Tai Chi Chuan - Basketball, Baseball and Bowling

Tai Chi Chuan – Is Basketball, Baseball and Bowling

The Three B’s?

Tai chi replicates aspects of each of these sports, in its own way, and by doing so, you are working on each one.

With basketball, you are always dribbling the ball. The ball bounces off the ground, and you give it a little push downward to take advantage of gravity, the floor, even the basic fabric of the ball itself. You need to give it just the right amount of impetus to keep control of the ball and your body in relationship to that ball.

We dribble in tai chi too. We do this by dropping our own weight into the ground. We are the ball and we let gravity drop us onto the ground so that we can bounce off the ground. With that bounce, we move our body forward. Drop, rebound, drop, rebound, drop, rebound… and so forth. Notice the same is true for walking?

With bowling, you take an under curve and a forward motion and you let the ball go to find its way down the lane. Your body, the ball, gravity, the right angle when you let the ball go, the mind’s vision of the intended path of the ball, even an inclusive big picture of the pins at the end of the lane are included.

In tai chi, with each drop, rebound, we follow an impetus that moves us forward. We let ourselves go. Just like that bowling ball, we are being moved. And just like that bowling ball, we follow that movement which drives us to the next shape. In bowling, your eyes tend to follow the path of the ball. In tai chi, we watch an internal sense of a path moving us forward. We follow our chi.

In baseball, the strong connection to tai chi is when the baseball player is catching a fly ball. The body lines itself up with the trajectory coming its way, the mitt has to give a little and continue this line, and the whole body has to connect all of the above into the ground for support.

In the Yin part of the postures, we have to align our weight and energy such that it is smoothly transferred into the ground. It is no different than catching a fly ball. Again, we become the ball, the mitt, the body and connect it all to the ground. We catch ourselves as we transfer our weight into the ground. It might be better to say the ground catches us and we direct ourselves seamlessly into that ground. This requires exquisite alignment so that all of YOU transfer (energetically) into the ground.

Hitting a baseball has tai chi qualities too. The timing in actually connecting bat to baseball is so fast that you internally predict the outcome – the strike of the bat to the ball – and give it a whack. Scientifically there is a point in the process where the mind subliminally calculates what the body must do to hit the ball. It is another big picture action because this is not linear. Truly you and the ball need to become ONE for this to happen. It all happens too fast for this to be the result of mental calculation. This is a feeling, not a mental strategy. The timing is a calculated guess. Most of tai chi is a feeling too.

We might want to contrast this with football. While catching and throwing a football has similarities to baseball, the brutal force of blocking the other team members or forcing the quarterback to the ground IS NOT like tai chi. Here force is what is needed. Force and tai chi are opposites. It’s what you might technically call a “no-no.”

Interesting to note that in all these ball sports, no matter where you are on the field, the ball is the center of attention. It is the center. Everyone is connected to that ball. Even those watching the game are connected to that ball. The actual time any player is in physical contact with the ball is minimal, but the focus on the ball is constant and optimal. We might say that in tai chi, the tan tien is the center of the focus. We are always in touch with the tan tien as the hands feet and head reorganize themselves around that center. We keep our (feeling) eye on the center.

Someone mentioned to me that many players in the stadium sports have to focus so intently on the game that their mind literally eliminates any awareness of the screaming fans. Yep, to these players, the fans are an unnecessary distraction and therefore are not included in the task in hand. A mental block is needed in order to play at a higher level.

Tai chi has a similar intensity of focus, but there is a difference. A tai chi player would include all of that distraction and incorporate it into the “game.” We develop a much larger mental arena and change our relationship to such distractions. In this case the distraction becomes a source of added energy, much like what runners in a marathon experience when the crowd cheers them on. Another way to look at this is to say that distractions are also players in the game.

So I like to think of tai chi as three sports in one. (There’s a little bit of ping-pong, soccer, golf and .. well, you get the picture.)

Let’s hit that ball, catch it, dribble it and let it go….