It’s pretty obvious from this site that I like to watch, talk and write about sports. If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. But I also like to play sports. In fact, in almost all cases, I’d rather play than watch. There are many reasons, all the standard ones, why I love to play sports – competition, exercise, winning, teammates, improving, etc. There is one more motivator though that you hear much less about. I don’t think people talk about it as much, because it’s something that’s rare, fleeting and unplanned. These are those special moments where everything comes together just right so that you perform flawlessly without even thinking about what you are doing. I’m not talking about a great game or season, but just one play where your body does exactly as it should while your mind focuses only on the goal of the movement, not the movement itself.
Every sport has these moments. Some sports naturally produce more, sports like tennis or golf that are a constant repetition of similar moments. In other sports, they are much more rare, maybe happening only a few times in a career.
In golf, a pure moment is one of those rare (for me) drives or fairway irons where you don’t even feel the club hit the ball. The ball rises in a majestic arc, flying down the fairway perfectly straight, as if you’d shot it out of a bow. These are the shots that make you want to come back and play again, forgetting those half dozen chili dips and three putts.
For runners, these are the moments where you no longer feel your legs – no fatigue, no impact. You are floating above the earth, not thinking about your feet, but only about your speed and direction. You change speed as easily and effortlessly as if you were pressing the accelerator in a Ferrari.
In basketball, I occasionally have these moments when I’m curling up from the baseline, maybe to catch a pass at the free throw line. As I catch the ball, I simultaneously turn, set my feet, jump, align and shoot. As soon as I release the ball, I know it’s in. I swear I can feel the ball on its arc, like I’m floating along with it the whole way to the rim. My follow through is me just softly dunking the ball through the rim. As soon as the play ends, the feeling goes away, although I can feel the energy for a while afterward, an extra jolt of adrenaline.
The reason I’m bringing all of this up is that I had just such a moment this past weekend playing soccer. Soccer is a difficult sport for this sort of thing, because for a play to be significant, it has to be a goal or at least a great shot and those things are rare. I don’t score goals like I used to, so I can’t remember the last time I had a pure soccer moment.
In this game, I had just come in the game as a forward. The opposing team hit a bad goal kick right to me, about 35 yards out and right in the center of the field. I knocked the ball down with my first touch and my brain immediately screamed SHOOT! That’s always my brain’s first reaction, trained after years of being a striker in youth soccer. Well, like I said, I don’t score goals like I used to, so my older, wiser conscience stepped in and suggested we consider the alternatives. There were two defenders in front of me, about 20 yards away and another to my right and a bit in front of me. My other forward was up and to my left, near one of the other defenders. The rest of my teammates were behind me. As I stepped to the ball, I realized that a dribble would put me in a situation where all three defenders would likely converge on me at the same time. A pass might work, but he really wasn’t in a better position than I was. No, my instincts were right; the best play really was a shot. So, I hit it. I hadn’t trapped the ball dead off the hard goal kick, so it was still bouncing a few inches off the ground. As soon as I hit it, I knew. I had hit it perfectly. I barely even felt the impact; I had struck it right in the sweet spot – it wasn’t going to swerve in any direction and it wasn’t going to rise, as most of my old man kicks do now. The only chance for failure was the goalkeeper, but I looked up to see him several yards out in the middle of the box. He hadn’t reacted immediately, so he now had no chance as the ball rocketed by him into the top of the goal – a beautiful 25 yard strike.
Now, don’t think I’m bragging here. I’m fully aware of meager worth of bragging about goals in men’s C league soccer – one of seven goals in this game mind you – a game my team lost. No, what really struck me about it was just the feeling of hitting that ball so perfectly. I haven’t had that feeling on a soccer field in a long time and it felt great. I went to bed a few nights in a row still seeing that shot in my mind. If I knew I could feel that even once a season, I’d play forever.
That’s what these moments of purity are. They are not our motivation for playing. You don’t go out to play because of these rare events. But they are why you play again.