NotebookFinding My Way to The Edge of Legend
Today's blog post is over at ShawnSmucker.com. Writer, blogger, and human being extraordinaire Shawn Smucker invited me to write about how writing The Edge of Legend changed me. Below is an excerpt and a link to the post at his site.
I could fill a book about what The Edge of Legend did to me. That’s part of what made its story so powerful, part of why I knew I had to tell it.
Since I want to keep this short, I’ll just tell a story.
Heading into college six years ago, I thought I’d become a pro baseball player. I was a catcher, and darn studly. Instead, I mostly rode the bench. I had a few brilliant days and weeks, but mostly I sucked. It wasn’t because I wasn’t good. It was because I was scared.
It got so bad that I couldn’t even throw the ball back to the pitcher. It went everywhere but to the guy’s chest. It was bad. It was painful. It was humiliating. And the more I tried to fix it, the worse it got.
We baseball players call it “the yips.” And dude, I was yippin’ hard.
I could blast batting practice pitches 500 feet with no problem. I had the strongest arm on the team. But that 60-foot toss back to the pitcher—it terrified me. It was so embarrassing when it went wrong. Who can’t throw the ball 60 feet? It carried over into everything else, eating at my game like a cancer.
Read how I recovered over at ShawnSmucker.com.
Reader Comments (2)
Now that was a truly awesome post on ShawnSmucker! Inspiring and well told.
Keep the faith and the confidence rolling!
Thanks dude.