Emulations

When I was a youngster playing driveway basketball at the home of my friend’s in northern Minnesota, I often emulated Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s skyhook.

I should say I tried to emulate Jabbar’s patented skyhook. Back then, I was nine, about 4 and a half feet tall and had the hoops skills of a one-celled amoeba. But it didn’t matter. On that driveway, shooting at a garage door hoop that was only eight feet off the ground, I felt like I was Jabbar. It also didn’t matter that I probably made five out of 100 shots. Back then, in my mind, I was doing what Jabbar did.

Like all kids, I continued emulating sports heroes. When at bat during our whiffle ball games in the small back yard of my friend’s house on  Calihan Avenue in Bemidji, I would wait for the pitch by taking counterclockwise swings and hitching the bat at the top of the swing each time, just like Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates used to do. Another hero, another form to copy. And when I pitched, I often held the ball in my glove, shook the glove and raised my arms in my windup as Boston Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant did.

My baseball skills, like my basketball skills, were non-existent, but I kept at it. At that age, I didn’t realize the one in a million chance it took of being a Jabbar, Stargell or Tiant.

The emulations continued on into my teenage years. When we played basketball in a dusty church gym after my family moved to Arkansas, I would wipe my hands on my shoes like Larry Bird did. I never figured out if I was doing it to clean the dust off my shoes or give my hands more grit to be able to handle the ball better. By then, I had evolved into a 6-foot teenager that still had the one-cell amoeba playing style.  Larry Bird would be ashamed of seeing me, I know now.

When my friends and I snuck onto the golf course in my town to play a few holes, Fred Couples was my golfing hero. So, I tried to be him. I couldn’t copy his skills, of course, so I copied him. I walked like he did, when approaching a shot. I’d pace the fairway with a cool-moving stride just like he did. Couples embodied the essence of nonchalance and being laid back. I came across more like a slinking Xanax addict trying to stay awake.

Again, it didn’t matter. Maybe it wasn’t having gained the sense of failure or that people would be judging me for those moves back then. In college, a few of us journalism students would go to someone’s house, put the Rolling Stones on the cassette deck (this was in the late 1970s) and we’d all become the group. It stuns me now of those Stones’ days because I try to keep a low approach and just stick to the periphery of the public radar. Back then, though, I’d be the brash Mick Jagger. I’d strut around and dance herky-jerky like he did and actually copy his vocals, all while the others were singing and being Keith Richard and Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood.

I’m embarrassed now even reading back over that last paragraph.

So, what happened? When do we quit emulating our sports heroes (or musical ones) and begin the more subdued life we will carry on to the end. Maybe it’s the realization of not being able to be as good as the real people we tried to mimic. I’ll never be a Fred Couples walker now. After tearing the medial meniscus in my knee last Christmas, I walk around more like Fred Sanford with hemorrhoids. The last time I played golf was maybe 10 years ago on a simple par 3 muni course. I played so poorly that I immediately called a golf shop after the game and tried to sell my clubs. They only offered me a dollar a club, so instead I briefly put them on sale on Craigslist until I realized only serial killers use that internet selling spot. The clubs still sit in my home behind a chair.

If I tried now to mimic the Stargell hitch, I’d get a hitch all right. A hitch in my back, as they say in the south, that would require chiropractic care.

Oh, I still try to emulate people at times. But no longer are the replications of those who can do physical things. As I near six decades of life in a couple of weeks, that whole sports thing is over. Instead, when I was a newspaper journalist until two years ago, I’d try to write like my hero, former Chicago Tribune columnist and author Bob Greene, or bark out questions in press conferences like Sam Donaldson of ABC News used to do.

But those carefree days of thinking I could be like the athletes I admired are gone. Maybe it’s part of the tipping point of when you go from a kid with endless possibilities to an adult who knows reality. It’s part of life, I guess.