My First Love

It's the most wonderful thing in the world. Books have been written about it and movies have been attempted to captivate the beauty of it. It's America's pastime, baseball.

The national anthem stops, the crowd is cheering and the announcer rolling through his lineup cards, “Batting sixth and playing first base, senior number five, Nathan Mery.” If you have never played sports or done anything where they call your name in front of a crowd, you need to.

For fifteen years I strived to achieve perfection. It was something I wanted incredibly bad. It began when I was three years old. My dad would take me out in the front yard and teach his first born, his first son, how to play catch. I was too young to play organized t-ball; you had to be five years old. I cried and cried, so my dad signed me up the next season. From that moment I had found my place in the universe. I now knew what I was to be in life, a baseball player.

I sit here watching the college world series seeing a few friends from past teams playing. How I just wish I could step on the field. I wish I could have some horrible day, accident, or person to blame for why I'm not out on the field. There isn't anyone to blame. I can't point my finger in frustration and scream, “YOU!” If anyone is to blame, it must be me. Then I ask, “Why me?” My mom says, “Look to God, he has all the answers.” So I try, but there is no closure.

The other day I went outside to throw the football with my youngest brother. He's 15. It's been a year since I picked up a ball, let alone thrown one. It felt good. My arm catapulting my hand which released the ball into flight. It flew between twenty and twenty-five yards, but that isn't important. I was throwing. For a moment it brought new hope.

It was a beautiful day! I remember it being sunny, very hot (Texas hot!) and the Austin High Maroons were playing for a state championship. It was an exciting game; we played well, but not good enough. The final score was four to two in favor of Midland. After the game a man in a Texas Rangers hat and shirt walked up to me and asked a few questions: “Where are you going to college?” and “Have you thought about joining a wood bat league for the summer?” I didn't know what to say, so I answered truthfully. Then he had me fill out a page about my personal information—where do you live, your birth date, position, and some other stuff. Afterwards, I didn't know what to think. I look in my hand and there is a business card from a professional scout.

“HOLY SHIT!” There is no way that just happened. Finally, the one dream every boy has growing up, to be a big leaguer. A couple weeks later the Major League Baseball draft took place. After thirty or so rounds of my name never coming up, it was time to come back down to earth. I had to find a college to go to.

I'm sitting in the doctor's office after last weeks festivities of getting an MRI, NVT, EMG, and a doplar test all on my left arm and shoulder. He comes in knowing already what all the tests results say. How do doctors do their job? My problem isn't life threatening, but some cases are. How can they be ice cold when telling a patient that they are going to die? My injury isn't going to cause my physical death, but the moment he told me baseball would no longer be a part of my life, I died! “Nate, you have ligament damage in your shoulder and we cannot tell exactly until we get in there. Also, you look to have some irritation in your elbow, most likely bone spurs. Now, this we can fix, but you won't be able to play competitive baseball again.” Now that doesn't sound so bad, does it?

I arrive at the surgery center and the doctor goes over the operation one last time before he does it. I get a few shots and fall asleep.

Every athlete, no matter what level of play, thinks about the day when they will have to give up doing what they love so much. It will come to an end. You can't play forever. They will tell you, “I've known this day will come and I have prepared for it.” Bullshit! I didn't know when it would come! I didn't prepare for it in any way. It jumps out and surprises you like a mugger in an alley way. Afterwards you feel distraught; you don't know what to do. Every day prior to this you would go to practice and workout with your teammates, your friends. Then, one day, you do not belong in that group any more.

All my life I have been a baseball player. That's who Nathan Mery was. After four surgeries (two on my right shoulder, one on my left shoulder, and one on my left elbow) I have had to take the nineteen years of creating the person I wanted to be and throw it all away. This was a very difficult process. Many arguments arose almost everyday with the people who love me and I love back. My mom would call and say, “You don't seem like the Nathan we all know…You're not being yourself.” How can I? I don't know who to be if I can't play baseball.

After many weeks of feeling depressed, or maybe just feeling sorry for myself, during my sophomore year at Southwestern I decided that I needed to move on. There was a whole new life for me and I needed to realize that.

May 19, 2003. I came home after having my surgeries on my shoulder and elbow. It's not fun going through the surgical process. It's almost been month and I still can't sleep, move my arm, or get comfortable anywhere I go. The doctor told me it would take nine weeks for my shoulder to heal. NINE WEEKS!

What people don't understand is that physical therapy rehabilitation is one of the most difficult and frustrating objectives to conquer. Imagine your mind knowing what your arm is supposed to do and you are telling your arm to lift, but no matter how hard you concentrate nothing happens. Your arm no longer recognizes a movement like the one you want. That's disheartening!

Baseball was the one thing I could count on. When life was at its worst I could play baseball. Once I stepped between the foul lines there was nothing but a baseball game going on in the world at that moment. I respected that game and played the best I could every moment I could. Surgery has created a new life for me. Fishing, golf, law, reading. These are things which I thought I wouldn't be doing until I got old.

Just as death comes to all, sports will come to an end for every athlete. It's just a matter of when. A part of me has died, but a new part has continued to grow.

Personal narrative journalism was a new landmark for me to conquer. I have always been a good story teller, but putting my story into words on paper has never been an easy thing. If anyone who reads this does not come away with the fact that baseball was a very large part of my life, there is something wrong with you. Today I still feel the same way about the game. I tried to incorporate the majesty of the game and my feelings about this experience in the first paragraph of the paper. My surgeries happened past and present. In my writing I wanted to give the reader a feeling that there was two different lives: an ending of one and a beginning of another.

My surgeries have been an immense influence on my life not only taking away baseball, but changing the way I handle events in my life. There is life after sports. A concept many athletes have a problem dealing with. The reporting involved to create this paper was a difficult search back into feelings, memories, and emotions of a past that I have loved to forget and re-embrace at the same time. Personal narratives cause the author to research something they would not normally share to the public. I am happy to have had this opportunity to tell my story.