Baby Steps – Issue 6
24-07-13
Quote For This Week
When your game is clicking like that, winning is easy, relatively. Then there are days when you just feel broken, your back hurts, your knee hurts, maybe you’re a little sick or scared, but you still find a way to win, and those are the victories that you can be most proud of.
Negative energy is wasted energy, you want to become a master of overcoming hard moments, that is to me, the sign of a champion.
I believe in myself, but belief in self had to be earned
– Roger Federer, Dartmouth 2024 Commencement
Baby Steps To Giant Strides
Imagine you are taking a step out onto the famous grass courts of Wimbledon Center Court. Having finally made it out of the preliminaries, you are about to play your first Wimbledon match on Centre Court. There are the cheers of 15,000 people in the audience with millions watching in streams. What would be on your mind? Your friends and family sitting in the stands? How do you adjust to the unique centre court grass? What would all that feel like?
I actually played a fair amount of tennis between the age of 8-16. It started with the fact that my dad discovered an appreciation of tennis. As a sport that was distinctly Western, with the most nearby courts by my apartment on the rooftop of a “five-star hotel” near my building, I can somewhat imagine what it probably felt like for my father to play tennis at 35. It must have felt good. Naturally, as someone who ended up teaching his son the basics of most sports, he brought me along too.
I was a small, scrawny child, and aside from recalling that I ran fast, I didn’t have much physical prowess to write home about. With my child-sized racket in hand, I remember my dad teaching me how to grip the racket properly for different strokes – grips that he also had to learn, at least partially, through a dozen or so tennis instructional DVDs lying around our house. Even now, I can still vividly recall standing on that court, trying to return a ball from my dad, and feeling the power behind the ball vibrate up my arm, threatening to knock the racket out of my hand. I later learned there are actually training balls, made softer and easier to rally for children, but that’s not until quite a few years later in Canadian tennis camps.
Despite years of playing, I never did get particularly good at tennis. By the time I stopped, I never quite developed a reliable first or second serve and I couldn’t quite settle on whether one-handed or two-handed backhands suited me better. That said, I recall very fondly the rush of getting a good backhand smash or sliding across clay courts as I volley. Skills aside, I loved the experience and wish I get more chances to play in the future.
While I always played at a barely amateur level (i.e. not even close to competition), I did recall in the camps and clubs I played in, there were always the top players of each batch who were incredible. The sharpness of their strokes, the grace of their serves, and the explosive speed to get to balls, all, unfortunately, failed to stimulate my inner competitiveness to get better. As years passed and other important high school matters shoved out tennis, I remember watching over two years this 13-year-old named Noah outstripping me to the point where there was no match between me and him at all. I believe he was playing competitively for the two years we crossed paths. I’ve always wondered what someone like Noah’s trajectory would have been.
Well, that’s what Baby Steps is all about! – Anime link | Manga link
That’s right, I’m doing an anime/manga recommendation this week.
Sports anime is a remarkable phenomenon. From Captain Tsubasa (what made soccer cool back in the 90s) to Haikyuu (what made volleyball cool around 2015), sports anime can stimulate waves of popularity both domestically in Japan and internationally. In an industry known for having power-scaling issues in storytelling, good sports anime/manga thrive right between the paradox of “anchored in actual reality” and “exaggerated for dramatic effect”. It provides a wonderful medium for using sports to illustrate the pursuit of excellence, human relating, as well as contesting philosophies, all while portrayed to artistic, symbolic effect.
Baby Steps is one of the top sports anime I’ve watched/read. Unlike Haikyuu, which is quite well known, or Kokou no Hito which can be a cult favorite, Baby Steps is one of those apparently-typical Shounen stories that contains far more depth than initially seen. Specifically, it demonstrates both character progression and world progression in one of the most grounded, yet captivating manners that I’ve seen.
The plot is fairly simple: Maruo Eiichiro, an ace student bound for academic success, incidentally discovers tennis. He was struck by the sport and started playing. As it turns out, because of his “nerdy” background, he took an intellectual and data-science approach to tennis (as in, literally took notes of every play between rounds to analyze trends), giving his tennis a unique and creative approach. Coupled with an exceptionally strong will1, he starts to improve, meets a whole cast of characters in the tennis culture, and eventually sets his goal to become a professional tennis player.
While the story is simple enough, what shines is the execution – how the story is told. It tells, with remarkable detail and realism, the exact process of both “what it takes” and “how it could feel” for a Japanese teenager with no prior sports experience to grow from one world to the next. From clever tricks at the beginning, to building a body suitable for an athlete, to brainstorming strategy and tactics, to developing one’s own philosophy of tennis. These stages couple tightly with playing for the first time, entering his first tournament, making a name for himself in his local prefecture, and eventually heading towards national competition and beyond.2
To tell the story of any “world” or “culture” in a full scope, in this case from picking up a racket to professional player on the world stage, is a remarkable undertaking. Even extraordinarily successful works can fail in their world-building, as the greater the world trying to be portrayed, the more easy it is to have inconsistencies within it. Baby Steps does a rather masterful execution, partially thanks to a faithful presentation, of the real world of tennis. Every character, from rivals who rank higher or hit slumps, to parents and friends who don’t quite know how to connect and support a changing protagonist, to coaches and sponsors that fill out the peripheral roles relative to the “Pro Tennis Player”, help constitute a breathing world that tells the high-dimensional “story” that is Tennis. Baby Steps is one of the stories that executes well the ability to introduce a large cast, keeping them simple enough to be memorable, but not so simple they feel one-dimensional.3
Within this breathing world exists an interesting protagonist that is not that common these days. In a similar way to how Mark Watney of The Martian is not quite the standard type of Hollywood protagonist, Maruo represents an outsider who came with intellect and not much else in a world dominated by physical abilities. His growth, including his triumphs and failures, makes this particular breathing world worth following, giving that distinct feeling of “Ah, I sure wish there was more” after finishing the series.
Baby Steps helped me connect up my own fragment of tennis experience and situate it in the larger world that I only grazed the outer edge of.
During a training camp, I remember there was an instructor who mentioned that he was almost national level, but had to retire due to an injury. At the time, the piece of trivia didn’t mean much to me, tennis wasn’t that important after all. However, what seared itself into my body though, was being on the receiving end of his serves. “That’s literally impossible” was what I thought as the ball landed wide and bounced at an “impossible” angle. Surely, this is a serve that happens for pro players all the time – probably not even “that good” of one, they didn’t even make national after all. On the receiving end, though, is where the body can really feel the gulf in abilities. It was impossible not only in that I didn’t know a serve could bounce like that. I also deemed it impossible to go after – there’s simply no way my body could cover that much distance in that short of a time. It was a hopeless endeavor. It wasn’t worth going after.
This is perhaps the moment where Maruo and I diverged (interestingly the initial incident for him was also receiving a serve from a pro). He went for the return. When he failed, he thought about why and tried again. When he could make contact with the ball, he felt the thrill of progress. Finally, when he returned the ball, he felt the ecstatic joy of triumph. I love reading this series because, in a sense, it helped me glimpse into what might have happened if I had gone for it and landed myself in the world of tennis.
In the last issue, I described how I have been feeling somewhat stumped by things recently. I deliberately picked Baby Steps back up again, because I’m looking for some inspiration.
How do you go after the “impossible”?
How do you keep going after it, even after repeated setbacks?
Where is the thrill and ecstasy in the quest towards the “impossible”? How do you hone the grit that facilitates it and share that joy with others?
“Baby Steps To Giant Strides” is a note left by one of the players for Maruo after his first training camp in Florida, and I’ve been trying to “feel” the statement more deeply the past few days of reading. Along the logic of “baby steps”, I remember seeing something like this image on the wall of a monastery in Taiwan, which stood out among the other more sutra-type texts around. The compounding part of the statement certainly makes sense. The part that I’m trying to think about more deeply is the context of this message.
This statement, core to the philosophy of the story and literally the title, wasn’t something conjured up by the main character in deep revelation, nor was it said by a love interest during some crisis. It was a simple goodbye note left as part of a two-week training camp from a new friend/rival.
The context is one where people remind each other, by any creative means, be it a nice note, competition, or whatever else, that the “impossible” is there and can be accomplished. In this case, there is no best player in the world without many incredible players for them to hone against, never mind the support team that stands behind that player. The impossible isn’t accomplished by a solo agent.
Recently, a few friends and I have been talking about Fellowship and I think that’s similar. There’s no taking the Ring to Mordor as a solo endeavor. Everyone had to achieve their respective “impossible”. Often one person’s hurdles were even precisely what supported another person’s process to overcome theirs. Only through everyone’s respective triumph could the Fellowship achieve the collective, world-changing “impossible”.
So how does Fellowship form? How do they last? To what extent do I feel already in Fellowship? What feels lacking still?
I want to more closely examine Fellowship around me, and how to amplify it as a means for pursuing the impossible in a way that yields more consistent joy. The good news seems to be that cultivating Fellowship seems to be fairly medium agnostic – anything could in theory yield the solidarity and connection that forms Fellowship. Whether it’s building a company, forming a band, or raising children together. I want to be more perceptive to the available mediums around me through which Fellowship forms.
Perhaps it could even be finding a hitting partner in tennis again.
Apparently, My Humor
God, I love writing this section
Power-scaling is hard, even in Tennis: Exhibit A, B
As Eliezer himself puts it: Tsuyoku Naritai
As it happens, for running something like SPARC, where some of the top high school math competition talents gather, the comparison is too amusing to not make a parallel. So for those who don’t mind spoilers of Baby Steps, basically the full plot goes like this: A jock who’s the school’s top athlete, on track for a sports scholarship, unexpectedly came into contact with the math competition world through the school math club. To everyone’s surprise, he was able to solve a few practice problems with very few hints and a lot of earnestness. Gaining a new passion, he started to participate in the AMC, only learning that there are far more problem types than what he learned! Humbled and supported by some of the math club seniors, some of whom were about to enter the prestigious USAMO, he resolves to study and learn everything about olympiad math. In the subsequent year, he did remarkably well, getting the top 5% in the AMC and qualifying for the USAM. Yet, he learns that the world of contest math is far larger, as some of his seniors were selected for the prestigious Math Olympiad Program, with a rising star who could become the youngest International Math Olympiad USA team member. As he and his new friends and peers competed and grew together, he was able to exceed everyone’s expectations at the USAMO, getting a 25, possibly granting him a spot in MOP himself. As he heads to his last year of high school, with a great chance at MOP, while thinking about programs in MIT, and sees the top of his peers attending the IMO as part of the USA team, he’s excited for his life as a mathematician. The end. In this story, I suppose I’m one of the side characters who gave the protagonist some advice in some weird training camp that wasn’t really about math.
I watched the anime around 20 or so, and followed it on and off during the years and I just finished the manga this week. Remarkably, I was able to recall features of side characters with years in between my reads.