“I’d have played for food money. I’d have played for free and worked for food. It was the game, the parks, the smells, the sounds. Have you ever held a bat or a baseball to your face? The varnish, the leather. And it was the crowd, the excitement of them rising as one, when the ball was hit deep. The sound was like a chorus. Then there was the chug-a-lug of the Tin Lizzies in the parking lot, and the hotels with their brass spittoons in the lobbies and the brass beds in the rooms. It makes me tingle all over like a kid on his way to his first double header, just to think about it.”
— Shoeless Joe Jackson
That, my friends, is love. That is how it feels when you are so deeply wound up in someone or something that every cell in your body turns into something it was never meant to be. Every chromosome on fire. Every mitochondrion thrumming. It doesn’t matter if it’s your childhood sweetheart or the mangy dog you found one night in the rain. A song. A story. A poem. The feeling is the same. And ideas are no different. When they are yours and when they are so perfect that they blind you with their intensity, that’s when you know the love that Shoeless Joe Jackson felt.
Not long ago, I was reading W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, which eventually was made into the movie Field Of Dreams. Early in the book, Jackson, arguably the greatest left fielder ever to play the game and one of the infamous eight players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series in the Black Sox scandal, was recounting his passion for the game. Passion. I know of no other way to describe it.
One of my daughter’s classmates at the Tisch School said one day that he had no other choice but to act. If he spent his entire life never having landed a part, he would have to act. Even if his only stage were the sidewalk. Even if he had to perform for pennies. It wouldn’t change a thing. That’s how much he loved acting. I suspect that had Shoeless Joe been destined for the footlights instead of the outfield, had he fell in love with the siren call of Hollywood instead of the crack of a bat, it would have made no difference.
Despite working his entire life as a writer, H.P. Lovecraft never made enough money to live on. So destitute was the master of weird fiction that he often had to skip meals to afford postage stamps. A planned project with Harry Houdini might have earned Lovecraft a great deal of money. Unfortunately, it all went up in smoke when Houdini died. Most of us would have jumped ship, preferring to eat over scribbling away at stories that never really went anywhere financially. Like Shoeless Joe Jackson, despite it all, Lovecraft’s love for those stories never faltered.
At Croke Park in Dublin on a Saturday night, a young Irish musician told a story of how, when he first moved to London aged 17 with dreams of becoming a singer, he felt completely out of his depth. The other artists he met were older, cooler, and had better songs. He, by contrast, was a gawky teenager with a shade of hair best described as Ron Weasley-red and arguably minimal fashion sense. In an industry where image counts for a great deal, what chance did he have? As it turned out, more than he thought. A wildly fierce love for music, for his music, for performing, for making it despite everything Ed Sheeran had going against him.
They say we’re living in a new era of creativity, that it’s the creatives who are suddenly the most important people in the room. And to a large extent, that’s true. But make no mistake. There are a lot of creatives of every stripe that have as much going against them as HP Lovecraft or Ed Sheeran. Ladies and gentlemen, years from now, wherever you might find yourself, in Los Angeles or London or New York or Boston or Davenport or Sioux Falls, will you know the kind of love for your chosen craft that Shoeless Joe Jackson, HP Lovecraft and Ed Sheeran did?
Will you see beyond the comings and goings of each day that passes and will you get carried away with the whole damn lot of it, every last sweet and sour moment of it? The late nights. The lost Sundays. The hack bosses. The bag of rancid peanuts that passes for a paycheck, for that is what it will surely be in those early weeks and months—and possibly even years.
For my friends in advertising, will you appreciate the drought times at The One Show and Cannes, the years when you will walk away empty-handed and empty-hearted from this show or that and will you watch on the same night as the buffoon down the hall walks away with everything? Will you still love the smell of the varnish? Will you still be able to show up at work the next morning and soldier on, working harder and longer and smarter than you did the day before?
I hope you will.
I hope you love it all. Embrace it all. Suck it all in and let it shape and form you into something amazing, something with depth and breadth and subtle variations in texture and color, the likes of which we’ve never seen. Love what you do. Love the highs and the lows and weave it all into what you are to become. Be blindly in love. Be Shoeless Joe. Hold the bat up to your face. Look at the grain. Feel it on your cheek. Smell the varnish. You’ll be better for it. We all will.
that military phrase "Embrace the Suck" comes to mind! As always, Ernie, thanks! i would really like to buy you a beer sometime :)