Rain Outs
Hate 'em. Always have, always will.
My dad liked art, but especially sports related prints. He owned a few but did not prefer pieces that featured real athletes as the subjects. “Sometimes those people end up being someone that you don’t necessarily want to have on your wall, maybe they change teams or end up not being that great.”1 When we were going through some of his things after he passed away, I ended up with a print that had been hung in a few different places in different offices. The subject was a team of little leaguers sitting in a dugout. It’s beautifully done and nicely framed, but the more that I looked at it, the more I realized that I couldn’t put it up. Why? The title says it all. “The Rain Out2”.
Nothing throughout my lifetime has more predictably put a knot in my stomach or a clinch in my teeth quite like rain on the day of a sporting event. My friend Neil and I discussed this in depth when my wife and I played in a beginners USTA mixed doubles league. Our team was scheduled to play in “regionals” at a junior college an hour and a half away. The forecast was for storms most of the day. Due to the nature of these leagues and tournaments, not everyone had to show up every time. I agreed to play early on a weekday morning, while Marianna would play during a later window3. I got that sick feeling the night before, hoping against all odds that the forecasted storm system would blow through quickly or dissipate. It didn’t. We showed up and hit balls for about 5 minutes dry, about 3 minutes in that ominous mist, and then went to our cars just outside the chain-link fence. I scanned the facility for those squeegee rollers that can be used to dry the courts.
“Ok,” I thought, “If this stops by 7:45 and we start rolling the courts, and then it doesn’t rain for like an hour, then we could start by…”[crash of lightning]
“Ok, if this is the same as a public pool, then we will have to wait for like 30 minutes after the last thunder until…” [black clouds darken the skies]
We could barely see our team director through our windshield wipers as she spoke to the tournament officials. She looked at us, pointed to her watch, and then did the twirling finger in the air motion, like an umpire signaling home run. This of course meant, “It’s going to be a while… if at all”.
We drove to Waffle house and had coffee and talked about our chances of playing that day and who needed to leave for afternoon work or carpool commitments. We eventually descended into the type of small talk that comes up with people that you have only known for a few hours each week for the last month, mostly at distances around 78 feet4. These people were not nearly as unsettled as I was, this was no time for small talk.
When I played High School football, I hated the rain because I played quarterback and really didn’t like the prospect of throwing a wet ball, or worse, not throwing the ball as much because of the conditions. I refused to believe them and resented it when teammates would act excited about a rainy game, “This is true football weather.” It’s not.5
For me, the worst of the weather disruptions were those that are represented in this painting. As a kid I would have laid out my uniform the night before, donned it at first light, and waited on plastic-cleated tiptoes for my mom to drive me to the ballpark. I needed those times each week. Nothing was more exciting to me than a chance to compete “for real”.
Spring time is here. Last night Henry (my 11 year old, red headed middle child) had a soccer game cancelled due to wet fields, even though it had not rained all day. He was so bummed.
“They told us that they would cancel if it rained anymore, but it didn’t rain again, and they cancelled anyway. They shouldn’t give us false hope,” he said with a groan.
This was one of those moments when you see some of yourself in your children – in a way that makes you feel connected to them in a deeper way, but without the anguish of it being some semi-destructive pattern that you wish neither of you possessed, and that you are afraid you caused and are exacerbating in them by your parenting.
“I wish I could fix it for you, Henry,” I thought. The rain, not the disappointment. Never lose that!
I have always lived in places where rain tends to include the threat of lightning and soil tends to not drain quickly. It is a bad combination for people like me and Henry.
During our 6 weeks in Scotland (2023) we did not have much rain, for some reason. You heard me correctly. I only removed my rain gear from my golf bag long enough to put it on once during the 6 weeks we were there. I wore it for two holes and replaced it. We had a drizzle here and there, but somehow, we never felt robbed of any fun. I even joked about it with locals a few times, “We feel a little cheated out of the full Scottish experience.”
We were so conditioned by the lack of “conditions” that on our very last night in the country, it never occurred to us to grab a raincoat or an umbrella on our way out to dinner. We stayed in Edinburgh late enough to miss the last bus from the train station to our hotel in Burntisland. Not far into what would be a several mile walk, the rain came. As we walked through the wetness, I wondered if we would be able to get our clothes even semi-dry before we had to stuff them into bags for our full day of air travel.
As we rounded a corner, I heard sounds that I did not expect. People were playing soccer (football) under the lights at a city park, people were walking their dogs and sitting on park benches. People were exercising. Did they wish that it was not raining? Probably, but it was as normal to them as pine-pollen on my back porch. Does it bother me? Yes. Does it keep me from going outside, sometimes, but usually not. The rain in Scotland that night produced no lightning and maybe just a little mud, but not enough to ruin your plans.
What brings all of this to mind for me today? I woke up with the same pit in my stomach as I had last night for Henry. About once a year my shoulder hurts bad enough for me to NOT play golf. It is not usually this time of year, and it is usually not SO bad that I won’t at least try to “play through it”. But today with The Masters two weeks away, I keep having that feeling that I am going to miss some chances to play and there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s the same feeling deep in my insides. What is the feeling. Helplessness? Maybe. A tinge of resentment? Sure. But mostly I just know it as “that feeling.”
So back to the painting. Remembering that my friend Neil and I connected over the emotional impact that “Rain-Outs” had on us as kids (and as adults), I asked if he would like to hang the painting in his law office. He accepted and did for a while, until I fetched it back to give to my brother to be hung in his son’s bedroom.
Emotion is what makes good art. There are lots of paintings of baseball teams and lots of paintings of rainy weather. What happened on this canvas was the special combination of those two things in a way that somehow subtly gives me that ache. But it also occurred to me that like my dad always said, “If you have a painting of someone real, there may become a time when you realize that you are not a fan of them for one reason or another.”
I guess that is what happened here. It is not the little ball players or the coach that I associate with disappointment, it’s the other character. The rain when you don’t need it is not someone that I will ever think fondly of in my heart.
My dad had a Normal Rockwell print of Brooks Robinson signing a baseball for a kid. Brooks Robinson was someone who would never be in that category for my dad.
We were on the same league team but not always on the same doubles team.
78’ is the length between baselines on a standard tennis court. Pickle-ballers these days can obviously get to know each other better at 44 feet.
I have learned in golf to embrace the conditions or else you will inevitably play worse. It is better to pretend that you love them and that you think they give you an advantage. I will accept this mind-game as a valid reason for verbalizing that you “like the rain”.