Fire in My Belly

I found this in an old note, in a book I started at a gym in February 2014 and never finished:

I was very good at football because I had a fearless attitude instilled in me by my dad from a very young age. He always told me that I needed to have a "fire in my belly."

I'd forgotten I wrote that. I hadn't forgotten the phrase.

What he actually gave me

My dad died of cancer on 25 September 2004, when I was nineteen.

The last time I saw him was in a hospital in Phoenix, on my way out of town. My mom and I were driving twenty-two hours to Pullman, Washington, where I had a full scholarship waiting at Washington State. I stopped at the hospital knowing it was the last time I'd see him, and then I got in the car and went, because staying would have meant missing my first semester and he'd have been furious with me for it.

Three weeks later he was gone. A week before that, Washington State's doctors had told me my hip was finished and I should stop playing competitive baseball altogether.

I've written a lot about my mother — she raised my brother and me on her own, she was the loud one in the stands, she wanted a log cabin up north and I wanted the big leagues partly so I could buy it for her. She died the following summer, a week and a half after she and I sat together in a meeting about what my life would look like after my hip replacement.

I've written less about my dad, and I think it's because what he gave me is harder to point at. It wasn't attendance. It was one sentence, repeated until it stuck.

Fire in my belly.

Why it lasted

Here's what I've come to think about that phrase, twenty-two years after the last time he said it to me.

It isn't about intensity. Plenty of people are intense and it burns off in a year. What he was actually describing is the thing that's still there on the day nobody is watching, when there is no season, no roster, no one who would notice if you didn't.

I've had a lot of days like that. Twelve consecutive Mondays riding a bike to a coach's office to ask for a chance he never gave me. Rehabbing a replaced hip alone, in a city where I knew almost nobody, with no medical insurance and no parents. Getting told no by four professional organizations for a reason that had nothing to do with how I threw.

None of those days had an audience. That's exactly when the phrase does its work.

The part I want to say plainly

I don't think my dad knew he was giving me the thing that would carry me through his own death, my mother's, a hip replacement at nineteen, and being told no more times than I can count.

He was just a guy telling his kid to compete harder.

That's the part I find hardest to get across when people ask me about mindset, and it's why I'm suspicious of most of what gets sold as mindset work. The stuff that lasts is rarely the stuff that was delivered as A Lesson. It's four words a parent says a hundred times without thinking, and then one day you're forty-one and still throwing, and you notice they're still in there.

I coach kids now. I have no idea which of the things I say to them will be the one that lasts, and neither do you about yours.

Say the good one a hundred times anyway.