Finding Your Bryn Smith

I have loved sports for about as long as I can remember. It started with with tennis because my dad was a tennis player but as soon as I saw American football on TV, I was hooked. I got into basketball, boxing, anything on Wide World of Sports or CBS Sports Saturday but when it came to baseball, I hit a wall. I really wanted to like it but didn't really understand the rules and thought the whole thing was a little on the boring side. My tennis dad was long gone and he wasn't a baseball fan anyway (I don't think) so there was no one to really introduce me to the game. 

By the time I was in 5th grade, I finally decided to try out Little League. All the other kids were doing it and I figured it could help me fit in. I foolishly assumed that I would be good at it because I was all right at other sports at other sports I played, but I did not take to baseball very naturally. To make it worse, I decided I really wanted to be a pitcher because the pitcher got the most action but as such, I exposed my suckiness even more. I really had no idea how to pitch and just like my foray into Muay Thai would be 10 years later, no one really showed me anything. I just figured I should wind up and throw the ball as hard as I can at the strike zone so that was what I did. Except I couldn't get the ball anywhere near the strike zone. So when I had an opportunity to pitch, I just walked everybody and hit a few kids and got yanked out of the game quickly.

I was moved to the outfield right away but did not want to give up on my initial "dream" of becoming a pitcher. I went to Target and bought something called a pitch back. It was basically a metal frame with a net in the middle and a square taped off to represent the strike zone. That way I could practice my pitches at home and ball would just bounce off the net right back to me. Even after a couple weeks of doing this, I still had terrible aim. I was lucky to hit the pitch back itself, let alone the strike zone.

I was too lazy to go to the library and get a book, too embarrassed to ask anyone how to actually throw a baseball and the internet had not been invented yet so I decided to turn to my old friend, the TV. I started watching MLB games to see if I could figure anything out. It did help me understand the game a little more but nothing really about pitching. The announcers talked about different kind of pitches like curve balls, sinkers, sliders, etc. but not about the actual mechanics.

One day though, the Dodgers were playing the Montreal Expos and I saw this dude pitch for the Expos named Bryn Smith. He pitched a little bit differently than the other people I had seen. He threw slow instead of fast. Later I would realize there were other pitchers like that but he was the first one I noticed. Not every pitch was slow but many of them would be. He could locate the pitch around the strike zone pretty well and when threw something faster, guys would sometimes swing at it even if it was way outside.

A light bulb went on in my head! What if I tried to pitch slow? Would my aim be any better? I went back outside to the pitch back and sure enough, my aim was indeed a lot better. And you might be sitting there thinking, "Duh!" but you have to remember that I was about 11 years old at the time and not very smart. I did start taking notes on baseball pitchers though, trying to come up with a strategy so I could not only land my slow ball in the strike zone but figure out a way to trick the batters so they don't just hit it over the fence every time. 

I practiced and practiced and one day, convinced the coach to let me pitch again. I honestly don't remember if we won or lost the game but I was so much better!! Only walked a couple, think I hit only one kid but I also struck dudes out, got 'em to ground out, pop out and don't think I gave up any runs. Maybe some of that is selective memory but I know it was way better and the other kids weren't laughing at me any more and best of all, I got to pitch some more for the rest of the season. I actually got a little better at everything (hitting, fielding, etc.). Of course the main part of this was just getting experience but the confidence I got from pitching better helped too.

I guess now that I think about it, this story could be about why you should generally take things slowly and thoughtfully first instead of trying to go really fast and hard right away but actually, it is about Bryn Smith the pitcher. Or at least what he represented to me. I was trying this new sport that I didn't really understand and wasn't very good at but when I saw him, I connected with something and thought maybe I could do this. I know nothing about the guy, personally, nor did I become a baseball fan, it was just seeing him throw the ball differently, got me to see things in a new way.

Why am I telling you this? Because you can do the same thing with boxing! I know not everybody loves the sport like I do and while I can pretty much guarantee if you are reading this, you are a better boxer than I was a Little League player at first, but maybe you sometimes feel awkward or like you aren't able to box as fast are as powerfully as someone else. First of all, don't be discouraged by this but the point I have very, very slowly been getting to is that YOU should find YOUR Bryn Smith! 

Maybe there is a boxer out there that you might connect with on some level. Maybe it is a style that suits your personality. Like if you are a big, lumbering guy who might have trouble pulling off the speed and footwork of Hector Camacho, look at a fighter like Zhang Zhilei to model yourself after. Or maybe it has nothing to do with style, you just like them for some reason. Maybe you have something in common. Or anything, any connection you find. 

So how do you find this fighter you connect with? At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will say the good, 'ol internet is your answer. Search for current champions or "most exciting boxer" or "best boxer right now" or maybe get more specific for something that relates to you personally. I was really proud of one of our members, who is left-handed, because she searched for great southpaw boxers when she joined. More people should do that stuff! Read up on some of these people and watch their YouTube clips. Doesn't matter if you are a big fan of boxing the sport but if it is something you are doing for your own health and fitness, you never know what you might find. As I mentioned earlier, I was not a fan of baseball nor did I even become a fan of Bryn Smith but I still found something about his game inspirational and was able to play better because of it.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

I don't know about these days but back in the 70s and 80s, movies where anyone learns some kind of physical combat skills always featured an old man coach/sensei character and almost always, this person did not look physically strong or capable. Not exactly what you would expect to teach you how to be a badass but the idea being that this person was such a badass, it didn't even matter how strong in stature they appeared to be. Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, Mickey from the Rocky series and pretty much every sensei in the Kung Fu movies are examples. The sensei could even blind but it didn't matter. They could "see" purely through their own awesomeness. But do these characters exist in real life? For the most part, they do! This man below is Angelo Dundee, who most famously trained Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, Carman Basilio as well as Sugar Ray Leonard, older George Foreman and plenty of others:

Doesn't look very imposing, does he? And this is him as a young man. If someone was going to teach you boxing or corner you in a fight and he looked like this, you might think, "How is he going to teach me how to fight? What does this guy know?" But he is maybe the greatest of all time. This is true in all sports, not just combat. The best coaches and teachers may not necessarily appear like the big, strong athletic people they work with.

Something like this kind of happened to me when I started training in a martial art called Krav Maga. When I first met my trainer, I was the slightest bit put off that he was this older, very small dude. He did look kind of tough though, I will give him that, but somehow I expected a large, younger super soldier type. Of course my preconceived notions were completely blown out of the water when we started to working together and I realized that my trainer was as hardcore as it gets. There was even a time years later when we were working on some knife defense techniques and it was me, Barney (my trainer), a big dude who was then the head of security for the Golden State Warriors basketball team, and another big, strong guy who could pass for a Russian Spetsnaz. Anyway, part of the technique involved controlling the knife hand of an attacker and I remember taking turns with everybody and when these bigger, stronger, younger dudes put their hands on me, they had pretty good control of my knife hand and I couldn't move it much. But when Barney did it, I felt like there was no way I could ever move my knife hand ever, even if I was 10x stronger than I was. His technique and weight distribution were so good, it overrided any size and strength advantages. It didn't make scientific sense to me but here was, totally immobilized by the smallest guy in the room. I thought that stuff only happened in the movies!

This doesn't just go for people either, it goes for places too. The very first combat training I ever did was Muay Thai and speaking of movies yet again, the gym I went to could have certainly been in one. It was dingy and dark, all the equipment looked very well used and you had a bunch of people all training pretty much separately doing different stuff. One guy was throwing round kicks on a sand bag, another one was skipping rope, someone else was shadow boxing, two guys were sparring, etc. It was in a bad neighborhood in San Jose, CA and many people there were competitive fighters and they sure looked like it. So my impression was that this place was the real deal. Where only tough, serious Nak Muays trained. And that might have been true but no one really taught me Muay Thai. I would just train on my own and if I saw someone who worked there, hope that they would come over and help me. Sometimes they would but it was a pretty short interaction and I never knew exactly what I should be working on. I just did my best to copy some of the people who looked like they knew what they were doing. I went to this gym on and off for about 7-8 months or so and if you were to come to one of the kickboxing classes at our club, I would teach you more in 5 minutes before class than was ever taught to me in the 7-8 months I trained at this very traditional, hardcore kind of place.

So my point is that while the appearance of my old gym suggested it was somewhere I could really learn how to be a fighter, it really wasn't. At least not for someone like me who wanted guidance and didn't have a training partner. I've mentioned this before, but the best fighters, the cream of the crop, can still flourish under these conditions as they show a lot of natural ability and get some attention from the coaches (or, in the case of boxing in particular, over 90% of the good fighters are trained by their dads, who are already involved with the sport). But regular schmoes like myself? Forget about it.

I guess this holds true for just about everything in life, right? Appearances can be deceiving. You might think that someone or something really looks the part and maybe talks the part but in reality, they aren't. And you might think that a creepy, old, shriveled up gremlin can't be a great warrior but you could be as surprised as Luke Skywalker was when he saw Yoda bring that X-wing out of the swamp.