Imperfect: An Improbable Life by Jim Abbott, Tim Brown Page A

baseballs in order to pitch them. I dropped a lot of stuff. I was frustrated when the easiest tasks required two hands, and so were nearly impossible for me. But it was better than the alternative, better than being Captain Hook. I’d left that behind; where, I didn’t know and didn’t care.
    Where it was not—cinched neither to my body nor myconsciousness—was good enough. Into a new world of the usual high school frailties and rather pointed tensions, enough of them drawn along racial lines, I arrived at Central a little gangly, a little intimidated, a lot self-conscious and with my right hand stuffed deep into my right pocket. This was a tough school, a burdened school, and a basketball school. It also was the neighborhood school, which meant a few warm faces and a somewhat soothing intimacy. I’d played pickup ball on the gym floor for years, so I’d crawled the grounds and hallways before. That’s not to say it wasn’t at times a dangerous place. Just like Flint itself, there were shadowy corners at Central where being young, alone, and unimposing drew unwanted interest. The rumor on campus—supported anecdotally by various bloody noses and black eyes—held that a black gang was recruiting new members. Gang leaders required their candidates to batter a predetermined number of white faces, which might have grown their membership but did little for the rest of the school’s morale. This seemed a long way from the color blindness of Burroughs Park. I’d avoided those rites until a couple months into my freshman year when one morning I was climbing the stairs past the auto shop, heading for first period. The stairs amounted to a back entrance into school, the quickest route to my locker from Burroughs Park. Halfway up the first flight, I heard from around the corner what must have been a half-dozen boys coming from the other direction. They were talking loud, laughing, and at a quarter to eight in the morning quite obviously not coming to school but leaving. My stomach churned.
    I paused, considered retreat, was caught in between, realized it was too late to run, and finally surrendered to the mobile gauntlet, thinking, “Aw, this isn’t going to be good.”
    I reached the landing as they did and stood to the side as theypassed. Single file, they looked me over coldly, one after the other, four of them, then five, and when I came to believe I’d been thankfully unworthy of their scorn, the last of them balled his fist and hit me square in the jaw, sending me staggering into the wall. They whooped and hollered, a celebration for the pledge who’d come a white kid closer to full membership. My mouth hurt, my books were scattered on the landing, and I felt like a dope for wandering into the ambush, but mostly I was relieved they kept going. It wasn’t until I reached my locker that I began to shake. I brushed a few tears from my cheeks with the sleeve of my jacket. I’d assumed my turn was coming at some point, and I hoped that would be the worst of it. My buddy Mark Conover once made the mistake of allowing a stray basketball to roll into another game in gym class. The kid tripped by the ball waited for him in the locker room and beat him pretty good for it. Mark’s attacker was expelled, but that hardly calmed a population of white kids who felt terrorized.
    For a long time, at least the first couple years, that was life at Central. If you fit the victim profile, you kept your head down, minimized eye contact, and hoped it wasn’t your day. The tough school in the tough town took its victims, and these were desperate kids who preyed on insecure ones. Fortunately, it was also a sports school in a sports town, which meant there were places where there were rules and pockets of etiquette and at least one way to rise above the random cold-cockings.
    So started high school and the adolescent lessons. There were plenty of punches to be taken, ducked, and thrown. The next connected closer to the gut.
    I regarded