But the goal is worthy: As Swami Vivekananda says: “work like a master and not as a slave; work incessantly, but do not do slave’s work. Do you not see how everybody works? Nobody can be altogether at rest; ninety-nine percent of mankind work like slaves, and the result is misery; it is all selfish work. Work through freedom! Work through love!”
When I hung around baseball’s major leagues, talking to ballplayers, I discovered to my glee that ballplayers talked about work, just as poets do, in opposite ways. I brag about six hundred drafts of “Another Elegy”; John Ashbery, on the other hand—confronted with having written a poem in twenty minutes when he was an undergraduate—answers, “Yes. I took longer then.” Half the athletes told me that working at baseball is silly; hell, just go out there and have fun … The other half said (and wholly believed) that they lacked any natural ability, that they accomplished their success by dint of practice, preparation, hard work, and virtue. In The Boys of Summer Roger Kahn remembered how George “Shotgun” Shuba—who hit line drives for the old Dodgers—told him of arduous practice all winter, convinced that only hard labor allowed him to play baseball. (If I had practiced twelve hours a day, at my physical peak, I would never have hit a line drive off a major league pitch.) Roger Kahn kept telling him, “But you’re a natural,” until Shuba finally reared up and contradicted him: “You talk like a sportswriter. In the winters, for fifteen years after loading potatoes or anything else, even when I was in the majors, I’d swing at the clump six hundred times.” Shuba hung a ball of string from the ceiling of his basement and swung a bat at it: “after sixty I’d make an X. Ten Xs and I had my six hundred swings. Then I could go to bed…. I swung a 44-ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 47,200 swings every winter.”
In spring training of 1992, Roger Clemens showed up in excellent physical shape, and then stepped up his preparations. On Florida days when he went five innings, he ran a mile and a half before pitching. He explained that he was toughening himself for late in the season, or even late in a game when he had to pitch tired. Between innings, in Winter Haven, he left the mound not to rest in the dugout but to do sit-ups; or he recruited a coach to throw him pick-ups—low ground balls which he fielded first on one side and then on the other. Asked why he worked so hard he answered, “People write articles about how you’re blessed with the right arm … That might be true, for some people, but I had to work to get where I’m at.”
Five years ago I put in my satellite dish, and every night after work I watch a game, or more likely part of a game; by the sixth or seventh inning, sleepiness overtakes me. August through January, some nights (or afternoons) I watch football, but baseball is my favorite, with basketball a lively second. Before I installed the dish, I listened to radio baseball on weeknights and watched ghostly games on weekends. Saturday afternoons for decades I have paid my bills watching television sports; I have looked through magazines, put photographs into albums, worked on my income tax—done all sorts of desultory tasks (not work) that reward full attention with full boredom. With the advent of the dish, I watch every Red Sox game, every Celtics game, and when my teams aren’t playing I watch other teams—finding more wearisome chores to accomplish, to cross off my list: