Throwing Like A Girl

Though I have never seen her toss much more than a wet paper towel into a trash can from a few feet away, I am willing to bet that my mother throws like a girl. And, while my grandmother knew her way around a meat grinder and the first Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, surely she threw like a girl, too. If that legacy can’t end with me, it will end with my daughter.

My dad was not, in my formative years, what you’d call an athlete, what with three packs of Kools a day and a penchant for meat and bread that rendered him the opposite of swift. He swears he was the pitcher on his US Army league. But evidence of throwing and catching and running was missing from my house, and I suspect it’s because my sister and I were not boys.

I wasn’t completely uncoordinated in phys ed, and I wasn’t a nerd; that is, I didn’t wear my gym bloomers pulled up to my nipples nor have a constantly running nose or glasses held together with tape. But I didn’t look like a jock, either. So despite the fact that I could actually shoot a foul shot, hit a baseball, and kick a field goal without tripping over my feet, whatever self-confidence I had was diminished each time Sarah Love and Merle Schreibstein got to choose up sides. I was last once. Have you ever been last? “Oh, all right. We have Leslie.” It’s a shame your whole class remembers.

So the afternoons would never find me at an intramural sport; instead, they found me smoking pot at the Kippermans’ house, Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” bouncing off the Escher-esque black-light posters. Kids chosen last become potheads for a short time, and then they become writers or accountants.

In those days, most dads didn’t take their girls to the batting cages (did we have batting cages?) or even out to the field to catch and throw. That’s what they did with sons. Even in my husband’s liberal home, where Dad did the dishes and cooked, as well as worked a grueling full-time day, his sister was rarely involved in catch with the men of the house. (Indeed, a park dog walker remarked just this morning that the fathers of his youth didn’t coach their girls, who always “threw like girls.)

The ones who discovered a natural inclination for this or that sport and became good at it had help honing their skills from their phys. ed. teachers (ladies who looked like MacGyver, women we would call “Mrs.” without recognizing the irony). Surely their moms didn’t take their daughters out to shoot hoops. You wouldn’t find those ladies in the basement, oiling their girls’ baseball gloves, banging hardballs in the palms to break in the leather, tying them around a ball so they could close on a pop fly.

Except for the summers, which I spent attached to my swim team (everyone was on the team, but I excelled and had won a number of blue ribbons for breast stroke and crawl), my year-round sport was English. I spent much of my time rereading Patti Smith’s Babel and trying to write just like her—poems about death with as many symbols and synonyms for them and ellipses between them as I could use on a page. I sat in my closet fort and wrote poetry and sang along with the latest punk anthem. And when I grew up, I sang in a punk rock band and continued to never throw—just like a girl. And that’s the main reason girls can’t throw (the ones who can’t). Because they don’t, and no one ever tried to show them when they were young, when it counts.

I thought the times were changing. T-ball had a good number of ponytail wearers and some pairs of pierced ears, lots of volunteer dads and moms helping out. But now that my daughter’s eight, and play has gotten more serious, she’s one of only two girls in fifty players. As the teams get older, the number of girls increases only slightly.

This is not indicative of the general decline in physical activity; girls were always odd man out in team sports—especially when it comes to male-dominated games like baseball. Occasionally, some crazy female gets on the news for wanting to be on an all-boy football team, but she’s an exception; most girls don’t dig getting tackled by heavy guys with black makeup under their eyes. And they don’t seem to dig whacking a ball with a bat, either. (They play lacrosse.)

I know two women close to fifty who were encouraged to play basketball and still do in organized women’s leagues. But the rest of my female friends go for the solitary workout—yoga, aerobics, running. Perhaps our lessons from our mothers never to rely on anyone else to get something done make it difficult for us to stand at second base, waiting for the accurate throw from the outfield.

This year, because our coach abandoned the team after the first game, and because the dads who’ve stepped up to the plate to pitch in with coaching are often on business trips or coaching other teams, I’ve had to take an active role in my daughter’s sport. I learned a few things about myself, most important: that I can really whack that little ball, that I can catch, and that I throw like a girl.

During practices with the kids, I usually stand behind home plate and return the four spent balls. Recently, I caught a high pop foul, but I couldn’t return the ball to the pitcher’s glove accurately.

One Saturday, we were down a dad, and I was asked to stand behind home, rather than in my comfort zone at third base, where I am not allowed to touch any balls in play. After a few batters had gone, the umpire—who divides his time between feeding balls into the pitching machine and reprimanding players for walking in front of it—told the pint-size pitcher to move a little closer so I wouldn’t have to throw the ball so far. The distance between home plate and the pitcher’s mound is just about the shortest on the field. I was ashamed.

I told my husband, the other morning at breakfast, that I would like to learn how to throw. I showed him my form, which is good. I don’t have little spaghetti arms; I’ve got muscle in there. But my fingertips seem to be putting a bit of a backspin on the ball, which is probably why I feel like I’m expending a great deal of effort just to get the ball to the pitcher.

I did a little research on throwing; the Internet is full of “how to” sites by cognoscenti. An article for Enquirer.com, by Susan MacDonald, features an interview with orthopedic surgeon, Warren G. Harding, who warns against throwing like a girl because of the injuries it can cause. The sexist phrase is, unfortunately, “the best way to visually describe how NOT to throw, because it automatically conjures up an image of an awkward, weak[,] and miss-its-target kind of lob.” The best part about this article is the picture of 10-year-old Daniel Woeste modeling both throwing techniques (that is, throwing like a girl and throwing like a boy).

Girls of any age—and boys, too—could get a good lesson sitting on their asses, reading a computer screen; it’s what we all do best these days. But it’s counter-intuitive. I return, as I always do with each new trick I teach myself, to Aristotle’s wisdom: “what we need to learn to do we learn by doing.”

I ask a girls’ softball coach if she has advice for the eighth graders on her team, one of whom is infamous for the shot-put style of throwing. (You’ve seen this: the arm cocks back fine, but then the ball is thrust forward from the shoulder, as if it is made of lead.) “Fingers to the sky, wave bye-bye” is a saying that might help some girls, but, she says, if you want to get good, you practice.

It’s the same advice I give my writing students. It almost doesn’t matter what you write, just as long as you’re writing. Keep a journal, write a letter, construct a to-do list from vigorous verbs—just write. Who will get good at anything-—piano, auto mechanics, accounting, brain surgery—without practice? Reading only gets you so far.

“We threw dirt clods,” my husband says. “We used to go to construction sites and have dirt clod battles; we’d pretend they were hand grenades, and we were throwing them at the Japs. I probably killed about a billion Japs.” (Marty’s dad was at Iwo Jimo in the war.) And when he wasn’t bombing the enemy, he was throwing a ball at a wall thousands of times.

Every day, Marty takes my daughter out to practice. They throw, they catch, they recreate common plays at the bases. I often go, too, especially now that my husband has talked me into joining his softball team.

But I’m like the kid who disdains after-school piano practice. It’s recreation, and I have real work to do. I have reading and writing and house cleaning. I have running. And who ever heard of 43-year-old women in the backyard throwing dirt clods at each other or chucking balls at the garage?

Grownup softball starts Thursday. I still throw like a girl.