Imperfect: An Improbable Life

Amazon.com Price: $13.49 (as of 10/10/2019 23:43 PST- Details)

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Description

“Honest, touching, and beautifully rendered . . . Far more than a book about baseball, this is a deeply felt story of triumph and failure, dreams and disappointments. Jim Abbott has hurled another gem.”—Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling writer of Luckiest Man
 
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
 
Born without a right hand, Jim Abbott dreamed of sooner or later being a great athlete. Raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who encouraged him to compete, Jim would develop into an ace pitcher for the University of Michigan. But his journey was only beginning: By twenty-one, he’d won the gold medal game at the 1988 Olympics and—without spending a day in the minor leagues—cracked the starting rotation of the California Angels. In 1991, he would finish third in the voting for the Cy Young Award. Two years later, he would don Yankee pinstripes and pitch one of the crucial dramatic no-hitters in major-league history.
 
In this honest and insightful book, Jim Abbott reveals the challenges he faced in becoming an elite pitcher, the insecurities he dealt with in a life spent as the different one, and the intense emotion generated by his encounters with disabled children from around the country. With a riveting pitch-by-pitch account of his no-hitter providing the ideal frame for his story, this unique athlete offers readers an ordinary and unforgettable memoir.
 
“Compelling . . . [a] big-hearted memoir.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“Inspirational.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
Includes an exclusive conversation between Jim Abbott and Tim Brown behind the book.

Amazon Exclusive: Essay by Jim Abbott

He wouldn’t say it exactly, because precision with words wasn’t his specialty, but my father was the first to ask me, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

The question itself –framed as a challenge–came years later from a sports psychologist, long after I’d develop into an adult and as I used to be nearing fatherhood. My father had warmed me to the answer.

I used to be born when my dad was 18, barely out of adolescence himself, not yet married to my mother, and coping with his own response to a savagely simple call to obligation. I used to be born without a right hand, which, in 1967, qualified me as “crippled,” predecessor to “handicapped,” then “disabled,” then “challenged.”

So, what was he going to do about it? What were we going to do about it?

Well, we fished. We rode a bike. We flew a kite. And, eventually, we played ball. In Flint, Michigan, that’s what boys did, what fathers and sons did. They played ball.

When I went out into the world and felt like I’d been spit out the other side, my father would turn me around, open the front door and send me back out.

He’d lost his own father at a young age, and his childhood with him. He replaced both with a desire to see more, and experience more. When everyone went right, Dad, regularly enough, went left. It wasn’t willfulness, but instinct. He raised me in the same manner, from a soul that told him I’d need to fall down in order to stand. If he caught me today, I’d need someone to catch me and help me up the following day, and that wouldn’t work at all.

He let me fail, with the faith it would teach me to succeed. I learned that it was as hard on him as it was on me, but not until my own children had fallen and risen themselves. Now one of my daughters will come to me, her eyes moist and swollen, and I’ll think of my dad and what he said. In a quiet moment, I’ll look at my little girl and I’ll ask her:

“Well, honey, what are we going to do about it?”

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