Swallow Your Spit

Baseball was really common in the southern US, and a bunch of us kids would play ball in the street where I grew up. These were quiet neighborhoods where drivers passing through knew damn well they had better drive slowly.

Often enough, we’d set up a little game of hotbox or pickle or monkey in the middle, depending on where you grew up, by throwing the ball back and forth, trying to tag out the person in the middle. We might play in someone’s back yard for little mini-games like this, since you didn’t need much room and back yards were much better for playing.

Quick sidebar: I rather enjoyed being in the middle and trying to “steal” the bases. How about you?

We had to play these sub-games because you really needed a field and some organization to play an actual game of baseball, where you need (typically) nine players on the field at a time, while the other team lines up to bat. You need at least one umpire, too, and if the kids are pretty young, you’re probably going to need coaches there to help them stay calm and know what to do.

Finally, one day, I was able to join my first little league baseball team. I don’t have a photo of anything from that first year, but I do have this sweet trinket from my time as an aspiring World Series MVP:

Look at that poise! That kid utterly exudes confidence, doesn’t he? It seems like nothing is going to get in his way.

I wonder where that attitude came from.

No, really. I wonder about things like this all the time. It can be difficult for me to pinpoint when or where an idea first entered my mind, and I suspect it’s a bit like the way Coca-Cola views advertising: you have to hear it a million times before it will stick.

However, I do have an incident that really sticks in my mind, and since I’ve thought about it for 40 years now, it must have had some impact on my life. Maybe, probably. I don’t know.

I wasn’t all that great my first year of baseball. Sure, I had played and practiced with my friends in the street, but that was mainly goofing and having fun (although, let me be very clear: we definitely tried to win every time). The sort of targeted drills you got in baseball practice were still working their magic to make me better.

I could run reasonably fast and throw halfway decent, though, so I was placed out in left field (honestly, it might have been right field or center, but let’s go with left for today). This had the downside of being potentially boring, but also the upside of not having to be under the spotlight during games too often, at least while I was in the field.

I got a lot better that first year of little league, and a lot of that was due to constant practice. We kids got tougher and more disciplined by the day, and for many of us, this was the first time we had been able to have rigorous practice like this, especially in a sport we actually wanted to play.

I remember that practice was grueling, at least by my soft standards back then… but I also remember seeing those results and being motivated to practice hard. One day, the Sun was beating down on us particularly hard, and I was pretty hot and sweaty. I felt like we had been practicing for hours, although who knows how long it had really been.

I asked the coach if I could go get a sip of water. What the coach said next shocked me to my core.

Swallow your spit.

Now, when I hear this today, I can’t help but chuckle internally. For one thing, spit comes from inside your body, and you obviously can’t get any additional hydration by swallowing your own spit. Your body is a closed system in that regard.

For another thing, dehydration isn’t something you want to mess with, particularly in children with developing brains. Suffice it to say, this sort of tough love approach to education and coaching can be a dangerous double-edged sword.

I do not want to recommend doing this to kids. At the same time, I’m pretty sure I needed that little shock.

I had walked through a pretty charmed life up to that point, where I got away with an awful lot of mischief. I also got away with being pretty lazy, at least in part because I was clever enough to figure out how to avoid doing hard things. Precociousness is a double-edged sword, too.

Here, someone was telling me to toughen up, basically. That’s exactly what I did once puberty hit, not terribly long after my little league days. I became very interested in tackle football, and that impulse ultimately led me to high school wrestling, where I first began learning skills I use today in jiu jitsu.

I still think about how messed up that comment seems in today’s context, but I also keep coming back to how much that shocking moment must have helped to increase my resilience and toughness. Wrestling practice was ten times tougher than little league, but I had begun to focus on ignoring my own immediate needs so that I could focus on getting better, and on endurance and cardio.

I’m much, much tougher as a result of going down this pathway, through baseball, wrestling, judo, and jiu jitsu. Swallow your spit turned out to be pretty good advice, at least in that one moment.

Have you had any advice like this, something that seemed shocking at the time, but now you’re glad you got it? Alternatively, did you play little league or other team sports as a kid?