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SF Magazine Article on Pitcher Tim Lincecum Mentions Spirit Rock
Here is an excerpt from an article in the July 2010 issue of San Francisco Magazine on Tim Lincecum, the Giants' ace pitcher, where he mentions his interest in Spirit Rock and the practice of meditation:
(excerpted from Why he’s our freak—not anyone else’s by Steve Kettmann)
* Because he is fascinated by the way the mind works
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that, as someone who played 11 years of basketball (point guard) and 9 of football (looking scrawnier and way younger than everyone else), as well as all the baseball, Lincecum has not been known as a guy who blazes an intellectual trail. He has such extraordinary physical abilities that we call him “the freak” and assume he will keep pulling down Cy Young Awards like grapes (he’s earned two in his two full years). Out of his uniform, he has a rippling, sleek-muscled Bruce Lee quality; there’s nothing skinny about this guy. But what truly gives him a shot at being one of the best Giants pitchers of all time—even ahead of Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry—is that he’s figured out that nothing matters in baseball and in life as much as mental strength.
But there’s no need to rush to make the point. In fact, let’s chill out a little at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, cofounded by teacher and author Jack Kornfield on a 400-acre complex just off Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, in Marin. Lincecum mentions it out of the blue, fascinated. The center is about 15 miles from his rented house in Sausalito, with its Ping-Pong table and predictably spectacular view of the San Francisco skyline through the picture windows. Spirit Rock offers mostly silent residential retreats, plus regular classes and workshops in Buddhist Insight Meditation. A place like this could help anybody focus, just as Buddhist meditation helped Kerouac and his chums. Lincecum admits he needs that sort of help.
“I have bad days,” he says, almost visibly scolding himself for his emotions on the mound. “Maybe it looks like I’m physically controlling myself well, but mentally it doesn’t feel healthy.” So, to help himself, he has toyed with meditation. “I’m just starting to get more into it,” he says. “It’s becoming more aware of yourself, and I want that.”
On other days on the mound—days when he is impossibly dominant—Lincecum looks like a young man who has found the one place where he feels anchored and centered and utterly at ease. “Pitching gives me something that I can be extremely focused on,” he says simply, ”that I care about extremely.” That’s the purity of mind he covets so much that he’s open to anything that may help him grasp it. When I tell him about a spot in the central highlands of Bali where people believe you can rinse yourself in holy water and cleanse yourself of all the bad thoughts that built up the year before, he goes with the idea of belief. “It’s like, you really don’t know how good meditation can be if you don’t try it,” he says. “Before you try it, you’re like, ‘What the heck is this? Sit here and think about my problems and it’s going to help?’ Then you try it and, no, it’s about looking at it objectively, from an outside perspective, not becoming emotional—looking at it as opposed to getting involved in it. Just, it is what it is.”
Click here to read the entire article.
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