In December of 2001, there was perhaps no human alive on Earth who needed to hear those words more than I did.
I don’t believe in epiphanies. My blinding-light awakenings always prove fleeting. But I’ll tell you this: I have never felt quite as hopeless since watching Harvey as I did just before I watched it.
A couple of months after watching Harvey, I was able to return to Chicago and to Booklist. Although my recovery was halting and often precarious, I got better. It was probably the therapy and the medication, of course, but Elwood played his part. He showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved. Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn’t bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true.
As Emily Dickinson put it,
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
I still sometimes stop hearing the tune. I still become enveloped by the abject pain of hopelessness. But hope is singing all the while. It’s just that again and again and again, I must relearn how to listen.
I hope you never find yourself on the floor of your kitchen. I hope you never cry in front of your boss desperate with pain. But if you do, I hope they will give you some time off and tell you what Bill told me: Now, more than ever, watch Harvey.
I give Harvey five stars.
THE YIPS
ON OCTOBER 3, 2000, a twenty-one-year-old pitcher named Rick Ankiel took the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals in the first game of a Major League Baseball playoff series. It occurs to me that you may not know the rules of baseball, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that, broadly speaking, professional pitchers throw baseballs very fast—sometimes over one hundred miles per hour—and with astonishing accuracy. Pitchers who can consistently place their throws within a few square inches of space are often said to have “good control.” Rick Ankiel had great control. He could put the ball wherever he wanted. Even when he was in high school, the professional scouts marveled at his control. They said the kid was a machine.
But about a third of the way into that playoff game in 2000, Rick Ankiel threw a very low pitch, so low that the catcher missed it—a so-called “wild pitch.” Ankiel had only thrown three wild pitches all season, but now, suddenly, he couldn’t regain his control. He threw another wild pitch, this one over the batter’s head. Then another. Another. Another. He was quickly pulled from the game.
* * *
A week later, Ankiel started another playoff game. He threw five wild pitches in twenty attempts. After that, he never consistently found the strike zone again. Ankiel won a few more games as a major league pitcher, but he couldn’t fully recover his control. He sought all kinds of medical attention, and even began drinking huge amounts of vodka during games to dull his anxiety, but his pitching never came back. He had contracted the yips. The kid, it turned out, was not a machine. Kids never are.
Rick Ankiel wasn’t the first baseball player to forget how to throw—in fact, the phenomenon is sometimes called “Steve Blass Disease” or “Steve Sax Syndrome,” after other baseball players who suffered sudden-onset throwing challenges. It’s not unique to baseball, either. In 2008, an introverted twenty-year-old tennis player named Ana Ivanovic won the French Open and became the top-ranked tennis player in the world. Commentators imagined her winning “a host of grand slams,” and maybe even becoming a formidable rival to all-time great Serena Williams.
But shortly after that French Open title, Ivanovic began to experience the yips—not when hitting the ball or swinging the racket, but when tossing the ball before serving. From footwork to swing mechanics, tennis requires precise movements and profound bodily coordination. Throwing the ball straight up in the air before serving is just about the only part of tennis that isn’t difficult. But when Ivanovic began to experience the yips, her hand would jerk mid-toss, and the ball would drift to the right, or too far forward.
Former tennis pro Pat Cash described watching Ivanovic’s serve as a “painful experience,” and it truly was, but if watching it is a painful experience, how much more painful to be the server, unable to toss the ball the way she had her entire career, ever since she first took up tennis as a five-year-old in Belgrade. You could see the torment in her eyes. Watching someone struggle with the yips is like watching a school play in which a kid forgets their line. Time stops. Attempts to disguise the discomfort—a little smile, a wave of apology—only heighten everyone’s awareness of the anguish. You know they don’t want your pity, but you offer it anyway, which only furthers the shame.
“She has absolutely no confidence in herself,” tennis great Martina Navratilova said of Ivanovic, which was no doubt true. But how could you be confident?
All serious athletes know the yips are possible, that they happen to people. But knowing something abstractly is different from knowing it experientially. Once you’ve known the yips personally, you can’t unknow them. Every time you toss a tennis ball for the rest of your life, you’ll know what could happen. How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?
Ivanovic once said of the yips, “If you start thinking about how you come down the stairs and think about how each muscle is working, you can’t go down the stairs.” But if you’ve fallen down the stairs, it becomes impossible not to think about how you come down the stairs. “I’m a person who overthinks and overanalyzes everything,” Ivanovic went on to say, “so if you give me one thought, it creates a lot more.”
The yips have many names—whiskey fingers, the waggles, the freezing. But I like “yips” because it’s such an anxious word; I can almost feel the muscle twitch inside the word itself. The yips are most common among golfers. Over a third of serious golfers struggle with them. Golfing yips usually appear when golfers are trying to hit putts, and people have tried all kinds of cures to stop the spasms. Right-handed golfers might putt left-handed, or they might try unconventional grips, or long putters, or short ones, or bending over the club and anchoring it against the chest. And the yips don’t only affect putting. One of the world’s leading golf coaches can only effectively swing a driver while looking away from the ball.
The yips do not seem to be a result of performance anxiety, although anxiety can worsen the problem—as it worsens many physiological problems, from diarrhea to dizziness. Some golfers, for instance, feel the yips when they play on a course but not when practicing on a putting green. I get the yips when playing tennis on forehand shots—my arm muscles jerk just before the racket hits the ball, and like that golfing coach, the only way I’ve found to avoid the yips is to glance away from the ball as I swing.
But weirdly, I don’t feel the yips when I’m warming up or hitting with a friend, only when we’re keeping score. Their situational nature has led some to argue that the yips can be cured by psychotherapy, specifically by processing traumatic events in one’s sporting life. I am a big fan of psychotherapy, and have benefited tremendously from it, but I do not have traumatic memories of tennis. I like tennis. I just can’t hit forehands while looking at the ball.