{"id":135,"date":"2005-04-23T00:00:07","date_gmt":"2005-04-23T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=135"},"modified":"2005-04-23T00:00:07","modified_gmt":"2005-04-23T08:00:07","slug":"lessons-in-life-from-bill-spaceman-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/lessons-in-life-from-bill-spaceman-lee\/","title":{"rendered":"lessons in life from Bill \u201cSpaceman\u201d Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.” – Bill Lee<\/a><\/p>\n

I lived in Boston for seventeen years and I used to play softball once a week with a ragtag bunch of players who were my good friends. One Sunday morning we were playing on a field in Belmont, a suburb of Boston near Cambridge, when Bill “Spaceman” Lee walked by with his two young sons.
\n<\/a>
\nI was pitching that day. He stopped and chatted with us for a while then looked my way and said, “Yep, she’s a good pitcher.” Damn, I was thrilled to hear that. I could not stop smiling.<\/p>\n

We had a short left field with a high fence attached to the tennis court beyond it. At some point Lee pointed at the fence and said, “That’s my stroke, that’s where I hit the ball.” The instant he said that I had an epiphany, one of those moments when you come to a realization that has a profound effect on your life.<\/p>\n

Up until then I thought I had to be good at every aspect of any game I played and, by extension, everything I did else no one would play with me and they probably wouldn’t even like me. If I played softball, I had to be a good outfielder, a good infielder, a good pitcher, hit the ball to all fields and throw the ball a mile. If I was playing basketball, I had to be fast, handle the ball well and shoot the lights out.<\/p>\n

Understandably, trying to be good at everything meant that I wasn’t too good at anything. On top of that, I was usually one of the few women on the field so you could see why I might be in mortal fear of dropping the ball. I was sure they’d never let me play again if I did.<\/p>\n

But if Bill Lee’s natural stroke was to left field, then I could concentrate on the things I did well: pitching and hitting for average, and not worry about things I didn’t do well.<\/p>\n

Bill Lee was a strange guy, a showman. That was a a problem at times because you were never sure when he was just trying to piss you off and when he was just being himself. But he was a good player and a hard worker. He had three straight seasons with seventeen wins. And he had a good sense of what was and wasn’t important and with a simple comment that Sunday morning, I learned something important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.” – Bill Lee I lived in Boston for seventeen years and I used to play softball once a week with a ragtag bunch of players who were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mental-skills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}