042 | INCHES ALL AROUND US (W3W) with Toby Brooks

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It is Word of the Third, my reflections on purpose, life, and growth.

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I'm Toby Brooks, speaker, author, professor, and forever student. Each week on Becoming Undone I bring you guests who have dared bravely, risked mightily, and grown relentlessly. High achievers who've transformed from falling apart to falling into place. But every third episode it's my turn to reflect, refine, and reprocess on Word to the Third. I'm super stoked to be back here with you today family. It has been a long hard summer around the house. We've still got about a month to go.

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Two things have happened this summer that I hadn't planned on that have really impacted my ability to get these shows cranked out.

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First, I'm in school again.

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Taking formal grad classes has really impacted me.

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It's been a big adjustment.

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Now, it's not a bad adjustment.

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It's just been more work than I expected to keep up with the papers and the projects and the tests.

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As a matter of fact, this episode today is being done partially out of procrastination. I've got an economics midterm that I really don't want to study for. The other thing that's happened has been baseball. My son Tay is heading into his senior year at Lubbock Christian High School. I've talked about him and his team on the show before. They won state in football and basketball last year and made the Final Four in baseball. Tay's first love is baseball, no doubt, and after a really solid junior year, he was on the fence for what to do for college.

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On one hand, he's considering going to Texas Tech to major in engineering.

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It's a large school, offers lots of options academically, but I think he knows that Big 12 baseball isn't what he was put on this earth to do.

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On the other hand, he could go to a smaller school and keep playing the game he's loved since he was two years old.

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It's a tough choice.

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He's played a little travel ball, but I wouldn't say a lot.

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He certainly hasn't done the whole showcase or college recruitment thing.

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So in order to try and keep his options open, he decided to go all in and play a full summer of travel ball.

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I'd gladly drop everything to watch either of my kids do what they love.

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This summer was no different.

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This summer, it was hard. He joined a team with very few players and coaches that he knew or knew him. I watched him deal with that first weekend of playing two or three innings of a game tops. He might get one at bat, hitting from the nine or the ten hole, and hardly got to pitch at all. It was humbling and if I'm real honest I took it harder and worse than he did. He kept plugging away though, doing what he does. My son has never been the real flashy type. He's always been kind of a team first guy. I can remember him consoling and coaching up teammates in the dugout when he was seven or eight years old. You think I'd learn my lesson about flashy by now so I'm gonna kind of take an aside. Once when I was in college I had a job at the Anderson Indiana YMCA as a youth sports coach. I coached six-year-olds playing soccer. Now that's a story for a few other episodes.

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But as the fall wore on, basketball season started.

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I had to pick my team from an open tryout of over 100 7 and 8 year olds.

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It was overwhelming.

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The tryout consisted of a free throw, a rebound, a layup, another rebound, and a dribble down the floor, ending with a 10 foot jump shot. From that limited assessment, me and eight or nine other guys had to pick our teams and we had those teams all season long. As I watched, I quickly developed a strategy. These were kids from all over town, all different walks of life. Some of them knew each other, some of them didn't, but how on earth am I gonna rank order 100 kids into my draft list? I started with a quick checklist.

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Dribbling, jump shot, speed.

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Then I added another box that I'd later regret.

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Gear.

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Today, we'd call it drip or swag.

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Some of the kids looked like ballers.

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They had matching Nike shorts and jerseys.

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The wristband pulled up to the elbow.

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New Jordans.

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If a kid was swagged out, I just made an assumption that he was probably a baller.

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And his mom or dad probably practiced with him more.

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Seemed logical to me.

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It was a disaster.

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I've rarely worked with a more spoiled, entitled, less coachable bunch than that squad of 8 or 9 northern Indiana youth who might have dressed the part but didn't really know how to act it just yet.

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So you'd think I would have learned my lesson, but I haven't.

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As a dad, I've always been about fitting my kids out with all the cool gear so they could look the part.

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But they've never really been super into it.

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Not my daughter Brennan and certainly not my son Tay. He just kept doing what he does. His abilities don't scream for your attention like most superstars. But if you watch him, and I don't think this is my dad goggles here, he does the little things really really well. He shows up on time, he gives consistent best effort, he picks his teammates up, he challenges them when they need it, but he's not the type to lift himself up by putting others down. Weekend after weekend, game after game, stuff started happening. He quickly adjusted to the pitching and he started hitting. He was hitting in the neighborhood of 600 from the plate. When he got opportunities on the mound, he threw well. He's a lefty who will work the corners and throw a lot of ground balls, he became a trusted part of the team's rotation.

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I could not have been prouder of him for the way he didn't complain or blame, and just slowly and steadily earned his way into being a big part of his new team's roster.

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From batting 10th and playing two or three innings in right field the first week of the season, to batting lead off and being the starting pitcher on Friday, he was confident, he was happy.

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That weekend he faced four batters in the top of the first.

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All were 18-year-olds and all are college commits for next season.

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One reached on an error, but he'd held one of the better teams we've faced all summer scoreless through one inning.

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He walked to the plate in the bottom of the first looking confident, but he quickly grew frustrated at two pitches that were clearly down being called strikes.

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He swung at the next pitch more out of self-defense than anything, because he absolutely hates strikeouts looking.

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He fouled it off, he winced in pain.

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I got a new lens for my camera and I was messing with it trying to get some good pictures of the at bat and in between I saw him kind of messing with his batting glove on his left hand. He finished the at bat, a strikeout swinging. I felt my pocket buzz shortly afterward as I went back from my spot on the third baseline to the bleachers. It was Tay. I think I broke my finger.

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I texted back, sigh, want me to look?

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I don't normally do the dugout dad stuff, and he never texts from the dugout, but it was serious.

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As he's gotten older, we've worked through some of his injuries together, and I think he's started to respect the fact that I once worked with Team USA, and for a while I'd worked in the minors. I think he trusts me, and I trust him enough to know that if it hurt bad enough for him to ask for help, it was probably pretty bad.

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Sure enough, I looked at it and it was already swollen. He'd been hit by that inside pitch on the index finger of his throwing hand. At best, he had a contusion that was gonna hurt for a few days. At worst, it was a fracture. At worst still, it was an unstable fracture. For a quick assessment, I was concerned that it was indeed broken, but he's tough. He wanted to try to throw with it first before we decided whether or not we needed to go for additional care.

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One pitch was all it took.

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I knew immediately that his summer season was over.

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One inch.

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One inch would have made all the difference.

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One inch further up the handle of his bat and it's a foul ball.

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Just like a thousand other foul balls he's hit in his career.

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One inch further outside and it doesn't hit him at all.

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One inch further inside and he doesn't swing defensively fearful of that dreaded third strike looking. In one of my favorite all-time sports movies any given Sunday, Al Pacino's character, pro football coach Tony D'Amato, talks about it in his locker room speech.

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Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small.

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I mean, one half a step too late or too early, and you don't quite make it.

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One half second too slow, too fast, you don't quite catch it.

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The inches we need are everywhere around us.

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They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second.

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On this team, we fight for that inch.

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On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch.

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We claw with our fingernails for that inch.

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Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's going to make the difference between winning and losing The difference between a season-ending injury and a base hit.

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The difference between a bruise that could use some ice and a fracture that would take five pins to correct.

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The difference between getting to enjoy the fruits of all the hard work and commitment of your summer and watching it evaporate in an instant.

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They had surgery yesterday.

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They did indeed put five pins in the proximal phalanx of the index finger of his throwing hand.

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His baseball season is indeed over, and the start of his football season is in doubt.

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But what I've seen my son do is, to me at least, extraordinary.

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No pouting, no sulking, no blaming.

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Instead, grit, determination, focus.

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So the next time something doesn't go my way, I try and remember my son and his willingness to look beyond the inches that could have been and embrace and crush the ones that are.

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♪♪♪Bricks and Buckets. Each week on Becoming Undone I reflect back on the highs and lows of my week in bricks and buckets. Bricks are attempts that miss the mark, while buckets sail through the net clean and true. It's like a basketball equivalent of roses and thorns or happies and crappies.

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My brick this week, other than the obvious, discussion board posts. Teachers, what are we doing with these terrible exercises and homework?

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Taking grad classes again has shown me life through the eyes of a student for the first time in a while, and I'll be honest, it can be pretty terrible.

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Mostly because of us teachers.

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Just stop with the research papers masquerading as organic conversations struck up with friends at some coffee shop.

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They aren't.

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And for all things holy, just stop with the mandated reply to x number of classmates.

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It is trash. Quit.

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My bucket this week? Tay finally got surgery.

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It was quite an ordeal to navigate the hellscape that can be the American health care and insurance system, but we did it. He's pinned, he's casted, and we can start rehabbing soon.

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He's gotten older, I've loved the time we spend together as I've worked on his various ailments. He's kind of injury prone.

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And this one's going to be no different. I will love every second of getting him back to full speed and strength. What about you? What are you working on or waiting for and what are you doing in the meantime to get better every day? I'd love to hear about it. Surf on over to Undone Podcasts and drop me a note. You can check the info for this episode out on UndonePodcasts.com backslash EP42. Also be sure to tune in for upcoming episodes as I've decided to 4-2 Also, be sure to tune in for upcoming episodes as I've decided to split a fantastic interview with former NBA player and SIU Saluki legend Chris Carr into my first ever two-part episode. Those will be dropping this week After that, we'll have motivational speaker and leadership expert Tim Kite as well as world-renowned strength coach Ron McKee This and more on becoming undone I'm Toby Brooks and this has been Word to the Third.

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Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype creative production written and produced by me Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience, victory, to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at Becoming Undone Pod and follow me at Toby J Brooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Till next time everybody, keep getting better.

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♪♪♪Bye.