by Josh Wilker
Before: the user’s vulnerable natural state.
After: the bulked up unbeatable behemoth.
After-after: a sallow man-boobed outpatient wearing an Aunt Jemima kerchief to hide alarming purplish lesions and hair loss; or court hearings, beady-eyed denials, a noxious misting aura of generalized shame; or simply a vanishing, in its wake a mockery, the vision of an unbeatable monstrosity now lampooned as a fraud, an unparalleled disappointment, retroactive asterisks blooming into a stinging poisonous swarm.
In my case the first picture, the Before, would show me watching my newborn cry on a cold metal table as a hospital orderly cleans him of blood. I’m the only one watching, as my wife in that moment is plowed under by exhaustion and pain and the after-effects of spinal anesthetics and terrifying intravenous visions of plastic trees and, more specifically, is in that moment getting the deep rips in her vagina sown up. It’s just me, and I’m happy and worried and want my son to stop wailing, but how? In the next picture, the After, I would be—what? Crushing a fastball six hundred feet? Breaking the world record in the one hundred–meter dash? What would be the very picture of undefeatable fatherhood? All the bills paid, all the broken things fixed, all the heavy things carried to where they need to be, all the dishes washed, all the laundry folded, all the worries calmed, all the struggles and burdens shouldered, all the joys spotless, unmarred. A happy wife, a son always laughing, a growing mountain of money in the bank. Who gives a shit about the after-after? I have been weak too long; make me powerful now. Make me into the vision of Tony Mandarich, the most powerful protector who ever lived. Many years after this vision was punctured, in a 2008 interview with the Arizona Republic, Tony Mandarich, the man, distilled the draw of steroids to one word:
Q: How did the steroids make you feel?
A: Bulletproof.
This kind of power, the power of certainty, invulnerability, is most often manifested throughout our asterisked world in fantasies of unstoppable disruption. This doesn’t quite mesh with the core demands of fatherhood. Being a father is like being an offensive lineman. You stand guard, try to keep all manner of attacks at bay. Pressure is so constant as to be itself invisible, impossible to locate and defeat. When I try to describe the feeling of failure in fatherhood I can’t point to anything specific beyond that pressure of always either being nowhere at all or in defeat. I want to grow so incredibly strong that I not only withstand the pressure but go on the attack against it. I pancake that motherfucker. I eat its soul! I am Tony Mandarich before his fall, Tony Mandarich, huge and fearless, the dream of Tony Mandarich, bulletproof.
So when I hear those words.
Some people know how to win and some don’t. They don’t have any winners.
When I hear those words I turn the corner, and I’m the vision of Tony Mandarich. I drive the two longtime residents of my mind, the celebrated soccer coach and his spike-haired disciple, down the hallway and through a cinder block wall and out across the snowy fields, and they’re screaming and begging for mercy, and I drive them right off the edge of the fucking earth. Then I pancake that motherfucking void. I eat its soul! I am Tony Mandarich before his fall, Tony Mandarich huge and fearless, the dream of Tony Mandarich, bulletproof, annihilating doubt. I am in the freezing drizzle on a cold Sunday in January, roaring, driving my shoulder again and again into the back bumper of a gray 2005 Ford Focus that will not move.
Marinovich, Marv
See Marinovich, Todd
Marinovich, Todd
If I manage to get any truth at all into this alphabetization, let it be that every morning when I woke and dragged myself out of bed and moved toward the bedroom door I turned back before leaving the room and saw the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: my wife and son together, safe in sleep. Their chests rose and fell with slow, calm breaths. I opened the door and stepped with care over the cardboard and vacuum cleaner barricade we’d set up to try to keep the cats from scratching on the door. I wanted to protect the fragile, beautiful sleep. I want to protect my son’s beauty. I want it to endure so that he sees it in himself always and so that his whole life unfolds in some kind of dance of beauty and not, as mine has, in a meandering arrhythmic series of retreats and hesitant lunging mistakes. But it’s unavoidable. Everyone is bound to a life of mistakes. This was easier to accept before I became a father. But when I began starting every day by seeing the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, I fell into the hope that beauty can endure. This is a core hope of fatherhood, the basis of every father’s attempt to steer his child away from the kinds of mistakes he made.
There’s a mug shot of Todd Marinovich taken from just a few months before he became a father. After many years of ravaging drug addiction the former NFL first-round draft pick had finally gotten sober, but the pressure of the impending birth of his first child, a son, caused him to relapse, and he was arrested for failing to report to a court-mandated drug treatment program. In the mug shot it’s hard to see beauty. See pain, see doubt. See a father. See Marinovich, Marv. See the man whose failure to stick in the NFL in the 1960s inspired him to devote his life to training techniques, to discovering how and why he failed, who applied all he learned about maximizing athletic potential to the relentless training from infancy of his son, Todd, to be a beautiful football superstar. See crippling pressure. See obsession. See a father who sees himself as valuing his role as a father above all else in life.
“Some guys think the most important thing in life is their jobs, the stock market, whatever,” Marv Marinovich once said. “To me, it was my kids. The question I asked myself was, ‘How well could a kid develop if you provided him with the perfect environment?’”
How could you fault someone for valuing fatherhood above all else? How could you fault someone for valuing his son’s development and for wanting to create a perfect environment? You could parse the man’s statement and perhaps take issue with the language, the way it is subtly casting children into the role of commodities, equivalent to the products of a job or a stock market killing. You could even raise questions about the idea of perfection, how striving for such a thing is always going to lead to unrealistic idealizations, which in turn will lead everyday life into continuous disappointment.
It’s a little unfair to pick apart the word choices of a father ready to try as hard as possible to do what he thinks is right for his kids. Still, I find myself going along with everyone else in wanting to vilify Marv Marinovich. He’s worse than us, right? He’s worse than I am as a father, right? Surely his mistakes are beyond the scope of any I could ever make. This is probably true, simply because, when you get right down to it, I am half-assed. Thank fucking god I’m half-assed. Thank god I am someone prone to giving up and giving in and not really trying my hardest, someone always looking for the easy way out and hoping every day above all for an easy time of it and to eat twenty chocolate chip cookies and drink whiskey and have a nap and watch TV. To make a really big mistake, you have to do something. The only thing that separated Marv Marinovich from other loving fathers was a total unbending commitment to his goals. He was and is great at what he does, and what he does is train elite athletes, such as Troy Polamalu, Tyson Chandler, and Jason Giambi. Another of his trainees, B. J. Penn, arguably the greatest pound-for-pound mixed-martial arts fighter ever, summed up Marv Marinovich’s talents: “I honestly believe nobody has dedicated their life to athletic performance more than he has. He is the best I have ever seen in my life when it comes to sports performance.”
The passion and genius he brought to his calling were based in personal failure, in his own inability to last in the NFL. He had been a college star, but upon entry into the NFL he overtrained with no subtlety, lifting more and more weights, which caused him to become too bulky and slow and to injure himself. After this failure he studied Eastern Bloc training methods and became a visionary believer in flexibility and speed. When his son Todd arrived, he wanted what all fathers want: to
see their children succeed where they had failed.
When Todd Marinovich was born he was beautiful, surely, just like all babies are, at least to their parents, and this beauty endured and manifested in the world thanks, in a way, to his father and thanks to Todd Marinovich’s own brutal devotion and sacrifice. The father started working with the son in the crib with exercises designed to improve strength and flexibility. The training never relented. By the time Todd Marinovich was in high school he was nationally famous as “Robo Quarterback,” a reference to the movie Robocop. The stunningly exhaustive, unrelenting practice regimen designed by the father and embraced seemingly without hesitation by the son, coupled with the son’s record-breaking on-field performance, suggested a teenager somehow beyond human weakness and doubt.
The standard story about Todd Marinovich jump-cuts from this vision of metallic teenage invulnerability to a montage of controversy, failure, squandering, strife: a bitter rift with his college coach; his resulting early departure from college; his predraft bust for cocaine; his brief, drug-addled NFL career; his many years of criminal arrests, wandering, and vagrancy; his occasional stabs at more football in the Canadian Football League and the Arena League, the former undertaken at least in part with hope that it would be a steppingstone back to the NFL and the latter purely to scrounge up money to buy heroin. The moral of this montage is usually: see Marinovich, Marv. See the results of an overwhelming pressure for perfection, for beauty, that the father exerted on the son.
I vaguely remember watching Todd Marinovich play in college for USC and remember that the nickname that had been pinned on him didn’t seem to fit. Robo Quarterback implied the stiff motions of the relentless half-cyborg in Robocop, but Todd Marinovich wasn’t stiff at all. You can see what I’m talking about in his most famous on-field moment, the winning play in a legendary 1990 shootout against UCLA. With nineteen seconds on the clock and his team down by four and twenty-three yards from the end zone, a tall lefty takes a snap, darts backward, sets, and, an eye-blink before getting leveled by a blitzing defender, fires a perfect spiral to receiver Johnnie Morton in the back corner of the end zone. The scoring play begins and ends in an instant, but that instant is a distillation of a lifetime of passion, practice, sacrifice, blessings. There’s balance, speed, precision, vision, poise—all things that could perhaps be programmed into a robot—but there’s also bravery and a racing, human fuck-you rhythm (encased in emphatic permanence in the aftermath by a photo of Todd Marinovich, still on the turf, giving a UCLA defender the finger), and everything is electrified by lightning-bolt grace. See ease under pressure. See a conduit for beauty.
See the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. My wife and son together, sleeping, my wife on the edge of our bed, Jack in a bassinet beside her. Sometimes her arm rested on the edge of the bassinet, her fingers touching his rising and falling chest. She breastfed him during the night, and sometimes when I left the room and looked back they would still be together on the bed, my wife still on the edge but turned inward, toward Jack, who was in the middle, curled toward his mother and she toward him, two parts of one being, the gentlest and most beautiful being alive. I had just been part of that beauty, on the other side of Jack, another layer of cocooning warmth and protection around him.
One day in January the cold eased up enough so I could take Jack to the beach. I carried him against my chest. When we got to the lake I turned sideways so he could look out at the water. Another father was nearby, his daughter in a stroller. We exchanged the usual info: names of babies, number of months the babies have been in the world. The two babies had been born within a week of one another, both about six months old now.
“It’s brutal right now, huh?” the father said. “Getting them to sleep in their room alone. Every night, just a battle.”
“He’s, uh, still in our room,” I said. “He’s still . . . ” I paused, as if the word I was about to say was something unseemly. “He’s still breastfeeding.”
“Oh yeah?” the guy said. “Really. Huh.”
I began to realize that we were going to be the weird ones. Right around then a billboard went up in a nearby city, Milwaukee I think. We must have seen it online, a photo of a baby sleeping next to a large, gleaming meat cleaver. I forget the exact words of the accompanying caption, but it was something like, “You wouldn’t let your baby sleep with a knife, so why would you let her sleep in the same bed with you?”
Abby and I laughed it off, the shrill conflation in the billboard of the risk factors in cosleeping (smoking, drinking, formula feeding, mushy mattresses, puffy comforters, etc.) with cosleeping itself, the benign, survival-supporting norm for the vast majority of the many centuries of human life on earth. But it was just another hint that we were starting to make choices that were veering us and our son away from the beaten path. Before Jack arrived I assumed without even thinking about it that I’d be the farthest thing from Marv Marinovich. I assumed I would not be a father making consciously unusual choices for his son. I assumed things would just flow along the path of normalcy, that such a path would present itself as the way to go simply because it was the way most people were going, like when you get off the subway and don’t know the direction of the exit and so just fall in step with the crowd. But it wasn’t like that. It was more like the line of scrimmage was crumbling. You scramble, try to see.
Mathematically Eliminated
See Playing Out the String.
Mendoza Line, the
I tried to see another book. My Big Idea for a Mark Fidrych masterwork was dead, but another Big Idea grew out of it. I’d been clinging to one thing I’d learned during the brief frenzy of research on the Bird: in 1980, while in the minors and trying to make a comeback, he had undergone treatment from a hypnotist. That story floated out of my imaginary Fidrych biography and into a story of the 1980 baseball campaign, which seemed, the more I thought about it, to be an unsung and highly valid choice as the most exciting year in baseball history. It featured two blistering divisional races, a rookie sensation so colorful as to rival the 1976 unveiling of the Bird, the Bird himself embracing hypnosis in bush league desperation, a hidden but pervasive influx of cocaine, the unveiling of Billy Ball, a golden-haired superstar flirting with a .400 batting average, and, finally, a World Series championship for a team that had never before, in all ninety-seven years of its existence, finished the year on top. I came up with a title and a sprawling subtitle: The Highest Season: Racing for the Pennant, Chasing .400, Philly Soul, Super Joe, and Blow.
This Big Idea fizzled even quicker than the previous one. I scrawled lists of people I should interview, but then within a few days of creating these lists I crumpled them up and tossed them. What, was I suddenly David Halberstam? When would I even conduct these interviews with Dallas Green and José Cruz? During my half-hour lunch break at work? While holding a screaming baby?
And yet I couldn’t stop researching it for a while. The last thing I clung to from that year was not its pinnacle, embodied by that famous shot of reliever Tug McGraw leaping with joy the moment the long-suffering Phillies won the World Series, but its nadir, the Seattle Mariners, who lost a league-high 103 games. I was drawn to the fact that during this disastrous effort Mariners shortstop Mario Mendoza had the strongest year of his career with the bat, and yet this personal best made no impact on the fortunes of his team. Worse, it seems likely that the 1980 season was the one in which Mendoza’s name started to become synonymous with poor hitting.
Most histories of that term bearing his name, the Mendoza Line, trace its origins to 1979, when Mendoza’s Seattle teammate Bruce Bochte noticed that the shortstop always seemed to be at the bottom of the Sunday batting averages, next to a mark hovering around .200, sometimes just above, sometimes just below. Bochte coined the term to describe the border demarcated by a batting average of .200. Seattle teammate Tom Paciorek then passed the term along to George Brett, and Brett (who would spend the 1980 season
in serious pursuance of the polar opposite of the Mendoza Line, the .400 mark that has proven itself elusive to every major league hitter since 1941) passed it along to ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman, who passed it along to the world. ESPN aired its first broadcast in September 1979, so even if Berman had debuted the term during the last month of the 1979 season, it seems probable, given the term’s newness and the fledgling network’s limited reach, that the notion of the Mendoza Line wouldn’t have begun taking root in the culture until 1980.
I was twelve that year, which perhaps explains my adult urge to freeze it in book form. It was my last year in little league, the year I was one of the big kids in our small town, the year I hit a home run and made the All-Star team. It was the last year, given this modest athletic success, in which I knew with any encyclopedic certainty who I was. From there the defeats began to proliferate, fortifying the idea that I was in some way made for defeat. This idea has endured. Consider what consumed me throughout the beginning of my new life as a father. I was drawn to the idea of a scuffling Mark Fidrych trying to be hypnotized into believing he still had electric stuff. I was drawn to the Mendoza Line.
I’m drawn to defeat. When does something like that take hold? Maybe sometime after 1980, but maybe in some ways it started before that. My faulty memory only goes back so far. Before memory, according to a few pictures, there was a fat, startled baby. Before that, life on a cellular level, no consciousness whatsoever, just one tiny cell splitting into two, then two into four, and so on. Before that, who knows? All we can consider is life, and life is a constant process of denigration, of division, of one thing splitting into two. The dawn of consciousness is a grasping of this process of division, of duality. There is self and other, good and bad, right and wrong, life and death, winning and losing. It’s a wound, duality. Maybe you find ways to numb the division inside, that feeling that you’re not quite cutting it, that you’re falling below some sort of definitive threshold or, worse, that there’s not even a threshold, that there are no definitions or directions, no borders, no lines, that there’s not even a falling.