In Praise of Mediocrity

By Neil King Jr.

I was playing pool, lining up an acute-angle shot into the side pocket, when I got to thinking about our profound mediocrity and how almost all of us, all the time, swim against the odds. How the world in so many little ways gets the better of us. How, by a cruel twist, we have a window into the superior way to do most things and fall far short of that, minute by minute, day by day, week after week. 

It’s as though the Platonic Form of fly casting, of banjo picking, of tennis or chess or cartwheels in the driveway, exists just there beyond our fingertips, taunting us quietly as we go about the lesser version of pretty much everything we do.

In this case, an eleven ball partially obscured my path, leaving a margin of maybe an eighth of an inch to sneak that four ball by and drop the sucker. What’s worse, Miles and Coltrane and the rest were halfway into So What, the opening track of perhaps the best jazz album of all time, and how can any mortal compare himself to that? You look down the cue, eyeing a shot and trying to get the angle just right, and yet you know there are mortals who occupy a far higher plane, who have achieved a level of perfection like Miles or Coltrane did, and what’s the point? Even my thinking of that while attempting the shot is a function of what keeps a mortal so prone to distraction and error. 

And yet, with just sufficient focus and finesse, I sank the ball, and left the cue ball within a foot of where I wanted for my next shot. And a brief current of divinity shot through my veins.

We live surrounded by daily blunders. We fall perpetually just shy of the mark. But the great organizer of the universe—let’s call her God—is kind enough to give us that occasional glimpse of the flawless. “I did 15 things shoddily,” we say, “but man did I ring that one.” The thrill every blue moon of getting it right—of throwing that strike—keeps us coming back. 

At heart, that’s what we love about engaging in sports. In no other activity—not in kissing, or scrambling eggs, or passing a semitrailer on a two-lane highway—do we better know the look and feel of perfection. The 7-iron approach shot from 80 yards out. The fading jump shot at the 3-point line. The top-spin crosscourt backhand into the far-right corner. The immaculate bank shot to sink the 8 ball in the middle pocket. The flawless roll cast under low-lying shrubs to get the fly to float exactly there, where the lurking brown trout lunges. Do one of those well on a given day and you have peered into the Great Beyond. 

What is horrifying in all this is that the truly good, the people we revere when we watch them do what they do to perfection, perform those feats as the baseline of their existence. We exult to do it just once really well while they despair if they do it just once badly. Doing it really, really well is their norm. 

Well, “Of course,” you say, “duh.” That’s just because they do it all the time. Those people who are prone to perfection are professionals. That shot they make 80% of the time is one they have practiced 10 million times. Do you think Steph Curry is a constant strike hurler when he saunters into a bowling alley?

Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were. And the point is, those who achieve perfection through practice do so because they were predisposed to that perfection. They had an entrée, took the opening into the palace of perfectibility, and ran with it. When his father put a tennis racket in Bjorn Borg’s nine-year-old hand, a light went on in his brain, and it burned brighter than any light ever does in the mediocre man’s brain. The rest of us are left to look longingly through a grubby window.

Like most of us, I am proficiently OK at a lot of things. I play decent pool, tennis, chess, ping pong, horseshoes, poker. I’m not bad at telling jokes. I ski pretty well but have never managed to catch a wave surfing. On any round of nine holes of golf I am liable to have at least one solid drive, one excellent fairway shot, a respectable chip shot and at least one celebration-inducing eight-foot putt. Putting aside the seven balls lost along the way, and the multitude of shots that overshoot the green by 25 feet, and the 87 or so other strokes I need to get through 18 holes, I’d call that a perfect round of golf.

Which gets me to my defense of the mediocre. I have always taken some consolation from knowing that the Latins originally applied the term to the middling peak. Not the highest and mightiest and most jagged summit, the one above the clouds and beyond the reach of normal lungs, but that one about halfway down. A peak that is a meagre facsimile of the real peak, but a peak all the same. Isn’t it better to be a medium peak than a mere hillock or swamp? And besides, the view from our lesser peaks offers, occasionally and when the wind is just right, an unimpeded view of the highest one. 

When any of us sink that amazing combo in the corner pocket, we’re a baby Minnesota Fats. That to-die-for backspin chip shot that hits the green and rolls back toward the pin makes you, in that instant but only for an instant, a baby Tiger. When you track the lob with an upraised left hand, left knee bent just so, and then crush it with grace into the far corner of the court, just out of reach of your fleetest opponent, you are for that brief second nothing less than Roger Federer, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 

To err is human, but to do that one thing exceedingly well once is divine. 

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–Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.