![]() Jim retired in 1999, but kids still send him letters and photos. "I've been on one knee many times, undoing my laces and tying ‘em up again." "I’ve found a way, and they can do it, too," Jim explains. "I'd be the tall one, I guess, in my baseball uniform, and there’d be a little boy, a little girl."Įventually it became the first thing he did when he met a child missing a limb - something that said more than words. A lot of kids asked, "How do you tie your shoes?" So he’d get down on one knee, pick up his laces and show them, "switching places with Donn Clarkson," he says. In the dim light, Jim had to face the part of himself he’d rather hide, and he became a reluctant hero. "We'd meet outside of a baseball clubhouse doorway in a dark corridor, and we’d have these encounters." Parents wanted their kids to see someone like them. As much as I tried to run away from those stories, they persisted," Jim says. "But what also started happening was kids and families started to come to the ballpark, a lot of them missing a part of an arm or part of a hand or facing much different challenges, and much more severe." "I didn’t want to be the human interest story. Jim had never been someone who wanted to stand out, but it’s hard not to when you play baseball without a right hand. "To think that that could be you seemed almost impossible,” he says. ![]() And he’ll never forget how it felt when, in his first year with the Yankees, he pitched a no-hitter. He could hardly believe it when his dream came true: He reached the major leagues. He developed a deep love of baseball and a drive to excel. "Although I wanted to do well in sports," he says, "a lot of that ambition initially came from wanting to fit in." In the years to come, Jim’s discomfort in the classroom was outweighed by the thrill of the field, the one place he could be like everyone else. So much of it was about generous supportive people who believed that there was a way to do things a little bit differently, and Donn Clarkson embodies that as much as anything that I can recall from my childhood." "Courageous, motivational, inspirational, and all these things. "A lot of people assign these labels to my baseball playing," Jim says. For Jim, it was a victory, one that would quietly reverberate through the rest of his life. "I tried it, and then he did it again, and then I tried it, and then he did it again."Īfter a few days of practice, Jim could tie his shoes. Clarkson had used his evenings to invent a one-handed shoe-tying technique. "I think he put a film on for the rest of the kids in the classroom," Jim recalls, "and we sat outside in those small elementary school chairs, and he started working with the loops in the laces, working with one clenched fist."Īpparently Mr. Clarkson started untying his own shoes, and Jim followed suit. Clarkson pulled him into the hall and said, "I figured it out." When Jim was in third grade, his teacher was Donn Clarkson, a tall, charismatic man who had worked at NASA. Jim Abbott warms up before the start of a Brewers-Cardinals game in 1999. It might seem small, but if Jim's shoe came untied at school, there was nothing he could do but ask for help, just the kind of attention he dreaded and that made him feel like an outsider. "I remember my parents tying my shoes for me and triple knotting them," he says. His dad figured out a way for Jim to shift his baseball glove to catch and throw with the same hand.īut while he could handle a baseball, Jim still faced a daily challenge: He didn’t know how to tie his shoes. "I had worked really hard on it, and then all of a sudden, it was torn."įrom a young age, Jim loved to throw a rubber ball against a wall for hours. "I was in a classroom coloring something, so I was writing with my left hand and trying to hold the paper on the desk with this prosthesis, and it ripped the paper," Jim remembers. There were many moments of simple frustration. When he could, Jim hid his right arm by burrowing it into his pocket. Back when he still used a prosthesis, some called him Captain Hook. He remembers kids at new schools recoiling when they saw him. It was in elementary school that he started to develop a real discomfort with being different. Years before he was a major league pitcher, in the '90s, Jim Abbott was a regular kid in Flint, Michigan, with a birth defect: His right arm ended at his wrist. Jim Abbott, then a Yankee, throws a pitch during his no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians on Sept.
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