching a perfect game in baseball is a demonstration of grace under pressure-- history shows that maintaining your mental composure enough to keep making outs until the very end is an almost impossible feat.  We all know that Jim Joyce botched the call at first base and ruined Armando Galarraga's chance to have a perfect game recorded in the books, but what impressed me most was Galarraga's immediate response to the call.  If you watch the video, you notice that for one split second when he knew he had made the out, he started to celebrate-- but when the call was made, he just smiled, stared at Jim Joyce, and then walked back to the mound.  HE SMILED!   And then he recorded the next out!  There was a lot of hype after the game, and all the analylists practically started singing kumbaya because Joyce apologized and Galarraga said "nobody's perfect" (even though he had been)... but what I'll remember is that smile.  My brother Nate was impressed by this moment, too, and wrote on my facebook wall, "Someday I'll tell kids about the grace with which Armando Galarraga handled himself in that situation."

Maybe that smile grows out of ten years spent in the minors before being called up to the majors.  Maybe it comes from the maturity of being able to recognize the strength of one's accomplishment even without official recognition of that accomplishment.  In the Women's final at the French Open, we also saw an experienced player earn the chance to make good on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  Before the French Open, Francesca Schiavone had never advanced beyond the quarterfinals in a Grand Slam tournament.  She'd only won three tournaments in her whole 12 year career.  She was the heavy, heavy underdog.

I'll admit that when I started watching the match, I wanted Sam Stosur to win.  I'd been impressed by her giant-killing journey to the final: she'd already upset Serena Williams and Justine Henin, the two favorites to win the tournament, and had destroyed former world #1 Jelena Jankovic in the semis.  I was already imagining how exciting it would be to experience in person the Aussie hype that would have been around Stosur at the Australian Open in January had she won her first slam on Saturday.  But even though no one gave Schiavone a chance, she came out with a game plan that handcuffed Stosur, and it became impossible to cheer against her.  With the chance to win the match in the second set tiebreaker, when most players participating in their first slam final against a heavy favorite would have tightened up and choked, Schiavone took risky shots, executed them perfectly, and began jumping for joy after each winner.  Aside from Serena and maybe Kim Clijsters, the women in today's game seem afraid to rise to the challenge in this way.  I generally find the WTA tour uninspiring precisely because it so sorely lacks these kind of grab-the-bull-by-the-horns moments.

But Schiavone is evidently not our average WTA player.  Afterward, Schiavone said "I took it, and I didn't lose the chance. I didn't care about nothing. I want to take that [ball] and play my tennis. It was the moment."  Peter Bodo also reports that when she was asked how she accomplished something so much greater than anyone had ever expected of her, she responded, "Every morning that you wake up, you work to do something like this. So maybe it was far away in reality, but here [she pointed to her heart] it was never that far."

Thanks, Armando Galarraga and Francesca Schiavone, for reminding me this week how much the human mind is capable of achieving.  For reminding me that the moments when we are placed under the most pressure are also the moments when are given the opportunity to surpass everyone's expectations.  For demonstrating, as Schiavone said, that "This is mean that everybody have the chance to be who really you want to be, and to do everything in your life. This is what's happen to me."