Page 33 - Demo

whiffleball. Even as I grew older and competed at a higher and higher level, he could still rear back and throw the ball by me if he decided I was getting too cocky. I remembered games of catch where I’d ask him to “throw it as hard as you can!” only for him to zip one in and bruise my fingers. “You okay?” he’d ask, not understanding that I was on cloud nine, filing away this newest evidence that my dad was a superhero.
Move fast and break things.
And then he tore his right rotator cuff. It had been a brutal blow for me, depriving me of my training buddy for months on end. Far more importantly though, it was an unimaginable blow for him. He ended up opting for surgery—a decision he’d later reveal he regretted—setting him up for a nearly year-long rehabilitation process with no guarantee of full recovery. Still, he has always been one of the most determined people I’ve known. I watched him grimace and shudder his way through hours and hours of small-scale exercises, accepting the challenge and seeming to meet it head-on. While to me it had felt like a long time, he was back to tossing me batting practice sooner than I could have hoped; underhanded at first, but quickly I was getting live-ball overhand tosses, noticeably slower than before, but still accurate and consistent. I imagined that, given enough time to nurse the injury, he'd be back to his typical superhuman self: kicking ass at Cross-Fit and embarrassing me with blinding fastballs in whiffleball. And that’s about when he tore his other rotator cuff. It was the second one that broke him, even more mentally than physically. Sometimes I wished he would have taken some of that bitterness out on us, instead of saving all the resentment for himself.