Like all real athletes,
my daughter is competitive to an extreme.
I think the first time we realized it was during a family game of Sorry. Talk about a nasty laugh after sending your
parent’s piece back to Start.
Clare was the same way
in softball, only infinitely more intense.
Losing made her moody, which made her ever so much more intense for the
next game. I remember one time her senior
year of high school, when the first homerun hadn’t happened according to
schedule; I sat in the dugout that spring, keeping score and keeping my
distance. When Clare did hit her first
homer, she nearly took off my hand high-fiving me. Now imagine college. Hint: the player in question didn’t exactly
mellow out. There was a
bat-poking-in-my-ribs incident that won’t get repeated here.
I was reminded of all
that when Jose Abreu of the White Sox hit a homerun Monday night in an 8-1 to
the A’s. Abreu had made an error—one of
four by the Sox in the game—and didn’t see any reason to act like he’d won the
World Series (or scored a meaningless touchdown in the way of countless players
for another Chicago team). How odd that
manager Rick Renteria thought otherwise.
Renteria explained to
reporters, “I told him, ‘Let me tell you something. It’s not necessarily the homer that you
celebrate. It’s the fact that you keep
fighting.” Wrong. Abreu knows what counts, just as my daughter
did, and does.
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