The Meaning of Ichiro (4 page)

It was the dream of every young player who aspired to a professional career to play in the national summer tourney at Koshien,
a single-elimination affair involving the 49 regional winners across Japan. This Holy Grail of amateur sports was televised
nationwide every day for the two weeks it lasted, attracting huge crowds as well as pro scouts from all the teams in Japan’s
two professional leagues, the Central and Pacific. Parents of boys with baseball potential chose high schools with the same
care that their counterparts in the United States did when selecting colleges for their sons. A youth who starred on a team
that made it all the way to the Koshien tournament was virtually guaranteed a pro contract. (Indeed, any athlete who played
in Koshien was considered a prime candidate for employment with Japan’s largest corporations because high school baseball
at that level was considered the supreme character builder.)

The school that eventually selected Ichiro and, wittingly or not, his father was Nagoya’s
Aikodai Meiden Koko,
one of the top baseball schools in the country, and a frequent Koshien participant; Meiden had a proven track record of sending
its best athletes to the pros.

Ichiro thus became one of 51 players on the team, all of whom were required to live in the Meiden baseball dormitory year-round,
except for the month of January, when they were allowed to go home to visit their parents. He gaped in amazement at the gleaming
three-story ferro-concrete building, compared by many to a modern hotel. On the first floor was a huge kitchen and laundry
room area, on the second were rows of bunk beds and on the third a huge, cavernous
tatami
room used for weight lifting and shadow swings before bedtime. The ballpark, a short bus ride away, measured 350 feet to
center and had equipment that rivaled that of professional teams. A large indoor training facility, for use on rainy days,
stood nearby.

At Meiden, the game of baseball was approached with the same intense dedication that characterized most other big-time sports
high schools in Japan. That meant practice every day, from 3:30 to 8:00, and then, after a break for dinner, special batting
practice from 9
P.M.
There would be no more late-evening trips to the Airport Batting Center. From March to December, Meiden played a game every
single Sunday.

The spiritual voice of high school baseball was personified in a famous college baseball manager and columnist, Suishu Tobita,
who compared athletics to
bushido,
the way of the samurai, where one could overcome natural limitations by sheer force of will and where only those who excelled
morally could excel on the field. “The purpose of training,” he wrote, “is the forging of the soul. If the players do not
try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, they cannot hope to win games. One must suffer to be good.”

And so suffer Ichiro did.

Only the top 17 players at Meiden were granted the honor of being allowed to practice every day, while the rest, usually underclassmen—and
Ichiro was included in this group—were required to spend their time doing menial character-building chores such as raking
the field and picking up the gear. It was a time for them to learn humility, to learn how to speak and show respect toward
their seniors. They had to earn the right to touch a ball.

Thus, while other boys his age in American high schools were driving cars and going on dates with their girlfriends after
practice, Ichiro and his confreres were enduring a routine that was more befitting a military boot camp. Ichiro later called
it “the hardest thing I have ever experienced.”

When practice was over, for example, they would make the dinner and start the bath. Then while the lucky 17 were taking their
evening batting practice, they were consigned to scrubbing the dormitory floors and doing all the dirty laundry, often enduring
long waits to use the limited number of washing machines and driers installed in the building. Rather than waste precious
time, Ichiro would sneak off to a nearby tennis court to practice shadow swinging a bat by himself. Then at 3
A.M.
he would get up to do the wash.

There was no small amount of hazing to be endured. Underclassmen who said the wrong thing or offended seniors in some other
way such as letting the rice cooker boil over had to be punished. A common—and extremely painful—form of punishment was being
made to sit atop a garbage can in the
seiza
position—legs tucked underneath the hips with all the body weight bearing down on the heels and calves—until the pain became
too acute to bear.

Ichiro became a regular in his junior year and his daily chores were replaced by miles of running each day along with a plethora
of exhausting baseball drills. Among the esoteric muscle-enhancing maneuvers required of him were hurling automobile tires
and attempting to hit Wiffle balls with a heavy industrial shovel—this is where Ichiro is said to have first begun developing
his now famous strong wrists and hips.

Through it all, standing there every day without fail, in the first row of spectator seats behind the net, was you know who.
For three full years, there was never a time, regardless of how bitterly cold or snowy it was, that Nobuyuki failed to be
at his post. The only father there most of the time, he never called out to Ichiro or spoke to the manager (who later confessed
he thought the mysterious-looking figure he spotted in the stands each day was somehow plotting to take over his job). As
was his habit, Nobuyuki never sat down during the Meiden practices, nor for that matter did he ever eat or drink anything
either. If his son could not do those things, then neither would he.

“Sometimes it got so cold that I thought my heart would stop,” he said later. “But I just wanted to be there in case he needed
me. I took notes for later use. Also it was just fun to watch him.”

Nobuyuki always bowed silently before he left—a gesture of respect to the field. It went without saying that he attended all
the home games, arriving several hours in advance to watch pregame workouts, and, of course, he was there for
all
the away games as well. Whenever possible, he made advance scouting trips with Ichiro in tow, to the fields of opponents
Meiden was scheduled to play in upcoming games, so he could familiarize his son with the lay of the land.

“Doesn’t your old man ever work?” was a question Ichiro’s teammates would teasingly ask. In time they began to jokingly refer
to Pere Suzuki as
“Chichiro,”
a play on the name “Ichiro” and
“chi-chi,”
which means “father” in Japanese. It was not exactly a compliment.

At Meiden, Ichiro perfected his unusual batting form—now pointing the bat toward the pitcher’s mound before going into his
leg-in-the air swing. And what an effective way to hit it was. Over a three-year high school career, Ichiro hit for a galactic
.502 average. Despite his flyweight physique, he also had 19 home runs with 211 RBIs and 131 stolen bases. Ichiro struck out
only ten times in 536 official high school at-bats and not one was a swinging strikeout. According to Meiden records, he connected
solidly on 97 percent of all the pitches he swung at. Ichiro also pitched on occasion, displaying an exceptional fastball
and deft control of a curve, until an injury sustained in a bicycle accident adversely affected his throwing form. Ichiro
took Meiden to the venerable Koshien Tournament twice, losing on the next to last day in his junior year and qualifying for
the spring invitational, but being eliminated in the regionals, the year following.

His sharp batting eye and lightning reflexes combined with a spookily placid temperament earned him the nickname
uch
jin
or “spaceman” from his teammates. Another nickname was
no-tenki
(“No Weather”), a tribute to his disciplined cool. In fact, a Shiga University research team once included high school star
Ichiro in a series of tests of Alpha 2 brain wave activity designed to determine an athlete’s ability to relax under pressure.
He was tested ten times over a ten-month period between June 1991 and March 1992, including the day before the opening of
the notoriously tension-filled National High School Baseball Tournament. Ichiro’s scores registered a super-serene rating
of 91 percent, far ahead of the other subjects, who averaged around 60 percent.

In 1990, when his team was eliminated at Koshien, he was the only boy on the entire team (indeed perhaps the only boy on all
48 losing teams) who did not shed a tear. But then, as one cynical sports writer pointed out, “He had had a batting average
of .625 in the games. All the pro scouts were watching him. So what did he have to cry about?”

Ichiro had hoped to go high in the November 1991 professional draft, but was taken in the fourth and final round—the 36th
pick overall—by the Orix BlueWave of the Pacific League, based in the bustling, historic port of Kobe, just west of Osaka.
Kobe is a twinkling gem of a city nestled between green mountains and blue ocean (and a temporary break in a relentless coastline
of concrete seawalls and shoreline hydropods, of the type that helped make Japan’s “construction state” famous). Number 36
was a somewhat ignominious rank given his high school stats, but scouts were a little dubious about his preshrunk physique—120
pounds on a 5′9′′ frame. He was so slight that he appeared years younger than he actually was, or, in the words of one bemused
American who had seen him interviewed on TV, “He looked like a fifth grader.”

All Orix was willing to pay for a signing bonus was $43,000.

Orix’s pint-sized manager Shozo Doi believed in what was known as the
totei seido
(apprenticeship system), long evident in many areas of Japanese society from small factories to large corporations and government
offices. To Doi,
totei seido
meant baseball rookies should endure a certain amount of pain and suffering and should not be allowed to experience too much
success too early. Doi liked to cite the case of his former teammate on the Yomiuri Giants, Sadaharu Oh, the man who had hit
868 career home runs, a world record. Oh struggled hard on the sidelines during his formative years in the pros. That kind
of tempering had built character, Doi would say, which, in turn, helped Oh develop into a great batting star.

Thus, after Ichiro, in his first season as a professional, had led the Japanese minor leagues in batting with a .366 average
in 58 games and compiled a .253 average in 40 games with the parent team, Doi returned him to the farm club early the following
year.

“Ichiro had come too far, too fast,” Doi explained. “He was progressing without any problems. A player has to know hardship
if he’s going to reach his full potential.”

But Doi, himself a former All-Star second baseman and accomplished spray hitter for the “V-9′ era Giants, so called because
they won nine straight Japan Series championships, had also been critical of Ichiro’s unorthodox batting form. “You’ll never
make it hitting that way,” he’d said and instructed him to plant his feet and shorten his grip.

Confused with this new wrinkle, Ichiro, ever the perfectionist, kept his mind focused, putting in longer hours on the training
field than anyone else in the organization. This was saying something because Japanese teams already practiced more than anyone
else in the world.

Consider: Japanese and Americans play similar seasons from April to October (162 games for MLB, 140 for NPB as of 2001), but
the way they go about preparing for them is very different. Americans start their training camp in the warm southern climes
of Florida and Arizona around the first of March. The players are on the field three to four hours a day and then it is off
to the nearest swimming pool or golf course—often with the wife and kids in tow.

Japanese start their training in the freezing cold of the Japan winter with something called “voluntary” training, which is
another way of saying “show up or start looking for a vocational counselor.” Camp begins on February 1 and consists of about
eight or nine hours a day on the field followed by evening indoor workouts and lectures on baseball, and just possibly, Zen
meditation sessions. For most teams, it is unheard of to have a wife in camp. Japanese coaches, unlike their American counterparts,
demand an extraordinary amount of running and not infrequently order punishing physical exercises like the so-called “1,000-fungo
drill,” not intended solely for conditioning but also to build inner strength. Americans who experienced this system often
compared it to military training. (“It was like serving in the Japanese Imperial Army,” is the way former Montreal Expo and
Tokyo Giant Warren Cromartie once described it.) All the extra work is one reason why teams in Japan take every fifth day
in camp off to recover, while MLB teams in spring camp take none.

During the season the training regimen continues. Whereas Americans believe that one has to save one’s energy for the games,
especially during the hot weather, the Japanese believe that the hotter the weather gets, the harder one has to train to compensate.