What we need to learn from India...and Baseball
The coronavirus can make a comeback…
According to a recent story in the Kansas City Star, the prime minister of India – Narendra Modi – declared victory over COVID-19 back in January and who wouldn’t trust a man who looks like this?
Unfortunately for India and its prime minister, his declaration of victory turned out to be just a bit premature; kinda like a football player, headed for the end zone, who decides to celebrate his upcoming touchdown by stopping and spiking the ball on the 10-yard line.
(Don’t get me started on the need for today’s athletes to celebrate themselves and their awesomeness in the middle of games because it makes me feel old and that job is already taken by my left knee, which each and every morning reminds me of all the stupid stuff I did playing football and baseball and the time I went off a ski jump without checking the landing spot first.)
Anyway…
The immensely-believable prime minister (he looks like you’d find him on the top of some mountain, sitting in a cave and dispensing the Secret of Life to Keanu Reeves) convinced many of his countrymen and/or women that the worst of the pandemic was over and it was OK to relax health measures like physical distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds.
So having theoretically turned the coronavirus corner, India allowed festivals and election rallies (at least some of which Modi attended and addressed, which might remind you of somebody and I’ll give you one hint…Onald-Day Rump-Tay) but now India’s coronavirus crisis is worse than ever and Dr. Navjot Dahiya of the Indian Medical Association has called Modi a “super spreader” and blamed the government for people who are currently dying because there’s not enough oxygen tanks to go around, even though the Indian government recently claimed “nobody in the country was left without oxygen” – a claim thousands of dead people and their relatives might find reason to contest.
In response to the people of India blaming the government and Modi for the resurgence of the coronavirus and not being ready with adequate supplies of oxygen, the government of India has done the logical thing:
It asked Twitter to prevent people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. So apparently you can look at 50 critical tweets and be just fine and dandy with the Modi government, but that 51st tweet might drive you over the edge.
It would be easy and racist (funny how often those two go together) to look at the situation and say, yeah, India’s a pretty backwards country, despite the fact that they seem to supply most of the people answering the phone when you need to talk to some big company, which would seem to indicate a lot more Indians are smart enough to be bilingual than all us Americans who would probably be well advised to learn some Spanish, but still refuse to do so.
(If pressed, I know enough Spanish to order a beer and find a bathroom, but never learned another phrase I thought might come in handy considering my South of the Border activities: “Why am I under arrest?”)
Despite India’s obvious example concerning the perils of celebrating too soon, many local governments – and Kansas City is on the list – are trying to please their constituents by loosening their COVID-19 restrictions.
A story about that was on the front page of Tuesday morning’s KC Star, while a story on 4A (and when you have a front section with a total of 10 pages, two more than the Star usually puts out, a 4A story is buried) noted that the KC area just added the most new COVID-19 cases in two months.
So while new cases are going up, restrictions are going down.
All of which logically enough brings us to baseball. (And if you didn’t see that coming, you must be a first-time reader.)
Step on their necks
I was lucky because I got to spend time around big league ballplayers and listen to them talk and while I couldn’t do what they could do, I could learn from their experiences.
For instance:
One day my men’s team was beating up on another team pretty good and we backed off in the last couple innings because we didn’t want to run up the score. After the game, one of my players who had spent time in the big leagues, pulled me aside and said: “You played like you were sorry for them.”
I said we were.
We knew most the guys on the other team and while we wanted to win, didn’t want to embarrass them. The former big leaguer told me that was the wrong attitude. It wasn’t our fault the other team wasn’t very good and while we could change tactics (quit stealing bases or bunting or doing anything else designed to score extra runs) we needed to keep playing hard and take extra bases and grind out at-bats and make plays on defense because we needed to be consistent in our approach.
Here was the ex-pro’s point and it’s one worth thinking about:
If we had an A Game and a B Game sooner or later we’d get caught playing our half-assed B Game when it turned out we actually needed our A Game. Pass up a run in the seventh because you don’t want to rub it in and you might lose a game when the other team has a rally in the ninth.
There is no clock in baseball or pandemics so as long as you’re scoring runs or getting people sick, the game continues.
The message was pretty simple: play hard each and every time you step between the white lines and play hard for all nine innings. Be consistent. You don’t pass up chances to score runs, you don’t ease up near the finish the line and if you knock someone (or in this case, something) down, you don’t wait to see if they get back up.
You step on their necks.
One of the many reasons I love baseball is the principles that work in that sport also work in life and I’d say the same thing about the NFL, but I have yet to join the Hell’s Angels.
(You never know, it could happen: I have money, access to alcohol and occasional poor judgment. Although the fact that the last time I was in California and my brother offered to let me ride his Harley and I reacted like he offered to let me ride his Brahma bull, does not speak well for my Hell’s Angels membership chances. Pretty sure they won’t let you join if you’re afraid to ride anything larger than a Vespa scooter.)
So here’s today’s lesson, assuming you need one and if you think back across your Life History, I’m guessing the fact that you don’t need advice has never stopped anyone from handing it out anyway and apparently I’m no exception: we’re starting to turn the corner on the coronavirus and now is not the time to let up.
Just ask any big league baseball player or – if you don’t have access to one of those – the prime minister of India.