A Modern-Day Samurai

A lot has already been said and written about Ichiro’s achievements of the last few days. To be honest, I don’t know a lot about baseball, having been brought up on a staple diet of cricket in Australia… But having a great love of all sports, and a strong competitive streak, even I can understand and appreciate the man that is known around the world by just his first name.

It isn’t an easy thing to become so famous that people know you by your first name alone. There are only a handful that truly fit the bill – people like ‘Tiger’, ‘Diana’, ‘Madonna’ etc. And Ichiro has also joined this short list. His heroics on the field, and the way that he carries himself off the field have combined to make him a much loved figure not only in his native Japan, but also in the US where he has played for the last 9 years.

I’ve read and heard a lot about his upbringing, and I don’t intend to rehash that all here. Suffice it to say that he began at the age of about 7 years old to have a strong interest in baseball, and proceeded upon a regime at that time with his father to hit and throw hundreds of balls every day. It wasn’t all easy by any means, and he faced a lot of hazing and extreme discipline from father and coaches. But he would of course eventually turn all of that to his benefit. As an Australian, I grew up with the legends of Sir Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer that ever played the game. He finished his career with a batting average almost double that of any other great batsman. What makes me mention him here is because of the famous stories of Bradman also as a child, hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump (basically a thin stick), against a water tank for hours on end every day. It was this same singularity of purpose and intensity in Ichiro which suggested from an early age that Ichiro was going to achieve something truly special.

I’ve titled this post ‘A Modern-Day Samurai’. My purpose isn’t to over-romanticize the Samurai era of Japan (there is good and bad in every era, and I don’t like to overly romanticize past, present or future…), but for many years now, whenever I’ve imagined to myself what a ‘Samurai’ might look like today, I’ve thought of Ichiro.

To me, the quintessential Samurai is someone who is loyal, dedicated, discliplined, industrious, and highly skilled. And for me, Ichiro embodies all of this.

I remember watching an interview with Ichiro a few years ago, where he was discussing how he is able to hit the ball with such consistency and relentlessness. He spoke about how coaches will always tell young batters to keep your eye on the ball. And this is great, and important. But, he explained, he had trained so much that he had reached a level beyond that. For him, his body actually remembered how to hit the ball without him even having to think about it. If he were to just rely on watching the ball and waiting for the message to be relayed from his eyes to his brains and on to his muscles, he would just be a run of the mill batter, he explained. Rather he needed to be able to sense with his body where the ball was, and train his body to make minute adjustments without having to think about them. From someone else, this may sound like bravado. But from Ichiro, its actually believeable. And Samurai-like…