THE IMAGINARY ATHLETE

Ila Borders of La Mirada, California, became the first woman to pitch in a professional baseball game. She signed with the Saint Paul Saints in the Northern League in 1997. Here she delivers a pitch in Midway Stadium.

The Beginning

For Ila Borders, the beginning was a baseball game. Phil Borders was a baseball fan, a semipro player in his youth, and when his daughter turned ten, he thought it was time she went to Dodger Stadium.

Baseball is a distracting sport, and children are easily distracted. That day, I imagine, Ila watched the fans around her talking and yelling shoulder to shoulder, holding their plastic cups of beer by the rims. When her father called her attention to the game, she took in the bright green of the field, the bright white of the players’ uniforms. The game itself was hard to follow, until the moment when Dusty Baker smacked a ball out of the park. That she understood: the heavy way the bat connected with the ball thrown a little too slow, a little too straight. The way all the players’ heads turned to follow the ball’s trajectory, up and up, until it disappeared into the stands. Ila felt a shiver of recognition. Not only for the athletic feat itself, but also for the easy way the batter was jogging around the bases, for the joy with which the fans leapt out of their seats, for the studious way the pitcher pretended to be interested in clearing off the pitcher’s rubber and warming up a new ball. That she understood.

Phil and Ila Borders both say that by the time they left the park that day, Ila had told her father she wanted to be a baseball player when she grew up. Most parents wouldn’t take seriously this claim from a child, even if that child were a boy. But Phil Borders told his daughter that, if she was serious, he would teach her to pitch. From that day on, he coached Ila every weekend morning, from six a.m. to noon.

On the other side of the country, my own childhood could hardly have been more different. My parents, both lawyers, valued the life of the mind; they owned no balls of any kind. I was always small for my age, frail, so tiny in fact that other children enjoyed picking me up and carrying me around like a little sister.

My parents had signed me up for ballet lessons when I was three. I liked ballet. The teacher showed us movements and taught us the words for them. This made sense: I enjoyed words and knowing what they meant—ronde de jambe, pas de chat, plié. I was clumsy and didn’t know my left from my right, but I learned to mimic the teacher, watching myself in the mirror. There was a precise way to do each step, a precise way of turning and stretching each joint, each muscle. It was partly a game of the mind, of knowing the names of the steps, of controlling the body and its motion.

I had never been to a baseball game.

Making the Team

The Little League team in La Mirada, California, learned that a ten-year-old girl named Ila Borders planned to try out. The coaches changed their tryout times at the last minute and informed everyone but the Borderses. But Phil Borders learned of the deception and arrived with Ila at the tryouts on time. That day, Ila ran and batted and threw and caught so well that the coaches changed their minds and put her on the team.

Ila played third base. Her teammates threw rocks at her and sabotaged her during games. Still, she quickly became one of the best players on the team. This is hard for me to imagine. How can you play well when you’re not wanted? How can you play a team sport when the rest of the team hates you?

A scout for the Little League majors saw Ila hit a home run and recruited a kid he mistook for a hippie boy with a ponytail. Ila’s coaches in the Little League majors told her that she had talent, but warned her and her father that as the boys got bigger, she would fall behind.

Why Does a Curveball Curve?

Any object moving through the air is slowed by air friction. If the object is spinning, the force of air friction is greater on one side of the object than on the other, causing it to curve in flight. A pitcher throwing a curveball must give the ball a spin with an axis of rotation that is not perpendicular to the ground; as a result, Magnus force causes the ball to curve horizontally. The curveball and other trick pitches would not be possible if not for the stitches on the baseball, which exaggerate the imbalance in air friction. Magnus force can be determined as follows:

F_{Magnus Force}=KwVCv

where K is the Magnus Coefficient, w is the spin frequency measured in rpm, V is the velocity of the ball in mph, and Cv is the drag coefficient.[1]

A Bit of History on the Little League

From its inception in 1939, the Little League struggled to keep girls out. In the 1970s alone, the League spent $2 million on legal battles to maintain boys-only teams.

“It wouldn’t be proper for coaches to pat girls on the rear end the way they naturally do boys,” said Dr. Creighton Hale, the Little League’s president.

This explanation did not hold up, in the long term, as a reason to exclude girls. Eventually, in 1980, the courts ordered the Little League to allow girls to play, five years before Ila Borders showed up to try out.

Summer 1989

Phil Borders forged fake identification so his daughter could play in a men’s semipro league. The ID said she was eighteen, but Ila was fourteen years old. I like to imagine her at that age, coming out of a growth spurt that gave her almost all of her five feet ten inches, stuffing her sunny curls under her baseball cap, changing uniforms in the car between a school game and a semipro game. Braces, a tendency to giggle. She says that she loved every minute of it. In the semipros, she learned that as much as fourteen-year-old boys dislike being struck out by a fourteen-year-old girl, grown men like it even less.

As I went on with ballet, I continued to get better. I went en pointe at twelve; the first time I put on those stiff satin toe shoes and stood at the barre to raise myself up onto the tips of my toes, I felt tall and graceful. I looked at myself in the studio mirror, and I looked like a ballerina, the impossible way the slim leg tapers into the long slim foot. I was on toe; I couldn’t take my eyes off myself.

Orthopedists have been quoted as saying that dancing on pointe should be physically impossible, that the feet should not be able to bear the body’s weight in that position, that the dancer should not be able to balance. After an hour of barre exercises on pointe, my feet began to cramp, all the bones in the toes grinding into each other. At the end of class, I pried the pointe shoes off to reveal the toes of my tights soaked in blood. I showed my teacher. She nodded.

“Get used to it,” she said.

Adolescence

At every stage, coaches took Ila and her parents aside and gave it to them straight: She’s good now, but the boys are getting bigger and stronger. In the Little League majors, in junior high, in high school varsity, she was told again and again that she wouldn’t be able to keep up, that soon she would fall behind. These men imagined Ila Borders’s true female nature, her smallness and weakness, lurking, waiting. For now, they believed, it was in hiding. But it was coming up behind her, gaining on her, and it was just about to pounce.

Over and over Ila was told this about herself, that she was about to fail, and I wonder—how did she resist believing it? Yet somehow she did. She kept getting better. Ila started high school, went out for the varsity baseball team, and was made a starting pitcher.

I was warned about adolescence too: the aesthetic of ballet emphasizes the weightlessness of the ballerina, the cleanness of her line. Dancers approaching puberty are warned not to let themselves “get heavy.” My teacher, a bone-thin Russian émigré, advised me how to diet so that I wouldn’t develop breasts or hips, which would spell the end of my career. I suppose that she, for her part, imagined my femaleness as a coat of fat, waiting to wrap itself around me and never let go, ruining my line forever.

My pointe work got better. I soon moved off the barre and started learning trickier combinations on the floor. The pain of pointe work, like the muscle pain of dancing itself, never went away, just shifted into different shades of pain from day to day—tendon pain, toenail pain, blister pain, bone pain. My strengths were in balance, extension, line. My weaknesses were in jumping and turning, moves that required quickness or attack, that required me to propel myself into space.

Yet, thinking about Ila Borders, I see that ballet was easy, in the sense that I was a girl doing something girls are supposed to do. What would it mean to endure all that pain and to have to endure ridicule as well? To be stared at, to be mocked—to be told that soon I would fail, that I wouldn’t be able to go any further? As tough as I thought I was, I was only playing by the rules.

A Common Fallacy

Most people, observing the fact that boys are almost always better at throwing than girls, conclude that the ability to throw a baseball has to do with inherent sex characteristics like size or strength, giving boys an inherent advantage. Girls who can throw, it would follow, will soon fall behind as the boys become bigger and stronger.

A study conducted in 1996 analyzed forceful overarm throws made by boys and girls aged seven through twelve. The researchers found that, when throwing with their dominant hands, boys threw up to seventy-two percent faster than girls. But when the children used their nondominant hands, there were no differences between boys’ and girls’ speed or accuracy. If boys were in fact naturally more coordinated, or more powerful, or more aggressive, even, then these biological factors would show themselves in both hands. But they don’t. The differences between boys’ and girls’ ability to throw a baseball with their dominant hands can only be attributed to the extent to which some children are taught to throw and encouraged to throw more than others.[2]

The Physics of Ballet

If a dancer wants to be in the air for 0.5 seconds (and reach a height of one foot), she must push off the ground at an initial vertical velocity of eight feet per second. If she wants to be in the air for 0.71 seconds (and reach a height of two feet), she must push off the ground at an initial vertical velocity of 11.31 feet per second. Height and velocity can be calculated as follows:

where h is height and v₀ is initial vertical velocity.

Therefore, time in the air depends only on the dancer’s vertical velocity, not on her weight or horizontal speed.[3]

Most Valuable Player

Ila Borders was named MVP of the boys’ varsity baseball team three years out of the six she was in junior high and high school, including her senior year. While her male fellow athletes were lionized at school, Ila was treated like a freak. Her teammates distanced themselves from her as much as possible, and the kids who didn’t like jocks—the various nerds, art kids, and oddballs—avoided her even more. Ila walked the hallways of high school alone, listening to Depeche Mode on her Walkman.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my hometown baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, won the World Series. School was canceled so that students and faculty could attend a parade through the downtowns of Minneapolis and Saint Paul featuring Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek waving in a convertible. I rolled my eyes at the whole thing. I felt contempt for baseball and everything I thought it stood for: drunk yelling men, the humorlessness that comes of adults taking sports too seriously. Fans acting as though they had somehow accomplished something just by being fans, acting as if they somehow shared in the achievements of these athletes whom they have chosen to represent them.

Soon after, my ballet teacher advised me to lose five pounds. I was already underweight. Instead, I quit ballet. In most ways, it was a relief—I had more time to spend with my friends, and my grades went up. But I missed dancing itself, and I missed the inevitable routine of class: first the barre, then floor work, then jumps. I missed the feeling of physical learning, watching a new step for the first time, breaking it down into its component parts, figuring out its keys. Just as much, I missed the feeling of being especially good at something, being better at it than most people.

Physical Education

Ila Borders became the first girl ever to earn a baseball scholarship to college. Recruited athletes are treated as a superrace at many colleges, but at Southern California College, Ila Borders received threats on her life, had her tires slashed, and was sabotaged in games by her own teammates. The things people screamed at her from the stands—the home stands as well as the visitors’ stands—cannot be printed.

In 1993, Ila Borders became the first woman to start a men’s college baseball game. Soon after, she became the first woman to win one.

The Saint Paul Saints

During a break from college, I went to a Saint Paul Saints game. The Saints were in the new independent Northern League, the equivalent of double A. I didn’t understand the game, so instead I watched the fans moving and talking and eating in the stands, the vendors hollering up and down the aisles, the Saints mascot, a live pig, running out onto the field to deliver fresh baseballs to the umpire between innings. It was a beautiful summer evening in July, which turned into a beautiful summer night as I sat outside with six thousand people and watched the stars come out. The train tracks of the Soo Line run five feet behind the outfield wall, and every few innings I’d look up from the game to see a freight train rolling by as the stadium announcer said quietly into his microphone: Train. The engineer blew his whistle and waved. I was surprised to find myself, with six thousand other people, waving back.

Ila and the Saints

Ila Borders was invited to spring training with the Saint Paul Saints on May 14, 1997, as she was graduating from college. Saints Manager Marty Scott told the press that he was giving her a chance based on her abilities, just like anyone else. Her fastball was in the low eighties, too slow for the majors, but she was working on her speed, working out with weights seriously for the first time. To make up for her fastball, she threw an assortment of off-speed pitches—a curveball, a slider, a sinker screwball all her own. She was offered a contract a few days later.

I had fallen in love with the Saints. I went to most of the games that summer, left downtown Minneapolis after work and crossed the bridge to Saint Paul in time to be in my seat for the national anthem. The Twin Cities are separated only by the Mississippi River and by their ideas of themselves: Minneapolis aspires to be a world-class metropolis, while Saint Paul embodies the ideal of small-town Midwestern life. On the nights when the Twins were in town, I saw people milling around on the ugly concrete outside the Minneapolis Metrodome, always with grim resignation on their faces: they knew they would have to watch the Twins lose in a mostly empty Dome and then would have to explain to their kids why bad things happen to good people. I felt pity for them, but the bridge across the Mississippi was wide and fast, and fifteen minutes later I’d be in Saint Paul. Walking into the Saint Paul Saints’ ballpark, I looked around to see everyone smiling, hopeful. Bill Murray, part-owner of the Saints, attended many games, and could often be seen sitting in the dugout with the players, or clowning around with fans on the field between innings. You could buy a tee shirt with the Saints slogan: FUN IS GOOD.

Now that I had watched enough games to finally learn the rules, I had come to love the game itself. I cared about the outcome of every pitch, knew the batting averages and nicknames and personal proclivities of each of the players. Minor-league ball players are paid so little they often can’t afford to pay rent in the towns where they play, so several Saints lived in my friends’ basements and spare rooms through an Adopt-a-Saint program. On their days off, the adopted Saints slept in, played video games, and went fishing. They were pleasant to have around, large sunburned boys so dedicated to relaxation it was hard to picture them running, throwing, and batting, but then the next day we’d see our adopted Saints out on the field again, their uniforms bright white against the green.

I kept taking dance classes in college, but now that I had left the pre-professional track, I saw how hard ballet had really been. I also saw that when it had gotten really hard, I had quit. I didn’t believe in the mind/body split my parents believed in any more; I had come to see how the mind shows itself on the body, just as surely as it shows itself in physics or poetry. I envied a little bit, for the first time, those who could play a game well.

Ila’s Debut

Ila Borders made her historic debut as the first woman to play in a regular-season men’s professional baseball game on May 31, 1997. She was put in during the sixth inning of an away game in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Her historic first pitch hit the batter in the back. She then balked a runner home, gave up a single, made a throwing error, and gave up another single. She was pulled out of the game before she could earn a single out.

I saw her on the news that night: the sportscaster could barely conceal his satisfaction at Ila’s awful performance. The next night she came in for the eighth inning and struck out the side. The news did not feature her.

Ila in Saint Paul

At a home game later that week, I looked for Ila Borders in the bullpen. From where I sat, the pitchers all looked remarkably similar in their white uniforms—tall, lanky, big-shouldered, narrow-hipped. If it hadn’t been for her ponytail, long, curly and light brown, falling almost to her waist and obscuring her number, 14, I wouldn’t have been able to tell which one was Ila. Her huge hands hung at her sides, limp and strong, the way all baseball players’ hands do.

Ila Borders sat hunched forward on the bench, like all of the pitchers. She watched the game and talked with her teammates. She kicked her spikes back and forth in the dirt. Her calf had that curl of muscle that all of their calves did. When she turned to look to her right and I saw her face for the first time, I was a little surprised to find that she had bright eyes, a long, straight nose, and full lips: a face that could be called cute, even beautiful. She was smiling.

If Ila had met resistance everywhere she had played before, Saint Paul tried to make up for it by welcoming her. Fans loved her, shouted encouragement at her even while she was sitting on the bench, brought signs to games reading YOU GO, GIRL. The Saint Paul newspaper ran an Ila Watch on the front page of the sports section, giving her current stats and recent highlights. Men, women, and children lined up after games to get her autograph. News outlets from all over the world filmed her every move and clamored for interviews. She told every interviewer the same thing: I have nothing to prove. I don’t want to be the first woman ballplayer. I just want to be a ballplayer.

How to Throw a Curveball

Hide the ball in your glove. Grip the ball by placing your middle finger perpendicular to the seams, with your thumb underneath the ball. Spread your fingers slightly apart. Wind up into the pitch. Use the same pitching motion as you would for other pitches so that the batter cannot predict a curveball. Keep your wrist relaxed. Hold your wrist so that the back of your hand points toward your body. Roll your wrist downward and toward the right (if you are right-handed) or to the left (if you’re left-handed) immediately before releasing the pitch. Turn your wrist farther to increase the spin of the ball (you will lose some control but will gain more curve). Throw harder, and the pitch gains speed but loses movement.[4]

Watching baseball games, I missed dancing sometimes. What I missed most was the way ballet was about physics but also about defying physics. The dancer understands friction and spin, the force with which to push off the floor in order to spin on the point of her toe, to achieve a certain height. But she must also believe in her own superiority to physics. She must be able to make herself three inches taller than she is, to jump slightly higher than should be possible, to be weightless coming down from the jump. You would think this were all illusion, but it’s not. Dancers believe in the magic of the will over the physical. Dance teachers yell at their students: “Be taller!” “Be lighter!” “Make no noise!” How arrogant to think that we could. What I missed was that defiance. I saw it in Ila.

Ila Pitches

I watched Ila Borders warming up in the bullpen at Midway Stadium as the starting pitcher gave up a walk and then a double. The manager marched slowly out to the mound, and a murmur started in the crowd, someone started yelling, and soon everyone was standing, chanting, “I-la! I-la! I-la!” When she jogged out to the mound, we cheered and cheered.

She pawed the dirt with her spikes, flexed the mitt on her right hand, brought her right knee high up, almost touching her ear, before hurtling herself forward, her other leg kicking back high. Her ponytail flew straight up into the air as the baseball streaked toward the plate. The idea of a woman pitching seemed remarkable until you actually saw her pitch; then all you thought of was the grace of the pitch itself, and the fact of the ponytail flying out behind her didn’t seem so odd after all. The batter swung as the baseball smacked into the catcher’s mitt. Steeeee-rike. We went nuts.

A few rows ahead of me, a father held up a little pigtailed girl on his shoulders, four or five years old. I watched her watch Ila. At first, the little girl wore a confused look. She opened her mouth halfway as if to ask a question, then shut it again. Her father forgot her there and went back to talking to his friends and drinking his beer, while over his head the little girl was lost in thought, staring as Ila swept dirt to one side with her spikes. This girl was born in the early nineties: she had been told at some point that girls could do anything. This had been sort of a lie. Her mother was maybe a lawyer, maybe a welder. But the lie was still in the process of becoming true, and now, now, a girl could be a baseball player.

The Public’s Reaction

As I left work on my way to games, coworkers would call to me, “Is Ila pitching tonight?” They asked me whether she changed in the locker room with the men, whether she looked like a lesbian.

“Can she, you know, throw?” asked a lot of my middle-aged male coworkers. As if Ila were out on the mound underhanding it, or tossing the ball with a flappy wrist. These men had probably touched neither ball nor bat for twenty years, but they seemed to assume that, given the chance, they could hit a homer off Ila. When I told them her stats from the previous game, they would shake their heads a little, staring into space, as if trying to make these numbers fit with the pretty young woman in a dress they had seen on TV signing autographs. “Well,” they said, summing up, “She’ll never make it to the majors, that’s for sure.”

Every minor league ballplayer hopes to make it to the major leagues. To say that Ila would never make it was like saying she should never have bothered playing at all, that all of her work would be for nothing.

“Just wait,” I told these men. I thought that Ila was unstoppable, that she had already been through so much, and now she was playing on a team that supported her, in a town that loved her. I imagined these men watching with wonder as Ila continued to improve, rose in the Northern League, became good enough that some expansion team would pick her up. She had the talent and the drive. The door would be flung open, I thought, and these men would have to admit they’d been wrong.

A Photo

In a pile of papers on my desk, I have a page torn from the Sports section of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch dated June 3, 1997. It’s a full-page spread of color photos of Ila Borders.

One photo shows Ila changing after practice, pulling an elastic out of her long hair. Her head is tilted to one side, her eyes closed, while her arm traces the length of her hair out to the side, a pose familiar to fans of impressionist painting. Her eyes are closed, her cheeks flushed from the workout. Behind her a row of empty lockers; in front of her, a row of empty benches. The photo’s caption tells us that she changes in the visitors’ clubhouse for practice. The article doesn’t say where she changes for games, when the visitors’ clubhouse is full of men. She looks lonely in there, changing by herself while next door her teammates are together, talking and laughing.

A Decisive Moment

I remember vividly a Tuesday night in July, the Sioux City Explorers at Saint Paul. The Saints were down 4–5. Ila was on the mound, and her game was starting to fall apart. Ray Korn, the pitching coach, wandered slowly out of the dugout, headed in the general direction of the pitching mound, winding up there almost as if by accident. He and Ila stood with their hands on their hips and exchanged words. As they talked, I became aware of a hush, a strange feeling of anticipation growing around me in the stands. Korn and Ila had been talking for so long, it was clear that he was going to leave her in the game. But now we were waiting for a much more important decision to be made: we were waiting to see whether or not he would pat her on the ass.

The necessity for coaches to pat players on the ass has been well established, and it had been enough to keep girls out of the Little League for decades. And here we would see something important decided once and for all: was Ila a part of the team? We wanted her to be part of the team. We hoped he would do it. Yet how could he possibly pat her on the ass? No matter how casual and professional a pat he might give her, were we really ready to see a man in his fifties touching a young woman—his subordinate—that way? In front of six thousand people? We were, at that moment, in the sixth inning of a minor-league baseball game in 1997, at an impasse of the gender renegotiations of the twentieth century. We weren’t sure what to hope for.

Ray Korn finished with his exhortations while Ila nodded vigorously. Korn turned to go. We held our breath. He took one step away from Ila, two. Then he paused, lunged back toward her, and patted Ila once, firmly, on the low back, just below her waist. A stroke of genius: she’d been patted more or less on her ass, but with a few inches’ deference to her femaleness. We in the stands smiled at one another, pleased with ourselves, with our team, with our pitching coach, with our Ila.

Losing Our Ila

Halfway through the season, Ila Borders was traded up the river to the Duluth-Superior Dukes. Manager Marty Scott said that he “wanted to give her a chance to pitch more and find out more about her ability.” In other words, she hadn’t done as well as he had hoped. Ila, unfailingly positive in the press, said she was happy to be going to a team where she would see more work. Keith English, the infielder who was traded for her, commented to the press, “I got traded for a girl. It doesn’t get any worse than that.” He went on to say, “I’ll probably be the most hated person in Saint Paul—they’re losing their Ila.”

As it turned out, Saint Paul didn’t get a chance to hate Keith English. He was traded down to the Canton Crocodiles of the Frontier League before he ever suited up for a game in Saint Paul.

Ila in Duluth

Ila Borders became the first woman to start a professional men’s baseball game, with the Duluth-Superior Dukes, on July 9, 1998.

On July 24, 1998, she became the first woman to win one.

She wasn’t on my team any more, but I still considered her my own, and I followed her stats in the paper. When Duluth played at Saint Paul, I was not the only fan in the stands cheering when Ila Borders struck out our batters.

Another Photo

This one shows a row of pitchers standing, caps on their chests, for the national anthem. The photo is taken from a low angle, looking up at the players’ faces. Ila is second from the left, exactly the same height as the men on either side of her. She stands out only because her hand is rising to her brow, pushing back the curls that are caught into a ponytail at the back of her head. Her eyes are closed, her dark lashes resting against her round cheeks.

Trouble in Duluth

The trade to Duluth, a weaker team with fewer left-handed pitchers, was supposed to give Ila more work. But she joined the team at just the wrong time: they were starting to do well, and as the season went on and their chances of getting into the playoffs got better and better, she found herself benched more than she had been in Saint Paul. When she did pitch for Duluth, she didn’t pitch well, and her ERA rose.

I was upset by this turn of events. Ila’s career was not following the script that I had written for her in my head: the triumph-against-adversity script, the girls-can-do-it-whether-you-like-it-or-not script, the script Ila had been following all her life. But maybe this was really the best she could do. Maybe the predictions of her childhood coaches were finally coming true; maybe the boys had finally become bigger and stronger. Or maybe it wasn’t about size or strength, but Ila had just reached the edge of her talents. Maybe she was just a minor league pitcher after all, and like ninety-seven percent of minor-league pitchers, destined never to see the majors. A talented athlete, but not good enough.

Ila Speaks Out

It was in an interview with Newsweek that Ila Borders first announced that she didn’t like feminists. Ila said she wouldn’t be speaking to female reporters any more.

I read the article so many times, horrified, I nearly have it memorized. She said, “If I make the team, then I’m saying women’s sports are not good enough. But if I fail, it’ll be, ‘You set us back.’ I don’t trust them.”

I don’t trust them! I was deeply and personally insulted by this. I composed elaborate responses to Ila in my head. If some reporters implied that Ila should be playing softball, wasn’t it unfair to blame all women for this viewpoint? Wasn’t that the kind of stereotyping that had been hurting Ila all her life? Why would she alienate her female fans this way, women like me who had cheered her on, who wanted to see her take her talent as far as it could go?

But then I wondered whether I had participated in this tyranny she felt from women. Hadn’t I wanted her to do something I couldn’t do, in the name of all women, thereby expecting her to be better than other minor league pitchers? Hadn’t I been disappointed and frustrated in her when she had failed, failures I would have ignored in a male left-handed pitcher? Hadn’t I committed the very fallacy I so scorned in men—making myself, via fandom, into an imaginary athlete? Associating myself with Ila’s success, imagining her ability to somehow become partly my own?

When those men I worked with hoped for Ila to fail because she was a woman, I saw the stunning gap in their logic. But maybe it made no more sense for me to have picked her out to succeed.

Decline; Retirement

June 10, 1999: Ila Borders was traded to the Madison (Wisconsin) Black Wolf. When the season ended, the Black Wolf did not renew their option on her.

May 2000: Ila Borders signed with the Zion (Utah) Pioneerz in the Western Baseball League.

July 5, 2000: Ila Borders retired from baseball after a game in which she gave up five hits and three runs, losing 10–6 to the Feather River Mudcats. She was twenty-five years old.

The Question of Embodiment

Are we what our bodies can do? Are our physical abilities properties we’ve earned, or properties given us by chance? What does it mean to admire someone for a physical ability? Can we ever champion the physically talented without thinking of ourselves in their place, thinking of something we wish we could do?

Throwing a Ball

When I tell him about Ila, about the study on children and nondominant throwing, about the question of embodiment, my boyfriend decides that he’s going to teach me to throw a ball. He played varsity baseball through high school, a first baseman; he has that easy athleticism of kids who have played well all their lives. On a sunny Sunday, he gathers balls, gloves, but I stall—I don’t want him to see how badly I throw, how much like a girl. He might lose respect for me.

Out at the park, surrounded by children, we toss a ball back and forth. Chris starts teaching me the rudiments of pitching. I know the dramatic kick of the windup, but I have never until now really understood the heavy step forward that is, after all, the momentous point of that big kick. I break down the pieces of the pitch the way I used to break down a complicated pass onpointe into single gestures. Chris is left-handed, like Ila, so I have to reverse his instructions. When he tells me to, I wind up. I do the big kick, feeling like a fool, then let the ball fly, and hear it smack into the mitt. He corrects my form a bit, but says that was good. I throw it again, smack. This time I feel my ponytail lift off my neck and fly straight up in the air. Again, smack. No one laughs at me. No one gets hurt.

On the way home, Chris claims that I have remarkable control, that I’m good at hitting spots.

“You coulda been a pro,” he says, and we both know this is a joke. But it’s odd to consider—if I had been taught to throw a ball before adulthood, what might my life have been like? I’m certain I wouldn’t have been a professional baseball player, just as I wasn’t good enough to be a professional dancer. But who might I have been if I hadn’t grown to doubt an entire category of myself?

The Last Photo

This one shows Ila just after her first, terrible performance in Sioux Falls, slumped in the dugout, glowering. Her frustration shows in the aggressive set of her arms, the elbows hardened. A teammate walking by her to go on deck is sort of chucking her on the knee, kind of a buck-up gesture. He is leaning over to touch her knee, his outspread fingers a pale shape against the gloom of the dugout floor. He has thrown his weight awkwardly onto one leg in order to reach her. His head is down—maybe he is muttering some encouragement to her, some baseball bromide about luck and next time. The brim of his cap covers his face, and studying this picture for the first time, I wanted to try to duck under it, to try to read his face. Because he is unrecognizable and wears a jacket over his uniform, the caption identifies him not by name, but as “a teammate.”

I remember studying that picture the day it appeared in the summer of 1997, looking for something I couldn’t quite name. Now I think I understand what moved me so much: it’s that her teammate is touching her. Really there is nothing remarkable in this. Baseball is a touchy sport. Ila had a bad game. Her teammate is offering encouragement. Yet I can’t take my eyes off it, off the casual angle of his wrist as his fingers brush her knee. That moment of contact. Zeno’s paradox defied—his body closing that distance of air between them by halves until there is no more distance.

Whether he feels nervous as he does it, whether he feels uncomfortable touching a woman in a nonsexual way, whether he has to force himself to do it—all of these are possible. I cannot answer any of these questions by looking at the photograph, though I have tried. But none of this matters to me, because he is touching her, telling her and all the world that she is a member of his team. Because he did it, and it can never be undone.

Notes

1. http://library.thinkquest.org/11902/physics/curve1.html

2. Kathleen M. Haywood and Mary A. Painter, “Environmental versus Biological Influences on Gender Differences in the Overarm Throw for Force-Dominant and Nondominant Arm Throws,” Women in Sport & Physical Activity Journal, September 1996.

3. http://web.hep.uiuc.edu/home/g-gollin/dance/dance_physics.html

4. http://www.umdbulldogs.com/bulldog_buddies