Rack 'Em Up

I went to a pool hall this afternoon to remind myself of my shortcomings. It's not really a self-esteem issue anymore - I have a fairly evolved sense of the cans and can'ts in my physical world. The whole hand/eye coordination thing has been a sore spot for me since I can remember.
I played a lot of right field. I'm always happier throwing a ball than catching it. Seeing how far or how long I can do something is a better test of my capablilities than how accurate I can be. If I work long and hard enough on a particular sequence of motions, I can usually approximate the look and feel pretty well as long as hitting the target isn't going to be required. Basketball was always kind of a laugh for me, until I figured out that with a hook shot, you really didn't have to be that good, you just had to find your spot. My hook shot was never truly graceful, but it did drop on enough occasions to win a game or two of HORSE.
Back at the pool hall, I tried to apply everything I could recall from watching "Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land" a dozen times in elementary school. I tried to connect what I knew about physics and all the times I watched "The Color of Money." I knew exactly what it should look like - but when the cue slid between my fingers, the result was generally a feeble roll across the table, dropping the cue ball as often as any of the balls I was supposed to hit. If I was looking to hustle anybody, they probably wouldn't have believed my best game enough to try to play me for money.
So this is probably why I continue to revel in spectator sports. I see these athletes as my surrogate hands and eyes. I grasp the innate physical difficulty of turning a double play, or sinking the eight ball off two rails in the corner pocket, but I can't truly conceive of it. I'll continue to work on my game - all of them in fact, since I've got an eight year old who doesn't care what my limitations might be. He just wants to play the game.