Of course, just as anxiety can cause physiological problems, physiological problems can also cause anxiety. For professional athletes, the yips are a threat not just to their livelihood but also to their identity. The answer to the question “Who is Ana Ivanovic?” was invariably, “Ana Ivanovic is a tennis player.” Rick Ankiel was a pitcher. Until the yips.
This complicated interplay between the so-called physical and the so-called psychological reminds us that the mind/body dichotomy isn’t overly simplistic; it’s complete bullshit. The body is always deciding what the brain will think about, and the brain is all the time deciding what the body will do and feel. Our brains are made out of meat, and our bodies experience thoughts.
* * *
When we talk about sports, we almost always talk about winning as the measure of success. Vince Lombardi famously said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” But I’m dubious of that worldview, in sports as well as outside of them. I think a lot of the pleasure in sports is found in performing well. At first, winning is a sign that you are getting better, and then as you age, winning becomes proof that you still have it—the it being control and competence. You can’t decide whether you get sick, or whether people you love die, or whether a tornado tears apart your house. But you can decide whether to throw a curveball or a fastball. You can at least decide that. Until you can’t.
But even after age or the yips steals away your control, you need not give up. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch defines courage by saying, “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway.”
Ana Ivanovic never recovered the ability to toss the ball the way she did before the yips. But over time, she invented a new serve. It was less powerful, and more predictable, but she became a top-five player again, winning four tournaments in 2014. She retired a couple of years later, at the age of twenty-nine.
Rick Ankiel sunk all the way down to the lowest minor leagues of professional baseball. He missed the 2002 season with an injury, then blew his arm out completely in 2003. After recovering from surgery, he briefly returned to the major leagues, but he couldn’t find his control. So in 2005, at the age of twenty-six, he decided he wouldn’t be a pitcher anymore. He would play in the outfield.
In professional baseball, pitchers don’t just become outfielders. The game is much too highly specialized for that. The last player to have a career that included winning over ten games as a pitcher and hitting over fifty home runs as a hitter was Babe Ruth, who retired in 1935.
Like Ivanovic, Rick Ankiel was licked before he began, but he began anyway. He played as an outfielder in the minor leagues, steadily improving as a hitter. And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St. Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game. Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel.
I give the yips one and a half stars.
AULD LANG SYNE
I FIND IT FASCINATING that in a world where so much is so new, we welcome a new year by singing “Auld Lang Syne,” which is a very old song. The chorus starts out, “For auld lang syne, my Jo, for auld lang syne / We’ll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.” Jo is a Scots word that can be straightforwardly translated to “dear,” but auld lang syne is more complicated. It literally means something like “old long since,” but it’s idiomatically akin to “the old times.” We have a phrase in English somewhat similar to “for auld lang syne”—“for old times’ sake.”
Here’s a bit of my old long since: In the summer of 2001, the writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal emailed Booklist magazine to inquire about a review. At the time, I was working for Booklist as a publishing assistant; most of my job was data entry, but I also answered many of the low-priority emails that came in. I responded to Amy with an update on the status of the review, and I also mentioned that on a personal note I loved her zine-like column in Might magazine. I told her I often thought about one snippet she’d written, which went, “Every time I’m flying and the captain announces the beginning of our descent, the same thing goes through my mind. While we’re still pretty high above the city, I’ll think, If the plane went down now, we would definitely not be OK. A bit lower, and no, we still wouldn’t be OK. But as we get real close to the ground, I’ll relax. OK. We’re low enough; if it crashed now, we might be OK.”
She wrote me back the next day, and asked if I was a writer, and I said I was trying to be, and she asked if I had anything that was two minutes long that might work on the radio.
* * *
We don’t really know when “Auld Lang Syne” was written. The first verse goes: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot / And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot And auld lang syne.” Versions of those lyrics date back at least four hundred years, but we owe the current song to the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. In December of 1788, he wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop, “Is not the Scotch phrase ‘Auld Lang Syne’ exceedingly expressive? There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled through my soul. . . . Light be the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment.” On the back of the letter, Burns wrote a draft of the poem. At least three of the verses were probably his own, although he would later say of the song that he “took it down from an old man.”
Part of what makes dating the first verse difficult is the poem’s eternality: It’s about drinking together and remembering old times, and almost every idea in the song—from picking daisies to wandering through fields to toasting old friends over a beer—could’ve been written five hundred, a thousand, or even three thousand years ago.
It is also, incidentally, a rousing ode to splitting the check, with part of the second verse going, “And surely you’ll buy your pint cup and surely I’ll buy mine.” But mostly, the song is just an unapologetic celebration of the good old days.
* * *
I guess I should tell you that Amy is dead. Otherwise, her death within this review might seem like some kind of narrative device, which I don’t want. So, okay. She is dead. The rare present tense sentence that, once it becomes true, stays true forever.
But we are not there yet. We were still in the past, I think. Amy asked if I had anything for the radio, and I sent her three mini essays, and she liked one of them, and asked me to come in and record it for her show on Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ. After that, Amy invited me to be on her show more often. Within a year, I was recording frequent commentaries for WBEZ, and then for NPR’s All Things Considered.
In April of 2002, Amy convened some of her writer and musician friends for an event at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago called Writers’ Block Party. She asked me to read for it, and I did, and people laughed at my dumb jokes. Amy hired someone to walk around the theater giving everyone compliments, and the complimenter said they liked my shoes, which were new Adidas sneakers, and that’s why I have worn Adidas sneakers nearly every day for the last nineteen years.