The Meaning of Ichiro (8 page)

Rob Dibble, true to his word, ran through Manhattan wearing nothing but a G-string.

Americans liked Ichiro because, for one thing, he was a throwback to another time. He had reintroduced them to a style of
offense that many MLB fans, accustomed to andro-induced sluggers and tape-measure home runs, had forgotten—an attack based
on the single, the hit and run, and intrepid baserunning that had once defined the game. Said the
Washington Post’
s Thomas Boswell, the MLB poet laureate, “To see Ichiro hit is to be taken back almost a century to the hit ‘em where they
ain’t technique.” Some commentators compared him to Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and other old-time greats. It was telling that
before long, his teammates began copying his technique of slashing the ball to the opposite field.

But there was far more to his appeal than that. Fans had never seen anything quite like the contortionist ritual Ichiro put
himself through before each and every at-bat: an unvarying set of squats, stretches, shoulder rolls, quad stretches and practice
swings designed to keep him relaxed, to empty his mind, and, at the same time, to prevent himself from looking at the opposing
pitcher before he was ready to mentally confront him.

Then, standing in the batter’s box like some modern-day Musashi Miyamoto (a famous 17th-century swordsman), he would hold
his bat one-armed, swinging it over his head in a clockwise arc, pointing it directly at the pitcher. Bending his elbow to
touch his right shoulder and tug on his uniform sleeve, he would lock his arms and cock his hands, then, drawing a breath,
he would wait for the first pitch in utter concentration.

It was a form of attack that, with its unvarying routine of getting set, breathing, exhaling and emptying the mind, then directing
all concentration into two movements after being perfectly still, enabled Japanese practitioners of the martial arts, from
Zen archers to
kend
combatants, to see their philosophy at work. It was also a way of hitting that Little League ballplayers all across America
began copying.

On top of that there was Ichiro’s perfectionist attitude and a work ethic which put his teammates to shame. His pregame workouts
were models of consistency and persistence—a demanding regime of running, calisthenics and weight lifting, followed by the
detailed viewing of videotapes of the day’s opposition, that surpassed what everyone else on the Mariners did. It prompted
Mariners second baseman Bret Boone to say, “I get tired just looking at him.”

Ichiro, in fact, opined that if his teammates spent more hours on the practice field they’d be even better off. He had expressed
disappointment that in the Mariners’ spring camp, Piniella had eschewed practice games and gone straight into the exhibition
matches, and that the team did not really start to play hard until opening day. There were no defensive relay drills for the
infield and outfield, or other fundamental drills. It was greatly different from the Japanese camp where such things were
practiced in great detail. If, on the one hand, he had found Japanese camps a little too rigid and had admired the way the
American system allowed its athletes to relax, he, on the other, was concerned about MLB’s neglect of fundamentals.

“Theirs was the type of practice that made you wonder whether they could really play the game or not,” he said. “Many times
during the season we made errors and I thought, ‘If we had just worked on that in camp.’ “

In time, many of his teammates did begin imitating aspects of his practice routine, following the sophisticated set of stretching
exercises he performed before games, as well as the special tee batting drills he did. In fact, in 2003, a new manager, Bob
Melvin, would incorporate some of Ichiro’s ideas on defensive practice in his camp and pregame regimens, and so would Tony
LaRussa of the St. Louis Cardinals, after having a lengthy off-season discussion with Ichiro about the differences between
Japanese and American spring training.

Ichiro’s dedication also showed in the respect he accorded his equipment. As his father had taught him, he religiously cleaned
and oiled his glove after every game. He shined his shoes on a daily basis. He kept all his bats in a humidor and his game
bat beside him in the dugout, propped against a pair of wooden tongue compressors taped together by the trainer. (His substitute
bats were cradled on a rack above his head.) Once he reportedly felt so bad about throwing down one of his bats after an unproductive
plate appearance that he brought it back to his hotel room and polished it. None of these habits were followed by American
players, a state of affairs that Ichiro had a hard time grasping.

“I couldn’t understand how my teammates could sit down on a glove I’d just cleaned and placed on the bench,” he once complained.
“I couldn’t understand why they didn’t take care of their equipment more. How can you play well and improve if your equipment
is not in good condition? Cleaning the glove cleans the heart. It’s all part of a 24-hour process, in which everything—eating,
sleeping properly, doing correct pregame workouts—is all intertwined.”

Chikara wa keizoku
(“strength is continuity”) was his personal motto.

In some ways, Ichiro seemed a cypher. With him, there were never any untoward displays of emotion, which was something else
that separated him from many of his American colleagues. As had been his habit in Japan, there were no excessive celebrations
of victory; no wallowing in the pain of defeat. No pumping of his fist in exultation after a home run. Not once during his
time in Seattle did he ever lose his temper or his cool, even when victimized by a bad call or a fastball in the ribs. (That
was a lesson from his father, who repeatedly cautioned him that such boorish behavior would only affect his mental state and
lead to a lapse of concentration on the next play.) At the same time, he never ever seemed to get rattled under pressure no
matter what the situation—as his fat batting average with the bases loaded would indicate.

“I get nervous and upset like everyone else,” he said, “but I just don’t want others to know it or see my fighting spirit
on the surface.”

He needn’t have worried.

As an admiring Japanese baseball philosopher put it sometime later, adding his own spin on the cool Ichiro persona, “Ichiro
knows the
mu
or nothingness of Zen.”

Ichiro tapped into America’s nostalgia for baseball the way it used to be in still other ways. After pregame workouts, he
would amble over to the fans in the stands down the right-field line and sign autographs—yet another thing that fewer and
fewer major leaguers could be bothered with. Following a season that most players could only dream about, no one heard him
complaining about his relatively low annual salary of $4 million. Indeed, prior to coming to America, he had told his agent
Attanasio that he did not care how much money he made in MLB as long as he could play there. He would also turn down $35 million
in endorsement offers by 2002, because he thought the products would either detract from his image or the effort required
would impede his concentration on baseball in some fashion. He continually displayed a profound reluctance to discuss his
accomplishments. Summing up his record-breaking first MLB season in a special 90-minute documentary for NHK, he said:

I really don’t like the word success or a lot of talk about records. Records are a way of saying a person is better than another.
People use them. It’s a way of comparing players. I don’t mean to say that they have no value or are insignificant, but the
most important thing is doing your best, preparing, giving your all. If you get a record without preparation, it’s not satisfying.
If you really prepare, try hard, do your best and you succeed in surpassing yourself, that is really satisfying. If you do
that and someone else surpasses you, then
shoganai,
it can’t be helped. So instead of thinking about who is number one and who is number two, you should think about whether
you have given your best.

It was the kind of intelligent, well-thought-out statement that Ichiro was capable of, if the spirit moved him, but one that
American fans seldom got to hear, partly because of the language barrier, but also because of, well, Ichiro’s chronic and
unfortunate distaste for interviews.

After a game he would sit in front of his locker, massaging his feet with his back to the gaggle of reporters standing behind
him. He would direct his answers to their questions through an interpreter or intermediary who then relayed them to the gentlemen
and ladies of the press. American writers, who had never encountered anything like it, wondered, “Is that the way it’s done
in Japan?” “Is that Zen?”

Well, yes and no. It certainly wasn’t the way things were done in NPB because access there was more controlled and reporters
were never allowed inside the clubhouse. Even in permitted interview settings, however, there was a premium placed on taciturnity.
There was a saying in Japan: “The man who says nothing, says everything.” And that indeed was Zen.

But, even in a country where evasive answers were par for the course, Ichiro had been known as a notoriously difficult interviewee.
A writer who made the mistake of asking him what his objectives were in baseball was apt to be dismissed with an abrupt “I’m
working toward my own inner goals. As for what those goals are, I can’t tell you.” Another common response was “I find that
question too vague to answer.”

Said well-known sportswriter Masayuki Tamaki, a longtime Ichiro watcher, “He’s a control freak. He thinks that if he stays
quiet then nobody will know what he thinks and he won’t be criticized. He’s a great player, but he’s also arrogant. Deep in
their hearts, most people in the media in Japan don’t like him because he is so uncooperative. Most of them were hoping he
would fail in the U.S.”

Ichiro’s general aloofness had not endeared him to all of his former Japanese teammates either. Said one Orix player, “He
didn’t join us in our morning walk. He was always the last one on the bus. He didn’t care if he kept his teammates waiting.
He was a standoffish guy.” Nor had his attitude captured the hearts of Japanese residents of greater Seattle, who criticized
him for not socializing more with them. Said a Seattle-based Japanese businesswoman in her 40s, “It’s too bad that someone
like him had to be the one to represent Japan to the American people.”

Be that as it may, Ichiro still managed to connect with his American teammates—Bret Boone, for one, who had become addicted
to the
bent
(boxed lunch) Ichiro’s wife made for him—as well as his fellow MLB players. He would go out of his way to try to speak Spanish
to the Latin players and English to the others. Cynics said that he tried harder to integrate in the United States than he
did back home.

Not, it might be remarked, without a substantial measure of success.

Asked once what he thought the significance of his accomplishments in the U.S. was, Ichiro replied simply, “I think I have
narrowed the gap between America and Japan.” And indeed, he had. For openers, he had introduced his country to a segment of
the American population that had never given Japan much thought. Twenty years earlier, many Seattleites had not even known
what sushi was. Now they were eating it at the ballpark and shouting
“gambaré,”
along with other demotic Japanese phrases of encouragement. It was no small achievement.

Seattle had, in fact, undergone a remarkable transformation over the years—morphing from an insular, rough, blue-collar industrial
town of mostly aircraft line workers, loggers and fishermen, to a white-collar, high-tech, sophisticated corporate city of
“Microserfs,” home to three of the world’s 10 richest men, even
after
the NASDAQ meltdown of 2000.

With that transformation had come a desire to white out all that had been small-town and small-minded about Seattle’s past—which
was not inconsiderable. The events portrayed in the bestselling novel
Snow Falling on Cedars,
a story of a murder set in Puget Sound in the 1950s amidst lingering memories of World War II and internment camps, were
not altogether fictional—involving as they did racial prejudice, forbidden love and a falsely accused Japanese-American fisherman,
a lifelong resident of the area.